I was blessed to be able to attend Hayden's birthday party two weeks ago. And it's always nice to see Johnny's family members again. I forgot my camera, dolt that I often am, so resorted to my camera phone. So these are a few more to expand upon Jewel's post.

Note the "shrine" at the top of the stairs. Hopefully Jewel will forgive me for letting that cat out of the bag. (She's always been a little shrine-ish.) It's the family proclamation, The Living Christ (apostles testimonies), and a picture of Christ between pictures of the kids. And a candle if I remember correctly.

Speaking of decor-related, I gave Jewel my vacuum awhile ago since I have Norma's. Mine wasn't very old and was a good one. It died and she's now on the third one since. One might think she's hard on them. No - she vacuums A L-O-T.

That's Uncle Seth, Johnny's brother, in the last picture. Raygen loves him! He can say "a-boo" very loud and she'll laugh. Me - a tiny "a-boo" that first day caused tears. But she did warm up to me some before I had to leave. In the beginning, I could get her to smile, but the underlying facial expression was "I feel a little sick." It was precious and brought back memories of Jewel's aversion to others as a baby. When Jewel was 10 months we had an out-of-town wedding we wanted to go to, and Grandma Norma, bless her, spent two weeks of almost daily contact so that Jewel would survive the separation!

Planned to tend while Johnny and Jewel took in a movie (Raygen down for the night of course), but it never panned out. Johnny often works overtime and also coaches Little League. Hayden has two sets of baseball equipment and practices with both Johnny and his dad. It's a wonderful thing for Hayden to have Johnny in his life. Per usual, however, the adult has to remain the adult, and Johnny has the patience for it. Meaning, it's not always a bed of roses and I appreciate his involvement and willingness.

Got to go with Jewel to Hayden's T-ball practice, courtesy of Johnny tending Raygen, the night before I left! Nice to have that memory to match future reference. It was surprisingly cold even though we dressed warmly. Jewel commented, "THIS is why I left Utah."

Hijacked!

I'm getting old. And ha-ha, you too will get there someday.

w

In the meantime, I've learned two things recently.

I've been doing a lot of genealogical indexing. Makes me feel less guilty about the time I spend multitasking computer/television. As a result, I've discovered I've unlearned the bottom right little finger keys due to the heavy use of the down arrow key. To put it mildly, I am surprised. Typing is my "thing."

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I do a lot of data entry at work in Excel, whose programmers I've figured out are a tad smarter than the Indexing programmers.

!

The Excel programmers have made it so it gets it if you want to enter data column-by-column, and automatically activate the tab key to react vertically. The Indexing programmers make you use the down arrow if you want go column-by-column. Apparently they think people will want to enter line-by-line, not realizing the column-by-column is way faster and I'm betting big money here way more accurate.

Secondly, I've learned that blogs can be and are hijacked!

S

(Heck, where IS that shift bar for that exclamation point.)

((Maybe I'll "simplify," like g&r who refuse to type caps -- I'll type "explanation point" which will be faster than my index-riddled brain re-finding the shift key -- explanation point/explanation point))

So if suddenly yours flips into something else when you get on it, go to blogger help and it will tell you how to fix it. Seems there are people who do this so that they get more hits, which puts them higher on the list when their subject of interest is googled or binged or whatevered. Fix it fast explanation point Don't let them succeed explanation point Blogger needs to address this. THEY need to up their security settings, not ME. (You now have to be careful in what you pick in the first place, and there are a LOT of them listed that no longer work.)

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The most disappointing part about it is you have no idea which gadget you've picked is the culprit, and you have to kill them one at a time until you find it.

L

Unfortunately the Quote of the Day version I had worked fine, but no longer exists on the gadget list, I discovered after I killed it. I guess I'll get over it.

K

Faster than I'm apparently going to get over my newly acquired little finger problem....

J

YOU'RE RELATED

to –Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), who said (today's quote of the day):

Faith, n.: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

(Sort of.) Like being related to Grandma Viola's siblings' descendants. Which may be for the "best" since in my less than humble opinion you can be impressed because he's famous but that's about it. Although I must admit The Boarded Window has long been a favorite of mine. And actually I suppose I should have read it again before making that statement - I find a lot of what I used to be impressed with to have been a mistake.

One of these days I'm going to blog about him - maybe I'll have time after taxes. Maybe not. Lois will recognize the name - he's among the pack descended from the Pilgrims.