HoundBlog

Well, Ken found me a van and we signed the papers on it last night and drove it home. It’s a 2003 Dodge Grand Caravan and it has lots of bells and whistles on it including 3 power doors, power seats, rear heat and air and too many other things to list. It also came with a very affordable price tag that the bank approved in a heartbeat. Now I just have to sell my other van, but I don’t think that will be too hard to do. I have 3 months to accomplish that as the bank deal came with 3 months of no payments which was unexpected and a nice sweetener to the whole deal.

I pick up Aurora today to keep for a couple of weeks. She is such a sweetheart that it will be no trouble having her around. She also reminds me of her mother, Nyssa as she has some of her Mom’s ways about her.

I’m hoping to complete some of the final testing on our new process today with an eye towards getting things up and running for Monday, 7/9. I have to create some user “manuals” so need everything to be functional.

Well, with that in mind, I need to run. Sorry this is so short.

Love to all,

Margaret

Boy Howdy! It’s already hot this morning! I can’t wait until this afternoon (NOT!!). The heat this summer is really getting to me. Although the year is flying by, and I deplore that, I will be happy to see the cooler temperatures of fall. At least we are getting a little bit of rain in the afternoons.

Uploaded a couple of photos to webshots this morning – one in birds and one in critters. I hope you enjoy them.

I finally have Suzel’s site uploaded to her host and am in the process of putting together her shopping cart and the support pages that show her fabric choices and the extras that can be added to the collars. We talked for a long time last night on the phone. She is like a little kid over this website. Just thrilled to death, but it’s really hard getting preferences out of her. Everything seems to please her 😆 It makes it easy on the one hand and hard on the other. For myself, I’m thrilled with the opportunity to test my new found knowledge on a site I’m not so emotionally tied to.

I seem to get “stuck in a rut” on my own website — although I’ve changed some of the look (and thank goodness for css to make THAT so easy!), it’s still the same website and I feel like I need to change a lot more than just the header and colors. I know I need to add a sitemap since that might help with page rankings in Google — right now, if you search on Whippets, we’re on about page 32 which isn’t a very great ranking. I did realize that my keywords didn’t make it over when I did the re-vamp a couple of years ago and added those last month, so that should help some, but I’m not sure how often Google re-ranks pages. If you add Kemar in front, we’ll come up on the first page, but I would like to be higher when searching on just the one word. There aren’t many people who will go to the 32nd page of the search engine results to find us 😆

Well, it’s time to go to work. Y’all stay cool!

Love to all,

Margaret

Good morning! Had another storm last night — don’t know how much actual rain we’re getting, but the wind and electricity is phenomenal!

I am in a total state of shock! Ken took today off from work!! This is the first day he’s taken off which is a normal day off for him in over a year! I think what tipped the cart was his supervisor calling in last Friday to say he wouldn’t be in — that was a day he didn’t schedule beforehand which is something Ken always does. He had told his boss he would try to come in and work 1/2 day today, but decided last night that he needed and deserved the whole day. YEAH!

Of course, the downside to this is that he’s going car shopping for me 😥

It will be nice to go home and have him already home. Really nice for a change.

I put a thistle feeder out for the finches since I saw a couple on the other feeder the other day, but no birds have tested it out yet. It’s one of those “sock” feeders that is basically a mesh with seeds in it. It was cheap, so even if no birds eat any of the seed before it goes bad, it won’t be a huge loss and I’ll know to get a more traditional feeder.

Well, work is calling, so I must go. You all take care, stay cool!

Love to all,

Margaret

Good morning everyone! Here I am working from home on a Tuesday and blogging :). Well, actually, since it’s 6 am I’m not working just yet, but will be shortly.

We had some very strong thunderstorms last night! We need the rain badly, but it was quite noisy all night and as usual, some of my dogs were scared witless. Then I was woken at 3:30 by them barking their heads off and when I went to see what all the ruckus was about, there was a car sitting at the end of our driveway. Just sitting there… I watched it for awhile before I woke Ken up, but before we cold decide if we needed to call the police, it drove off down towards Charlotte’s house. Ken got in the truck and followed it — he said the driveway down that way was a real big mess, so it was probably the neighbors coming home and finding they couldn’t make it up the hill in their car until after the rain had stopped and it drained some.   I just wish they had chosen Hardees in Honea Path to wait it out at instead of my driveway. 

I plan to work on more reports today. I brought both of my books home and hopefully, with no distractions, I can get something done.

Well, that’s about it for me. Y’all have a good day.

