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Author Archives: ireneg63
3 Reasons Why I’m Reading the Bible in 90 Days AGAIN
Starting tomorrow, August 20th, through November 17th, I’ll be embarking on my fourth round of reading the Bible in 90 Days. For those new to the concept, the goal of Bible in 90 Days is to read attentively every word of the Bible from cover-to-cover in a 90-day period. I’ve successfully done this once, twice, three times in the past two years. Why on earth, might you ask, would I do this seemingly insanely aggressive reading program yet again? (pssst – the key word here is “seemingly”) Because God wants me to. Jesus said that we are to live by every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4). I can’t live by His every word unless I first know by reading His every word. And for me, being able to read the Bible in a 90 day period has been far more meaningful than attempting to stretch it out over a year’s time (something that I was never able to do successfully, by the way). Because I want to. The last 6 months have perhaps been the most personally challenging of my entire life to date. If I shared the details, you would no doubt think I … Continue reading
Merry Christmas 2011
Classic Holly Frame Christmas Card Personalize your holiday card this Christmas with Shutterfly. View the entire collection of cards.
Posted in Down on the Farm
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Struggling Readers: You CAN Read the Bible in 90 Days!
My 10-year-old dyslexic son just completed the Bible in 90 Days Challenge via Mom’s Toolbox! Struggling readers, adults and children alike: if he can do it, I can assure you that you can, too! Click here to read my post on how he did it. Here’s a hokey 2-minute video I made with my iPhone to celebrate the milestone: If you have trouble seeing the video from the email, click here to view it online. Blessings,
Our Family’s One-Year Activity Fast
Last September our family boldly embarked on and successfully survived a 30-Day TV and Gaming Fast (it was great, by the way, you should all try it). This September we are embarking on a <gasp!> one-year activity fast. It all started toward the end of Spring 2011, when our family had reached new heights in terms of activity burnout. All the extracurricular activities our family members were involved with not only depleted our respective energy levels but also, and probably more important, destroyed our evening and weekend family time together. Practically every night of the week, as well as every weekend day, our family was split up in different directions as we attended to various sports practices, clinics, & games, public speaking classes, Aikido lessons, church, and sporadic meetings, as required. We were physically and mentally exhausted from running around and became more and more disconnected as a family. I wholeheartedly subscribe to the “The Family That Stays Together, Stays Together” principle and our family clearly wasn’t living up to it. So one rare, available night last spring during dinner, I suggested to the family that we conduct a one-year experiment beginning in September of this year: for one year, … Continue reading
Falling Out of Love with Crashplan
[The latest updates are provided at the end of this post. Spoiler Alert: I'm back in love with Crashplan.] The time had come. The dreaded and inevitable hard drive crash. My 6-month old Western Digital My Book World II 2TB drive (that’s a story for another post) contained 10+ years of photos, videos, thousands of music files, documents, all our financial data and more. Did I worry? Nope. After all, I had pre-purchased four years of backup insurance with Crashplan (www.crashplan.com). All my data was safely and soundly backed up to the reliable Crashplan cloud. Or so I thought. Since I had so many files to restore (it would have taken months to restore over the internet), I ordered Crashplan’s “Fast Restore” service. Essentially, for $124 they back all the data up to a hard drive and overnight it to you. Once the drive is connected to your computer, you follow instructions to have Crashplan restore the files in a much quicker fashion. Except for one teensy weensy problem. Crashplan sent the drive to me with ENTIRE DIRECTORIES of my data missing. That’s right. MISSING. Including my 2006 photos folder (get this – not my 2001, ’02, ’03, ’04, … Continue reading
Pencil Sharpening the Man’s Way
I asked my Sweetie, whilst he was watching TV, if he would manually sharpen 36 TRI-conderoga pencils (they come with their own hand sharpener because they are too fat to fit in a traditional electric pencil sharpener). Having done this task once before and remembering how much his hands cramped from it, this is what he came up with. My genius man.
