I Accidentally Deleted the Last 50 Blog Comments on Friday

Hi Everyone!

Just a short post to let you know that I accidentally deleted the last 50 blog comments on Friday.  I had gotten a bunch of spam comments.  In the process of trying to delete the spam comments, I accidentally clicked on the tab with the real comments and selected all and the system deleted the first page of 50 comments.  I’m very sad, since I rarely get comments these days and those 50 comments were over the last year.  I just wanted you to know because I didn’t want you to come over to the blog and wonder why I deleted your comments.  It was a total accident, and I’m sad and sorry.  After over 10 years of blogging, I made a technical “fat-finger” mistake while on my phone.  Ugh!

Christine

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August 2019 Favorites

One of the things that really helps me to feel blessed and grateful is recapping all the great things that happened during the month.  I also have a paper notebook where I make lists of things that make me happy on a regular basis.  I also keep track of my doings in Google Calendar so that I remember all the stuff I did and with whom.  This blog really helps me remember with photos and words too.  That’s why whenever I think about giving up blogging, I end up always coming back to it.  Because it’s good for my mental health, and good for my soul to remember the good things in my life.

This is a recap of some of my favorite things from August 2019.

I had lunch with my long-time work friend Susan at Piacere Mio.  I also had lunch with my good friend Anne at Urbane Cafe.  I need to be better at taking photos with friends when I have lunch with them.  We had dinner with my long-time friend Sally (since I was 12!) at Ryoma Ramen.  Todd was there too so I did get a photo!

I’ve been walking outside regularly and listening to podcasts while walking.  I walked up the hill to the street where our first house in San Diego was.  Yes, we were totally those people who fell in love with a house in our own neighborhood and moved two streets over!  We moved into that house in Feb 2000, then sold it and moved into our current house in Oct 2001, so we were only in that house for less than two years.  However, I never realized how beautiful and huge our neighbors’ houses were up there.  I walked by this one with a 4-car garage and  ocean view. 

I just never even realized that my neighbors had 4-car garages, for some reason.  It seems really extreme… but we don’t have basements in SoCal and people are always hurting for more storage space.  Although I’d say just own less stuff, ha ha.

One of the highlights of August was flying to Ohio to see Todd’s family and for Todd’s 30th high school reunion.  And his sister Amy’s good timing of giving birth to her 2nd son while we were there!

We flew there on Southwest and somehow on both legs of the flight, we got exit rows.  Todd had some really awesome legroom! 

Meeting Pierce for the first time!  (Older one is his big bro Quinn.)

Having lunch with one of Todd’s oldest and goodest friends from high school, Joe, and his brother George.

Turned in our first electric car, a Kia Soul EV. 

And then buying a used 2017 BMW i3 EV.

Going to the Padres vs Colorado Rockies game on 8/10.  And eating Carnitas Snack Shack food inside the stadium.  The weather couldn’t have been more perfect.  Sunny, breezy, and not hot.  So San Diego.

Celebrating my dad’s 75th birthday with lots of his friends, and getting to see my sister Joyce and my nephew Andrew again.

Todd’s last softball game with his team Purple Reign on 8/14.  They lost so they didn’t get to go on in the playoffs.

We've had a fun summer with Todd's company softball team Purple Reign! Because I don't work now, I was able to attend about five games this year. It was so fun to watch them improve, and watch Todd become a reliable hitter, outfielder, first baseman, and first and third base coach. I really admire Todd's ability to participate in things he loves, have fun, and make friends. He's a good example to me of someone who enjoys life to the max and MAKES fun happen for himself. So inspiring!

We found a new-to-us Persian supermarket and restaurant – North Park Produce in Poway.  The food there was SO good!  Here’s Todd’s chicken shawarma with hummus.

We watched two movies at the theater:  The Farewell and Where’d You Go Bernadette.  I had listened to the Fresh Air podcast episode where Terry Gross interviewed the filmmaker Lulu Wang about The Farewell, based on her family’s real life lie.  I was intrigued and made sure to see the movie.  I had read the book “Where’d You Go Bernadette?”  by Maria Semple several years ago and really enjoyed its quirkiness, so I enjoyed the movie adaptation as well. 

One dish we made twice this month that we really enjoyed is White Balsamic and Tarragon Chicken.  We made it for Todd’s family while visiting Ohio, and we made it another time at home.  Yummy!

Here it is with the olive relish, along with an Aloo Gobi side dish.

The very end of August (8/31), our favorite time of the year started.  Its college football season!  We celebrated by watching ESPN College Gameday, watching Ohio State beat Florida Atlantic, and eating homemade nachos.

Some Noodle cuteness happened this month as well.  Always makes me happy to see his antics!

