Water storage in preparation

 Seriously though we are getting prepared, beginning to clear the yard and deck, storing water for the inevitable power outage that usually follows these things. I’ve learned from experience that having PLENTY of water on hand is the most important thing, After Isabel we had 8 days with no power, temps in the high 90′s and unberable high humidity. Believe me it was wonderful to be able to even wash up in a basin of water during those days, not to mention having a “flush” supply on hand! That year I did the normal “filling the bathtub” before the storm which I had never done and it was the best decision i made. But we cut it very close as the last day of no power we were down to the bottom of the tub! So this time in addition to the tub we have filled a few plastic totes with water in preparation. We’ve got about 50 gallons on hand so far and will fill some more tomorrow. I expect tomorrow will find evacuation orders issued for all the beach areas and probably Currituck as well, at least the Outer Banks portion of the county. We will monitor the track and strength and decide tomorrow if we are going to stay. As it stands now we will stay and hunker down. As is ususal today was a clear beautiful day, calm and hot. Calm befor the storm… check out our commentary if you’d like :)

Calm before the storm and More Calm before the Storm

Today marks one of the ‘firsts’ for us with so many more still to come. This one is very special though. We have always had a hard time being apart on holidays; Christmas being especially hard for us. Today we went and bought a tree together and some decorations. We put on some Christmas msic and had a lovely evening filled with such a tremendous happiness of sharing something we have dreamed of for quite a while. We had bought the ingredients to make mulled wine but feeling a bit worn out form a long day of shopping we thought better to pass on it tonight or we would never have got the tree done! ;)

I’ve not taken the time to post anything since Alison arrived,  we’ve been doing a lot of ‘catching up’ :) I will post a better update on things soon, but for now we are settling in just wonderfully and so very happy being together. Her flight over was good and was actually a little early arriving. She made it through immigration very quickly too. The time difference so far hasnt been too bad a problem and shes adjusting well to that , maybe wakign a bit early in the morings but usually managing to get back to sleep. the weather has been rainy but warm the first couple of days. It cleared up nice today but getting a little colder today. Just made it feel more like the Christmas season.

Ok time for some more catching up.. :) speak to you all soon and thanks for all the congratulations and comments and mails!

I signed up a while back as I wrote about in this post for the google Friend Connect Preview and today got a mail that this site had been whitelisted to use it! While not replacing any of the login information of this site, its more an added feature letting you sign in to certain features of this site with using your Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account info. Its not incorporated into the core of wordpress which powers this site, it’s rather an added set of gadgets, or widgets if you prefer, such as the “shout out” box there to the right to let anyone post a quick comment or say hello. They have only a couple of gadgets available at the moment including a “rate it” gadget, with the promise of more to come, both from Google and independent developers. I was looking at several of these “shout out” widgets to use before , but most of them have so many proprietary links to ads ands services that i wasn’t interested. This is a very simple one, just comment and post! I have found over the years that no matter how easy it seems to me to post a comment to these blog entries a lot of web surfers really are just passing by and don’t have the time or know-how to do it. Well i think this one will work out well as most people I know have one of these id’s and it only takes a single click to join the site or sign in. As i mentioned its an early release so I don’t know if its available to the general public yet or not, I’m assuming so, but you know what that entails ;) It only took me a couple of minutes to get it set up on this site, the first step was to upload two files to the root of the server which lets the code work around the site. the next step was verify the files were there and the next was to generate the code for the widgets, its already set up on a default size so its only a few seconds to use that and have it running on your web-page. In my case i spent a few more minutes customising the colours to match the site. I chose two of the gadgets, a member gadget, and the comment gadget. I may play around with some others if they can do something that I don’t have already at my fingertips. I did run into a problem trying to post the code into a post- it wouldn’t work. Putting it in the sidebar widgets though was smooth as silk, worked instantly. I think it is a WordPress specific problem as the sidebar is generated from a different directory that the post contents… I think.. well I’ll play around and see what I can do with it. Just as it is now I like it as a simple way for friends to say a quick hello. I’m sure though thats just the tip of the iceberg though. so check it out and say hello! I don’t know what the plans are for these hosted blog programs like blogger and the like as right now you have to be able to upload files to the server. But I see it somehow being incorporated into blogger very soon and actually transforming that into something similar to myspace or facebook! , well the social connection part anyway.

