Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Preschool

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Sarah started preschool with a little preschool group that cousin Jocelyn organized. There are 7 kids in all and us moms take turns hosting and "teaching." Sarah loves it! She has been a little shy in the beginning, but eventually warms up to everyone and has a blast. Here are pictures of the first day at Joceyln's; it was the day before leap day so she did a frog theme. Cute!


Posing before going in. We had to get a first day of "school" shot. ;)
She refused to let me go for the first 20 minutes, but then she was fine.
My turn to host fell right before St. Patrick's Day and I had a lot of fun with that theme.
The kids enjoyed some rainbow fruit kabobs, green cookies, and green milk that the silly Leprechaun snuck in and turned green! I kept asking Sarah if we should set a trap and catch him, but she said, "No, he's nice. He's just being tricky." The kids also found "gold" (Rolos) that the Leprechaun had dropped all over my living room. We sang a Leprachaun song and the kids painted paper-plate rainbows. Good times!






Activity Days

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I have been the Activity Day leader for a couple of months now and I love it. The girls crack me up and Sarah loves when the "big girls" come over. I planned an activity where I would teach the girls how to knit on a knitting tube and since I didn't know how to do it myself I had to teach myself first. I used a tutorial to learn to make my knitting tube which I made out of a toilet paper roll, some skewers I cut in half, a couple rubber bands, and some scrapbook paper to make it cute. So simple. I then watched a You Tube video to learn how to knit and within 20 minutes I had the hang of it, good thing too, because the girls were starting to show up, lol. I went around the table showing each girl how to get started and I was so surprised at how fast they caught on. Within no time they were racing each other to see whose was longest. It was a huge success! I am not sure what to do with the knitted tubes once they are done; I made mine a necklace.






St. Patty's Day

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It rained on St. Patrick's Day this year. I love the rain!

Since the leprechaun came to our house earlier in the week for preschool, he only made a quick stop at our house on St. Patrick's day and all he did was turn my finger nails green. ;) That sneaky little guy!

We made corned beef and cabbage for dinner. I used my pressure cooker for the first time (I got it for Christmas so that is pretty sad) and loved it. It cooked the veggies and potatoes super fast and it only took 1.5 hours to cook the corned beef. Mmmm...it was so yummy!

I had planned on hitting up some yard sales that morning and had even found ads for all of the yard sales that said 'rain or shine' so I would know where to go if it was raining, but I was very disappointed when many of those who said they would have their yard sale in the rain, cancelled due to the rain. Come on, people! I did end up finding a princess bike for Sarah, a pink soccer ball, and a Little People mini van and only paid $5 for it all. Sarah used some of her money she made from selling her play kitchen at our yard sale.

And since it is a day about being lucky, I thought I would list 7 reasons that I am so lucky:
1. I am married to best man I know.
2. I have two of the most entertaining children who I never get sick of.
3. I have a house that feels like home.
4. I have lots of parents (mine and David's) who make me feel like I am never alone.
5. I have friends who are always there for me.
6. I know that my Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ live and love me.
7. I know that my family will be together forever.

I am pretty LUCKY!

Pink Grandma's

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I love going to my grandma's house.  Last weekend it got pretty hot so we went over to play in the pool. I made cabbage soup (for the second night in a row, because it was THAT good!). This was my view from the kitchen. ♥ And...grandpa always has diet coke in the fridge. ♥
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A couple days ago, we went to hang out with my grandma while grandpa was out golfing and we decided to go play at the park.
I can't get enough of that face!  He LOVES his new (Sarah's old) boots!
  ♥

Bakersfield Women's Business Conference

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I was asked to help out at the Women's Business Conference this year.  It was my first time as a volunteer and it was great.  I got to eat a delicious lunch while listening to Tyra Banks speak!  She was amazing!  I've always liked her, but now I really like her!  She is more normal in person than I thought she would be.  Great speaker!  There wasn't much for us to do since there were so many volunteers so we just shopped around and I even bought this new, cheerful, yellow wallet. This picture makes it look like we are a football field away from her, but we were actually pretty close. So I tried zooming in but then it just looks blurry.  You get the idea.  By the time I got home from picking the kids up from grandma's, they looked like this...

