Moving On

So, June is almost over – its one of my favorite months and I have a coupon for you all hoping you will cheer me up by purchasing some of my product. Its good for 50% off all my products until midnight tommorrow night – So you will have to be real quick to use it. The coupon code is: sc75bigones
at DigiScrapStation.com

While you are there checkout the other designers. There is some great talent there

Moving on

I want to give you a hint of something exciting that is going to happen July 1 – look for a huge collab kit coming out in a bunch of blogs – I am really excited about the pieces of this I have seen. Last I saw, there were over 40 designers participating this collab. It is very exciting to be a part of something like this.

Moving on

 I completed another layout – this is my precious Clio as she explores one of the drawers of my desk. She loves getting in there but does not seem to stay there long. Its a huge drawer where I file some bills and other stuff and heavy. I have one of those huge CEO type desks. Hubbie rescued ithe desk from the front yard of my aunts a long time ago. He put so much work into restoring it that doubt I will ever get rid of it.

For this layout I used a kit called Summer in the Country – its my gift for participants in the ScrappersZone Ad Challenge in July.  You might want to check it out – a great kit. The kit has twenty papers and oodles of elements to help you create your layouts. Here is a preview of the kit:

With the new external up and running and my files finally organized, it is time to start rebuilding my digital layouts stash. So, tonight about midnight, I opend up the photoshop and pulled out a photo from one of my folders and tried to begin. But, wait a minute, all my kits are now in zips since the unzipped ones were lost in the crash. Bummer.

I spent about 30 minutes unzipping kits but really could not force myself to finish. That is going to have to be an ongoing project. Do you see how boring it would be to spend several hours unzippng zip after zip? Part of the problem is, I cannot unzip to my internal drive as it is too full. And because I am unzipping to an external, WinZip forgets where it is each time I click on the extract button. So, to add to the tedium, I have to browse to the correct folder on each zip. Sigh.

Well, I determined I was not going to bed until I finished at least one layout. I found a kit to use, and moved on with the photo I had started with. I am going to make a quick page out of it later, but here you all can see it now. I used my own kit – Hot Summer Nights and a doodle swirl from my commercial use stash. This is a photo I showed you all a few days ago – my first rose this summer from the poor abused rose bush that we had given up on. Don’t you just love those butterflies of Monica Larsen? She makes the best actions around in my opinion.

I got the newsletter out for DigiScrapStation tonight. Did you all get it? Or are you even signed up for it? Every weekend it is a race to see what comes first, the newsletter or the end of the weekend. I don’t know why I always put it off. But, when hubbie is here it really is hard to get out that newsletter. This week we have quite a few sales going on. Why don’t you check them out – the newsletter is at:

http://digiscrapstation.com/newletters/june14.htm

Oh, and if you want to see one awesome blog – check out my art work at the new DigiScrapStation Blog.

http://digiscrapstation.com/blog/

I am really proud of that baby –not sure if it will go with the rest of the site, but I am going to leave it up there for a while at least. I like how it looks like the train is running off of my phtoshop canvas. I found that pattern from Cybia, and rediscovered it during the organizing I’ve been doing lately.

So, there you have it. A blog, a newsletter and a layout all in one evening. I can’t remember what I did the rest of the day, but it was a very productive evening!

NOT on hold on the phone, which can involve hours. But the server people have put me on hold which can involve days and days. Their timing could not have been more frustrating. Hubbie is gone for the whole week and I had a whole list of things to do to the site and to the store while he was gone. When he is out of town, I get whole days to spend at the computer with no interuptions. Then on Monday I got told that the website was in manual transition mode. They are moving it from the old server to the new.  When I called and asked what in the world am I supposed to do, they said nothing we do it for you, and oh, by the way don’t make any changes during this time.

Well, when I asked if we were talking hours or days, I was told it would take about two days. Well, two days have come and gone and my site is still in QA whatever that means. When I called tonight I was told that there is no way of speeding the process along. That the QA takes howeverlong it takes and there is nothing they can do for me. I told the nice sweet lady that I could fix any problems on my own site if they just moved the thing over. That I could even delete part of it – – have some sample forums and galleries that are not really needed. But, she would not budge.

I AM ON HOLD

Well, as you can see I don’t do HOLD very well. I just had to write something on the blog. Its an addiction I think. Maybe those of you who blog on a regular basis can relate. Dunno what is going to happen to this post after they get me all moved over, but hey, at least it will be here for a while. Then there is the 10G of zips I uploaded before I found out I was not supposed to be making changes. Well, dunno what is going to happen with those either. But, gee, a little communication would have helped. My zen store needs attention, I had just moved it to a new folder and now it has an error page instead of a home page. So I just don’t look. And the list goes on.

I guess what really upsets me is why would they put my site in this mode and tell me not to make changes if they were not quite ready to do the work? Like gee, what is the hold up? I am put on hold and am waiting in line for my turn and I am not happy at all. They could have waited until they were ready to deal with my site before doing the preliminaries and then putting me on hold. But I guess that would have made too much sense.  

As far as a freebie, well, I thought I had it covered. But when I downloaded it, the zip turned out to be corrupted and no good. Maybe when the site is on the new server this won’t happen so much. One can only hope!

I just logged in to the blog dashboard and it says Askimet saved you from 10 spammers and there are 84 comments waiting for you in the spam folder. Well, gee, a whole 10 did not get through. I wonder why I even activated the silly plug in! I don’t normally get 10 spammers in one day let along 84! Someone must have published my number somewhere – lol

Robin as this on her blog and I thought I would participate.