Love to all,

Margaret

Good morning! I hope you all had a great weekend! Ours was HOT and DRY.

I had to take Ken’s car and my van to the oil change place Saturday to get that done. Ken also wanted me to look at the dealerships along the way to see if I could find a newer van — mine is a ’99 with 131,000 miles on it and he thinks its time to get a newer one with lower mileage. I’m not so sure. This one is running fine and has given us no problems beyond the air conditioner that went out last year. I’ve kept maintenance up on it routinely and religiously, so don’t agree with him that it needs to be replaced just yet. However, I did look just to appease him.  I only found vans at one dealership who had several and of those, I zeroed in on 3 of them. They were all Chrysler/Dodge vans which is fine as I have had those before and liked them and they provide the space I need for crates and combine the features that I enjoy and have become accustomed to. I’m in no hurry, though.

He worked Saturday, but when he got off, he went over to one of the German’s apartments for a going away party as there are several of them leaving today to go back to Germany. He said they had a lot of really good food and he got somewhat sun burned sitting at the pool. Sunday we went to the Golden Corral for breakfast, then to Lowes to buy the shelves I wanted for the bathroom and picked up a few other things while we were at it. Then to PetSmart for dog food and back home around 11:00. He started mowing the yard, but I would not let him stay out more than an hour as it was just too hot. He came in for awhile, then went back out to finish up. The race didn’t start until 3:30 and he was back in the house in plenty of time for that. I made sure he drank plenty of tea while he worked outside. 

I took Taji outside for a bit, but he didn’t act like he was too thrilled with being out there and wanted back inside after just a few minutes.

Ken brought the tv in from the camper and hooked it up, so the birds got to watch Animal Planet all afternoon. I had  to laugh at the cockatiels as they all gathered at the end of the cage closest to the tv when it was turned on. Then when the program about snakes came on, they dispersed to eat and play and when the program about the wildebeasts came on, they were gathered back to watch intently.

I worked some more on Suzel’s website –mostly creating graphics and getting those to line up and act right. She sent me an email yesterday saying she was going to call, but I never got a phone call. At any rate, if you want to take a peek at what I did, it’s HERE. I’ve also worked on an order blank for her, but haven’t even gotten that to the stage where I have it loaded to the site yet as it’s still very raw-looking.  I think that page is going to be the hardest one to complete of all of them.

Well, I suppose I should get back to work. I hope you all have a nice day! Stay cool!

Love to all,

Margaret

Well, we’ve managed to make it to another Friday. I must admit that I’m looking forward to a quiet weekend. While I have all the usual chores that will need to be done, I have managed to stay even with the laundry (which means I only have 2 loads to do WHOOPEEE!!!). I do have to clean up the camper this weekend, but I think it really only needs a good vacuuming and wipe down with a damp cloth, so that shouldn’t take up much of my time.

I do want to finish reading the book on CSS that came two weeks ago and work some more on Suzel’s website. I’m waiting on her to tell me who her host is so I can begin uploading files to it, then begin work on the other 3 pages I envision. I talked to her some last week about needing fabric swatches, trims and some finished product to photograph for the website.  I’m kind of excited about getting it published to the web formally.

I did complete my report yesterday and am only tweaking on it. It felt SO good to have it pulling data correctly and displaying it as I had envisioned! My next step is to put it where everyone has access to it. Of course, it’s only one of a dozen reports that I need to develop, but now that I have one easy one and one fairly complicated one under my belt, maybe those other 11 won’t be too hard to develop.

Am still trying to get some real testing done. Time is running out and my results are less than stellar with the things that Acumen has done so far. There needs to be a lot more tweaking to make  all of that right. Of course now is a really bad time as everyone is doing inventory, so the field is overwhelmed with tasks right now. All testing pretty much has to be done by myself or Traci who is also involved with inventory and that leaves just me. I really need more eyes looking at this and playing around with the system.

Guess I just need to get on with it.

Take care everyone! Have a wonderful weekend!

Love to all,

Margaret

Uploaded more pictures to Webshots last night.

I watched 3 bunnies playing in the yard last night. They ran from one side to the other for over an hour, boxing with each other, leap-frogging each other and just having a grand time! 😆 I was only able to get one on disc as they were just moving too fast for me to get all 3 (well I did get one shot of all 3, but it’s way blurry, so didn’t upload that one).

Looked at Colin’s blog and what did I see, but a photo of a pink Whippet! 😀 Of course I had to send the link to all my Whippet buddies and hope to have it ID’ed by today. Thanks for snapping that one, Colin!