Monday, June 25, 2012

Microsoft Back in the Tablet Business With Their Own “Surface” Units Coming Soon

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I do have to say from what I have seen the new Surface Tablets certainly look good and I’ll have to revive and add more to the “Tablet” sectionimage of this blog.  I was one of the very first adopters of a tablet computer and I think that goes back to around 2001.  It’s been a long time and I currently have an Acer Windows Tablet.  The only thing that it lacks is enough battery life to make me happy but you can’t have everything.  I still have this particular tablet as well from Tablet Kiosk and you see it regularly on CSI New York, except they use a black one. 



Sahara Slate Tablet PC i440D From TabletKiosk with Core 2 Duo available to order – Sunlight Display included as a standard feature….
Sahara Tablet PC Graphics and Dictation

 

Way back when I was still writing my medical records program I had it working with tablets too and the tip input bar.  In 2008 I ranimage around HMMS with my tablet and One Note and in those days one was considered a “goober” if you had it in tote as most vendors only showed and used them in the booths:)  Today all that has changed but the article below is still very applicable on using One Note as “intelligence files” and really work a convention and get everything covered that you set out to do.  I did it and had everything I needed and One Note did the queries for my information both before and at the show.  I talked and wrote my notes in One Note.  Everyone kept coming up and asking me what booth others were in as I had that too":)  Just think this is only 4 years later and how far we have come with tablets.  You can see a sample image as to how my rough files looked before I began with all the notes I took. 

 
HIMMS 2008 Summary - Getting organized is the trick

The little Acer Arconia does ok for what I need now but it’s not a digitizer and I do miss that with having the option to be touch or a full digitizer on the unit, and my TabletKiosk model does both and I can switch back and forth.  If you have not caught a video of the new Surface Tablet you can view it below.  I’m one of the founding members of the Los Angeles Windows Mobile Group (Pocket PC) which has undergone a few other name changes tooimage and I remember the one night back in Santa Monica at our meeting at Microsoft where we all got to see one of the first tablets previewed even before they were released and a special employee from Microsoft arrived to give us the unannounced prior presentation. I just wrote to a Microsoft Tablet MVP who made a video of it to see if he could dig it out for nostalgia purposes:)  The video quality is not what we have today but seeing this from 2001 would be fun to look back at.   I’ve mobile before it was cool to be mobile and Pocket PCs were not phones yet:)

I did the mini UMPC round of tablets as well and this is one of my clients, a doctor a few years back using the small imagetablet to enter data in his medical records program in 2007.  At any rate I hope before too long that I am able to get my hands on one of the Surface units and really check it out.  Little humor, this is far cry from a Mike Arrington Crunch Pad for those that remember:)  It’s been a while so time for a little friendly reminder of the project. For your absolute utter enjoyment here’s a picture of a couple of tablets running my antiquated VB6 medical records system, although it was hot at the time and your screens could be any color you wanted:) If that picture did anything for you, there’s more at this link of some screenshots of the antiquated coder/blogger at work.  Boy the formatting was tough to get right for the little tablet. 
What Does an Antiquated EMR (Electronic Record System) Look Like


The bigger unit with the Intel processor looks like the real imagework horse and of course I will be interested to see what battery life is like as for years it seem as if you want more power you get less battery and even the IPAD with it’s wonderful engineering only does one program at a time and that’s how the battery can last so long.  They really did a good job on that design, however let’s see what Surface can do and for sure it stands to be a huge tool for the enterprise and healthcare world with medical records.  Tablets have come such a long way since that first little Acer I had years ago.  BD 



Surface Tablet Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpzu3HM2CIo&feature=player_embedded