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.

sleepless night

Well... I don't know the best way to "tell" this story. It probably won't be eloquent. I'm rather sleep-deprived. Last night, just as I was finally dozing off to sleep, around 12:30am, I hear what I thought was a gunshot outside our bedroom window. It freaked me out, but Chris wasn't sure it was actually a gunshot, plus we can't see out our bedroom windows anyways, so we just tried to go back to sleep. Then just as I was falling BACK to sleep, we heard a bunch of gunshots all at once (I think I counted ten) right outside. This time we were sure of what we heard, so Chris called the police, and was told that a call had already been made and police were on their way. The strange thing was that we didn't hear anyone talking outside (back behind our apartment is a seedy bar, and we usually hear people out there until all hours of the night, so you'd think if someone was shot outside, people would be making some noise). Chris said "probably someone shot into the air." Within a couple of minutes, there were cop cars EVERYWHERE, and the whole block by our apartment was blocked off. Chris managed to get enough of a glimpse out the window to see cops running around everywhere, see someone put into an ambulance, and then see a police officer inspecting the ground about 15 feet from our bedroom window. Of course at this time we really couldn't sleep, and we were half expecting a police officer to ring the doorbell to see if we knew anything.

After a while of trying to look out windows to see what was happening, we realized we really need to try and get some sleep. Chris had to be up at 5:30am to open the coffee shop, and I had a 90 minute drive and a 12 hour work day ahead of me the next morning. So, of course, it took us a long time to finally fall back to sleep, and I was just barely falling asleep AGAIN when we heard knocking, at 2:30am. We're used to people ringing the doorbell if they need to get us, because the door to our apartment is inside of another locked door, and if anyone knocks on that door, we can't hear it. So Chris opens our door to investigate the noise, and is surprised to see a cop standing there, asking if we heard anything. Chris told him what we knew (gunshot at 12:30, lotsa shots at 12:50, the end). And the officer left. So needless to say, we didn't exactly get any sleep.

This morning I did a google news search for the incident and found this article, which tells me that a man was murdered outside our apartment. Just a little scary. Needless to say, we're REALLY happy to be leaving ghetto downtown Savannah in under three weeks.

Computer in a Coma, and a Life Update

Yesterday my computer decided to quit working. I think the hard-drive died. It came as quite a shock. For those of you that don't know, basically everything I do requires that machine. I am a freelance designer, which requires the computer. I manage a business for our PEZ documentary, where all the records are kept on that machine. And I am a graphic design & web design teacher, and when I'm not at the school I need to check emails from students and grade assignments for the online class I teach. So I'm going through a bit of withdrawal today.

We still have Chris's computer to check emails and do a LITTLE bit of necessary work, but, well, Chris's computer sucks. It doesn't have all my software on it. And while I actually have a work laptop that I could, in theory, work on, that one started acting funny a week ago and I need to take it in to work to have the tech guys look at it, because right now I can only boot it up in safe mode. So I'm kind of being forced to do less on the computer and more in the real world for a while. It's probably a blessing in disguise, but right now I'm expecting to start displaying symptoms of withdrawal... like the shakes, or nausea.

What this DOES mean is that I have no excuse NOT to start packing up our home while I'm computer-less. Why would I start packing up my home, you ask? Well... we've officially decided to move to Atlanta. In three weeks. It's a really long story with lots of pieces to it, but the short version is that Chris and I really feel this is where the Lord is leading us, and so we have made the decision to step out in faith and follow, trusting that the Lord will put together the pieces in His timing. The middle of June is when my classes end for the quarter, so at that time we're going to move up the the Atlanta area and start looking for apartments, finalize jobs, etc. Chris's brother and our new sister-in-law have offered to let us stay in their apartment for a month while they're out of town, so we're taking them up on it. It's going to be a crazy ride, but we're looking forward to it all. We're just really ready to get out of Savannah, and we feel that now is the time. As things become more finalized, I'll post updates. For now I don't want to start talking about things we haven't confirmed. But that's what we know.

What, no GoLive? What a surprise...

