Mom Coming Home

If I Had A Million Dollars - Cool Home Office

Mom — Wed, 21 May 2008 12:00:42 +0000

Dad and I are in the process of finishing the basement. In said basement, will be the ultimate his/her work at home office! Oh…I can’t wait! We are at the hanging drywall stage, and when there is more progress I’ll post pics.

In the meantime, check out this awesome tree fort office! What a gorgeous view!

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Automatically Upgrade to Wordpress 2.5.1

Mom — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:14:30 +0000

As some of you know, last year I made the decision to move my blog from Movable Type to Wordpress.

Joni Ang from E.Webscapes did all the hard work for me, as well as create Mom Coming Home’s vibrant design!

So…Wordpress 2.5 came out and to be honest, I let the task to upgrade sit on the back-burner for a while. This was due to my laziness…some days after working “IT” all day, I don’t feel like doing anything techie.

Anyway, I found this amazing Plugin that takes all the guess work out of how to upgrade. After I took a backup of my website, I installed the plugin and the upgrade was complete in less than 2 minutes! It was safe and easy!

Install Instant Upgrade Plugin for Wordpress from Zirona –> Click here to Download
Upload and unzip to you WordPress Plugins folder
Activate the Instant Upgrade plugin from your Admin Panel
Go to the Options tab, Click InstantUpgrade and choose an upgrade method. Pick either FTP or HTTP. I went with HTTP, and it worked with my web host.
Next, the plugin notifies that it’s ready to upgrade. Go to Manage, InstantUpgrade, and start the Wordpress 2.5.1 upgrade process. It installs the 2.5.1 Upgrade in less than 1 minute.
That’s it! Your blog is upgraded to the latest greatest version of WordPress!

A big thank you to Alex at Zirona Open Source Consulting for making my upgrade a breeze! The Instant Upgrade Plugin is free, but please consider donating if you use the plugin so these guys can keep creating excellent code!

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Duggar Family Expecting #18

Mom — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:41:19 +0000

Congratulations to the Duggar Family. Expecting #18 (or maybe #18 and #19 if it’s twins). God Bless them…and I thought my home was full with 6 kids!

Read more about the big announcement on MSNBC:

Michelle Duggar gives her kids a Mother’s Day surprise: ‘We’re expecting!’

Help the Duggars name the newest baby here

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Cell Phone Usage - The Forbidden Frontier

Mom — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:00:41 +0000

Last night, in honor of our son’s 6th birthday, we went out to his favorite restaurant - Buffalo Wild Wings.

After dinner, I took a trip to the ladies restroom where I encountered rather shocking behavior. In one of the stalls, a woman was talking loudly on her cell phone…while using the restroom!

I understand (well…I really do not) some people live and die by their cell phones. However, chatting on the phone while using the restroom? C’mon! There is nothing so important that you cannot wait a few minutes and call the person back from a more appropriate place.

Besides invading others privacy, these rude cell phone talkers show little regard for the person on the other line. Can you imagine talking to a friend or colleague and being exposed to the sounds of “bathroom business”?

Nothing says I care about you like a loud flush.

How tacky.

I missed the bus, you missed the bus, we all missed the bus

Mom — Fri, 02 May 2008 01:27:51 +0000

Photo by Mike

A co-worker shared a story about his previous employer…a story about corporate silliness gone wrong.

Apparently, the CEO was into “team-building” and often used the brilliant “bus” analogy from Jim Collins book - Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t

“Get the right people on the bus, get the wrong people off the bus and put the right people in the right place in the bus.”

Ok. Makes sense when thinking about how to build a good company. Where the CEO went silly, was to present bus driver hats to each employee. He even encouraged his people to wear them.

Imagine walking down the hallway at work and bumping into Ed from Finance, who is wearing his Ralph Kramden bus driver hat. How silly. I’m sure that hat will help Ed do his job better.

Should have handed out “I Ride the Short Bus” t-shirts too.

The bus stops here.

Renters: Take Advantage of the Housing Slump

Mom — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:12:23 +0000

Jen at Millionaire Mommy Next Door posted a brilliant guest article addressing how to take advantage of the current housing slump and make money through creative house renting and leasing.

In our city, there are 16,000 foreclosures for the month of April. Many of these desperate homeowners attempt to sell before the ~~“Grim Reaper”~~ Bank Forecloser comes knocking on their door.

Imagine you are currently renting an apartment and would love to upgrade to a house rental. Maybe you need extra space, a yard to plant a garden or for your kids to roam.

By approaching FSBO’s (For Sale By Owners) with the idea of leasing from them until they can sell, you could find a sweet deal!

I encourage you to check out the article How to Make Money Without Ownership: Take Advantage of the Housing Slump to learn more.

Avoid Work At Home Scams

Mom — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 01:59:35 +0000

Avoid Work at Home Scams – Our Story

When Dad had his accident in early 2001, our world came crashing down. How could someone in their 20’s who was strong, vibrant, and hard working be struck down so suddenly and told he may never walk normally again?

Thankfully, Dad had excellent doctors who saved his foot and after 18 months of hard physical therapy, he learned how to walk again.

