HoundBlog

Well, Ken is almost to Gray. He’s had a pretty uneventful trip if you don’t count the heart attack over the total to fill the gas tank

I emailed a friend of mine to see if she could look out for him (if she’s going to be at those shows). I’m sure she will — she’s a nice lady.

He’s still giving me grief over deciding to stay behind, but he’ll get over it. He’ll probably do really well without me there to give him bad luck.

Not much to talk about today It’s quit raining and the sun is out for the time being. I’m sleepy since the hamsters wouldn’t get off the wheel last night, so I couldn’t get to sleep until the wee hours. Maybe I can get caught up over the weekend.

You all take care!

Love to all,

Margaret

Good morning! It’s cloudy and spitting rain today. Would have been a great morning to sleep in, but here I am at work again and already slaving away.

I had to go home yesterday at 9:30 AM as I forgot my power supply for my laptop, so battery only lasted about an hour and a half. I felt really stupid forgetting it, but guess it was inevitable that would happen at some point. At least I haven’t totally forgotten the computer.

Anyway, first thing I did upon returning home was to order a back up power supply. I’ll probably leave that one in a drawer here at work. It should be here in a couple of days.

I’m always able to get more done working at home (or at least I feel like I do) thanks to an ability to focus on the task at hand and having very little in the way of distractions. Around here, there’s always someone stopping by to chat or something going on, so I get pulled away from projects. Sometimes that break is useful especially when I’m stuck on something, but more often it’s a pain in the tail.

I was reading a blog the other day that had a list of exercises you could do in your office/at your computer. It cited the benefits of exercise and talked about just doing 5 minute intervals of exercise every hour or so. I can’t drop and do 50 pushups nor can I drop and do 50 sit-ups — there just isn’t room on the floor of this cube to do that, but I can do the 5 minutes of shadowboxing. Now what my fellow workers will think of that is another question. No worry about the birds Envisioning someone’s face that has irritated me being the recipient of my punches might bring other benefits as well as just exercise.

Ken leaves tomorrow for Gray, TN and the show up there. I decided to not go to this one. Only two dogs are entered — Payne and Tigger and Ken can handle that pretty easily. It will save us the $30 for a pet sitter which will help offset the cost of the fuel up there. He’s complaining about the price of diesel and is regretting our offering the use of our camper at Asheville next month for their health clinics. I think I can manage to use the expense as a tax deduction on our income tax next year, though. It’s for a charitable cause after all.

Imagine my surprise yesterday when the UPS truck pulled up and tooted his horn. I hadn’t ordered anything (other than the laptop power supply which would have been totally weird to get that mere hours after I placed the order). Anyway, it turns out Ma sent me a little sweeper thingy. I had seen it in her apartment and remarked that I should order one for myself as it would be lots easier to use instead of pulling out the vacuum cleaner every day. She must have hopped on the phone and ordered it Saturday before I got all the way out of the parking lot. Anyway, I put the battery on to charge last night and will get to test it out on my accumulation of dog hair, dust bunnies and birdseed when I get home from work tonight. Should be quite the test!

Well, now you know everything there is to know about us. Back to the grindstone!

Love to all,

Margaret

Good morning! I hope your day is a good one.

Yesterday I worked from home. Had some issues early on with connectivity, but got them resolved for the time being and all was well. Cranked out two reports; one for Wes and one for Kurt and dealt with issues surrounding incomplete data on a job that runs a zillion times a day.

Every month we roll out jobs to do preventive maintenance on sites we have under contract. Our method of doing this is not as smooth as it could be and so we end up with a lot of jobs getting assigned to inappropriate people and this causes other problems down the road. Anyway, that was a headache to get past.

This morning I managed to get away from the house without the power supply for my laptop, so the battery will be running out here pretty quick and I’ll have to call around to see if someone has one I can go and buy. No fun.

I forgot my cell phone Monday, so couldn’t call Mom on the way home. I have it today, so will call her today.

My week isn’t shaping into a stellar one that’s for sure.

Enough of my whining.

Love to all,

Margaret

Went to Mom’s Saturday to spend part of the day with her. Ken bought strawberries and I went by the local creamery to get her some whole unpasteurized milk and those combined with the cookbooks and all-occasion cards, comprised her Mother’s Day gift from us. Not much, I know, but she seemed to like them all.

She and I went to the street fair and enjoyed meandering through all the booths with the hand made stuff. I took photos which I’ll post later today or tomorrow as I need to resize them for the web. We saw lots of beautiful and cute things. Smelled some smelly stuff that left me with the smell permanently in my nose (well it seemed like it was going to last forever at the time!) and her not able to smell at all.

Then we went cruising through the new shopping center’s parking lot. She didn’t see any stores she just HAD to go in, so we went across the street to McAllister’s Deli for lunch. Once we were finished eating, we headed to WalMart where we ended our shopping spree.

Back at her apartment, I tinkered with her computer a bit, but really wasn’t able to do much other than figure out her log-in information for Webshots. I wanted to leave in time to get back home before dark and managed to do that.

