Everyday Randomness

The Family Circle

Happy Memorial Day weekend everyone!  My family really impressed me this weekend.  See, hubby has always felt like an outcast in my family.  That’s because we come from two very different families with very different backgrounds.  I come from a very christian family who spend a lot of time together and always put family first.  We get together not just for one meal each holiday, but we normally have 2 or 3.  Every birthday is celebrated with the entire family going out for birthday dinner, we have random cookouts all the time, things like that.  When I say the entire family, I mean everyone from my mom’s side of the family…my grandparents, aunts, cousins, mom, sister, sister’s fiancee, hubby and I…everybody.  Hubby’s family is more of the laid back hippie type.  He hardly ever sees any of his extended family, and holiday dinners really don’t happen anymore since his grandmother died.  Christmas with his family consists of eating a meal with his parents and siblings, then receiving presents from extended family in the mail.

It has taken hubby awhile to adjust to how my family is, and he’s always felt awkward just because he’s not used to the way we do things.  When we moved in next door to my grandparents, I loved having them so close to me.  I loved seeing them daily, and my grandpa would stop by to check on us every day.  Hubby on the other hand felt like my family was being a little intrusive.  He eventually adjusted to living so close to them and seeing them everyday, but he’s always admitted that he thought they only pretended to care about him because he is married to me.  For some reason he seems to think that because he came from such a different background that my family still 4 years into our marriage sees him as my tag along.

That finally changed this weekend.  I mentioned a couple days ago to my grandma that hubby wouldn’t be joining us this year for our Memorial Day cookout because he doesn’t have the day off.  He usually has to work both Memorial Day and Labor Day, so he never gets to attend.  My grandma decided this year was going to be different, so she went out of her way to round up the family this afternoon and held the cookout a day early just so hubby could enjoy the cookout with us.  He really enjoyed himself, and I could tell it really touched him that my grandma went out of her way to make sure he could participate.  When we got home, he gave me a big hug and told me he was sorry for feeling the way he has about my family for so long.  He said they really are great people, and he can’t believe it took him so long to see what a blessing it is to have them in his life.

Monster’s Running Again

I finally received the new motherboard from EVGA on Friday, and of course it didn’t pop right in and work like I hoped it would.  Windows didn’t want to install, and I kept getting error messages, but each message was different, so it didn’t take long to figure out that when it was telling me the Windows CD was bad, that really wasn’t the case.  I tried to flash the BIOS 3 times with 4 different floppy disks with no luck.  I made a total of 4 calls to EVGA tech support, and they kept telling me the same thing they always say.  The swore it was the ram throwing an error.  I swore it wasn’t because all 4 gigs were showing and I wasn’t getting the C1 code from the motherboard.  In fact, I wasn’t getting any error codes from the mobo.  I finally gave up on the floppies and resorted to flashing the BIOS by cd.  It worked!  Why didn’t I try that 13 hours sooner?  I could have saved myself a lot of hassle!

My Love Of Gel Pens

I have this obsession that a lot of people don’t know about until they walk into my home office. I absolutely love gel pens! I have 3 cups full of them on my desk in every color imaginable. I especially love the ones that work on black paper. I think my writing always looks so much better when I use gel pens. I even have a few that glow in the dark! I guess it could be worse. I used to collect bigger things like holiday barbies and plushies, but I found myself running out of room to store them in my house. Now I collect pens, and hubby can’t complain about the space they take up! I would have to say my favorite gel pen is my Clemson pen. It has a clear tube with Clemson Tigers on the side of it in big orange letters, and it writes in a swirl of orange and purple. If I ever find anymore like it, I’ll buy up as many as I can!

2CheapBlogs: My Blog Host

If you’re looking to move off free hosting to your own domain, but you haven’t quite settled on a package yet, let me introduce you to my host.  A very dear friend of mine runs 2CheapBlogs, hosting designed specifically for bloggers.  I also know a few others who host with 2CheapBlogs, and we have all had great service.  I haven’t heard one complaint because there hasn’t been any downtime.  That’s because the service is designed specifically to help bloggers find a package that is right for them without all the extra hassles of dealing with a large company.

Any problems I’ve experienced with my blog have been due to my lack of knowledge with Wordpress, and my host stays on top of any problems I have, even if I created them.   2CheapBlogs hasn’t had any downtime at all since I have been doing business with them, which has been for a few months now, and if your blog experiences any downtime caused by something on their end, you receive 3 months free service!  The packages are great, the service is even better, and tech support is always just a quick email away.  I normally receive an email reply within a couple hours at most!