Tech girl

I think that, in another life, I probably should've been an IT person....well not really, but I do like trying to figure out techy things and am a sucker for gadgets.

I love my smart phone, probably more than is healthy. It lets me see emails, pictures, and all sorts of stuff anytime, almost any place, and its like a *new* phone now that I got a new battery. With my old battery it would randomly turn itself off even when it still had power left and would run itself down really quickly. Not good traits in something that is to be used if I have an emergency. With the new battery, no problems so far :)

My latest techie thing - I got my new computer at work today and I opted to have 2 screens, by keeping my old one and getting the new one too. It'll take some getting used to, but will be wonderful for all the work I do with several programs open. I already used it for some work I was doing on a survey - the survey was open in IE on one screen and the backup documents (Excel mostly) on the other screen. hopefully it won't feel strange to look at a single screen at home....I am also proud that I was able to get my palm to sync to my new computer, for some reason getting that thing set up correctly is always the hardest thing.

Another fun and sort of techie (definitely nerdy) thing that Kevin and I do is geocaching. We use our GPS system and get to go on treasure hunts. We haven't had much success in the past but decided to try again when we realized how many caches there are near us. We went on Sunday (great use of our extra daylight and a beautiful day) with my sister, new to geocaching. We found 2 of the 4 we looked for, and they were SO TINY, called 'micro caches'. We'll definitely be doing more geocaching now that the weather is warming up. It can be frustrating, but was so exciting when we finally spotted what we were looking for. I am learning that when I choose what caches to look for that I need to read the guest book posts, at least enough to know if people have indicated it is missing...one that we looked for is no longer there, oops. I'll learn more as we practice. Its a great way to get outside on a nice afternoon.

Census FAIL

I got something in the mail yesterday that said Census on the outside of it, and opened it up thinking I was about to fill out the Census 2010, only to find a letter letting me know it is on the way and asking me to take them time to do it. uh, waste of tax dollars to send a letter out to everyone a week before letting us know its coming.

I can't turn on the tv or open my mail without seeing something about it - there have been fliers with my gas bill, our local school district newsletter has a big ad about it, even my credit union had a blurb about making sure the census people are legit before giving them information. I know its coming, and nerd that I am was actually going to sit down and do it right then.

I need to come up with more interesting ideas for my blog, but haven't even really thought of it lately. My conference last week Waco was great and my presentation went well!

Girl scout cookie time

Girl scout cookies are so good. And all my years of selling them - door-to-door and booth sales - has not lessened my enjoyment of them. I can still rattle off all the names, and remember when they cost less than 2 bucks a box. Did you know there are 2 different bakers for them? and that only one baker uses the names, the other uses descriptions as the names (tagalongs vs peanut butter patties), oddly enough thin mints have the same name with both methods. As a kid, we'd swap cookies with my aunt who lived in Houston because the girls near her had the other baker's cookies and so each year they'd have at least one cookie we didn't have and we'd have one they didn't have either.

Do I know too much about cookies? Yes, but that is what happens when you sell them for years and years. Hard to believe that my troop was able to go to Savannah, GA and to London with the proceeds from selling those cookies.

My favorites are still the tagalongs, with samoas a close second...

Pinot and DeWalt

Where has February gone? We're already in the last week of it. I'm ready for the Olympics to be over, I enjoy watching some of it - and find myself wanting to go skiing when I heard the skis and snowboards cut the snow - but am ready for 'regular programming'.

We finished a couple of house projects this week and I think this will be the end of our projects for a while.

It feels good to have them accomplished, and amazing how small changes make a big difference in how the house looks and feels. We are becoming quite the pros at putting up curtains! Last weekend, we put up a curtain rod in our bedroom (Lowe's had the length we needed) and put up the two panels I'd ordered. They looked great, but we decided that we wanted to add 2 additional panels. Our bedroom window is actually 3 large windows, so with the two additional panels it would cover each wall section between and make it appear to be one large window. We got the panels in the mail this week (love online shopping!) and I put them up yesterday. Since the hard work of putting the curtain rod up was done, it was really easy. and we were able to use some supplies we already had to make it really POP -- tiny hooks that we screwed into the wall to hold the 'holdback' that came with each panel. We also had to use our own anchors for the screws since the ones that came with the curtain rod were pieces of junk and collapsed on themselves.

I took a curtain rod from our old house and wanted to put it back up -- I think it was the ONLY curtain we'd put up at the old house since we had such a hard time with it. We put it in our bathroom, and it looks great! It was tough to put up because it was hard to get the stepladder in the bathtub situated in a way that we could get to each end of the window and both of us being short it was a stretch to reach up that high from the middle of the tub, but we finally finished it. Lots of up and down the ladder since Kevin works the drill better, and I can get the screws started more easily. Truly, a team Tucker effort! It looks good and is much more stable than it was the last time we put it up - that time, it felt that if you barely touched it, it would fall off the wall. Again, we're saved by anchor screws..

The title of the post is something I thought of last weekend. Our other project was putting hardware (handles, knobs) on the kitchen cabinets and drawers. We bought them last weekend (also at Lowe's), and decided on Valentine's Day (after a wonderful homemade dinner that we made together) to install one so that we could do the trial and error with the size hole to make, and how to measure where to make the holes. It took us quite a while to find the right sizes and get the handle installed. Kevin had to drill the hole a few different times to get it to the right size and then drill a larger hole only *part* of the way for the screw head to sit into. We finally got the sizing right and got it installed. We'd only planned to do one but went ahead and did the rest of the drawers (6 of them) and measured and marked all of the cabinets, Kevin finished those up on Monday. We worked on the project while each drinking a glass of the wine we'd had with dinner (pinot grigio), and Kevin's drill, which is a godsend for each of our projects, is a Dewalt - and there is the reason behind the post name..

I am back from my business trip to Charlotte, NC. I had a good time, and learned a lot. Every work trip makes me happy that I don't travel very much for work. I know that some people love it, and I guess I'd get used to it, but I really like that I get to come home to my house and see my hubby and our dog every day after work.

What I do like about such conferences is its a time to share ideas with people who do similar work and 'speak the same language' in a way. This was a different sort of conference for an initiative called "Achieving the Dream". It was a mix of faculty, staff, and administrators. Hearing stories of individual students, and hearing from some of the students themselves in the closing session serves as a great reminder to me. I work at a university, but not directly with the students. Since I am so removed from the students, they often just become numbers and statistics to me, and this reminder of who they are and what we as a university are doing (and what my job supports) is something I wish I was able to see more often.

While I was there, I got to do a little sight-seeing, the Museum of the New South is a great museum if you get a chance to see it. I love how interactive some of the exhibits are - I was able to try 'carding cotton', and see a set up of a tenant farmer's home. People in that environment worked longer and harder than I've ever had to.

I also had some local food and drink - nearly every restaurant I went to had shrimp and grits on the menu, so the last night I had to taste it. It was surprisingly good! The grits were really smooth, and had some spice to them! and I love shrimp. It was much better than any of the conference food! I even tasted a local made beer, all at the Rock Bottom brewery and restaurant. Should I say I hit 'rock bottom'?

The weather was cold and rainy all week, and snow fell not too far away from us. I am very glad I was able to get out and head home on time on Friday. If I'd have been just a little further north I'd have been stuck, the weather system coming in was the huge snow maker coming into all of the northeast and dropping historic amounts of snow in DC, etc. Many people from those areas left the conference early so that they'd be able to get home before the storm came in.