Author: Big Mama

This is going to be a really quick list of a few quick things. Seriously. No rambling or anything. Because it’s late and I worked on edits today and my brain is tired.

1. My friend and decorator extraordinaire, Holly Mathis, is coming to visit me on Saturday and help me figure out how to redo my living room.

With any luck it will look like this by the end of the weekend.

Or probably not. But a girl can dream. And Holly is the best at what she does.

I’ll keep you posted.

2. My friends Chad and Jamie emailed me to tell me about something a friend of theirs started. It’s called Humankind Water.

Humankind Water is a nonprofit that uses 100% of their net profits to help fund clean water filtration systems in underdeveloped counties. Walmart is having a contest called Put it on the Shelf, like American Idol for products and Humankind Water has made it into the Top 10 out of 4100 entries. The winner gets a free contract with Walmart and their product will be sold in all Walmarts across the country. The dream is if Humankind Water were sold in Walmart it could raise hundred of thousands if not millions to build water systems.

Because, y’all, I don’t know if you know this but there are a lot of Walmarts.

Anyway, they need our help to get there. You can visit their Facebook page to read more about it and text 4829 to 383838 to vote for them.

I just did it and it couldn’t be easier. You can vote once a day between now and April 24th.

3. My friend Marla Taviano has a new ebook out called Once Upon the Internet. You can download it on your Nook or Kindle or whatever else you have that has the ability to read an ebook. It’s only $2.99. Find out more about it here.

4. I wrote a post about Mad Men and another one on Downton Abbey over at Pioneer Woman’s blog. You can read them if you’re interested. And Sophie wrote a great post over there about music for grown-ups. It’s a must read if you’re looking for some good stuff for your iPod or Sony Walkman.

5. That’s it. Over and out.

See y’all tomorrow with fashion aplenty.

I’m going to go ahead and confess something that most of you probably already know. I am not a technological genius. In fact, I try to avoid dealing with technology as much as possible because I can’t be trusted with it.

I mean, just in the last six weeks I’ve managed to accidentally delete all my iTunes songs and everything else off my desktop. And I’ve never been so thankful for the people at the Apple store who took pity on me and made it all magically appear. I may have wept.

Basically my preferred method of dealing with computer issues is to close it and then open it again. And if that doesn’t work then I’ll bang it on something and see if that helps.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got. If neither of those things works then you’ll know because there won’t be anything new on the blog until I get to the Apple store.

It’s really a wonder that I ever started a blog. And when I made the switch to WordPress a few years ago, I quickly realized I was in over my head. Like Paris Hilton at a MENSA meeting.

Oh sure. I had big ambitions at first. I talked a good game about wanting to learn how to “code” things and make graphics and figure out how to change my design every month, but that quickly devolved into a simpler dream of just not causing the whole thing to explode because I don’t know what I’m doing.

So I found Cathy who owns a business called Desperately Seeking WordPress, which is, appropriately enough, a business that deals in WordPress sites. This isn’t an advertisement for Cathy, but I feel like she should get a shout out for all the misery and pain I’ve caused her over the years. God bless her.

And so Cathy works behind the scenes to keep everything running smoothly while I just get on and type a few words every evening like a trained monkey. But occasionally I’ll see something I like on another blog and I’ll email Cathy with something like “Hey! Could I get one of those whatchmacallit things at the bottom of the thing on the right side of my main page?”

Then she’ll email me back and somehow know exactly what I’m talking about and then she’ll do it. It’s like magic. Or maybe it’s more like idiot interpretation. I don’t know.

And that’s what happened last week. Cathy was fixing up a few things on the blog because she knows I have no idea what I’m doing and she sent me an email and suggested that I might want to include a thing at the bottom of each post that would allow people to subscribe by email.

(That’s a fancy way of saying that you’ll get an email notification in your inbox every time I write a new post.)

(You probably already know that, but I had no idea.)

(It’s a wonder that I’m not sitting in a room somewhere with a legal pad and a pen just writing out stories in longhand to share with Gulley.)

So I told her that would be great. Sure! Let’s do that! Let’s join in and do something that other bloggers have been doing since 2001. I love being ten to eleven years behind technology. Maybe next week I’ll go wild and get an answering machine and see about this new thing called “Call-waiting”.

