Been planning Christmas

I have been on Messenger with two of my sons this evening and we have decided to get together for this Christmas. It has been many years since we have done that. Steve will fly out from Vancouver to Calgary on Boxing Day, and we will drive over bringing the turkey and trimmings and cook it for Boxing day. We will probably be away for 5 or 6 days with the travelling. Everyone is looking forward to it, we will have to stay in a motel but Steve will bunk with his brothers. His wife and kids will be staying in Vancouver with her family, but they will have had Christmas day together.

So that will be a nice break in the middle of winter and then we are off to Mexico in February. Oh joy.

Been away for a couple of days

Image via Wikipedia

We took a drive up to Terrace on Thursday and stayed overnight. It was a beautiful Fall day and the drive was very pretty. Terrace has a lot more stores than we have in our area so the 4 hour drive was worth it. We bought some new clothes and I purchased a wireless router so my husband can learn about the internet on my laptop while I am on the main computer, and I also purchased some more beads. They have an enormous craft store there. Here are a few shots of the trip.

This is a shot of the Skeena River looking towards the Skeena Mountains.

Moricetown Canyon. The Bulkely River rushes through here and it is very deep. The salmon make their way up it and the first nations people are waiting with hand nets to scoop them out of the water. There are places in the gorge that are over 200 feet deep. Last year a truck went into it and they have never recovered it.

We just had to turn left and we would have been on our way to Alaska. Hubby wanted to go.

To see a few more pics click here.

Some more new computer goodies

Glubble Family Edition for Firefox allows your child to discover the best of the web that you choose. Designed for elementary school age children and their families. Disney Glubble offers printable coloring pages, games, and more.


Yotify - Scouts for what you are looking for. Track sales, new stories, job postings and lots more.

Heads or Tails - How would you change where you live

Skittles started a meme a while back called Heads or Tails, this week we are to write about how we would change where we live.
That is easy I would be either in a city or very close to one where there are malls, and book stores like Chapters. Coffee shops to meet with friends, and it would be in a warmer climate with a few butterflies rather than giant mosquitos and black flies and other nasties. It would have not bears anywhere near. There would be things to do and places to go and I don't care if I ever see snow again, or a lake or mountain, or another fish.

I need a city fix.

Can you believe it!

Yesterday morning I decided to colour my hair, I do it every eight weeks or so as I have a little grey starting at the temples but on my light reddish brown hair I really don't like it. If I had dark hair it would look smart but it just looks sort of grizzled.

I had gloop all over my head and the door bell rings, can you believe it? No one comes up here much but there it was ringing. So I answered the door and told my visitor that her timing was bad so she said she would come over in an hour.

When she came over we had a cup of tea and visited for a little while and then there was another knock on the door and it was her husband come to tell her he was home and would she come and make him some lunch. Can you believe it, is he so incapable that he can't throw a sandwich together.

My husband has too much self respect than to ever do such a thing. I was shocked.

Update on Annie

As you know we gave our dog to new owners that have an alpaca farm quite a bit north of us. She is settling in well and seems happy. She has the full run of the place which is much larger than our place and has two other dogs which she is bossing around.

She has got used to the alpacas and has been herding them and rolling in their poop to confuse any wolves who may think she is an alpaca and then she will attack. So now she is ready to take her role as protector seriously. She has already alerted the owners to wolf activity and chased one off.

Here she is with her new owner. He has made her a kennel so I hope she likes it she is quite fussy when it comes to sleeping places although Maremma dogs are nocturnal and generally nap in the day as there generally no predator activity in daylight.

So now I guess it is time to let her go emotionally as well as physically, she has a good home and appears to be busy and happy so we have done the best we could for her and she has moved on, so should we.

Print what you like - looks to be a great tool

A new tool just out is Print what you like, everyone must thinks so because they have been swamped this morning and I have had overload messages from Google on their site. What it allows you to do is take out the items on a web page that you don't want to print. I don't know about you but I have often wanted to print something off and I end up with all the ads and other stuff I didn't want, well no longer. They have a demo so go try it out when it is not so busy.

Some computing goodies I love

I have been using Google Reader for quite a while but a month or so ago I installed a plugin for called Better GReader for Firefox, which really speed things up in that you can comment directly from your Reader. A feature that shaves off a lot of time which I haven't had much of lately. If you use Firefox here is the download

Another is Zemanta which has done a major upgrade today. Zemanta suggests links and websites pertinent to your post but now has added a more personal touch that enables you to add friends feeds and photos etc to enrich your post. Try it download it from here for Internet Explorer, Firefox or Live Writer.

