And 13 is a lucky number

Yesterday marked 13 months since mom's diagnosis with brain cancer! We rejoice every day that she is with us and she is well enough to enjoy another day. The weather has been fairly warm for this time of year...in the 40's and today was even 50 degrees so mom was able to get out for some much needed fresh air which is great!

I have been thinking about the fact that one year ago I was in Hawaii waiting for Robert's flight to land so that we could welcome him home again after his 2nd tour of duty. I can't believe how the time has just flown by and how much has happened in our family in that year.

This past tuesday was my monthly scrapbook class and this time Brianne joined me and did the layout because I knew I could certainly use 2 sets...one for Jesse's book and one for Alex's book. They turned out really cute!

Finding new RSS feeds

Finally had some time to do a little more WEB 2.0 stuff tonight. As far as finding more feeds I prefer just looking for the RSS icon whenever I'm on a favorite website and that allows me to subscribe to that site. By far I think this is the easiest way to stay connected to a site that is of interest to me.

I did so some poking around on Technorati and I thought that was interesting as well but not sure if I would use it much. I just did a simple search for glioblastoma and picked up a few blogs that I might keep up with from other patients, etc....since I'm always looking for more information regarding mom's condition.

A couple of recent pictures

Not much to talk about today, I actually am super busy cleaning out my laptop so that I can transfer all the important stuff (pictures!!) to my new laptop that I just picked up at Staples the other day! (Yay!) If I start ripping my hair out because I have Windows Vista now, I'll let you all know.


On Sunday Alex and I enjoyed going into the city to see The Lion King on Broadway and true to form I got emotional when the show first started because my little boy was experiencing his very first Broadway show....I'm such a sap, I'm telling you! The show was great, amazing costumes and dancing!


When Nancy visited a couple weeks ago I took a few photos but didn't have a chance to really post so here is mom with Nancy and her soon to be new grandson.




Honestly I can't even put into work how cute Alex is and excited about his new cousin coming. I've talked about how he reads Goodnight Moon to his cousin at bedtime and he also kissed his cousin a few times and when Aunt Nancy was leaving Alex said goodbye to his cousin, too cute!

Happy Valentine's Day

Just wanted to share what a wonderful husband I am blessed with. Not only did he get me my usual Whitman's Sampler (my favorite of all time because the inside of the lid tells you what each piece is so there is no surprise when you bite into a chocolate!!) but he also got one for mom. He is so thoughtful of her feelings and it was a great surprise for her and made her so very happy today. We are very lucky to have a special man as our Valentine.

Tomorrow I am taking my special young man (Alex) to see The Lion King on Broadway and it will be his first time seeing a live show like this, I cannot wait to see his reaction and to spend some quality time with my son.

Happy Valentine's Day to all!

Feed readers

The new library website is going to be a wonderful tool for patrons, I love the new layout and feel of it. The fact that there are feeds to explore on there is something that I think will really help patrons find things more easily (at least those that are computer savvy not so much those that don't use computers much). My experience with the feeds (putting myself into patron mode here) was that I was able to subscribe to the library's feed for upcoming programs so now I can glance on my Google reader and know what programs we have coming up that might be of interest to me. My opinion is that those patrons who use computers and have a good knowledge of them will enjoy the new options available to them via our new website but those who simply use the website to search for a book or movie might not really appreciate the changes and upgrades to the site.

What the heck are RSS feed readers??

Ok, I'll be the first to admit I had no clue what this was...yeah I've seen the little icon on some sites but never really paid attention or tried to learn what it was until this Web 2.0 stuff came along at work and activity #11 is about just that. So....I looked into it and interestingly enough I already had Google Reader and just never looked at it. What I found is that Google has their own blog...too funny! I added the news feed from ABC news on my google reader and it will give me the headlines right on my google page which I think is pretty cool stuff.

Suffolk Wave

This is something that I'm already familiar with so it wasn't something I had to research and read about. I already have the Overdrive Media on my laptop because I downloaded it last March when I was planning to burn a book to CD for my mom but for some reason I never got that far but did 'borrow' the book.

I am currently reading the Friday Night Knitting Club and I just downloaded the Audio book from Suffolk Wave and I might go ahead and listen to a couple of the chapters. While I personally prefer to read books the old fashioned way I think that Suffolk Wave is a great tool for people that commute or just enjoy listening to books or for those that like to read the Ebooks as well. The music and video collection on Suffolk Wave has expanded quite a bit since I last browsed through there but I think there is still some more work to be done in terms of the selection available.

Do you have the digital library technology available to you where you live? What do you think of it? Like I said, I prefer the printed word as opposed to 'listening' to books but that's just one person's opinion.

Flickr

In researching Flickr I was wondering how it would work for me and decided it would be a great place to store images of scrapbook pages and sketches that I want to use in the future. I do keep a notebook where I glue layouts and sketches that I want to save from magazines but this is a way for me to keep images online that I can refer to as I need them and whenever I come across a layout online that I like I can just copy it and add it to my photostream. I usually take my laptop with me when I go to crops so this is a nice option for me to be able to refer to sketches and layouts that I want to 'lift' for my own pages.

You Tube

I know there are so many videos on You Tube and a lot of them are just useless and silly but I have a You Tube page and I pretty much just use it to share any concert videos that I happen to get when I go see a band or solo artist that I like. I have so many different musical tastes from jazz to pop to rock and for that reason I am often at a concert...especially in the summer months I'll try to hit up a few shows at Jones Beach. By far my favorite thing to do is just sit at my computer and search some old stuff that I enjoyed back in my teenage years...bands like Supertramp, Genesis, The Strawbs and Nektar. While the first 2 are pretty well known I'm sure most of you reading this have no clue who Nektar and The Strawbs are. In the early 80's I got into a group called Hiroshima and I was happy to find them on You Tube as well.

