Anchored in Faith

This is a wonderful example of a young mother trusting the Lord through difficult times. She’s a homeschool alum with two young children whose husband is overseas with the Army. I found it neat to read about her faith and how she’s getting through these rough times.

4 Things

I got tagged for this over at LiveJournal and thought I’d post it here too.

1. 4 movies you can always watch:
Singin’ in the Rain, Star Trek: First Contact, White Christmas, Fellowship of the Ring

2. 4 bands you can never get enough of:
Hmm…none really come to mind. As for singers and other music, though…Josh Groban, Nichole Nordeman, Tchiakovsky’s Nutcracker Ballet, Beauty and the Beast soundtrack

3. 4 towns you lived in:
Dallas, TX; Little Rock, AR; Baton Rouge, LA; Prattville, AL;

4. 4 shows you like to watch:
Star Trek, LOST, Jericho, Monk

5. 4 websites you visit daily:
HSA, Facebook, Dilbert, my Google Reader rss feed

6. 4 favorite foods:
Peanut butter, chocolate, Caesar salad, pizza

7. 4 places you’d like to be now:
Ireland, Scotland, someplace with lots of snow, Italy

8. 4 songs that really move you:
I Am, Why, and Gratitude, all by Nichole Nordeman; Beauty from Pain, by Superchic[k]

9. 4 books you will always love:
Little Women; Anne of Green Gables; Lord of the Rings; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

10. 4 colors that will always be in your closet:
Blue, green, black, chocolate brown

11.4 authors you’ll always love:
Jane Austen, C.S.Lewis, Louisa May Alcott, JRR Tolkien

12. 4 favorite actors/actresses whose talent you honestly respect:
Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Patrick Stewart, Hugh Laurie

13.4 languages you’d love to be fluent in:
Italian! Welsh, Irish, Russian

14.4 other countries you would like to live in:
Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Wales

15.4 skills you would like to improve:
Writing, sewing, crocheting, music(guitar, tin whistle, piano)

16.4 items that are “a few of your favorite things”:
fuzzy socks, cute hats, peppermint mochas, my Audrey Hepburn purse

Now I’m singing the song My Favorite Things. It is a great song though!

I’m not tagging anyone here, because I don’t know who regularly reads this, but if you read it and feel so inclined, feel free to fill this out! I’d love it if you commented to let me know so I could read it.

Homeschooler Influence

First off, if you haven’t seen the ad with Mike Huckabee and Chuck Norris, watch this. I think it’s great.

Then I was just watching an interview on Fox News with Chuck Norris and Huckabee, and found this pretty cool. Chuck was asked how he came to endorse Huckabee, and he was talking about all the research he did…and how two boys from Oregon with a site called The Rebelution emailed him and told him why they supported Huckabee, then he gave the link to the site and told people they could check it out. I’ve been to their site and heard of it many times, and they have a lot of great stuff. I just thought it was pretty cool that they got together because of Brett and Alex Harris, Josh Harris’s younger brothers, and Alex is also on HSA, which I’m a member of. They’re pretty well known amongst older homeschooled kids and graduates.

Here’s the link to the video, but I’m not sure if that will work. If not, go here and scroll down to “On the Record” and click “Dynamic Duo”. (After writing this, I found you can also view it here on their blog)

I thought it was pretty neat to see how much influence an email from two homeschoolers could have like that, and it’s a reminder how small the circles are among homeschoolers.

Plans…

There’s a quote that says, “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.” We can plan so much, but sometimes, our planning just doesn’t coincide with our circumstances.

I planned to be much more diligent about blogging this month, to write a novel(or at least start one) in a month, to work on crocheting and finish up Christmas gifts and making cards before December, and to work more on web and graphic design and make some blog templates and advance my skills. A bit ambitious, but I was going to try. Another quote says, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” Okay, a bit inaccurate, considering the moon is closer than the stars are, but that’s beside the point. I wanted to make the most of my time by working toward all those goals. I figured even if I didn’t accomplish them, if I at least tried, I would get a lot done and have a rather productive month.

Did I mention that our plans don’t always work out? Mine certainly didn’t. That tendinitis has still been being a pain, quite literally,  and typing irritates it faster than anything else. So I’ve done little typing, and when I have been typing, it’s been to catch up on correspondence or do things I had to get done. Pretty much everything I planned to do needed my hand, which hasn’t been so cooperative. Though I can crochet some, which is nice. That doesn’t bother my hand nearly as much as typing does.

This is the longest thing I’ve typed in some time, and my hand is starting to rebel, so I should probably stop. My hand is slowly improving, I think, but  I still need to rest it a lot.

Snow!

In honor of the coming winter, and because I’m rather longing for cooler weather, I thought I’d share a picture with y’all. The only snowman I’ve ever made.

I made that a couple of weeks ago with a free program I downloaded. It’s pretty cool! I haven’t worked much more on it, because of the problems with my hand and wrist, but I’m reading over things about it and want to learn how to do more 3D/animation type stuff.