It was a nice trip and I enjoyed it very much. I think I wore her out, so I’m glad I didn’t stay longer.

Ken took me out for breakfast yesterday morning and from there we went to Circuit City so we could buy a new router as the old one was nearly 9 years old and we were afraid it was failing. He’s been having trouble connecting and his computer was running pretty slow. We bought canned air so I could clean the dust out of his computer.

I ended up totally ruining the computer. It will not turn back on. I thought it might be the power supply, so he went back to Anderson to buy one, but that wasn’t it. I’ve brought it in to work for Carlos to take a look at. If he can’t get it to working, we’ll get Ken’s data off the hard drive and buy a new computer — he was already considering that purchase anyway.

Work is about the same as last week. Kurt wants a report that shouldn’t take long to put together and I’ll get on that right after lunch.

Well, now you know all there is to know.

Don’t get blown away!

Love to all,

Margaret

Good morning and TGIF to all! Today is supposed to be sunny after last night’s rain. We needed the rain and it made for some primo sleeping. I think the weather report calls for more rain tomorrow but not until evening.

Listening to NPR radio on the way home Wednesday had my ears perk up at the mention of a name in conjunction with some legislation passed somewhere. I resolved to do a Google search on the name and was surprised at the hits I got as I had no idea that “Prentice Cox” was that common of a name. The first hit was a genealogical database that has granddaddy in it as well as Prent and some other Prentice’s. The gentleman of the news story is Minnesota Representative Prentice Cox and the reference was to home foreclosure legislation that’s in controversy in the state. Besides these, I also found one on Facebook, but he must be from another branch of the family since he’s definitely African American

We got our stimulus package this morning. It’s already spent on bills, so no new gadgets for the Norkett family. Ken’s getting his new lawnmower Saturday ( the funds for that came from his savings, tax return money and what he sold the old mower for) and he’s tickled pink. He finally decided on a Snapper after much angst and tons of research. He really did a bang up job figuring out what would be the best machine to last him for a long while. He mentioned 20 years, but I doubt that will happen given the way things are made these days. Nothing has a life expectancy of 20 years anymore at least in my experience.

I put the photos I’ve taken this past couple of weeks up on WebShots. They are scattered through the Butterflies and Flowers, Birds Wild and Tame and Yard Critters albums. Hope you enjoy viewing them as much as I did taking them. I get a weekly report from webshots of the views and downloads to my albums. It’s not at all unusual for me to have hundreds of views and nearly that many downloads although since I hadn’t put anything new up in awhile, the downloads were down. I need to upload the photos from our Vegas trip to as the Cozumel photos still get a lot of looks.

We finally got the pictures from the vow renewal. I’ve scanned them all and now just need to put them somewhere they can be seen.

Well, I reckon I need to get my butt working instead of goofing off writing this blog post. It’s been really slow around here this week and today doesn’t appear to be much busier. I’m sure all heck will break loose soon, though. That seems to be the norm.

Love to all,

Margaret

Good morning everyone! Hope your day is going well.

Mine is very slow this morning. I’ve got my reports run and checked the logs for errors (there were none for a change!). Everything seems to be running very smoothly and with so many out of the office for inventory, it’s quiet as a morgue in here. I am bored silly.

Am going to Mom’s Saturday to spend some quality time with her. I’ll be taking her some books (so Judy — look for them coming your way eventually) and some other small items she can use. Oh - and a Mother’s Day something although I don’t know what just yet. She mentioned a street fair this weekend, so I’m hoping she’ll feel like going Saturday — I love street fairs! If not, I’ll take her to Walmart or where ever else she wants to go and treat her to lunch out somewhere as well.

If you haven’t checked out the “other” blog lately, I uploaded a bunch of photos to it last night. Birds and flowers and a bunny, but you knew it would be stuff like that didn’t you?

Well, I’ve just noticed something amiss, so need to get in touch with one of my guys. See you later!

Love to all,

Margaret

Writing late in the day today. Worked from home, but had to take a bird to the vet. Once in the car, I turned on my cell phone only to have messages from the vet’s office telling me they won’t have time to see the bird today, so had to take her to the other bird vet that’s 30 more minutes away.

At least she got seen and put on meds for her bad toe. She was not a happy baby after all the needles and manhandling she had to endure. She was pretty good about taking her medicine though.

I got photos of the petunias taken finally. I think they are so pretty! But here, see for yourself!

My yellow azaleas are blooming, too. I’ll put photos of all these and some critters I caught in the yard over on the photo blog so as not to make this so hard to download. Guess Ma will want them uploaded to webshots so she can add them to her screensaver, too. I’ll have photos all over the web <G>

Ken had to work an hour over tonight and he just walked in the door. I managed to get our bathroom clean and 3 loads of clothes washed, dried and put away today as well as worked 8 hours and took the bird to the vet. The day started at 4:00 am, though, so you know how I had time to get all that done.  It will be early to bed tonight, I’ll bet you.

