Lizzie's Link Love ~ January 29

Good morning internet lovelies!

Okay, I am fibbing just a smidgeon. As I'm writing this, it is Monday evening my time and I'm waiting (im)patiently for Shannon to post the Mr Linky for the Bloggy Carnival. Darn international time zones! You guys might be waking up fresh and reaching for the coffee as you log on to post your links, but I'm in a mad dash to ready the Lizzie's Home household for the beginning of the new school year tomorrow. And by the time many of you read this, I'll be packing the newly haircutted kids off to school. And collapsing in a heap because it's very, very likely that I won't be going to sleep until very late tonight. Purely my own fault of course. And maybe Shannon's, just a teeny bit - I worked out the Mr Linky will be up around 12:30 am my time. I could wait until tomorrow morning to link up but the probability of me still being up and completing #412 on a long list of school readiness-related tasks is high regardless :P I kind of want to be quick off the mark because ten minutes after Shannon goes live with the post there'll be about 632 links already and there's only so many giveaway posts readers will want to read through.

And is it weird that this bothers me?

Yes. Yes it is.

Okay, so since I'm sitting down and taking my last sip of hot tea before having to get up and bake (because I couldn't be organised enough to do that this afternoon, no sirree...), I thought I'd get a head start (for a change) on Lizzie's Link Love. Not many this week. Everyone will be too busy signing up for giveaways anyway. Probably a bumper edition next week to make up for it. You know, when Bloggityville has calmed down again.

Amanda of Free To Live, my new bloggy BFF (and very accomodating and willing guinea pig) wrote a great post on perfection this week, or more specifically, why the pursuit of it is irrational. I interviewed Amanda last week as part of My Last Ever Assignment (a portfolio of autism pieces) and then wrote a little piece about her story. Zane's Story is currently in the hands of my lecturers and I'm currently awaiting the results. In the end I was literally still writing two minutes before walking out the door to post it, that's how close I came to my deadline. Amanda has given me permission to post it in some form here on Lizzie's Home but as I didn't have the chance to swing it by Amanda before submitting it, that will come first (once I have my results - don't want to jinx it!). I have a new level of respect for my fellow 'autism sister' after peeking into her life :)

I have no doubt most of you read Scribbit, so you've probably already come across her post today about the Quiet Family, but I have to link to this for the stragglers. I love this idea! I only wish I'd thought of it when my kids were young enough to need it!

When trying to add four and subtract twelve to the power of 5 to figure out when (in my time) Shannon was going live with the Bloggy Giveaways Mr Linky, I came across this nifty site for calculating the time differences between two points on the globe. I'll use this all the time - when most of your readers and fellow bloggers are American/Canadian, it kind of becomes necessary, LOL.

And the final link should appeal to the geek within - it certainly placated mine :) I found a nifty application called Crawler Notes. Crawler has a few different products, but this one appealed to me because I'm always on the computer and always jotting down various reminders on slips of paper which get lost. If you click on 'take a tour' in the above link, it will give you a basic demo. I haven't yet worked out the Crawler Organizer thing yet (where it opens up in a browser window as opposed to something you steer from your desktop) as I'm happy just to potter around putting sticky notes up on my desktop - but others might find it useful. When I downloaded it I was not required to sign up for their email account but you could run into a prompt for that so here's another source: Download.com. I usually more inclined to download apps from sites such as this one anyway - you can't be too careful. Crawler Notes is freeware, with no ads. Here's an example of how I have mine set up at the moment:


Now you can set it to load up when you computer boots, but for some reason mine needs to be manually opened from the Start menu. You can 'hide' all the notes when you don't need to look at them and then 'show all notes' when you do. If you want to write yourself a new note, you click on that little yellow pad you see down in the bottom right hand corner and then 'new note'. New notes open up yellow but you can set the new notes to open up with different default settings (make the new ones pink, or blue, or with a different font, or....) I left mine yellow and then there's a little spanner image at the top of each one where you can manually change the colours of individual notes.

So that's what I did. Cause I'm crazy (geeky) like that. Blue is 'don't forget', yellow is 'daily to do lists', green is 'additional household tasks', purple is 'blog related stuff' and red was 'school related'. The sight of so many neat little cyber sticky notes is enough to warm the cockles of my heart. Or you know, remind me of all the things I haven't yet done. Either way.

And so with that happy thought, I'm off to go and complete some of my red notes.

Because I suspect having the Piglets turn up to school without their lunches on the first day might be pushing it a bit.

That's a 'second week' mistake.

(I'm setting this to auto-post on Tuesday morning my time (Monday evening US time). By the time this post actually pops up, I'll be neck-deep in sleepy, almost-school-ready children. Oh, the things I'll be able to get done now that school has returned!)

Cheers,
Lizzie