During those first few months, we struggled financially. I had two consulting contracts ending and Dad’s disability income was not enough to pay the bills. In desperation, we searched high and low for a quick way to make money, possibly a work at home opportunity. It wasn’t that we were interested in GRQ (get-rich quick), we simply wanted to PTBQ (pay the bills quick).

What we found, were TONS of scam artists eager to take our money and offer nothing in return.

That 80’s song “Taken In” from Mike and the Mechanics rings in my ears:

♫ Taken in, taken in again
Wrapped around the finger of some fair weathered friend
Caught up in the promises, left out in the end

Taken in, taken in again
Someone saw me coming, a fool without a friend
There’s one born every minute and you’re looking at him ♫

Unfortunately, we fell for an illegitimate direct sale company. We spent $600 for sign up fees and inventory and three months later, the company folded. Ouch! This was a hard lesson learned but one that made us wiser.

Seven years later, there is no shortage of unscrupulous people hocking work at home scams, especially with more and more people using the Internet.

Here are some tips on how to protect yourself from work at home scams:

Use common sense. Remember this wise advice: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Be wary of companies requiring money up front before providing details of how their business works.
If a company offers a money back guarantee, get it in writing.
Don’t allow yourself to be pushed into making a quick decision. Scam artists often use hard selling techniques to close the sale. If it’s a “limited time offer” that does not provide enough time to think it over, move on.
Check out the organization or company. Make sure to obtain the telephone number, address, and owners contact information. It’s also wise to check with the BBB and obtain references.
Work at home jobs and businesses require time and real effort. If you are promised “BIG MONEY” with little or no effort, chances are…it’s a SCAM!

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Balancing Work and Home

Mom — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:30:24 +0000

I normally do a good job on balancing my work responsibilities and home life, but sometimes a heavy workload threatens to tip me off balance. Here are some great tips on how to manage work and home. If your starting to feel like your going to crash and burn, check out my for tips on how to avoid work at home burnout.

5 Tips for Balancing Work and Home

By Craig Rowe

Most people understand how difficult it can be to balance their work and home lives once they get married and have children. Somehow it seems that work life or home life is always encroaching on the other and causing problems at work, at home, and many times both. However the following five tips are great options to help with balancing work and home.

Make a Schedule

The best thing to do when trying to balance work and home is to make a schedule. Know how much time you have and schedule your work time and your home time. Then, you will know when you need to schedule work and home events. This will make your life significantly easier and you will know which activities fit into which time frame. Just make sure you stick to your schedule.

Share Responsibilities

Many times work and home responsibilities can become overwhelming because one spouse is handling more of the responsibilities than the other. So, learn to share responsibilities at home and each spouse can be responsible for their work. Also, older children should have some home responsibilities as well to help parents balance work and home.

Leave Work at Work

Balancing home and work can be difficult because it is so easy to take work home. If you really want to balance work and home then you will always leave work at work and keep home a sacred place for family and home activities.

Dedicate Weekends to Home Activities

A great way to keep home and work separate is to always focus on home activities during weekends, or at least on days off from work if you happen to work on weekends. When certain days are home days and other days are work days then it makes balancing work and home considerably easier.

Plan

The best way to balance work and home is to always make a plan. There are tons of tips that will help you, but there is nothing like making a plan and then following the plan to really balance work and home. It might be difficult, but if you have it planned out and follow the plan you will be surprised how easy you can find a balance.

SearchArticles.net features thousands of how-to articles and tips on working from home. For more work from home tips, visit http://www.searcharticles.net

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Craig_Rowe

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Welcoming 2008

Mom — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:38:04 +0000

The holidays are over. My birthday is over. The kids are back to our school schedule, I am back to my ~~normal~~ work schedule.

Reflecting on 2007, I would say it was one of the best years of my life. I gave birth to Baby A (after two consecutive second trimester miscarriages). Our oldest graduated high school. We sold the rehab house that we thought would never sell. We spent an incredible week in Cancun!

There were many good things to celebrate, many hard times that we pushed through, but the bottom line is we are all healthy and we made it through another year…together.

I’m looking forward to this New Year and have great expectations for myself and my family.

Happy New Year!

Quick Update and Random Christmas Stuff

Mom — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 17:49:03 +0000

All is well in the world of Mom. We are incredibly busy right now in the midst of preperations for the Christmas holiday. Personal tasks combined with my crazy work project, have left me little time to post and read my favorite blogs.

I think back to this post: 99 Days Until Christmas and wonder where the time went? Now we have 5 days left, and I’m trying to enjoy each day to it’s fullest.

We normally mail our Christmas cards during the first week of December, but we were a little late this year. At least they went out!

~~Mr. Martha Stewart~~ Dad, loves to embellish our cards with sealing wax imprinted with our last initial - “P”. This year, he used a green and gold wax and it turned out beautiful…here is a pic:

Last week I baked up a storm and mailed a goodie box to each of my co-workers. They love the Christmas snacks and I really enjoy doing this for them.

Well, I’m off to do a quick conference call and then have lunch.

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