Cathy emailed me back and said she’d need the username and password of my Google account to access my feed settings. I sent her back the username and password.

Then she sent me another email that said those didn’t work because I’d never switched my feeds over from Feedburner after it changed to Google, but that would mean it had been three or four years since I’d logged into my Feedburner account and how was that possible?

(What? Is this email in English?)

I sent her back an email that probably made her want to mail me a legal pad and a pen with a request that I please get off the internet forever. I asked, “Are you sure I have a Feedburner account?”

As it turns out I have a Feedburner account. I’ve had one for six years. That’s why you internet savvy folks are able to subscribe to my posts on Google Reader or Bloglines or whatever else is out there that I have no idea exists. The problem is that I had no recollection of ever creating the aforementioned account.

Yet we needed to access that account to enable email subscriptions to the blog. And I could just create a new account but then all of you who have subscribed to the old account wouldn’t know if anything ever changed.

(Is this making your head hurt? My head hurts.)

So I’ve spent the last week trying every username and password combination I have ever used in my whole life trying to crack the code that I created when I opened that stupid Feedburner account six years ago. I felt like I was that Department of Defense computer in War Games. And I almost gave up. After six days of various combinations of my name and birthdate and Caroline’s name and birthdate and my childhood pet’s name, I was out of guesses.

But then it hit me like a bolt of lightning on Sunday night. I wish I could say I sat upright in bed and yelled “EUREKA!” but that would be a lie. However, I traveled back to my brain six years ago and remembered that I used to really like to use the number 1 after almost everything.

Lo and behold, it worked.

And so I emailed Cathy with the good news. She was able to fix all my feeds and now WE ARE VERY FANCY and you can enter your email in that little box under SUBSCRIBE at the bottom of this post and get all new posts sent to your email address. What? Is this 2002? What is this Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?

It’s not easy being on the cutting edge.

Cathy also suggested that I subscribe to a service called Last Pass that’s a free service that manages your online passwords securely so you never have to worry about losing them.

I’m not sure why she thinks I need that.

I’ll just write them all down on my legal pad.

Is the weekend already over? Because I find that depressing.

We had ourselves a nice little weekend. Went to Home Depot, bought some wallpaper. Planned to go to Bed, Bath, and Beyond but didn’t know if we’d have time.

Not really.

We actually didn’t do anything nearly that exciting.

On Friday night my friend Michelle came into town to spend the night with us. We all went to eat Mexican food because that’s what we do on Friday nights. And then we came back to the house and sat out on the patio to visit while Caroline occupied herself by seeing how far she could hammer a croquet stick into the ground.

I have no explanation.

But I have to say it kept her busy for at least an hour and she managed to get it so far in the ground that P was worried it was about to hit the pipes of our sprinkler system. I don’t know that hammering a stake in the ground is an important life skill, but I was impressed with her tenacity.

On Saturday morning I made about forty-eight cinnamon rolls for four people. And I don’t want to lead you astray. When I say I made cinnamon rolls, what I mean is I popped open cans of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. I feel like I need to clarify this because Saturday morning I asked Caroline if she wanted homemade cinnamon rolls and she ran in the kitchen excitedly saying “I WANT TO HELP! I WANT TO HELP!” and I was confused as to why she was so excited to put rolls on a cookie sheet.

That’s when I realized she’d pulled out the rolling pin as if I was really making homemade cinnamon rolls. And, since it’s not Christmas, that was not the case. I think she felt like my offer to let her ice the rolls with canned icing was a lame consolation prize.

However, she did guilt me into promising that I’d make homemade cinnamon rolls for us on the first morning of summer. And her birthday.

Which reminds that I need to start working out again.

I haven’t mentioned that I have fallen off the workout train and can’t get up. Fortunately, I’ve stayed fairly committed to the healthy eating train as evidenced by the fact that I made kale chips tonight. People say they taste just like potato chips. And those people are liars. They are an acceptable substitute if you’re in need of something crispy and salty, but you will not for ONE MOMENT forget that you’re eating a vegetable that’s not a potato. P would like to add that it makes the house smell like cooked underwear.

Anyway, working out. I’m starting again this week. True story.