Still working on reports today. Report builder is a powerful tool, but boy howdy can it be frustrating! I have this beautiful report build that does everything I want it to do except show all the detail lines– it’s only showing the first one. I’ve spent 2-1/2 days on this one report! Talk about frustrated! I WILL get it done, though or know the reason why it can’t be done.:mad:

Well, I guess I should get back to it.

See you later!

Love to all,

Margaret

Good morning!

Today is rather dreary looking. We had some very strong thunderstorms last night that shut our power off for quite some time. I had to leave to attend a meeting and at the time I left, it had been off around 30 minutes, so I don’t know exactly how long it actually stayed off. It’s supposed to rain more today and although we need the rain, we can do without the pyrotechnics.

Our meeting last night talked about the responsible dog owner day on 9/15. Our club was asked to sponsor a booth at the dog park. We discussed some things we could do. Last year’s booth had mixed reviews. There were some things that generated a lot of interest, but there were some things we did that were ho-hummers. We want to learn from that experience and offer some other things. Since watching things go on is not my favorite thing to do under normal circumstances, I offered the idea of purchasing washable paints (water colors or acrylics) and getting some newsprint from the newspaper and having an area cordoned off so people could have their dog paint them a picture. Since one of the goals of this enterprise is to raise money for the dog park (they’ve commissioned a statue for the entrance and want to pay for it), we could charge a $1 or $2 fee for having your dog create this masterpiece. There is also an Art-In-The-Park function scheduled for this same weekend, so this activity would fit in and serve to combine the two things. If you were attending such a function, would you be inclined to participate in this event and, if so, what other things besides the basics of water to wash with, paint and paper would be needed? I may purchase some paints and just see what my dogs do with them given an opportuntity to play and test out potential problems. For long haired dogs, I may have to provide “aprons” to keep the paints from spattering on coats, etc. Maybe I’ll also have one of my dogs create a few masterpieces to offer for sale. I think Payne might have some artistic talent 😉

Well, I guess I need to get back to work.

Love to all,

Margaret

Break through on the project. I have parts and labor items in the calls , so now when we are ready to “go live”, I have the scripts and the means at hand to migrate the open and completed calls over to the new system so that everyone who comes in in that morning will be able to pick up where they left off.

Now I just have to see if my completed call report works — that will be the challenge today.

Posted Judy’s turkey picture to my webshots album if anyone wants to download it for their screensaver. You can find it HERE. I see turkeys here all the time, but like the skinks, they are very shy and by the time I’ve gotten my camera, they have disappeared. It’s easier to get photos of the deer than of the turkeys. I caught two blue jays in the yard this morning and the first goldfinches I’ve seen all year and got them on disc. Guess I need to get another thistle feeder for the goldfinches.

Have a kennel club meeting tonight. I think this might be the first meeting I’ve made all year. It’s certainly been a crazy year!

Got to run. Need to get back to work.

Love to all,

Margaret

Good morning! No blog Friday ’cause I worked from home and didn’t raise my nose out of the computer screen until really late.

I did upload some new pictures to Webshots in the Birds Wild N Tame album as well as the Flowers and Butterfiles album Saturday. I was not successful in my attempt to photograph the skinks, but did discover that they are 5 line skinks and are pretty common in South Carolina. The blue ones are juveniles while the red ones are adults. I will continue to try to capture them on disc. The blue is really pretty!

Ken and I drove to Florence Sunday to meet a friend of mine who wants to use my Chihuahua stud on two of her females. They both came into heat at the same time and since she was in the hospital most of last week (just got out Thursday), she wasn’t sure how long they had been in. She is afraid she missed, but I think, from the way Zoomer is acting, that they are not ready yet. We’ll see as the week goes on. Both girls are Champions and one has won group placements. They are both as sweet as can be. It’s no trouble for them to stay with us for awhile. And, of course, Zoomer is in heaven! Not one, but TWO girls to pay court to 😯

Still working on my project, but it is very close to being as complete as I can make it. Once Acumen is finished with thier piece, I can make some instruction manuals for using the interface and dispense those and then everyone can test to their hearts content. I have one small hurdle to overcome and that’s with how Traci loaded the labor line codes. She put them in as inventory items and they need to be service items in order for things to work properly. She is supposed to be talking to Brian about how those will hit GL and once they have that all ironed out, then maybe I can get on with my life.

Well, that’s it for me. Hope you all are not going to have as hot a day as we are — upper 90’s 😮 which is just too darned hot!

Love to all,

Margaret