I like it when I feel like I got a lot done. My mom is coming into town on Wednesday and staying for a week, so I’ve been preparing for her visit. And also, I was ready for some cleaning anyway. It was getting WAY too cluttered. I also just did some other stuff that needed to be done. Here are the things I did:

– Re-rearranged the DVD shelves after Adam put them in disarray after some arranging of his own this morning. I’d fixed them up good last night, but he organized something ELSE which completely messed up my shelves. I fixed everything up good, though.

– Cleaned the heck out of the bathroom.

– Cleaned Aidan’s room. There was one section that Adam needed to work on. He did and then I finished the less intensive stuff. I also rearranged Aidan’s bookcase. He put his stuffed animals on his bed and put his toys away. Adam found a beautiful nightstand in the enchanted alley, and I now use that as a dresser for Aidan. At first, he was living out of his suitcase which I hated. But now, the suitcase is neatly standing against the closet door, and Aidan’s clothes are in drawers or on top of the nightstand.

– Rearranged ALL the bookcases. They looked like tornadoes had taken up residence. But now they look neat.

– Went to Target and got loads of air fresheners (the cats love to counteract them as much as they can, ick), and bottled water for my mom. We also picked up some more storage stuff.

– I got my HP laptop running again. The hard drive crashed back in February, and even though it was under warranty, they fought me on getting a new hard drive to me. Andy came to the rescue though, and a new hard drive came. But no operating system. I have an XP disc, but HP does something to their drives to keep XP from installing properly. I did not want to buy Vista. Anyway, I recently got the idea to install Linux onto the laptop, because it had been sitting under my desk collecting dust for the past several months. I put Linux (Ubuntu) on it today and with the exception of wrestling a bit with Flash, got it up and running. Aidan is playing his games again and loving it. I don’t know WHY it didn’t occur to me before! So far, Linux is awesome, though. It’s simple and fast. It came with Firefox and Pidgin and Open Office, plus DVD burning software and music players! For some reason, I expected it to run like DOS or something, not like a Windows-based program. Silly me. This brings my total of working computers up to four. Three laptops (two of them Macs) and a desktop (PC) that needs a new monitor.

– I converted all of the 2005 Disney videos to DVD. Who knew that nearly 2 hours of footage would take up FIVE DVDs? I’m sure I miscalculated or something and probably wasted quite a bit of DVD space, but oh well. It took AGES to do! Probably about 30 hours of encoding, editing, and burning. I like using iDVD, though. It’s fun and easy if you use the pre-made themes. I just use the wizard and the discs come out beautifully. I was having fits with iMovie, but I just need to keep practicing with that. Anyway, the DVDs are done, and I made disc images so that I won’t have to wait for them to encode every single time I want to burn a DVD. Next, I have to do Aidan’s first years. Not sure when I’ll get to that. But for the future, life will be much easier. Adam got a Flip cam, so the rest of my videos will be DIGITAL. The Flip cam is awesome, too. Can’t wait to use it at Disney World. Or even when my mom’s here.

– I updated my Upromise account for Aidan. I wish I’d done it sooner. I also asked family to register their cards and such as well. Aidan thinks college is far, far away, but it really isn’t.

What else has been going on? OH! This is cool. Today, there were LOADS of packages for us at the UPS store. Three for me, one for Adam. Mine was volumes two and three of The Fuccons, and a Hidden Mickeys book (seriously, I can’t believe it took me so long to start ordering from the 2nd hand people on Amazon! Total of all that stuff was like $13!), and Adam got a pipe from his favorite author Daniel Pinkwater. He was soooo thrilled to get that thing, and I was thrilled for him. It was a total surprise, too. I mean, his favorite author sent him a pipe, so he can walk around pretending to be General MacArthur. So cute. That would be like Sarah Dessen sending me a stuffed Mickey Mouse or something. Can you imagine?

WHY is this summer speeding by so quickly? Seriously! OK, I mean, I am very thrilled that it’s only 12 days and 15 hours until I’m at Disney World, but still. This is crazy. I hope the winter is not too hard on us this year. But this summer’s been mild. Not a lot a really hot days, and no crazy humidity. It’s weird. I really don’t want a winter of -20 temps again.

Aidan seems to be doing very well with the bed-wetting alarm. Last night, he got up even before the alarm went off, and he woke up COMPLETELY dry this morning. (Sometimes he wakes up dry, but that’s because he wet earlier and it dried without him noticing.) The purpose of the alarm is to teach him to STOP and HOLD it either all night, or long enough to make it to the bathroom. I’d been walking him to the bathroom a few times a night, but there are flaws in that plan, the most obvious being that sometimes I got to him too late. And he’d be asleep, so he’d not remember any of it. He needs to be conscious of his bladder to control it. So far, so good. It’ll be slow going, but it can’t be any worse that what I was doing before.

I switched back to Firefox. I’d been using Flock for a while because Firefox was constantly crashing. But Flock started doing something weird with Flickr, and that got on my nerves pretty quickly. So, I’m trying out this latest Firefox to see what happens.

Things I have to do:

– check my mother in for her flight
– vacuum
– last minute laundry and cleaning
– get Mommy from the airport Wednesday morning
– hang out with Mommy for a week
– memory stick dumps
– pack for Disney World

Does anyone on here watch Make It or Break It? I seriously want to break Lauren’s (aka Evilina’s) face. But seeing Candace Cameron (Summer) is always good for the lulz. Her character is so GOOD and wholesome… it’s like Lauren’s purpose is to be someone for Summer to lecture with the slow Full House type music in the background. Ah, that’s ABC Family for ya. I still love the show. A soap opera about gymnastics? Oh yeah, baby.

OK, getting a bit tired. Dealing with sinus stuff and it’s making me feel all weird and lightheaded. See ya!

(Originally published at Anywhere Is…)