Uncategorized

I stopped in Free People this week while Christmas shopping and HOLY MOLEY do they have some amazing clothes right now. One of everything in the store, please!! Make that two! My favorites??

I think I must must must have this gorgeous sweater.

The girl working there was wearing this fairisle cardigan. I doubt I would have looked at it just based on the picture online, but she paired it with jeans and a ruffley white shirt and it was lovely.

This skirt is divine. Absolutely divine! Love the black and brown combination!

Oh my. Oh. My. COAT!!

Is it possible to fall in love with a pair of boots? Cause I just did.
Happy Friday, guys!

Can someone please tell me how I can have a house that looks like a catalog?

Because my desk has never looked like this:
Actually, its a little odd to be able to actually see the desk part of my desk lately.

And my mud room has never ever EVER looked like this:
I mean, really. ONE pair of shoes?? What kind of mud room is that? Where’s the mountain of coats? The piles of shoes? The mud???

I think I need to stop getting catalogs.

Well, I learned one this past two weeks: Lice SUCK.

Lets never, ever, ever talk about it again, okay? I’m going to try and erase it all from my memory. Because thinking about it makes me itch.

See? Now I’m itchy.

Darn it.

Going to stop thinking about it again now.

***

Anywho, I have a bunch of cool gift ideas to share with you this week! And cool stuff like that. Oh and did I mention that we got two little cute  kitties this weekend?

This is Hazel:
And this is our yet-to-be-named girl kitty:
I’ll try to get a better picture of her. When she is still for longer than 1/2 a second!

As a blog designer, this is one of my top requests. While the new Blogger can automatically add your pages into a nav bar, what if you want to link to categories in the nav bar? Or another site of yours? That gets tricky. Here is a simple tutorial to show you how to do it.

Step one:
Go into your Design Tab to Edit Layout. Click Add a Gadget, choose Custom HTML/Java Script.

If you do not have an Add a Gadget  then you have to modify the HTML to enable it. Don’t be scared. You’ll be fine. But backup your template just in case by clicking Download Full Template.

Now,

Step Two: Enter the code for your nav bar

<div id=’menu’>
<ul>
<li><a href=”http://www.yoursite.com”>Home</a></li>  <– links to your homepage
<li><a href=”http://www.yoursite.com//p/about-me.html”>About Me</a></li> <– This links to a page
<li><a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/search/label/Category1″>Category1</a></li> <– This links to a category
<li><a href=”http://www.outsidesite.com”>Site</a></li> <– This inks to another site
<li><a href=”mailto:youremailaddress”>Contact</a></li> <– This links to your email address

</ul></div>

Simply replace my fake links with links your own pages, categories, outside sites and email, and replace the “Category” or “Site” to whatever you want to show in your nav bar, (and remove my notes!) and you have your nav bar!

Step 3: Click Save, then drag your HTML/Java Script widget to right below the header.

Step 4: Click Template Designer and go into Advanced. You can edit the text, color, background color, etc of your nav bar by editing the “Tabs Text” and “Tabs Background” here:

Step 5: Save. And Smile! You did it!

This week I am feeling especially grateful for email.  I was anxiously waiting a phone call all of Thursday morning. I must have been checking my phone every 5 minutes, making sure that I turned it on (since I forget that often).  I was at an event that morning at Neimen Marcus with Jo-Lynne and it was so obvious I was glued to my phone that she was like, “What is going on?” Well, my sister-in-law was going in for a c-section that morning at 7:30am. So I was waiting and waiting for news of our newest family member!

I finally got the phone call later that morning. And its a boy! A big boy! (as in 9 pounds, 14 ounces big! WOW!)  When I was chatting with my sister-in-law on the phone, I could hear those little newborn coos and whimpers on the phone. (Insert my heart melting here.)  And look at what was soon waiting for me in my inbox…

Isn’t that amazing??? I love email. I can see a picture of my minutes old nephew… all while a thousand miles away.  Those are the best emails – when friends who we haven’t seen in years send us those virtual birth announcements and we get to share a bit in their joy.

Babies are powerful.

Babies are what got my grandparents are online! After we had our first baby in 2003, they decided they were tired of having to go to other people’s houses to look at the pictures we were emailing everyone practically daily. (It was our first baby! There were zillions of pictures!)  So they ended up getting  a computer, learning how to use the internet and now they are total experts! I love it!

Now my whole family, who is living far apart, gets to see my kids growing up, experience their lives and be a larger part of our daily lives. Its truly a gift!
Thank you to Yahoo! Mail for sponsoring this post about staying connected. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.

Getting pictures ready for the blog takes a tremendous amount of time. They need to be resized for the web (so my site loads in less than 9 hours), watermarked (remember, stealing isn’t nice.), edited, cropped, buffed and polished… then they’re ready.

I’m tired just thinking about it.

Recently I attended a seminar during CE Week in New York City run by Techlicious founder Suzanne, and she shared how to batch process pictures in Photoshop Elements. *cue angels singing* This has saved me a tremendous amount of time when preparing pictures for blogging. And it is so simple –  I wanted to share it with you!

First, create a new folder and put the pictures you want to edit in it.  This is especially helpful if you’re like me and you never empty your memory cards, so there is tons of random stuff on there. Now you’re ready to go work in Photoshop Elements.

{sidebar: I have Photoshop Elements 7.0, so your version may look ever-so-slightly different.]

Step One:
Under FILE, click on Process Multiple Files. Your screen will then look something like this. Don’t panic. Stay with me.

Step Two: Choose Your Pictures
Select the file your pictures are in. Then create a new file for the edited pictures to go in. This will also protect your original files, just in case.

Step Three: Rename {optional}
Sometimes I will choose to rename my files, to help myself stay organized and then they are saved online in a more SEO relevant way. In this case, I’m processing pictures I took on a trip to visit a dairy farm with Horizon Milk, so I used the super creative name “HorizonFarmTrip.” Now all my pictures are labeled horizonfarmtrip1.jpeg, horizonfarmtrip2.jpeg and so on.

Step Four: Resize
Designate a size and resolution for your pictures.

Step Five: Watermark
Write the text you wish to watermark your pictures with, your font, size and your location on the pictures.

Click OK and you’re set! Your screen will look like this as it takes all those huge pictures and optimizes them for the web and watermarks them for you:

Then TA-DAA! Its done! Its so incredibly easy – and saves me tons of time in my blogging.