<$Wednesday, August 20, 2008$>
What's the plural of hiatus?
| First, some good news for a change: We have a house! It's a three bedroom 1971 brick ranch with a small kitchen and a big back yard and walk-in closets and YAY, it's OURS! Well, it's in escrow, so it's not really ours yet. But everything has been agreed upon, inspections and appraisals have taken place, minor repairs are being asked for, and in just eight more days we'll sign the deed and then it will officially belong to So, as you can imagine, we're pretty busy. So busy I can barely keep up with it all, let alone keep y'all up to date as well. What's more, just the thought of blogging these days leaves me cold. Too much pressure, man! And there's also the fact that I've been kind of ambivalent about this particular blog for a while now. So, as with Sparkle Motion, I'm declaring an official hiatus until life settles down a little and I figure out what I want to do. You can head over there to find out all of the places you can still keep up with me in the meantime. Thank you for reading. I hope I made it worth your while. Labels: meta |
<$Monday, June 23, 2008$>
What I've Been Up To Lately
| As I mentioned last month (o.O), we've officially started our house hunt. But we didn't get very far out of the gate before we got tripped up and had to take a step back to compose ourselves. Unfortunately, the real estate agent we were going with--who is a great guy and and a very knowledgeable agent--is just too busy right now to accommodate our weird schedule. After the second time he's had to cancel an appointment on us--we had cleared Friday afternoon to go look at houses, but he got tied up in closing rigmarole with other clients and couldn't take us--we're stepping back to take a deep breath and decide whether we want to stick with this agent or try out my sister's favorite realtor. So that bit sucks. We did get to go out one afternoon a few weeks ago, and found a house we both really liked, but we were dithering on the location, and while we were doing that somebody else snatched it up. So much for that. Apart from that, I've begun revamping my web site (a redesign for this blog is next on my list), which entails re-self-teaching myself CSS and various other web languages. I also revamped my Etsy shop and added some new items, and have still more stuff to add once I get a sunny afternoon free to take pictures. And I've been writing. I think I'm only 20,000 words or so from the end of my novel. That looks like a lot, until you hold it up next to the 70,000 words (or somewhere thereabouts) that I've already written. Finally, I took a much needed vacation, in which I didn't go anywhere, slept as much as I pleased, got lots of "me" time, and discovered a thrift shop where the clothes are expensive but the price tags are so very not. We're talking brand names that I gave up thinking I'd ever wear a long time ago, and nothing over $5.99. No, I'm not telling you where it is. I don't want you snurching all the good stuff out from under me. But today, I feel stylish and cute and like I belong in a cotton commercial. It's the fabric of our lives! Labels: house-hunt, meta, personal, shopping |
Let the hiatus be ended. I come bearing links.
Hidey-ho, boys and girls! Since I've been absent for so long, I'll waste no time giving you the goods.
That's all I've got. Unless you also want excuses as to where the hay I've been for the last month. I don't really have any of those, either. I just felt a little burned out on blogging--especially on blogging-for-hire--so I put this blog on the back burner while I decided whether or not I wanted to continue it. And the decision I reached is that, indeed, I do. So although, like with my other blog, posting will remain a little sporadic while I try to finish the rough draft of my novel, I will be posting here again. And I will try my very hardest not to let it descend into all rants about our nightmare house non-hunt (which is a whole 'nother post), although as things currently stand, that certainly is tempting. It's good to be back! Labels: bargains, coupons, food problem, link roundup, meta, personal |
<$Thursday, March 13, 2008$>
Sometimes you just have to take a step back...
| ...and admit when something's not working out. Like splitting "Growing Up" into three separate blogs, for instance. That's not working for me at all. In fact, all it's doing is stressing me out. As such, I'm going to be making the following changes around here: 1. A name change. This blog will soon and thenceforth be known as The Bauhaushold Blog. And it's getting a redesign to match. 2. A re-integration of subjects. The house & home and health stuff is coming back here to roost alongside the personal finance stuff. It's not like you can really separate all of those things from each other, anyway. 3. A move. This one is still tentative, and will be the last to happen, if indeed it does happen. But I'm thinking about putting this blog on the front page of my site. I haven't totally made up my mind about this, though. I might end up just leaving it where it is. Labels: meta |
<$Tuesday, January 29, 2008$>
Growing Up is growing up (part 2)
| You might have noticed a little link up there in the logo banner to a little something called "the Growing Up Network." This is because I'm currently in the process of turning Growing Up into a network of three blogs: This one, renamed Growing Money; Growing Healthy, my health and fitness blog; and introducing Growing a Home, where I'll blog about my journey to buy a house and turn it into a home. These blogs are all connected via a new home page. My next step will be to set it up with its own domain, but that won't happen until after payday. I'm pretty pleased with how the home page turned out. My biggest limitation toward designing my own web pages since my computer died was the loss of my Photoshop program. I did the majority of my designing in there, and then just futzed around with the HTML until the finished project came as close as I could get it to the Photoshop design. I know all about GIMP, and once we replace our computer, I'm sure it will take care of all my web design needs. In the mean time, though, since I'm primarily stuck using borrowed computers for all my online business, anything that has to be downloaded and installed is out of the question. Thankfully, the internets have caught up to my needs by providing free web based image editors, and they have come a long way. I started out using Picture2life (aka editmypicture.com), and while they've grown a lot in their functionality since I first started using them, they have an unfortunate tendency to crash or freeze up in the middle of editing my pictures. I recently discovered Picnik. It appears to be more reliable and user-friendly than Picture2life, but the free version is fairly limited if you want to use it in a design capacity. The paid version has a lot more functionality, and I thought $24.95 a year was a pretty reasonable price to pay for those extra functions. Still, I decided to keep looking. Yesterday I found Phixr, which turns out to be almost exactly what I wanted. It's very close to Photoshop in both function and form, and I was really impressed with how much I could do with it. The only drawback I could see was that it doesn't have a great selection of fonts to choose from. I got around this by combining it with the other two programs mentioned above. Between the three of them, I could accomplish pretty much everything I needed. In a pinch, there's also always Big Huge Labs' Flickr toys, with their motivational poster generator, ID badge maker, picture framer, and more. I used their magazine cover generator to create the home page for JMBauhaus.com. This one is a lot of fun to play with. With all of the web based applications available these days, you could easily get away with not even having any office-type software on your computer. I'm sure Microsoft is just loving that. I know I sure am. |