lists, tasks, and blogging notes

Done Yesterday:

• Caught up on laundry (mostly)
• Cleaned downstairs thoroughly
• Met with Aidan's occupational therapist
• Went to library, market and post office with kids
• Played Sequence with the younger kids and Liam.
  
• Talked with Liam for a long time about his thesis and other things.
• Read the first draft of Liam's thesis.
• Read to little ones
• Oh yes, and brought down all the Christmas decorations and stored them away! : (
  

To Do Today:

• More laundry (Aidan soaked his bed)
• Drive down to the high school to meet with Sean's counsellor (a standard meeting for freshmen to plan future coursework according to life plans)
• Work on Flash programming
• Try to get back into the homeschooling mindset. -- organize, sort, think.
  
• Focus on habits -- the January Challenge, saying the Rosary, and being attentive to the kids.
• Help sign Brendan up for ACTs.
• Start a grocery list
  

I'm sure more things will come up as the day goes on!

I appreciated the comments on my last post -- gave me things to think about and there were some new virtual faces along with the familiar ones. Thank you all so much.

• On the topic of "Why Blog", several people mentioned that they blog mostly for themselves though they welcome people visiting. I guess that is something unique about blogs, in a way -- they are able to do both. So maybe that tug I was feeling between the two is more like a healthy dynamic. Something to think about a bit more....
  
• And several people commented that they read blogs a lot more than they leave comments, and that they often read in their feeders rather than visit the site directly. This is how I do it too. I usually keep up with most of your blogs (and have some new ones to add now) but don't always write out a comment since I'm often reading from the feeder.
• JoVE mentioned that the statcounter and the scale are really both unnecessary, in some ways. This is true, though they can be a form of feedback, of course, which is how I generally am comfortable with them; but her point was basically the point I was trying to bring out, that when I think about why I blog, it is about how, as Lissla said, it mingles conversation with escapefulness (that must be a word, since it isn't triggering my spell check ;-)). Quantity is less important.
  
• Susan mentioned that she liked my template. On that topic -- this tiled backgrounds designer is fun and free. I found it here. I don't have time right now to write out how to edit the Blogger CSS to put it in, but it's not that hard. My Microsoft Word 2007 which my dad gave me for a birthday present is fun to edit photos with -- it doesn't do very much with the photos itself, but you can get the nice shapes and effects like beveling, framing and shadowing. The rose on the header is from a photo my daughter took and I lightened it and gave it the oval shape, and added the yellow background by using the bit map editor. Those things are fun and probably the closest I will ever get to scrapbooking.
  

Aidan is doing an alphabet puzzle, Paddy is playing with his beanie-baby animals and carrying on a dialogue of which I can only hear pitch and intonation, and Kieron is telling me it's time for breakfast. I think Kevin is online shopping for a laptop for a combination graduation and birthday present for Clare, so she has something to take to college with her next fall. No one else seems to be up and around right now.