Give the Gift of Sheep... or Cows... or...

I'm very excited about Oxfam America Unwrapped, where you can buy gifts of sustainability for third world villages. It's pretty freaking awesome, and right now I'm trying to figure out which one(s) to ask for for Christmas. I can't just get these gifts for others because I risk pissing them off that I got someone else something cool for THEIR gift, so I just hafta ask for myself. Some options are to get someone a Sheep for $45, or maybe Support an indigenous craftwoman for $90. Other gifts include buying a crocodile, a cow, or a camel, or irrigating a farmer's land, supporting a fair trade co-op... even building a coffee mill. Prices range from under $20 to over $5,000. Pretty freaking awesome. Interested? Start shopping now!

hardware

Yesterday I got a new piercing. It's something I wanted for about 5 years, but I was waiting for a good reason to do it... it needed to be a celebration of something big. And with everything the Lord has been doing in our lives lately... sending us to Atlanta, providing me with a great job (I start Monday!), and then giving us a fantastic apartment (move in August 11), I thought this would be a good time. And it helps that Atlanta has this really great piercing place that is really obsessive about the quality of their hardware, and proper piercing care so that it heals well. It's called Piercing Experience, and although their website is butt-ugly, that just means they're too busy being concerned with their piercing rules to worry about anything else. Although my ear still smarts a bit today, I'm pretty hopeful that the healing time on this cartilage piercing will be significantly shorter than on the last ones I got 5 years ago (which, by the way, took more than a year to heal). Anyways. I like it, and I especially like that it's pretty understated... I don't think it's too noticeable, especially since my hair half covers it up.

experimental Amigurumi

I found a free pattern online for an amigurumi Panda bear (scroll down for it), so I decided to give it a shot. I made it while at the PEZ Convention this weekend, so I didn't really have access to stuffing, so I used toilet paper... I don't know if that's to blame for how dumb he looks, or if I should blame his eyes (I also didn't go out and buy eyes to go on him, so I just made them out of yarn) or if I am just bad at this... nonetheless, I'm not too pleased with him. Chris named him Milton. I was gonna give him to Emily since she loves purple, but Milton is too ugly to give away.

Now I'm working on a rabbit to see if I have any better luck on my second try, with different (more forgiving) yarn. And eyes. Gotta get real eyes.

Team Skeene

I keep forgetting to point you all to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law's new blog, Team Skeene. I know what you're all thinking. "But Kendra, you and Chris have been married for four years, and Sam and Nicole have only been married for a month. How is it that THEY get to call themselves Team Skeene?" Well, the simple answer is because they DO call themselves Team Skeene, and... we don't. So there. We have decided, however, that whenever the FOUR of us are together (which will be often since we will be living close now!) we are called Team Skeene Supreme. That's right, Chris and I are the Supreme part.

Photos

A couple months ago we went down to Orlando/Lakeland for a Mother's Day / Chris's Birthday / Cornerstone Florida weekend. Chris was borrowing a rockin' digital camera from a friend (for shooting the festival) and so the evening of his birthday party, he ran around taking pictures with it. A lot of them were really good (considering he was taking "snapshots") ... I love this photo of Emily (Chris's sister) and her dog Duncan... and I always hate the pictures he takes of me, but I actually like this one. So here ya go!

Waste of money?

So a couple of weeks ago, I paid to get a Spot Test, which was to test for food allergies. I know some of my food allergies, but I still get a rash sometimes when I've been good at avoiding the things I'm allergic to, so I was hoping to figure out what else I may have overlooked. I finally got the test back today, and was pretty disappointed with the results. According to this spot test, I'm not allergic to ANY foods, not even sulfites. Here's the thing. I KNOW I'm allergic to sulfites... how do I know this? Well, whenever I eat something with sulfites in it, my faces breaks out in a horrible itchy rash. When I avoid sulfites, no horrible itchy rash. So either they messed up my blood sample, or their test is bogus? I dunno... but I'm pretty disappointed.

sweet sleep

chris and i rewarded ourselves for our last few days of excessive busy-ness by sleeping for 12 hours. ahhh, i feel so refreshed! (although, admittedly, I would feel more refreshed if i wasn't allergic to peachtree city. my sinuses are killing me!)

farewell savannah!

we're outta savannah and into HOTlanta! the move went GREAT, we have very great friends. Angela was especially amazing, she basically single-handedly cleaned our entire apartment, and helped me out with packing and stuff, for two and a half days. I don't think we would've gotten it done without her.

