Ron went to San Fransisco last week and yes he had a great time and yes I am jealous. He got to hob nob with the big names and the little ones and sit and work in the Automattic offices and tinker away at the 3.0 version of WordPress coming soon to a dashboard near you. (pics here here and here)

I got to stay home and work work work.

As a side note, he always (okay, sometimes) complains I interrupt him too much to get any work done until everyone goes to bed. But all by my lonesome in my office, I really managed to pull quite a few things out of my… well, I got organized and stuff.

Ron brought home yet another WordPress book and this one we are thanked in the acknowledgments. (Thanks Brad!) We don’t even need last names, because we are Ron-and-Andrea you know. Yes, the children think this is the funniest/weirdest thing ever.

Also on the up side he brought home gobs of stickers and things. Want one? I can give you a couple or ten. And a pin. We have two new shirts and a mug too. The olive shirt looks fabulous on Meaghan, and after the next trip I think everyone in the house will have a WP shirt. Firmly drinking the kool-aid here, it’s purple.

Speaking of adorable children:

Ahhh, there we go. I held & stared at Isabella on Saturday and wished Kaytlyn happy first mother’s day. I got a brag book of photos all printed out for me too. Now I need to hassle my neighbours and make them look at MY grandchild.

Such a hardship, see?

Anyway, Sarah is here for the week too. I bought her a domain name for her to make a portfolio. Work is swimming along and we are firmly booked until at least September, and I have someone penciled in for then too. Looking forward to Chicago. Oh, and I did another interview yesterday for the WordCast podcast. I’ll let you know when it’s up.

In between I am writing. Or staring at a page. Or editing. Lots and lots of writing for a few different things, along with reading, sorting mentally and thinking. I have all sorts of thoughts that I think I should probably gather and stuff in a blog post, but they flit here and there on twitter and forget the rest. Sometimes they hold on, wispy. Sometimes I just lean over and hold that warm hand near me and share it. Mostly, that’s enough.

Work stuff:
- launching Premium BuddyPress Themes in partnership with StudioPress. Our add-on is specifically for the Genesis framework while using the BuddyPress plugin.
- if you have a WordPress blog, you may have seen my name in your dashboard. Hey ma! I’m on wordpress.tv! A 5 minute presentation I did in New York.
- Go to wordpress.org/about/ and look on the right under Contributors. Ron’s name is there, it’s official. When you upgrade to 3.0, the Network option and ability is his doing. To be fair, he didn’t write it all, but he did roll it in.

Homeschooling: still at low tide. Every so often some eddies roll in.

Had some fun with Sarah and an exploding appendix. She’s almost healed over because it got infected on top of that, but she’s back at college. We had her here for a couple weeks to take care of her, and a good chunk of that we had a nurse visiting ever day.

Otherwise, I mostly live on twitter. I have ideas for posts, things I’d like to write about, but I just do not have the brain to fully flesh the posts out. Life is mostly work, so it’s a good thing I like what I do. I might get back on a regular schedule, I might only update when I know I have something to say. Who knows?

- fabulous, amazing, awesome, wonderful, grateful, sharing, collaboration, all are fitting adjectives

- i had no idea how many people had read my words. Seriously. you guys, seriously.

- i really am funny, despite what my kids think.

- i did not love NYC like I thought I might. I mean, I *like* it, but I did not love it. It reminded me of Saint john if it had grown that big. I do want to go back though. There’s SO MUCH to see.

The weather impacted our leaving. Flights got delayed, canceled, rescheduled, delayed some more, then a “everyone get to the security gate NOW, this is the last and ONLY call”. We were told we had 15 minutes to be in the air. Then we were told we had to sit on the runway for 40. Then ten minutes later we took off.

Needless to say, that can leave you a little rattled.

The hotel we stayed at was like a guest room at your crazy Aunt Martha’s, who inherited a rooming house and liked art. The gal in the room across from us kept going outside in the hall to talk on her cell phone. The walls were thick. The doors weren’t. Otherwise the beds were comfy.

My presentation went well. I tried to pace myself, but then had to cram in the end. Then I did my second one directly after that. Tons of questions, and later I second-guessed a bunch of stuff and thought of things to do better.

Ron did his off the top of his head. Turns out he had no copies or notes from his presentation. Astoundingly, he got good feedback.

We mostly forgot to eat, split up for a different sessions and spent too much time trying to find each other. The second day was better. We wore our new WordCamp tshirts and both in black pants, so we were matchy-matchy & cute.

ooo! ooo! We went to a BAR! And we hung out on the roof. We threw in the towel at 9pm tho. I was asleep by 11, awake again around 5 or 6. Ron… well, he does not sleep well when we are away. But it was better than the night before.

second day, and it is an unconference based on popular items from the day before. Guess how was requested at the top fo the list??? ME! had a full room for that too.

in between, I talked myself hoarse & tried to stay hydrated. I met a TON of people I had been dying to meet.

other highlights:

- NYC pizza

- walking walking EVERYwhere. look waaaaaaaay up for the good stuff.

- “follow that cab!”