No its not a video from Britney Spears, just a mistake I made in not keeping up with all the security fixes for these web apps I use on the site. I guess a year or so ago I set up a couple of forum boards to use with this and our other sites, but never really got them integrated the way I would like with the blog. Anyway someone found a way to use it to access the root folder of my server and it appended every top level index file adding a list of about a hundred different porn and spamming sites to the pages. well they weren’t visible in the outcome of the page rendered but still there to be searched and indexed and it was jsut pure luck i  came across it as soon as I did, no telling what else they would have done. well i say they as it was likely a bot of some kind doing it all but it had to started by someone, and a search of the site the links went to revealed it wasn’t just an isolated hack of my site, but a widespread thing. well anyway I cleaned up all the mess hopefully, and in the process just got rid of everything but this blog app and my photo albums. I dont need the forums anyway as I hardly have time to maintain this blog, let alone keep track of things I actually forgot about having in the first place. so from here I will keep it simple and let this blog be the whole works. anyone wanting to speak outside the blog has my address anyway or could find it fairly easily.

Finally having a day off again and just catching up on mails and trying to get up with my daughter in Florida. shes in Jacksonville and that tropical storm, Fay is supposed to be coming near where she lives. Its setting rain records all around that area and of course I want to make sure shes ok and staying safe and dry! well at least safe, hard to stay dry when you get 20+inches of rian isnt it! YIKES!

I dont know what I did, but somehow I messed up the WordPress installation and had to reinstall it frm scratch. :( Well the good news is I have been exporting a backup file of every post, comment, image and file so its not been too bad a thing and it seems to have made the site work a bit better too. I think the culprit was a WordPress plugin, WP Super Cache, that set something wrong, or either I didn’t know how to use it. Whatever the cause everything is back now … almost Well i lost the user data, not that I had that many registered ones anyway, LOL , but you will have to get a new password. I actually don’t know if there’s a link anywhere to reset yours as I have added all the users back with their original emails so It may be if you try to log in it will show one of those”forgot my password ” tings and you can reset it. I think I remembered Alison’s and have set hers… and Mike I set yours up with the one I gave you to the sub domain ftp login, don’t know if you remember it but I’ll mail you too with it.
Sorry if its caused anyone any problems, and it sure wasn’t that you have been unregistered on purpose! I’m just so freaking happy I still have my posts! :)

Well I had to lose the other theme as I finally found some of those incompatibilty issues with WordPress 2.6  I was worried aboutafter making the sidebar useable.  Mainly the gallery functions were not working, it would load the gallery images in the post, but no support for the individual image pages themselves, and I really can’t do without them. But I still was able to retain the image header that I so dearly love :) And I still have a very clean looking theme as well, and very well maintained in regards to WordPress upgrades by the designer Sadish Bala on his site WordPress Rocks. He has a number of very well desgined WP themes available for free and a very nice selection of premium themes as well. I am tempted to see if he can take on the job of getting the old theme up to date as it was just so eye pleasing to me, not that this one isn’t though! It’s called MistyLook, and I actually use it on my WordPress as well.  Its solid and very clean and works very well. I should just stay with his designs as they are some of the best out there and I wont have to worry with hacking all these other ones to just get them to function, just dont have the time for it.  well off now to change the feedjit codes and some of the ad codes to match the site… again :( I’m not changing this anymore… for a while ;)  LOL