So now we're at Sam & Nicole's place just south of Atlanta, our stuff is in a POD for the month, and starting Monday, Chris and I start figuring out what our lives are going to look like in the ATL.

We're tired.

packing, and... break from packing

So we've been hard at work packing up the apartment... we have a lot of stuff, so it's taking a LOT of time. I'm pretty exhausted. So I took a break from it the other night to do something equally important - customize my computer's desktop image and icons. Since I got a new hard drive, I had to re-customize. This is extremely important for my mental stability. So here's what I decided on this time:

I'm especially happy about my new hard drive icon. Hooray for R2!
I found all these at Pixel Girl Presents, in case you wanna check 'em out.

missing: 9 months of emails

Note: this blog post contains some whining and some computer-talk. If you don't care about that, please jump to the important part below.

First I want to start by saying that I DO back up my computer. Not nightly, not weekly, but about every 2 or 3 weeks I force myself to run a backup, which requires digging my backup drive out of the fireproof box, plugging it in, and letting it run overnight. I have software that checks for new and updated files, and copies those over to the portable hard drive. So when my hard drive went kaput, I was unhappy, but not panicked because I knew that I was only missing about 10 days of info, not my entire lifetime of info (plus I was hopeful that the repair company would be able to salvage some of my files). Well, I finally got my computer back yesterday, with a fresh new hard drive, and they told me they were NOT able to save anything from the old one. This sucks, but again, I have a backup. No problem.

So yesterday I started the task of plugging in the backup drive, and copying files back over to the new drive. Pretty much everything is intact, minus those 10 days of work that will take me a little while to figure out what's missing and what I lost. UNTIL I got to the part where I was trying to open my email. I used to have all my saved emails on webmail, but a couple months ago I finally ditched my crappy web host in favor of a better web host, and when I did that, I had to copy ALL my saved email to my computer. It took a long time. I had to re-organize everything in Entourage (Outlook for the Mac), and from then just started using Entourage exclusively for email (whereas I used to go back and forth between webmail and Entourage). Long story short, I ran into two problems. The first problem is that Entourage decided that it couldn't open its own database of emails from the backup. Why? I don't know, but apparently when Microsoft wrote this software, they didn't bother with making the email database robust enough to be easily backed up. But when I finally got Entourage to open a backup version of my email, it turns out that my backup software hadn't been updating up this particular file! It's been doing great with EVERYTHING ELSE, but my EMAIL database hasn't been backed up since September of 2006!!!!

For those of you who are already bored with this blog post, let me get to the point: If you have emailed me with anything of importance since September of last year, I don't have it. That means email addresses, business info, ANYTHING emailed to ANY account with ANY importance is no longer in my possession. If you are waiting for me to reply to an email, or handle something important, or anything, you will need to send it again, because it's gone. Even if you haven't sent me anything important, you may just want to shoot me an email to say hi so that I have your email address again, just in case. I don't want to post my email address online because I get enough spam as it is, but I'll write it out for ya... kendra ... at ... idreaminblue ... dot ... com.

Now I've got to finish updating my computer, and then figure out a new piece of software for backing up my data so this doesn't happen again. I also might switch to Mail instead of Entourage since Entourage keeps screwing me up. This is going to take a while. It sure doesn't help that we're MOVING in less than a WEEK and I don't really have time to take care of my computer.

thanks for the understanding.

Mizero

Mizero is the Kirwandan word for "Hope." The Mizero Foundation is a non-profit organization who is bringing hope to orphans from the Rwandan's genocide. They are organizing a tour for a group of orphans to perform traditional Rwandan music and dancing at churches around the United States this fall. They will be raising money to build a cultural arts center for the orphans in Kigali, Rwanda.

The Lord has been moving and growing this organization within the short time since its inception just a couple months ago, and He has been bringing some great people together to make this happen. But we still need a lot of help in a lot of different areas of the ministry. If this is something that the Lord is prompting you to look into, please visit their website at www.mizerochildren.org to learn more, and if you feel you may have resources (time, money, contacts, knowledge, or things we haven't even thought of) that the Lord could use in growing this foundation, please fill out the form on the Partner With Us page.