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I’m Back

I haven’t blogged for about four months due to technical issues with Open Live Writer’s interface with Blogger.  I HATE the Blogger web interface, so blogging was no longer fun for me and I gave up.  I kept checking Github threads to see if someone was kind enough to volunteer his/her time to rewrite Open Live Writer to fix the issues, and lo and behold last Friday when I checked the thread, someone named Nick Vella did!  So now I’m back to blogging, except I’m still considering migrating my blog to self-hosted Wordpress so I never have these issues again.  But that would require research and lots of work, and learning the technical details on my part. 

Todd and I are doing really well, and I am personally doing well! 

Here are some bigger things that happened while the blog was dormant.

• I started reading and watching videos about skincare and have been really interested in it for the last three months.  My 49-year old face looks more glowing and wrinkle-free than before! 

• We watched Game of Thrones’ final season, Season 8.  Sigh.  We loved that show.
• We discovered a couple of new-to-us Chinese restaurants:  Szechuan Chef and Shan Xi Magic Kitchen.
• We turned in the Kia Soul electric car (lease was up), and we purchased a used 2017 BMW i3 electric car for Todd.

• Todd played an entire season of intramural softball at Illumina.  They lost in the first round of playoffs.  I went to 4-5 games.

• Todd went to Trailhead DX in San Francisco.
• We celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary!

• We took a week off in July and staycationed here in SoCal.  We went on a bay cruise.  Spent a day up in San Clemente.  Went to Coronado.  Learned to make Chinese dumplings at home.  Had breakfast out.  Went wine tasting.  We did most of the activities with a Groupon and it cost less than 50% of the regular price!  Woo!

• We went to Nashville, TN for Con of Thrones!

• I went to jury duty.
• I drove to the US-Mexico border for my Global Entry interview.  I’m now a Global Entry cardholder, so I can go through the expedited customs line when I return from a foreign country.  And Global Entry includes TSA Precheck, which I enjoyed immensely when we flew to Ohio.  Two minutes through security!
• We flew to Ohio to spend a few days with Todd’s family.  Todd’s sister Amy had her second baby while we were there!  AND Todd attended his 30th high school reunion!  The funniest thing was when a guy he knew in high school said in front of everyone, “Now what guy our age still has a full head of hair like that??!”  Apparent Todd does.

• My sister Joyce and I put together a 75th birthday party for our dad in LA.  She and my nephew Andrew flew into LA and we drove up.  We had a Chinese banquet at Newport Seafood and invited several of my dad’s friends.  We had two big tables of people to celebrate my dad.  It was grand.

So now we’re caught up!

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Thoughts on Sharing

At the end of 2014 I quietly stopped sharing most of my personal life on this blog.  It was definitely a conscious decision on my part.  Sharing my life so publicly on my blog and on other social media has become a squeamish and undesirable thing for me.  There were several reasons I felt this way. 

I am now a middle-aged woman.  I like living my life joyfully but mostly anonymously.  I started to feel like sharing on my blog and on social media actually took away from some personal experiences that I want to savor for myself.  I like enjoying the experiences with family and friends with just those people and not plaster them on the internet for strangers to look upon.  I felt like people commenting on my experiences took away from them, rather than added to them.  This is a very personal thing that has changed for me.  I did not feel this way when I first started blogging 10 years ago.  But in the last year I’ve definitely felt this way, so I wanted to test the waters of NOT sharing for myself to see how it feels.  So far I like it.

What a lot of people don’t understand about online sharing and blogging is:  You are only seeing a SNIPPET of someone’s life, not their full life at all.  People think that just because I shared a lot about eating out that I eat out all the time, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.  We cook at least five dinners every week at home.  I don’t scrapbook every dinner I make at home, because it’s just not that interesting.  It’s mundane most of the time.  But I used to blog about eating out a lot, because those were special occasions to me.  People drew the wrong conclusions.  That was just one example.

One downside of sharing so much less of my life on this blog in 2015 is I sort of miss the connection with people.  For some reason people do connect with me when I share about my personal life, even if they don’t see the rest of my life and sometimes draw the wrong conclusions.  I’ve made some good online and even real life friends through this blog.  I’m somewhat wistful that this is less likely to happen now.  But really, many of my favorite bloggers have stopped blogging.  I can see that blogging is becoming less and less of a thing now, and I am a part of it too, without planning to be. 

You are probably wondering, hmm, what about the memory-keeping aspect of your blog?  You used to say that most of your memories are kept on the blog, and only a few of them get scrapped, and that’s ok with you.  The answer is, I have been blogging my personal posts on a private blog this year, where only Todd and I can post and see the blog posts.  My life is still documented and I very much enjoy looking at my personal posts about the fun things I’ve done this year.  There’s actually been around 70 posts on my private blog that I started at the beginning of 2015.  When I scrapbook I still reference those posts and sometimes copy and paste the journaling.  I still love blogging as a form of memory-keeping.  Just not publicly.

It is the beginning of August now.  I don’t know how I’ll feel about blogging personal life blog posts here at listgirl.com going forward.  I sort of enjoy my setup for now.  However, while blogging some personal posts at my private blog this weekend, I came upon some fun experiences that I may share on this blog selectively, from time to time.  We shall see.