Honestly I just love it when I'm home and just hanging out in my scrapbooking room and I can search You Tube for something random from my younger days and listen in the background or even watch the old stuff.



What oldies, but goodies come to mind for you? Search them up on You Tube and see what you come up with. I just spent a little time on it and looked up Christopher Cross and listened to him singing "Think of Laura" and it brought me back to the old days of Luke and Laura on General Hospital and then I searched up Henry Gross and listened to my favorite song of all time, "Shannon."

So do you read a lot of books?

I know a few people that do...and Library Thing is a great place to catalog all of the books that you have read or want to read. You can share with other readers and review the books you have read. For me I think it's a great way to put up books that I want to read without having to keep a list on paper or on my computer. I simply joined and added books that I've read and also books that I plan to read into my catalog and now I can go back and just with a quick glance at the book covers I can remember what I've read and what I still want to read. I love it!!!

So now it's friday night and my sister is here visiting for the weekend and I am going to start organizing my scrapbook stuff in preparation for an online crop on sunday and also my weekend crop coming up in March. I can't wait for that, I hope to get about 40-50 layouts completed during that weekend! It's all about being prepared in advance!

Delicious!!!

And I don't mean the brownies that are going in my oven at the moment! I am talking about a great website and tool for searching as well as saving your own bookmarks so that you can access them from other computers! This is probably my favorite new thing I have learned so far while doing the activities for the Web 2.0 stuff at work. Honestly in the past I have been frustrated with how to save my precious bookmarks if I would upgrade my computer or if I was using another computer and couldn't remember the links to certain sites (I've even gone so far as to email myself important links so that I would have them at my destination if I was traveling!).

I created an account at Delicious last night and imported all of my bookmarks so now whenever I log in they are all there, no matter what computer I'm using! What a great idea and a huge time saver for me. Another really great way to use Delicious is tags and I played around with that last night a bit and this morning and I was really impressed with it. As a scrapbooker it is a great tool for me to use because while I thought I had a lot of websites saved I loved all of the ones that came up when I simply typed "scrapbooking" in the tags and did a search! I found an amazing site with these gorgeous stamps by clicking on a bookmark on Delicious...I'm excited, yeah...you could say that...I feel like a whole new way of finding scrapbooking/stamping stuff has opened up to me and it will help me find things that I don't see every day in the regular craft stores.

I think putting tag clouds on the OPAC is a great idea and another way for patrons and library staff to further search for related items in a specific area of interest! I can already tell that Delicious is going to be something I will use and frequently!

Now speaking of those brownies...check out this awesome baking pan I found on a bookmark just by searching brownies on Delicious!

Do you My Space or Facebook?

Activity #5 for my Web 2.0 assignments is to learn more about social networking websites like My Space and Facebook. I have never been on Facebook before and don't think it is something that would be for me, either. I noticed that the library has 100 fans and yet the library's My Space pages have very few 'friends' and I wonder why? I only used My Space for a few months back in 2006...I mainly created the page so that I could log into My Space to see if my son (who was deployed at the time) had been on his My Space page, it would give me reassurance that he was ok if we didn't get a phone call for 2-3 weeks at a time. I rarely go onto my page anymore. My husband uses My Space pretty extensively as a way to promote his band and his music. He does run an open 'mic' night once a week and uses his My Space page to notify the other bands/performers if he isn't doing it that week for one reason or another.

Web 2.0

We have a new thing at work (most of you know I work at a library) where everyone can learn some of the cool things that are available on the internet such as blogs, My Space, Facebook, etc. Lucky for me I am pretty familiar with most of this stuff but I'm looking forward to learning what I haven't tried out yet. The best part is that completing all of the activities will score me some comp time to use at a later date! Yay, me!! Last night I did a few of the activities so this should be a breeze for the most part...well one of the things was starting a blog (check!!).

I guess part of the reason they are introducing this at work is so that everyone can be more familiar with the technology that is out there but I do have to say that I miss the days of old (ok, I'm showing my age here) when I went to my library and it was so quiet in there you could hear a pin drop. Remember those old card catalogs? I still have the memories of looking up a book in the card catalog and having a librarian help me with a project and when I would check out a book they had this cool machine that would take a photo copy of the card inside the back of the book along with my library card. Computers are progress, this is true...but some things are still remembered fondly.




Another activity was to check out and try Twitter. Ummm, I wasn't that crazy about it and don't think it's something that I would personally ever use. I had a little bit of a time trying to figure out how to "tweet" and had to go into the help section, man did I feel stupid! I guess that's what these exercises are for, huh? I put up a "tweet" about my favorite books that I read recently, the Blossom Street series by Debbie Macomber...who knows, maybe someone will read my tweet and read the books.

Snowy tuesday morning!

Good morning, it is snowing today (of course because I have to take mom to the doctor this afternoon) but we will manage.

33 days until daylight savings time!

I will check back in this afternoon!

Edited to say that mom's MRI was CLEAN!!! WHOOOOOO! Blessed be to GOD! Dr. Wu is very happy with her scans, even said that there is evidence of decrease in the edema from the surgery which is awesome! Time to breathe a sigh of relief and move on....until the next MRI. Thanks for all the prayers!