- Empire State building. At the top. At night.

- Canuckistan and I really do have an accent

- geeking out and talking code not on the slide. I think I scared some people.

- mah huzband is awesum.

- my 700+ new best friends are great too

YES: pics coming as soon as I get around to it. I have to walk all the way downstairs to get the cord…

By the time I had Emma and she refused to drink cow’s milk, I had already realized that if I drank milk, she would be fussy. Lactose cannot pass through breast milk, but milk proteins can. It is quite possible she has a milk allergy. It’s only since last year that she’s tried ice cream. And still her older sisters will eat much more ice cream than she will.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to stop putting milk in my tea. To be fair, it’s the only time I have any milk or milk product other than cheese. When I was on Weight Watchers, I was actually astounded at the amount of milk I consumed in a day, even though I had always felt I put very little milk in my tea. Just enough to color it, I’d tell people who were pouring.

So I skipped the milk. And I felt better. maybe it was better sleep, maybe a coincidence, but I kept skipping the milk anyway because I don’t need the extra calories.

Then I had a glass of chocolate milk, which I DO like.

And I had a bowl of ice cream. (neopolitan. stirred until smooth. Like I’ve done since I was little.)

A few days later I was in a LOT of pain in the intestinal area. So much so that looking at the jug of milk makes me feel ill. I am not drinking milk anytime soon. I would like to recover fully before testing that theory again.

Cheese seems to be fine though. Whew.

When I go to WordCamp New York, I fully expect half the people there to be the ages of my oldest child. Sheesh.

In other news, I moved this domain to a new server, and rolled it in as a second Site on my wordpress mu installation. Doesn’t matter if you get that, mostly it means NEW BLOGS really easy.

Because we all know I need more blogs, amirite?

Seriously, if you’re family and want a blog to pay with in the form of atypicalife.net/yourname/ just let me know. I have a ton of ideas. We’re working on a family food blog called “Never trust a skinny cook”. Meaghan & I spent two hours this morning looking at themes and still haven’t found one we like.

There may be a few wonky things here and there, like my flick pics along the top are gone, and I still need to move a couple of mom’s latest posts over, do up a new landing page for the whole network, but I’ll get it sorted.

Lastly, we backend up my computer and installed a new OS. I was limping along on Fedora Core 6, 64 bit version, which gave me no Flash, no pngs, and the chopiest javascript you’ve ever seen. Now? Oh my. I think I’ll be up half the night zooming thru things.

Kinda lovin’ the husband right now.

More to come – the girls are chomping at the bit to go trick or treating. It’s cold, wet and drizzling out, plus half my scattered neighbours aren’t even home.

Fun times, people. Fun times.

- we still haven’t made it back to the other library to get Emma’s finished movie.
- Emma found a cheque from her grandmother and purchased a small Wall-E from Toy ‘r Us. While she finds it fun, it just isn’t quite the same as the cardboard one she made. (It comes apart tho.)

- my bathroom is still waiting for a sink and the septic field still isn’t finished
- i did, however, sort of fix the downstairs shower which was handy for that whole two weeks of heat we had at the first of the month.

- Sarah is moving a few blocks away from where she spent the summer and will be rooming with a family friend. She’s a mom of 4 grown children with family values like ours (hippie, slightly crunchy, leaning towards British, and odd in a good way). Food is included. They should get on famously.
- Sarah also begins her first day of real school next week. At 18. I was supposed to set her up a blog, but that was tied to the moving around of this site, whcih hasn’t happened yet.

- Meaghan made a hammock.

- then she made two more cloth ones.
- the baking has continued. Today’s snack plate has caramel shortbread cookies.

- we partook of a community art festival, and joined in a large painting

It was in the local paper too.

- work tanked for a bit. We slogged through finishing up (or trying to) long overdue projects and a few of our own.
- when we started to make actual progress, a whole pile of new clients came flooding through

- I’m continuing to get veggies from our neighbours, on credit for the work I did picking berries and beans. Not together. Last night, they left a large bag of corn on our back step so someone could eat it before it went bad.

- we also discovered that the roof join over one end of my craft room was leaking. right into the wall. We’ll be closing this room off completely for the winter, and I moved my sewing table to someplace we could use it better. my sewing has stagnated.

There’s more going on in the background. Just waiting for the best time and all.

And most of those in the last week.

her comment was “Nothing says summer like cherries. Count me in for this cute one!”

That’s right. I’ve emailed her already, but hopefully she’ll see this too.

Man, that was fun.

All you have to do a LEAVE A COMMENT on this entry. Although if you tweet it on twitter, or blog it, I’ll add those as entries too. I’ll choose a winner at random on August 7th, and mail you this lovely half-apron.

I made it myself from a vintage pattern, and it doesn’t suit me. It would look adorable on you though. The fabric is a stretch cotton with cherries that have a tiny glitter highlight on them. The ties are extra-long too.

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And! As a new work promo, I’m doing WordPress installs & setup for $25 – just follow the link for details. Get hosting from my recommended host, and I’ll do the rest and hand over the keys.