I have put some of the blogs I read in the new Zemanta and it picked up a couple of articles pertinent to this post from AlwaysBCMom

Related articles by Zemanta

• Better GReader
• Have You Tried Zemanta?

Memories of Dubrovnik

When I was eighteen years old, in 1965, I went with a bunch of girlfriends from the typing pool where I worked on a trip across Europe to what was then called Yugoslavia, currently called Croatia. We took a coach trip from England through the Netherlands, Austria, Italy and then caught a boat across the Adriatic Sea to Dubrovnik.

Dubrovnik is a walled city set above a crystal sea, or at least it was then. I remember looking down from the walls and you could see clearly the bottom of the ocean and fish swimming below. One of the problems in Dubrovnik, which is common in any old city is rats. I remember coming home after an evening outing with my friends when the city staff where hosing down the streets and we had to walk close to the edge of the walls and we could hear the rats chattering as we went by. We three girls were supporting our tour guide, a large plumb Belgian called Freddy, he was terrified of the rats but we thought it all part of the excitement.

That is where I met my first serious boyfriend, Terry, a sailor from Leeds in England. At least he was serious and actually came to visit my father in London to ask for my hand in marriage. How sweet, I don't think anyone does that these days. My father liked him and was quite ready to give the go ahead but I was not ready for marriage and children. I wonder if Terry ever thinks of me now, or if he is even alive. He had the most beautiful eyes with long curling lashes that any girl would have loved to have had, probably poor Terry is fat and bald now, such is life and aging.

Related articles by Zemanta

• History oozes from every corner in Dubrovnik
• Dubrovnik: The perfect break
• Island hopping in Croatia

Sneezing and blessings

Image via WikipediaThe social habit of blessing someone after a sneeze came about during the reign of Pope Gregory the Great (approx. 550 AD), whose predecessor died at the start of the plague. In hopes of squelching its spread, Pope Gregory began praying in earnest.

He also sent people out to pray street-by-street. Each time a sneeze was heard, they called out, "God bless you," hoping to replace the plague with the blessing of health in the person. Did it work? It was one of the briefest plagues in history.

I found this at Take Root and Write a Christian Womans Blog

Waiting for dinner

Heads or Tails - Box

Skittles hosts Heads or Tails every Tuesday. This week the topic is Box.

I don't have much to say about Box but if you are looking for a good and inspiring read and are willing to think outside the box that mankind has created I suggest getting hold of a book called 'The Shack' by William P. Young.

Whiz kid and I have so much going on right now

I have been quite busy with stuff this last week and still have lots to do. I made peach jam and also preserved about 20lb of peaches and have apples and plums waiting. I harvested our broad beans and packed them away along the the last of the raspberry crop. I have filleted and packaged about 14 salmon and still have more to do but I am taking a break.

On top of that I have been making earrings and I have sold four pairs already, and have an order for another pair, plus I am going to get a table for the village Christmas bazaar so I have to make stuff for that.

Hubby has been so encouraging and guess what, he comes with a full complement of information on how to bead. His older sister used to do it when he was a kid and he would help her by making bead flowers for her, and do some bead weaving and so on. This is one of the most masculine men I have ever met but he can crochet, knit, embroider, cook and is currently using the sewing machine to make a canopy for his boat plus he sews a very fine seam, whereas I glue or staple. I have a pair of jeans that need hemming hanging over the bedroom chair, maybe if I leave them there long enough he will hem them for me, do you think? I think his parents were very farsighted in not stopping some of these activities because they are considered to be feminine pursuits. He is also a whiz at woodwork, can fix just about anything, plus he is a very good artist, doing detailed pen and ink drawings which he hopes to find time to do in Mexico, the only thing he can't do is spell he is absolutely awful at that, comical actually, so at least I have something he needs me for.

So the whiz kid and friend have gone fishing again, this time for trout, I told him just to do catch and release as we really have a lot of fish and they are leaving for Prince Rupert on Saturday for four days to hopefully catch halibut and some sole and cod.

I have been standing over the kitchen counter so much this last week that I am wearing my back belt to help prevent back ache and it really does seem to do the trick. I get the most escruchiating pain in my back if I stand for any length of time, I am okay if I can move about.

Well I better get back at it, I have quite a bit left to do today and we have friends arriving who have a place in the village, they come up periodically although they live in Vancouver, so I want to run a vacuum around dust a bit, they probably won't notice but I will feel better about having them over.

