Mediatinker has a clover desktop that works well for Green Irish Beer Day today. I happened upon it while looking for a nice shamrock desktop for dual monitors. He has several different sizes (though I made my own because I wanted the clover in different spots.

I invited the Vice Arch-Druid to come visit the Grove this past weekend, and I really wanted him to teach his workshop listed on his website on integrity. Integrity has been something I’ve been pushing recently at the Grove, and was also the topic of our Imbolc/Ostara newsletter that came out this past week.

I’ve always been semi-intimidated by the ADF leadership, as I never get much of a chance to “mingle” with them during festivals and have no reason to hold conversations with them in other formats such as email or anything (Granted Skip did sit down and pull pieces of wood that were embedded in my arm at the last Trillium). So I was a bit apprehensive about how Kirk and I would get along.

Surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly), however, we got along swimmingly. He showed up on Saturday evening close to 5ish and I stayed at the Grove for him to make sure someone was there to help him get settled. We showed him around the Grove Space since he has never been there and we are the only Grove in ADF to actually own our own building. I treated him to dinner and afterwards he and I came back to the Grove and shared some white wine and talked and talked for hours about everything under the sun. Not all of it ADF related, which was the best part because it really gave me a chance to get to know him on a personal and real level, and hopefully vice versa.

Sunday he participated in our Rites of Caffieena and Walk with the Old Ones Sunday Brunch and Ritual. And then he gave his integrity workshop (which was very awesome and even emotional for some, I noticed). And he also quoted me in his workshop from something he and I were talking about the night before that I wrote in the fall issue of the Grove newsletter, which was just plain cool. I recorded it so I hope to have the workshop up for listening on the Grove website within the next few days. We went out to dinner again tonight on him to reciprocate the night before.

I hope he enjoyed his stay, and I certainly enjoyed hosting him. You just have to make your own impression about folks instead of listening to hype or my own sub-conscious paranoia. I can say I was happy to see the ADF leadership as real people.

I was also happy to see that some of the networking at WABA-PLC paid off, as one of the local Coven folks I met there stopped by today per my invitation. She’s really an awesome chick and I hope I get to hang out with her more.

The uncle that had the chainsaw accident just called, his wife just had a heart attack and is in the hospital. She’s an Aunt by marriage, but she’s a hella awesome hippy Aunt that I adore.

I feel for my cousins the most though, they are 16 and…12(?) and to have to deal with all of this a week apart from each other, and the oldest one being deaf and anorexic.

I suspect I will be very busy the next couple of weeks. Someone has to help take care of things.

From “Your Money or your Life” which I am reading right now:

“In 1970 staying trim and fit meant doing your own yard work — mowing your lawn with a human-powered mower and raking leaves. In 1990 it required a health club membership and a $300 ergonometric stationary bicycle — and these for the person who has a 12-horsepower riding mower and a 140-decibel leaf blower.“

I love how reading these types of books shows how brainwashed people are about money. It’s really enlightening.

My uncle had a chainsaw accident this morning and cut his leg really bad. I’m not sure what all is going on but I know his wife wasn’t home and he had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance.

There was definitely no Grove visit for me today.

My dad and I are going to try and help out around the house for his wife and kids.

Edit:
Dad just came back from the hospital, my uncle is going to be alright. He cut through the muscle but not the bone, and no major veins hit or anything.

The doctor said if he was a thinner man (all of the men in my family are big muscular men) then he would have cut his leg in half. They had to do some spinal thing to sedate him.

My sister is visiting for the weekend. My best friends came over yesterday and we all went up to the organic markets in Frederick for shopping. I fell in love with the market immediately (even though they are pricey), and fully intend to molest the markets on a regular basis.

My sister told me she watched some movies on animal cruelty lately and has been working hard on eating a vegetarian diet. So while my friends came over we went over a few different things that she can eat and enjoy. She also helped me while I made some meatless spaghetti which she loved

I want to support her choices, and I’m thrilled she’s being conscious about her decisions with her diet, and the environment. Maybe some of my habits did get a chance to rub off on her

My sister’s current career path choice is a fashion designer. She’s taken some model sketches and drawn various dress designs on them, and they are actually pretty good. I know she’s also been fairly decent with artwork, something I was never good at.