A year or so ago, my husband and one of my best friends were both taking a web design class at SCAD. They were being forced to use Adobe GoLive in this class, although it is TERRIBLE web design software (and this is coming from an Adobe girl). I complained about it and mentioned they should be learning Dreamweaver. They said "Well, Adobe bought out Macromedia, so our teacher said that Dreamweaver will be discontinued, so we have to learn GoLive." I insisted that this was ridiculous, Dreamweaver is the industry standard, and there's no WAY Adobe would trash it. They insisted that their teacher is WAY smart (he has a degree from HARVARD, after all) and WAY cool, and of course since I'm not a Harvard grad, nor do I take pictures of deer antlers covered in icing, I must not know what I'm talking about. In their defense, the Kendra-bashing did not actually happen, but in my mind it may as well have, since they were so enamored with their teacher and his GoLive-loving ways. And don't even get me STARTED on how his OWN website is all images and in no way optimized for search engines to even FIND HIM. Some web teacher.

Well, ladies and gents, you know what's coming. The new Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium comes packaged with none other than Dreamweaver, NOT GoLive. GoLive has, in fact, been discontinued from the Creative Suite. Although this victory matters to no one but myself, I still take great pride in knowing What's Up. I am The Nerdiest.

ego

Sure, I graduated nearly 10 years ago, but it's still kinda cool that my high school (Fort Myers High School) was just ranked in the top 100 in the COUNTRY.

And what's with all the talk of Florida schools being among the worst? I was always surprised because I got a pretty stellar high school education, in Florida. But I guess as a state it's not so hot, but there are some good ones. 22 of the top 100 schools are in Florida, actually. (12 in Texas, 13 in N.Y, only 7 in California, 11 in Va, and after that is seems like no state has more than a handful).

new sister-in-law!

My brother-in-law Sam got married to an awesome girl named Nicole this past weekend, and Chris and I were blessed to be a part of it. It was a crazy-busy weekend, but worth every minute of it. Lots of time with family, making new friends, and celebrating. Good times were had by all.

Favorite Sesame Street Moments

I don't know how I got sidetracked watching old Sesame Street clips this morning, but here are my favorite clips in Sesame Street history.

This time-waster was brought to you by the letter K.

Don't Mess With Our Chocolate!

If there's one thing that really gets me mad, it's when corporations lobby the FDA to drop regulations on food products. I think the worst is when companies want the FDA to loosen standards on organics, but on a more universal topic that people other than me might care about, chocolate companies are trying to get the FDA to cut back their regulations on what's labeled chocolate. CHOCOLATE! They want the FDA to allow them to use vegetable fats instead of cocoa butter, and milk substitutes instead of milk, and still label it "chocolate" ... making the chocolate less tasty and less, well, chocolatey. I don't care of companies want to make fake chocolate to save money, but I don't want them to be able to call it chocolate. It just bugs me that the FDA really is in the business of serving businesses, at the expense of the consumers. Not that this is something new... just something we need to be increasingly aware of when it's becoming more clear that what we eat affects our health, and not just in the "eating fat makes you fat" kind of way.

back, but not for long

We got back from Atlanta late Sunday night. Had all day Monday to catch up on some stuff at home. Off to work Tues/Wed, and the cycle continues again. I finally pulled out my PDA and counted how many days I've actually been home in the past few months.
Here's the tally:

• March: 17 days outta 31


• April: 12 days outta 30


• May: (tentative) 12 days outta 31 (but that might decrease).

Luckily we have an awesome friend to check out mail and hang out in our house when we're gone, water our plants & keep our internet company. But MAN, that air mattress doesn't suit my neck so well.

Anyways, I'm still waiting for the rest of the pieces to be put together to figure out what we're doing with ourselves after June... When I know something I will share.

rock, rock

The Lord is still rocking our world, and we're still in Atlanta for the festival. Brooke and her hospitality has been a huge blessing. Friends calling out of the blue because the Lord put us on their hearts has been a strange an amazing product of the week, as well. I'll post more when there's actually something to post, instead of just lots of confused feelings and nervous tummies. Please pray.