And I pray the last~ lol First of all , apologies to anyone visiting the site the last couple or evenings and being suddenly lost in a  completely different layout from one page to another, or one visit to another! :o) if you’ve been here within the last few days you may have seen or read the post where I had some trouble with the original theme just having a few bits of trouble with the latest WordPress upgrade, nothing major but it threw off the look of the sidebar widgets just a little bit, well no one would probably have noticed but me, but its those little things get on my nerves, I dont mind if most of the posts I make are lacking any real depth or information, but I want the site to look right at least. Well I have had my eye on this template now for a long time, the link to the original is still in the footer as it is mostly their work still. The only trouble was that it wasn’t ‘widget ready’ as it was advertised to be. Well yes it had a sidebar that could be edited manually, but I wanted to be able to use the widget administration capabilities available with the last couple of versions of WordPress. Just makes it simpler IF I do change a theme, the widgets are carried over to he next template without a lot of work. anyway I confess to not having any grand knowledge of the workings of a wordPress template. Well some of it. I’m fairly adept, if I say so myself, at playing around with the CSS and even adding a few codes here and there. But when it came to understanding how to make the sidebar widgets ‘editable’ (if that’s the word) from the admin area I was clueless. Well I have had this template now a few moths I think, even had the image header set up and couldn’t wait to use it! it was only then after I uploaded and activated it I realised it wasn’t working 100%. Well i have looked and looked how to widgetize a sidebar and to be honest i was lost trying to understand what to do. So that’s the reason I had that other theme going and I made that header image that I thought was very artistic :) Well you can see where the inspiration of it came from, I had this header image already in my head and really wanted to use it. Anyway this evening I was sitting around just messing with the site and css and the thought struck me… what if I replace the sidebar php page of this theme with one from a theme that had a single simple working sidebar already in place. My first attempt was a bit disappointing though. the sidebar appeared at the top of the page and that wouldn’t do. Well i got to looking at a few of the sidebar php files of a few different themes and happened to notice that most all of them had a specific ‘id’ in the HTML division tag at the beginning… EUREKA! I changed the id to the original one called for, refreshed the page and I was ECSTATIC! :) Can it really be this simple?? Oh I love this theme, even more than the one I had up originally. Its everything I wanted, a prominent place to show my Alison Michelle and me together first, then the layout is clean and simple and, to me, very easy to navigate and view the content too. The color scheme is pleasing to me as well. I just like it period. this is the one I will keep, just pray I don’t run into any trouble by failing to fix something else I don’t know about yet. Well as always with these theme changes, if you notice anything out of whack anywhere or any errors you encounter, please let me know. I’ll see what I can do to straighten it out.

Visitors may have noticed the theme changes over the last few days. I upgraded WordPress to the latest versiona week or two ago and something in it set off a few problems in the sidebars of the other template that I really wanted to keep. I guess its for thebest though as Ihave been looking into some that werent so heavily built by images and are faster loading. I did find one I really liked. but unfortunatley it isn’t “widget ready” as yet so I wll have to wait until its updated, if it ever is or do it my self, which I dont have the time to mess with at the moment. I was looking around the other night and found this theme I am using now, Sakura 3. It’s a really nice clean open theme, and easily editable with a minimum of html knowlege. I’ve been customising it just a bit, changing the CSS in some areas and of course the header image. I sort of like thmuted green and tan shades and like the cleaner less busy look, of course the content isnt readily visible as you eneter the page requiring a visitor to scroll down so I may have some quick exits if they dont bother to go gown a bit, but nevermind I like this. It will stay.. for now anyway :)  feel free to comment on any thing you see not dislaying correctly or any probless loading the page.

With the site being revamped, most of the old content will soon disappear. I have decided to remove the old forum, just to simplify things for me and less to keep up with. I have sent a mail to all the registered users. If by chance some of those email adresses are no longer valid I have put this post up to notify everyone as well. I have set a date of August 1, 2007

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Hi to all my friends who occassionally visit the site, all 3 of you, well maybe 2… ok at least one not counting myself! ;) Well maybe this time around I will have it sorted like I say I will every year. I have been working behind the scenes actually getting some old insecure apps removed and trying to find one that is secure and also lets me manage the whole site without a lot of extra work. If you have any bookmarks to the site you may want to remove them as a lot of the content is soon to be dleted. I will keep the photos and one or two pages, but the rest of the site will be entirley revamped. If you have any bookmarks, I would suggest going ahead and removing them now as soon 90% or more wont be working, so if you have a mind to go ahead and bookmark this page as thsi is where the latest info will be.