So I want to encourage her current passion by
1. Scanning her current designs so she has them in digital format to send off.
2. Research schools around here that have a good fashion curriculum
3. Start teaching her some sewing basics (which is all I know, but I do have an old text book from when I took a sewing class in highschool), and maybe research some good classes she can take at the local college when she gets older.
4. Start helping her to save money for college and teaching her about savings and being frugal
5. Encourage her passion

She is starting highschool next year (WHAT?!?) and I think it’s good she’s thinking about her career choice now. She also mentioned wanting to do something for animal rights and the environment (YES!!!), so I mentioned doing fashion in the organic fabric and animal-free department. Which will require her to do research on the new types of materials being used for this purpose, like bamboo. She could even do what one guy did that I read about a couple months ago, make fashionable items out of recycled clothing.

Some local colleges I’ve looked at so far in regards to fashion:
The Art Institute of Philadelphia
List of Art Institutes with Fashion Design

Some additional links:
Blast Eco-Fashion or Blast Art and Design
Fashion Television
Fashion Open Directory Project
Fashion Design Resource Center
Fashion Schools.com
How to become a fashion designer

This past weekend hosted an event called the Addy Awards. I don’t know much about these rewards, except that we always enter in a bunch of sites into them every year. I believe they are like the grammy’s for advertising, and in our line of business, more specifically with websites. (I tried looking up stuff on their website but ironically it’s not done very well and 2008 winners aren’t listed yet).

Anyway, we only had one site win this year, but it was a site I put together (note: I didn’t design it, just coded/maintained it). Not only did it win a GOLD Addy for best Website, but it won one of 5 JUDGES awards, out of like 330 entries or something. To quote one of the videos talking about the site: “The CSS was perfect” (CSS being my main job at the company).

Talk about fucking awesome. It felt really good to have everyone congratulating me (and me making wise-cracks about it all week). Honestly coders are pretty much always behind the curtains and rarely recognized for their work I’ve noticed. So while trying to be humble about it, I’m still pretty much ecstatic about the whole thing.

The site that won the award is: Epic Theatre Ensemble (but honestly the CSS isn’t all that great since I was in a time crunch to put it together. But I’m going to be cleaning it up. Or maybe I’ve reached the point where I’m being too anal).

And if you want to check out the video, you can: Download

They said I could order copies of the awards if I wanted, since the awards we got are to be kept at work, but they are $60 each. I decided I could live with just having a digital picture of them

No Credit Needed asks What is one area of your personal finance management you would like to improve?

While I’ve come a long way to the slumlord of Personal Finance that I used to be when I was married, obviously no one is perfect. With that said I can honestly say that there is not much I’d change about the way I handle my money, and the few vices that I do still have will (not “can”) be changed over time.

1. Impulse Buys. I still get an impulse buy urge now and then. It’s never anything major, but once in a while I’ll be browsing etsy.com or something and buy something I’ve fallen in love with that I didn’t need. This always comes with a pile of regret. The only way to really fix this is to sit on any purchase that I really want for a week or so and then decide whether it’s something I really want to waste my money on. After all, material possessions do not make up who I am.

2. Paying in advance. Mainly this means paying for my whole 6 month policy of car insurance instead of the monthly fee. Most insurance companies give you a discount for doing such, and I haven’t quite gotten this far in my financial turn-around yet. The same goes for web hosting, you can get some major discounts by paying a year or two in advance. The easiest way for me to do this is through ING because they allow me to set up as many “accounts” under my account as I want in order to manage funds. I already have one for my Christmas Fund, I could easily make two more for my car insurance fund and my web hosting fund if I wanted. That way certain amounts can be taken out every month and I can set it and forget it until the time comes to pay the bill.

My sweetheart and I figured out that just paying the auto insurance and web hosting in advance would save me about $500 a year, which I can just put into savings by still paying myself every month as if I am still paying these bills as is.

I did recently email my host and ask for a promo to pay in advance and they did offer me a pretty good deal of $118 for 2 years, which is a lot cheaper than what I’m paying now.

3. Finish reducing all of my bills. I’m so close to getting down to my most minimal amount of bills each month, but I wanted to add this anyway because it is important to me.

The only one right now that I can think of that I need to work on reducing is the phone bill. If I switch over to VOIP service then that’ll cut my phone costs considerably because I’ll have the “Comcast Triple Play.”

4. Finding better deals. A lot of times I am too impatient to find better deals on things, so I will take one that I think looks good. This isn’t really a flaw, but I’m sure I could be even more frugal about the way I get what I need. Obviously I already do things like buy used books instead of new. But I don’t use things like Goodwill or Consignment shops or the like enough.