A Jen Too Many

Yes! The oven is still working! The house has not burned down! The turkey cooked faster than I expected!

OK, so maybe that last isn't such good news. But it's amazing how much better the oven works now that it has a new bake element. I hadn't realized just how much the temperatures were off with the old element. The Love of My Life tells me that next time I will know what is happening when the oven starts to heat erratically and I just replace the element before it melts all over the interior. I told him that next time that happens I would rather just buy a new oven ...

We had a nice Thanksgiving. I hope you all did, too! And now I can say:

I'm back!

A big Thank You to my baby brother (who is considerably taller than me, but who's measuring?) who suggested that I check the monitor. Yes! It was broken!

Unfortunately, that was not the only thing that was broken.

Another big Thank You to the geeky guy at Geek Squad! When I brought my computer in he told me to call the company that made my computer to order a new recovery disk. He saved me lots of money!

Gateway does not get a thank you. They make you order recovery disks online, a place that is hard to get to when your computer insists on rebooting every time it tries to run Windows. If you happen to be lucky enough to find a phone number for them, you will get sent to various places, told by everyone that they cannot help you because your computer is out of warranty, and then finally told that you have to go online to order the disk because ... your computer is out of warranty.

Thank You to my sister who patiently went through the Gateway website with me, reading to me, typing in as I directed, and who has faithfully promised she forgot my credit card number faster than I read it off to her.

Nothing was lost permanently, thanks to Mozy Backup. Seriously, if you don't have a backup in place, take care of it now! I would have been fine losing most of our stuff, but not the family photos. The very thought makes me hyperventilate.

I have also fixed the oven, just in time for Thanksgiving. It was scary! Very, very scary! I don't like working with wires, which is what you have to do when you replace your bake element. I unscrewed a panel at the back of the oven, pulled the wires forward and then spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to detach the blasted element from the wires. Then the new element was a little too lose and I had to try to clamp everything tighter. I am now living in terror that I did something wrong and will wake up to a fire fighter beating at my door some dark night.

Oh - when working with electricity, always remember to TURN IT OFF FIRST. I almost didn't. I was carefully placing the flashlight so the light would shine in the right place. I idly thought how it was a good thing the element was in several different pieces, so that it couldn't come on and melt the plastic flashlight. And then I thought, "Oh. Right. I should turn off the electricity." And then the magnitude of my goof really hit me, and I panicked and became obsessive about making sure the electricity was off. I flipped the breaker for the range off, then turned on all the burners and the broiler element and watched them carefully for 10 or 15 minutes to make sure nothing was heating up.

But I did it! And it worked! Watching the oven element heat up (after I turned the electricity back on) was quite the moment of triumph for me. It feel as competent as my mother.

Amazon is giving away free mp3s to celebrate hitting one million followers to their Twitter feed. You get a credit on your account of $1.29, which is enough to give you a free song (most of them run around 99 cents.) The catch is, you have to use the credit by this Sunday, September 6.

Free mp3 from Amazon

Woohoo!! I love free stuff!

You might have already seen this, but I thought I'd share it anyway. How fun!

I ran across this video and the article explaining the story behind it while I was news surfing. Very funny and well-done. As The Boy Child said when he saw it, "Don't mess with talented people."

This group is called Sons of Maxwell.

The picture for this puzzle is mine, taken a few years ago, when the girls were much younger and we lived in a different state - one where we had a ton of azalea bushes lining the front of the house!

We have a couple of azalea bushes in front of our current house, but they barely flower and look wildly ill. Azalea fertilizer hasn't helped. I think it's just not warm enough here.

Evidently, I am channeling Princess Leia.

Free is almost always a good thing. Not so good if it's junk that someone is trying to Freecycle in order to save themselves the cost of taking it to the dump, but good when it's coming from Amazon. They are currently offering three free games - Build-a-lot, Jewel Quest II, and The Scruffs.

Just in case Akinator wasn't distraction enough.

I have run into an absolutely delightful time waster. Akinator is a website where you can challenge the program to "guess" what character you are thinking about.

I noticed it is heavily weighted toward things familiar to people in their teens and twenties. The Boy Child introduced me to it, and the two of us took turns choosing characters. He tended to pick people from animes, mangas, video games, World of Warcraft, etc., and usually had his characters guessed. As someone a generation older, who really enjoys books from my grandparents' generation, I found that I didn't have too hard a time stumping it. If you do pick an entirely new character, you get to add that who you were thinking of to the database. I got to add people like Wendell Urth and Valancy Stirling, which was kind of fun.

If you:

1. Have a blog;
2. Are a full-time college student;
3. Are a U.S. Citizen or a permanent resident of the United States; and
4. Could use $10,000;

...then you might be interested in this scholarship. The deadline is Oct. 30! If you are interested, do not delay!

Husband, kids, a garden, a dog, and too much fabric in the basement.