this woman’s work

No surprise there — we knew she wasn’t ready to be whatever comes next (tadpole?) but Noah, who was jealous of the end-of-class Gushers given by the teacher, was trying to make her think she flunked. This from the formerly unschooled kid. See, I told you that virtual school was ruining him!

Speaking of ruining him — or rather his LIFE — we decided to give up cable FINALLY. I’ve felt guilty the whole time we had it but I’d be lying to say I’m not going to miss it. But so much of what we watch is available on the computer and we just figured out how to hook Brett’s laptop up to the television. Besides which we’re all watching too much anyway. When we broke it to Noah he began to gnash his teeth and tear his hair, poor dear. Life is hard in the big city.

Today I’m going to work on theming our new biz site after I get my regular work done. Hoping to debut it soon but we’re taking it slow and this time I’m walking Brett through some of the things so he won’t feel so left out and frustrated. We’re talking about what other aspects of the biz he’d like to take on besides the paperwork. Working with him is a challenge, frankly, because our communication styles are pretty different. Like he’s detail oriented and I’m “get-the-big-idea-and-move-on” oriented. And he’s a worrier and I don’t like to focus on worries because they sometimes catch me with their evil little purple claws and keep me stagnant. (Caution is one thing — chronic worry is another.) Plus I’m generally more optimistic, which would surprise everyone who knew me when I was a gloomy teen but there you go. Sometimes people change.

Oh and changing the subject entirely — since upgrading to Firefox 3, I’ve lost all my scroll bars. Very frustrating. I can still scroll but I can’t see the scroll bar. Firefox 3, to me, is like Wordpress 2.5 — perhaps released too soon seeing as how bug-filled it is. (I hear the beta of Wordpress 2.6 is out. I’m salivating for it because I haven’t learned my lesson about wordpress upgrades yet.)

You must get this extension: Better GReader :: Firefox Add-ons

It lets you click within your google reader to open a person’s page, which means no more clicking through the reader and opening a new tab or page so you can comment or read past the short excerpts. That way when you’re done reading (and commenting) you just keep scrolling through your reads. Yes, my friends, you never need to leave your feedreader to read your blog friends!

Excerpts of feeds? DRIVE ME CRAZY. I know some of you are all about the stats (and may I mention that if you have wordpress and are hosting you can use the feedburner plugin to see how many people subscribe to your feed regardless of where they’re reading — no it doesn’t help your ad stats but it’s good for the ego).

It’s rare that I click through to read a whole entry because I’m subscribed to (I just checked) 269 blogs so yes, generally I scan (a bunch of those are work-ish related and a handful of total timesuck mp3 blogs but that’s also not counting my livejournal friends list). But now my feedreading life is easier!

Please join me in the goodness that is  Better GReader.

(I assume, of course, that you’re already a Firefox person and not using that bane of the web designer’s existence, Internet Explorer. And if you’re not, join the beauty that is the opensource platform!)