IE problems…

I just viewed my site in IE6, and it looks pretty awful. The formatting is messed up and it’s hard to read, and there’s no menu. If you’re viewing the site in IE6, I apologize, and I’ll work to fix it asap! I had previously checked it in IE7, Firefox, and Opera. Cross-browser issues sure can be a pain! Apparently it’s also having some trouble when not viewed on a widescreen, so I’ll have to see what I can do to fix it. Maybe I’ll find a pre-made layout to use until I can fix this or create a new one.

Also, I’m not sure why, but some of the additional pages aren’t working properly, such as the comments or about page. Not sure what’s going on there either, but sometimes they’ll load and sometimes they won’t.

New domain

I wanted to post this separately from the last post, but I got my own domain! I put this on a subdomain of that, and need to decide what to do with the home page. I want to reinstall Photoshop Elements and make a new layout soon. I haven’t reinstalled everything yet from when I erased the hard drive recently. I’d like to post more, both about this and for GreaThings, but I have a splitting headache which I’m trying to keep from becoming a migraine, as well as a lot of dizziness right now. I’ve been fighting that off and on the last few days. So I think I’ll go rest and watch a movie and see if that helps.

Historical inaccuracies in fiction

I posted this over at HSA and thought I’d post it here as well:

How much would you put up with in books or movies? I’ll tolerate a bit, but there are times so much is wrong and all they care about is having a good story, and that rather ruins it for me. For instance, a WWII movie where some of the uniforms used wouldn’t have been worn for another 15 years, where they have people in the OSS before it was even formed, where they have songs that weren’t even released yet being sung, etc. Or a Civil War movie where people aren’t acting appropriately for the time period, historical facts are all messed up, etc. When a movie is just full of things that were wrong/didn’t happen at the time, I get fed up and find it too hard to enjoy the movie.

With something like Pirates of the Caribbean, I can overlook it more. That was meant to have fantasy elements, so it’s not as bad, I don’t think. But when something is trying to be passed off as “a WWII movie” or something set during the Civil War or whatever, I think people should do what they can to make it as accurate as possible. Also with writing. I’ve seen people on a writing forum who basically don’t care if they get historical facts right. “So what if they didn’t wear crinolines for 20 more years? I want my characters wearing them and want it set in this era.”

So I thought I’d come ask all you about it and get y’all’s opinion on historical accuracy in fiction, though this post is quite a bit longer than I intended. Do you care if a film or book is historically accurate? Does it really matter all that much? Why or why not?

Jericho

I had never seen the show Jericho before, but my mom had seen part of it and liked it. So this week, we’ve been watching it online, and finished the last episode last night. Ah! I can’t believe that had canceled it at that point! Thankfully, due to a huge fan outcry and petitioning, CBS renewed the series. They made a seven-episode second season, and have yet to announce when it will air. Hopefully soon, and hopefully to be followed by more episodes. Anyway, if you haven’t seen the show before, I would highly recommend watching it on cbs.com. It’s awesome. One of the best shows ever.

It’s set in Jericho, Kansas, a small town where everyone knows everyone, everybody shops from the same little general store, and they rely on the crops from the farms on the outskirts. As people are going about their daily lives, they begin to see something is seriously wrong. Off in the distant sky. seemingly over Denver, there looms a giant mushroom cloud. Power goes out, all communication goes down, and they’re cut off from the rest of the world with no knowledge of what happened to Denver. Was it an accident? Was it attacked? If it was attacked, who did it and did they bomb anywhere else? Is the rest of the country still there? Was the radiation close enough to kill the citizens of Jericho? How will they all survive? What happened?

Superb acting and characters, especially Hawkins and the Greens, and the story is amazing. It’s something that’s so relevant, because we really wonder if and when something like this will happen. Seeing the news about New Orleans after Katrina gave us a glimpse of human nature after a disaster. Something of this magnitude would magnify that tremendously. The story is so real and possible that it’s a bit scary. Yet that realness and possibility is part of what makes it so intriguing. When will something of this magnitude happen, and what would it really be like? How would we respond? What would it take to survive? Seeing such things played out in the lives of these characters really draws a person into the show, and makes you wonder. It’s very clean as well, which is a rarity nowadays.

System restore…

While giving my hand a rest(I’m typing one-handedly), I’m going to back up my computer files to our external hard drive and do a system restore on my computer. That will include re-partitioning my hard drive and installing Ubuntu(a Linux distribution) to dual boot with Windows XP. I’ll be able to install the new version of Ubuntu then too! They released it last week, but due to their server lag and my computer issues and work I needed to do in Windows, I haven’t installed it yet.

Backing up my files shouldn’t take too long. Most of my pictures are backed up, except one or two smaller folders, because I’ve been backing them up pretty regularly. Most of my music is backed up already too, so this should go pretty quickly, I would think.

I’m about to watch Meet the Robinsons while working on all this. It looks good. Netflix is great about getting out new releases. If you have one at the top of your list, they ship it the day before it’s released so that you get it on the actual release date.