Posted in Homeschooling, Tuesday's Tips
Tagged pencil sharpening, triconderoga pencils
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What I Did on Summer Vacation (2011 Edition)
Started a third round of the Bible in 90 Days Challenge (finishing Oct. 8th) via Mom’s Toolbox. Our 10-year-old is doing it for the first time, too. If his dyslexic little self can do it, so can you! Participated in my first ever Beth Moore bible study (Breaking Free). Jumping Jehoshaphat! Does she ever take you neck-deep into the Word! ♫ Lo-o-ove it ♫. Changed over to a Raw Food diet. Lost 22 lbs and sprouted rabbit ears. Threw a 50th wedding anniversary party for my in-laws at our farm. The highlight of their my summer. Good times. Homeschooled. ‘Cause that’s how we year-rounders roll. Finished our 2009 taxes. Owe $150K (that’s without any of the penalties & interest). Not feeling any love for our government’s messed up tax code system and how they treat small business owners. And not feeling particularly motivated to complete 2010′s, either. Taxes should be God’s Abomination #8 (Proverbs 6:16-19). Did NOT feel the east coast earthquakequiver and was forced to endure predictable & tragically unimaginative Hurricane Irene jabs. Yawn. Lost 10+ years of photos, videos, music and documents when my network drive went belly up. I thought I was in the clear with having … Continue reading
Posted in Resolutions
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Aperature Library Could Not Be Opened
After much research about the right photo organization tool to use, I decided to download Apple’s Aperture v3′s 30-day trial version before investing the $200 to buy it. Right away it installed flawlessly and allowed me to create a library on my Western Digital (MyBookWorld II Edition) network drive. Yippee! I spent the next 4 hours importing my images, also located on my WD drive, into the library and naming faces. I was very pleased. Then life got in the way and I couldn’t return to Aperture for about a week. That’s when IT happened. I launched Aperture and got the message “There was an error opening the database for the library ‘<file path and name of library>’. The library could not be opened because the file system of the library’s volume is unsupported.” Excuse me?!? All I did was walk away from it for a week and all of a sudden my WD drive is unsupported? When I tried to create another library onto the same network drive, I got the message that the drive wasn’t in a supported format. Huh? Didn’t it just create one on it about a week ago? <sigh> Back to googling the forums again…for … Continue reading
Solution to iMac’s Finder “Connection Failed”
As a Mac newbie I was immediately impressed with how polite and professional the AppleCare reps are. However, polite professionalism notwithstanding, what really makes me a satisfied customer is actually having my problem resolved. Apple missed an easy opportunity on that one today. Here’s my situation: Our household experienced a 3-second brown-out last week. It took my 27″ iMac down as well as my network-attached Western Digital drive (MyWorldBook Edition II). The WD drive choked with a strange lighting sequence on the front of it and I couldn’t manually reset it via the Power Button so I had to disconnect the power cord then connect it back in. Upon rebooting both the iMac and the WD drive, I was able to see the WD drive in Finder’s Shared devices list. However, when I clicked on it, it said “Connection Failed”. Yet, when I did Go -> Connect to Server and reconnected the device, I was able to access the drive and everything on it. Still, any application that I launched after that (eg. iPhoto, Word, etc.) that needed access to a file on the WD drive, I would get the same “Connection Failed” message and would have to reconnect AGAIN. … Continue reading
Posted in The Tool Box
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Bible in 90 Days for Kids
My ten-year-old is attempting to complete the Bible in 90 Days challenge along with me. My idea. Not his. He’s been stuck in the Old Testament forever and, just like with me, I felt the material wasn’t gelling for him at such a slow pace. When I first suggested it to him he thought I lost my ever-loving mind. He was, after all, diagnosed with dyslexia 3 years ago. And even though, through therapy and a number of other tools, the majority of his reading challenges are behind him, the thought of tackling the Big Book in 90 days was more than his 10-year-old brain could handle. But I assured him that I had a plan to make it as easy as possible for him. I downloaded all thirteen of the weekly audio versions of the Bible in 90 Days to my iPod (they were $2.95 each from Amazon.com) and he listens to the audio as he reads along with it (reiterating to him daily that the goal is to read every word on the page attentively). This method takes approximately one hour a day based on the speed of the narrator. To make it even easier, I have him … Continue reading
Posted in Bible in 90 Days
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