Have you ever:

-Gone on a blind date: no
-Skipped school: Only as a teacher
-Watched someone die: Yes
-Been to Canada: No
-Been to Mexico: Yes
-Been to Florida: Yes, I was BORN There!!
-Been on a plane: Yes
-Been lost: No
-Been on the opposite side of the country: yes, top and bottom right and left
-Been to the capital of your country: No
-Swam in the ocean or waded: Yes, lived by the ocean in Floriad and in Guam
-Cried yourself to sleep: No
-Played cops and robbers: No – cowboys and indians
-Recently colored with crayons: No
-Sang Karaoke: No

– Paid for a meal with coins only: ues
-Done something you told yourself you wouldn’t: Plenty of times
-Made prank phone calls: as a kid
-Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose: No
– Caught a snowflake on your tongue:No but sounds like fun
-Danced in the rain: yes
-Written a letter to Santa Claus: No, we were not allowed to do the Santa thing
-Been kissed under the mistletoe: Yes, hubbie does it when ever he can
-Watched the sunrise with someone you care about: Yes, driving in a car several times at dawn
-Blown bubbles: Yes
-Gone ice-skating: No
-Been skinny dipping outdoors: yes
-Been out of North America: Yes, spent several years on Guam
-Been in detention: nope
-Regreted something you blogged: nope
 

Like Robin, I am not going to tag anyone, but please if you answer these, link us up so we can read your answers.

You probably can’t see any difference, but I upgraded my blog software tonight. It was kind of download and upload and replace this and to that, but there were step by step diretions to follow. That is until I got stuck!

This is how it was. The first thing they said to do was back up your blog. Of course you are going to follow THAT direction. But then again, you know they ALWAYS say to back up. THEN the directions said you might want to use this Down for Maintainence plug in that shows your visitors a message that you are not broke but undergoing some back end work. Like a good little techie, I download the plug in and activated the maintainence mode. It was kind of cool to have one of those messages show up, like hey folks, Nancy does maintainence. The next steps took a little concentration. I had to delete this and this but never that, and finally on to the last step. The instructions said to go to your blog run this file to do the final upgrade process – But my blog WAS DOWN FOR MAINTAINENCE! There was no way to get into the blog to upgrade!

So, sure this must have happened to other peoples who followed the directions like good techies. I went to the support site for the blog software and found the support site for the Maintainence plug-in and guess what? He is too busy to provide support, but gee he will take some contributions so that SOMEDAY he could provide support! What to do? What to do?

I finally went to the sacred spot – the database.

Yep, I was desparate, I was going to the database. There I found something that looked like it would do the trick and clicked no where it was saying yes. And, NOPE did not do anything, still could not get past the Down for Maintainence screen. HMMMMMMM, big sigh. Now what. Well, I could delete this little part of the database that controls this maintainence plug-in. Would not that be the same as deleting the plug in??? Big IFFFFFY thing to do, messing with the database.

I was in a quandry. Either I would have to rebuild my blog from scratch. Or perhaps I could send an SOS to some people and wait on the answer, or, or, or ……..I could delete that little piece in the database. Well, I surely was not going to wait for any answer that might not come, so it was the delete key for me. Deep Breathe, think a moment and then, I hit that key.

That was the scarey moment.

But as you can see, it did the trick and I am back online with an upgraded blog. It does not look the same behind the scenes and I am not sure I like it. But, the message I get when I log in to post that says “upgrade please” is no longer staring me in the face.

 Today’s freebie is something very bright, so I named it Kinda Bright

It has six papers and a few elements. Enjoy!

Click Here to go to the No Wait Download Page

Gee, remember when we purchased cell phones in case of emergencies? They were not fashion assessories or not glued to our hands like they are today. But we got them just in case. Just in case the car broke down and I need to call for help. Just in case the land line phones went out and I need to call about it. Just in case we have a disaster – flood, tornado, hurricane.

Well, that feeling hit the dust today for me. I could not understand why the internet was unavailable. I could not understand why my mail thingie from Outlook kept popping up with issues. The phone had a dial tone, it must have been working. Uh Oh, maybe I did not pay my bill. Let me call them. And all I get is a busy signal, again and again. I put the number on speed dial and still cannot get through. Gee, they sure are busy. When I tried to call BIL his phone was busy too. So, I’m slow and finally realize the phone is not working. But that is OK – I got a cell phone for that just in case time. It was not an emergency, but still I could talk with the phone company and find out if I missed a bill.

That was when I found out that you cannot rely on your cell phone in an emergency. All I could get was the looking for signal window. I walked outside and still no joy. Gee, how silly, they must use the same towers. Meanwhile I found the bill and find that I am up to date and do not owe them anything for another week. Whew, then it is not my fault and I can get mad if I want to.

As soon as the land line got back into service, the cell phone found signal. So, yes they are connected . And no, I cannot count on the cell phone when lines are down. So I wonder just what phone company I will be able to rely on? Not that they would tell me the truth if I asked!!

While disconnected from the real world out there I did get some stuff accomplished. I actually got the inventory done for my business so finally we can get the taxes done. I also got a little cleared off my desk. Gee, maybe I should plan some down time every day???

ONE thing I did get done is this freebie for you all. I called it Aquas since that is the color I started with. It has nine papers, three stitched frames, two dragonflys, and a  wrapping bow with a flower in the bow. Enjoy!

Click here to go to the no wait download page