As for the rest of our Saturday, we ate our cinnamon rolls and then Michelle went with Caroline and me to run various errands. We went to the shoe store to look for sandals and then the toy store to buy a birthday gift for a party we had that night and then picked up Chick-Fil-A for lunch. Because we feel that it’s important to really entertain our young single friends who visit. I mean, sure, Michelle spent the last month doing all kinds of glamorous traveling but when was the last time she got to watch a mom and an eight-year-old engage in high level summer sandal negotiations and then go to a little league baseball game?

Because that was what we did next. We headed to the little league fields to watch Jackson play baseball while Will and Caroline ate snowcones and tried to avoid the bees. Good times. I bet Michelle is already planning to come back next weekend. Especially because I treated her to a bag of sunflower seeds.

Later that day, Michelle left and we went to a birthday party. It was the best kind of party because it was a grown up/kid party. Which is to say that there were juice boxes and margaritas. Chips and guacamole living happily alongside a big plastic bin of cheese puffs. And the kids ran and played and bounced in the bounce house while the adults visited and occasionally refereed or intervened when the Nerf sword battle got too intense.

And now it’s Monday again.

Which means I need to go for a run.

I’ve spent most of this week either shopping or working on edits for my book. I’ve also spent a large chunk of my afternoons helping Caroline do her math homework. And I’m here to tell you I don’t care if I ever see a trapezoid again, much less if I know the perimeter of one.

It doesn’t help that she complains about the homework with each problem. I finally threatened to take fifteen minutes off her bedtime every time she whines about the hardship of division and word problems because I couldn’t take it anymore. And it worked like a charm.

Anyway, I haven’t been shopping for myself. I’m shopping for a friend. And I’m not just saying that to make P feel better. It’s true. I’m spending someone else’s money, but getting all the thrill of the clothing hunt.

But I have been looking for one thing for myself. A pair of gold sandals. Nothing fancy. I’m just after a gold flip-flop type thing in a moderate price range. I am a simple woman with simple desires.

So I went in a store the other day, looked around and then asked if they had any gold sandals. And the lady looked at me and said, “Well, gold sandals didn’t really happen this year.”

What does that even mean?

They didn’t happen? Like they don’t exist? Because Tory Burch, the patron saint of cute sandals, would disagree. She believes in the gold sandal. And I believe in her gold sandals. I just can’t justify buying a pair instead of paying the mortgage.

The whole thing suddenly felt like a challenge. I was determined to find the best pair of gold sandals ever. I was going to make gold sandals happen.

Gulley and I went to lunch yesterday because she couldn’t go on our normal Tuesday and none of this is even relevant to the story but I’m just happy I’m typing words because I spent thirty minutes in front of the mirror plucking my eyebrows trying to think of anything to write about tonight and I will tell you plain and clear that my eyebrows are the worse for it.

And you may think you’re the victim having to suffer through this nonsense, but I will tell you that you have nothing on my left eyebrow.

(Tomorrow morning I’ll regret that I wrote that because P will read the blog while he drinks coffee and will turn and look at me and say something sympathetic and tender like “Dang, you really did screw that eyebrow up.”)

After lunch I made Gulley go with me to DSW in my quest for the elusive gold sandal. Lo and behold, there were about 100 different gold sandals to choose from. It was a plethora of metallic footwear.

So naturally I bought a silver pair of sandals.

What?

I know.

But I really needed a new silver pair because my old silver ones are on their last legs. I guess I mean that literally. And these sandals beckoned to me from the aisle. They were perfect even though they weren’t gold.

Then I remembered that I’d seen gold flip-flops online at Gap. I’d even linked to them on Fashion Friday but hadn’t bought them because I was waiting until they were in the actual store so I could try them on. Gulley and I had just enough time to run in Gap before we had to pick up the kids from school.

Alas, they had the flip-flops in every color but gold. Why is my life so hard?

However, I was able to figure out that I needed a size 9. And so I came home, looked online and discovered that Gap online was offering 25% off plus I had a $10 reward card. So I got those gold flip-flops for the sum of NINE AMERICAN DOLLARS.

For those of you who’ve been reading for a while, that’s $6.00 less than what I normally pay for things.

I made those gold sandals happen. And I made them happen for $9.00.