Broken Email Form

If you've ever tried to contact me via the actual "Contact" page on this site (instead of comments on this blog) then I did not get your message.

Although the contact form itself was written just fine (and any messages sent to Chris were, in fact, received), it appears that past web hosting issues were preventing me from getting my mail, unbeknownst to me. So, just so that everyone knows, I was not blowing you off if you did send me a message.

Now, rather than try to get the problem fixed (which I've tried to do before, only to encounter helpless hosting services who refuse to acknowledge there is a problem and pretend like I just don't know how to check email), I just have that page sending to a different email address, which has fixed the problem. So. Now you can contact me.

expensive tastes

So a couple years back, Tiffany brought a bunch of stuff back from Japan, and included in her stuff from Japan was a lot of green tea. The labels were all in Japanese, of course, so all I knew was that it was "Japanese green tea." And I loved it, so I drank a lot of it. Now it is gone. It's actually been gone for a while. I tried finding more, and what I found was Sencha green at Wards... but it's not quite the same.

So today I went down to the Savannah Tea Room to see if they had what I wanted. After lots of explaining and lots of tea-sniffing, we found it... and I discovered I have very expensive taste in tea. While I could get an ounce of Sencha for $3.00 from them (and I could get that at Wards for even less), it was $9.00 for an ounce of Gyokuro, which is what my taste buds crave. Alas. I settled for an ounce of Cherry Blossom Sencha, and headed back to my computer to find some Gyokruo (Jade Dew) green tea online... only to find very similar prices everywhere I go. Considering I'm always excited about how inexpensive it is to be a tea drinker, I'm just not able to bring myself, so far, to purchase some of this pricey loose tea.

So far, the cheapest I've found is here, but I'd have to buy a lot of it. Enjoying Tea also has an okay price. But for now I'm gonna keep looking for alternatives. Alas.

My brother is so cool

So my brother and his girlfriend are on vacation this week, and they stopped by to visit on Saturday. They've already done the tourist-Savannah stuff, so we basically just hung out. When I told him about my dead Mac desktop that I don't know what to do with, he decided to take a look, because he used to work at a computer repair place. Well, we didn't fix the mac, but what he *did* do is salvage my hard-drive, which made me very happy. I'm kind of afraid to take apart computer stuff, because I don't know what all the parts do. But I told him to have at it, so he took apart my external hard drive, swapped the hard drive in that with the desktop hard drive, and then we plugged that one into my new laptop... sure enough, it worked! I was able to retrieve what little was on there that wasn't on my backup drive, and then I was able to wipe it so that I can get rid of it without worrying about someone getting my old info. Ah, happy day.

We tried modding the case so that my external drive housed both harddrives, but it didn't quite work. So for now I've just got everything back to normal, and I'm still trying to figure out what to do with that desktop. Now we're guessing it's the power supply that's shot. But everything else works just fine.

shocking

This story is fantastic. Apparently some guy in Australia generated enough static electricity from the friction between his wool sweater and his synthetic jacket that he scorched carpet and melted plastic, without even realizing it. I don't know why this story makes me smile so much... it just does.

I wear many hats - The New Job blog

I have a new job.

Chris wants to be sure I specify this as "I have another job" which means I have not quit any of my other jobs.

Which means I have 3 part-time jobs, plus freelance.

Anyways. As of today, I have a new part-time job as Adjunct Faculty at Southeastern Technical College in Vidalia, FL (90 minutes from Savannah). At the end of this month I will begin teaching 2 days a week for their Computer Graphic Design Specialist certificate program. I will have my own office, and I will be teaching two courses - Intro to Computer Graphics, and Publication Design. I will teach in a mac classroom and a pc classroom that are specifically for these courses. I will be developing the curriculum for Publication Design from scratch, and modifying an existing curriculum for the Intro to Computer Graphics class. I get to pick out books and stuff. And I am so excited.

The classes are on a quarter basis, and after this fall quarter, I will most likely be teaching two different classes for the next quarter, and so on and so forth as long as they like me and I like them. This kind of thing is exactly what I've been wanting to do ... well, pretty much forever. It's a great opportunity, and a great foot in the door.

Of course, part-time doesn't pay the bills, so I'll still be working the other 3 days a week at my current job. And tomorrow my SAT class for Princeton Review starts, so that's my third part-time job (although that one is REALLY part-time, because the classes are only about 10 hours a week for a few weeks, and they are few and far between here in Savannah). Plus freelance web design, which is very random and never guaranteed (even after clients guarantee they want me to do it, it's not really guaranteed). Oh yeah, plus that movie we're making.

So I'm a busy, busy girl. But I'm a happy busy girl.

Now I must get to bed so I can be up and ready to proctor an SAT practice test in the morning.

back in savannah

Well, we're back in Savannah, after almost a full week of visiting family in Florida. We haven't been down to visit our parents since we moved to Savannah, so we figured we had to get down there (and good that we did, with all that was going on with Chris's mom). Anyways, we had a very busy long week, with a LOT of traveling (with $3 gas!!!) So I just had to map out our trek. You'll find that numbered below.

1. We started out last Wednesday night, driving the 8 hours to Fort Myers (where my family lives) but made a short pitstop in Gainesville to have dinner with a couple friends to break up the drive a little.


2. We spent two days in Fort Myers, hanging out with my family.


3. Drove to Lakeland Saturday, where Chris's family lives


4. Sunday we made a short trek back to Fort Meade to visit Chris's grandparents


5. Tuesday we headed out, stopping in Orlando to meet my sister-in-law's boyfriend


6. After killing a couple hours in Orlando, we made our way up to Jacksonville, where we had dinner with my brother and his girlfriend, then drove the rest of the way home to Savannah.

Yes, we had a busy but productive week.

And now that I'm back, I have a cold. blah. go figure.

New Orleans

If you've been following Chris's blog, you know that his mom was stuck in New Orleans during this recent ordeal after the hurricane. Well, I'm happy to report that she arrived home safely last night, and we were all there to greet her (which in itself was something, since Chris and I, as well as his brother Sam, all live in Georgia now and just happened to be coming here for the weekend already). She added some details to the story we already knew that just amazed us all... and would be, I think, almost too much to recount.

Chris may add a bit more later, but what I want to make clear from all this is the fact that the National Guard did not help these people once they arrived in New Orleans. Chris's mom was in the Superdome (after escaping her hotel that had been looted) and there were shootings and stabbings there all the time. She feared for her life, and rightly so... people had to fight to protect her on a couple of occasions. When the National Guard did finally arrive, their purpose was to block people IN the Superdome, not to protect people... they saw shootings and stabbings happening, and did nothing to stop them. They pointed their guns at people when they felt they were in danger, but did nothing to protect those who were actually in danger.

Even once they made it on a bus (Friday, after being stuck there since Wednesday), no one was concerned with really helping them. Deborah tried to tell them, whenever she could, that she had a home to go to and if they would just let her off the bus, she could get to a hotel and get herself home, but they wouldn't let her. She was not really safe on the bus, either. So she literally had to escape the bus in Fort Worth in order to get to a hotel and get a flight booked for home.

I'm just amazed and disgusted with just how little was being done to actually help these people.... And the government and the news are spinning this to be a better situation than it really is, so I think it's important that we all know just how little is being done to help. And if you've seen news stations where it look terrible (because I have) I want you to know that it is actually worse than what you've seen. We are very blessed that Deborah made it out safely.