Second look at Google Chrome

I took a longer look today at Google Chrome and although I will stick with Firefox 3 for most of my browsing as I have it set up the way I want and there are extensions in Firefox that I use, there are some definite benefits to using Google Chrome as an alternate browser. For example there  a few sites that I have reason to check fairly often and with Chrome I can put a link to that site directly on my desktop so I can bypass loading up a browser and then clicking to where I want to go. It is faster. Also I find that watching You Tube videos are quite a bit faster and with smooth delivery, whereas Firefox and Internet Explorer videos stop and start a lot, that may be partly due to my satellite connection. I want to find a site where I can watch movies and try that out, something I have given up on trying with Firefox and IE. No doubt as I play with it some more I will find other benefits.

Google Chrome

I downloaded the new browser Google Chrome this evening and played with it a bit. I don't care for it and will stick with Firefox.

Google claims it is much faster and it may be so but it doesn't appeal to me compared with Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Google hopes to break into the browser market with Chrome but it will have a hard job competing with the two favorites I think.

Check Google Chrome for yourself

I still haven't made up my mind

I have been dithering about using a web hosting service for my blog for a least a year now. I  initially moved from Blogger when my blog got messed up, either from something I did or something on Blogger's end. I moved to WordPress.com which I liked and decided to get a domain name at that time, because if I moved again, hopefully I would not loose my Google Page Rank and my regular readers could still find me. After a while I decided to earn a little money with my blog as I had reached a Google page rank 4 and could write small pieces for about $10 a shot, but then found I could not do it with WordPress.com.

At this point I started debating whether I should take the leap and use a hosting service especially as the company with whom I had purchased my domain name kept sending me encouragements to use theirs but I felt intimidated by the business of looking after my own blog. What I felt was lacking was some basic instruction in the whole business. So many of the web hosting services assume that one has a certain amount of knowledge about what is expected. There were terms I was not familiar with and tasks that I had no idea how to perform and although I have been around computers for about thirty years I decided not to risk it.

So I returned to Blogger which permits paid posts, and fortunately my domain name followed me but not without some trauma as the level of instruction to make necessary changes was not good and I had to contact the helps department several times. Even now the page rank from Google is all over the place. My Blogger blogspot blog which points to my domain name has a page rank of 2 but the blog that comes up under my domain name has a page rank of 4. Can't they get it together and maybe it would be a 6. I have no idea and I don' t know how to fix that, if it is possible. Since I have used the same name for all of my blogs Cariboo Ponderer I thought I was making it simple.

So I will renew my domain name for sure but I am still unsure about using a web hosting service, I have to read up on it some more, although it does give one a lot of freedom, but I am happy with Blogger for now, I probably will get a bit restless to do something new when winter sets in for sure.

Making more bling

This is what I have been up to recently. It is fun but I am getting quite the jewelry wardrobe but have nowhere to wear them. I am thinking of getting enough done to put in the village Christmas sale. I thought $10 for a necklace and $5 for the earrings, that should cover my costs plus a little extra so I can buy more stuff. My time is free. If I sell any there I might be brave enough to go to the nearest town and rent a craft table in the mall. What do you think? It is a relatively inexpensive hobby, at least at this stage, but I am afraid I am going to have a lot of stuff and will end up having to throw them away, guess I can always donate them to Goodwill. How's that for confidence and entrepreneurial spirit?

What is Bling? An expression popularized by the hip-hop culture, used to describe sparkly jewelry, accessories and/or gemstones.

Jammin' Skype

I downloaded Skype last night as I had all sorts of problems with Windows Messenger and my new webcam. It took a little while to download but once set up it worked like a charm. Definitely a better tool. The boys and I can conference call now plus I can see the grandkids and talk to them and that is what I got it for after all. I am sure I have not plumbed the depths of its uses as yet but I hope this will help keep my family a bit closer and all for free how can you beat that.

I made a batch of raspberry jam this morning and will probably go and work in the garden a little as it is sunny right now. I hacked down one part yesterday as it was done for the year and tidied it up. We had 2C or 34F last night so it won't be long before everything is dead. Fall seems to be coming early this year. Mostly I think we jumped from Spring to Fall with a quick look in at Summer.

I couldn't resist the little play on words in the title. I had heard the word jammin' but I thought it was something to do with music but that is to have a jam session and the verb for that would be jammin', but the web definition for the word jammin' means Excellent or First Rate.

So have a jammin' day all.