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Anatomy of a Blog Banner

As you know, I recently totally revamped my blog.  As part of the revamp I created a new blog banner for the top of my blog.  I knew which photos I wanted to include, but making them have the look and feel that I was looking for was pretty trial and error.

First I used the photos as is.  This was too bright and jarring.

Then I lowered the opacity of the photos to make them less jarring.  It still didn’t look right.

Then I made the photos black & white.  But I didn’t like how some of the photos looked a little dingy and not bright.

So I tried brightening up the photo on the left a bit.  I thought this banner looked pretty good, but I was not wow’ed.

Then I opened up Rad Lab and used the Pool Party filter layered with the Flirt filter.  This was the exact feel & look that I was looking for!

So that’s the story of the different iterations of the new blog banner.  :)

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Major Blog Revamp

I had planned to totally clean my craft room today.  But what I ended up doing was coding a major blog revamp.  I’ve had the same blog layout for about 3 years.  I really wanted a cleaner, flatter look, with some pink thrown in there.  I am very happy with the result, especially since I did it myself with lots of Googling.  If you are reading my blog from Feedly, Bloglovin, or some other blog reader, feel free to click over and check out the new real estate!

What’s changed?

• New blog banner.  I was so tired of the old one.
• New Page Tabs with new font, and now they turn pink when you hover over a page tab.
• I went to two columns instead of three, and cleaned up a lot of extraneous sidebar items.
• New profile and intro.
• New social media buttons that change colors when you hover over them with your mouse!
• Instead of showing the entire post of blog posts, now there are thumbnails with the first paragraph of each post.  You can click on “Read More” or the thumbnail photo to read the blog post.

It was a much-needed change and I am so happy with how it turned out!  Well, that and pretty proud that I did it myself in one afternoon, heh.

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A Splash Of Fun

Last Saturday we had a church small group reunion at Jen & Steve’s house.  When we moved to San Diego in early 2000, we looked for a church to plug into, and also joined a “young married” small group.  At the start of the group it was just couples and nobody had kids.  After a couple of years that changed.  Finally the small group disbanded due to family changes.  However, our friendship remained, even though we see some of them a lot less often. 

Steve & Jen had a grotto and a waterslide added to their pool!  Saturday was so hot it was the perfect day for a pool party. It was hard to take a photo of the whole slide, but it goes all the way up the hill in their backyard! 

Our friends and their families.  Good times!

Todd & AJ

We each brought a little something to add to dinner.  Todd brought dessert of course.  (Apple Cinnamon Cake!) Steve grilled tri-tip and hot dogs.  AJ & Meera brought a salad.  Jennifer & Mike brought fruit.  It was an awesome time!  The kids seriously just kept going up the hill and down the slide, none-stop.  Even the adults loved it.

Last Wednesday we went to Burger Lounge for dinner to celebrate Todd being done with his “moonlighting” job.  He had been working at nights for a few weeks on a contract project, and it was finally done.  Todd loves Burger Lounge so we drove over after work for dinner.

This time I did a Todd Shot!

I got the Little Lounge burger and I think it’s funny how small it looked next to the fries we shared, ha!

We also cooked at home too, because I got my braces adjusted and soup is perfect for the day of the adjustment!  This is Cauliflower Soup. 

I worked on Project Life some this past weekend and the weekend before.

I bought Miss Tiina’s Unplanner on Etsy.  They are digital downloads and I printed them on really nice 32 lb printer paper.  The pages are nice and sturdy and writing does not show-through to the other side.  I love these “Weekly Docket” pages, which have a calendar week on the left, and different boxes on the right for to-do lists.  I separate them into Personal, Work, Scrapbook, Blog, and Clean.  Photo was taken at work under florescent lighting so it doesn’t do the printed planner pages justice. 

I got happy mail this week when my first Paper Issues Swag Bag came!  This is the September Swag Bag and it’s only $9.99!

Not only that, but you don’t have to subscribe.  Just put in the notes section of your order that you want to buy it one-time only.  Also, you can use my code LISTGIRL to save 20% off this and anything else in the Paper Issues store!  What a great deal!

This weekend I finally learned how to HTML-code my own gallery pages here at my blog.  I added a “Scrapbook Gallery” static page where you can find a thumbnail gallery of my scrapbook pages and they link back to the original post!

I also updated my Project Life Gallery with the same code, so that the thumbnail photos are much bigger now! 

If you’re reading my blog in Feedly or a reader, click over and check out the new galleries.  I’m really excited that I learned how to code it myself! :)  If you are interested in doing it on your own blog, check out this tutorial at Craftivity Designs, and this tutorial at Laura’s Crafty Life.  I combined the codes and made it my own.

Even though it’s been hot, Noodle has been enjoying some snuggle time with his humans.

And of course he loves his papasan time with his stuffed animals!

Who’s excited about the iPhone 6?  I didn’t pre-order it, but I will be getting mine! :)

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