Got to run. Need to fix dinner so we can hit the sack.

Love to all,

Margaret

Happy Monday to you all! Hope your day has dawned as clear and pretty as ours has. Highs are predicted in the low 80’s for most of the week. I can stand those — I don’t look forward to the 90’s and above that we’ll probably get before too long.

I am so ready for gas prices to come down, but it doesn’t look like lower prices at the pump will be coming any time soon despite the US Dollar gaining ground overseas. Of course the price of transportation is making everything else go up in price, too. Economic stimulus or not, it’s going to be rough for the next foreseeable while.

The show Sunday was pretty much a repeat of Saturday. Payne did end up with a ribbon Sunday, although it was a 4th place one. No sniff even of points. Again Tigger won his class handily only to lose out on the higher award to the 9-12 puppies. They are nice puppies, don’t get me wrong. I’ve gotten Tigger a little too heavy and so he’s not as competitive in looks. I’ll have his weight down for the next show in 2 weeks in Gray, TN.

So far work has been fairly quiet. Let’s hope it stays that way for awhile.

Ken took the lawnmower to its new home Sunday. Now he’s REALLY into researching the replacement for it. Of course, if he doesn’t put some weed and feed out soon, he won’t have to worry about having any grass to mow.

My yellow azalea has bloomed. It’s just loaded with blooms this year and I need to get out there with my camera and get some photos of it. Ken bought me the prettiest petunia hanging basket yesterday when he stopped at Home Depot looking at lawn mowers. They are a double shade of yellow that reminds me of lemon sherbet. Photos of that will be coming as well.

Well, that’s got you caught up with us. What’s new with you?

Love to all,

Margaret

Show day today. Ken had to work, so it fell to me to show all 3 dogs. Not great results as Payne got nothing, Butterfly was 4th out of 5 and Tigger won his class of 3 but was stopped from going any further by puppies. Ken’s off tomorrow, so will show Tigger and maybe have better luck.

I had a new visitor at my feeder this afternoon. I’ve identified her as a female Rosebreasted Grosbeak. She’s quite distinctive!

I’ve started a photo blog over at www.msns-blogs.com/blog which has this photo and more. I’m trying to upload photos there from my cache of photos that I’ve taken over the years. I had been uploading them to Flickr and Webshots, but it’s easier to put them in the blog and feels less like I’m peeing in the ocean if you know what I mean.

That’s about all there is to tell you. Wish us luck tomorrow.

Love to all,

Margaret

It was another long day today and it’s not over yet.

I’m sitting in Atlanta airport waiting on my connecting flight back to Greenville which doesn’t leave until 10:35 pm and it’s just 8:30.

The day started off with no internet at the hotel which meant my getting up at 5:00 so I could log into work and run some reports was for nothing. I went down to breakfast and then back up to my room to wait until time to meet the other witnesses in the lobby and go to the courthouse. I was scheduled to be first on the witness stand this morning and the District Attorney wanted to talk with me briefly before we went into the courtroom.

We had our chat, then headed up to the 10th floor where the courtroom is. I was put in a small room to wait for them to convene court and call the first witness. They called me in, then seated the jury which had 16 people (12 jurors and 4 alternates). The DA went through the questions we had covered the night before although in slightly different order. They stopped me a time or two because they couldn’t understand some of the things I was saying — the judge joked that they couldn’t understand my accent although I was trying to not speak with one. It took longer than I thought it would as there was some hullaballo over the complaint I had filed with the Better Business Bureau in New York. I had filed it online and they showed me a paper with what I had typed on line on the paper and asked if I recognized the document. I could not honestly answer yes to that question which got the defense all excited thinking he had found a flaw in the prosecution’s case. My DA was not going to allow that, though, so he was quashed in the end.

When the defense attorney was allowed to do his cross examination, he told me I had testified that I had not spoken with his client, Lewis Moustachi and I replied that statement is not correct as I had spoken with Mr. Moustachi just couldn’t remember the exact conversation since by that point I was trying to find out what they were doing with my money and why they had not sent proposals to the credit card companies as they had told me they had done.  He repeated the statement again about my not talking to his client only in a belligerent and loud voice which the DA immediately voiced objection to and before the “n” in objection was out of his mouth, the judge was saying “sustained”. His next question was just a rephrase of that question although in a less combative tone and I repeated my answer.  He gave up trying to trip me up at that point.

I was NOT like Law and Order or Perry Mason. I wasn’t nervous although I worried about the document thing, the Postal Inspector who walked me out of the courtroom when I was dismissed was elated over how it all transpired and told me no one would ever know that I had never testified before.

Now I’m just waiting on the final leg of my flight home, then making the drive and falling into bed. I’ve already talked to Wes about working from home tomorrow and he’s agreed that I can do that.  I’ll probably “go to work late”, though.

Since I still don’t have internet although there is WiFi here in the airport you evidently have to pay for it, I’ll send this off tomorrow.

Love to all,

Margaret