challenge family history ideas

Well Past Time to Add a Child Care Rating to the Military

We interrupt this regular broadcast of house renovation and excavation posts for a special announcement. This past week, Erik and I became grandparents to our second grandchild. Woooooo-to-the-Hooooooo! As with Grandchild #1, in the interests of our new grandson’s privacy, I likely won’t blog much about him except in fairly general terms. Grandchild #2 is an adorable bundle who doesn’t like to stay swaddled, so I suspect he will be as active as Grandchild #1…

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art challenge design process

Owl or No Owl?*

Several weeks ago I made a necklace with an owl pendant for a friend. Because the package of owl pendants I bought contained four pendants, I decided to try my hand at another. Here is the result. While buying the owl pendants, I purchased the pink glass beads (2 tones of pink beads in the package) specifically to use with this owl pendant. There were only 8 pink beads in the package, so I had…

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challenge technology

Emailing Yourself Stuff

My friend and fellow historian David Grabitske threw down a writing  challenge on Twitter recently. The following tweet passed through my timeline recently from Stephanie @SimplyDreamin95: “Does anyone else email themselves stuff they need to save on another device and read or do you have your life together? #PhDLife” I retweeted Stephanie’s tweet and said: “I email myself stuff aaaalllll the time to read and save it on another device.” David replied that he did…

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challenge family projects

708 Books

Over the past week or so, I have been culling my book collection. Before I did, I took photos of the bookshelves in our house and counted all of our books. As you can see from the photos, we have books all over the house. In my initial count, I found 691 books in the house. I had no idea there were that many. Most of them are mine, but Hubby and Young Son Number…

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action challenge ideas observations

Whatever Happened to Anger Management?

Recently, my husband and I were watching an old episode of The New Detectives, a crime show that investigated actual cases, on Netflix. During a particular episode in which a guy was found to have killed an ex-girlfriend, it was revealed that he had been referred for anger management classes. Upon hearing that term, I realized that it seems to have faded away from public consciousness. It was a term that was used a lot…

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