This is getting to be a long day!

Thursday, July 26, 2012 at 10:03 AM

Good morning. This is me it is about 10 o'clock in the morning and we’re working with our cat to get her to stop meowing in the morning. She is driving me crazy it starts about eight o'clock and continues until she finally settles in which could be a couple hours later when she has finally settled in, but when I start to talk on the Dragon then she starts up again, so what we’re doing is, we got a squirt bottle with water so now when she meows she gets a good squirt. I just get very aggravated at that pleading sound for attention over and over and over again, and I can't figure out what she wants except for to tell me it's about 8:00 AM and something should be happening.

We plan on doing social media for a while. Rich has left about 45 min. ago. I think that he is a busy day and I believe he has a fishy meeting tonight. I'm glad he is going because he has missed quite a few because he hasn't been fishing. I think that they're going to talk tonight about some things he's interested in and they will be talking about a trip that is coming up in about three weeks that he actually is going to go to. He and Bob talked about it last night. On this particular trip the best friends get a chance to fish together, and that doesn't happen very often so they really want to take advantage of that opportunity.

We met Bob and Linda for dinner last night, Linda cooked. It was very good meal and we enjoyed the company, though Bob wanted to continue talking about fishing. Every time somebody would bring forward another subject, he let it die and then he would continue back on the fishing conversations it was terrible. It was like he had an addiction and he just couldn't stop picking at it. Fortunately, Rich said we didn't need to stay too long. I would really like to get to know Linda, but it seems always centered on where Bob is at.

I also ate too much. Linda had made a really good roast with a potato blend of onions and green beans, and Rich thought to bring strawberry cheesecake pie. I rarely ever take seconds, I did this time in both the dinner and dessert, and we overdid it. Annemarie’s stomach felt terrible and we had to lie down on the couch and Rich massaged - which is a nice changeup. It took a while for her stomach to feel better. It would've been hard to do anything else but obviously I had pushed the limits.

We had gotten started on school yesterday again I'm really afraid that the pace is just so slow that I'm never going to get by with this but all we can do is keeping up the effort. We were working on filling in the blanks of all the questions that were being asked for the assignment. We're still working on last week's assignment.  It is already 10 o'clock now so will try to get things moving faster today than we were yesterday. And then also today, we have Dr. Marvin so that will take out some time, but it will also add some support for the project and so maybe that will be helpful in the long run and the short run. I miss Dr. Marvin and it seems like it's been a very long time since we've seen him. He was gone on Thursday and Tuesday. I'm not sure where he went though I know are going to have to try hard not to be mopey when we see them again sometimes we feel just neglected.

I don't know what we really have to talk to him about. I know that we do have to bring in some business to have him look at and help us understand. It has to do with the Medicaid papers. It looks like we were covered for April, May, and June, but we don't have enough information yet for July. It still is not helping us preplan the things that we need to do because of not sending out the Medicaid card until after we send and receive the bills, and now they are saying that we have to ask specifically for the card, though they don't give us a phone number, if we want the actual Medicaid card each month. It isn't doing any good coming in after the month is already over, and we have a problem with dentistry now. We told Rich our right side of our mouth has been hurting. He's good, but pretty pushy about trying to get us into receiving dentist help. I don't think that most dentists cover Medicaid, even if we could get the card on time. I think that UIC has a dentist program but the last time I remember going there you had to wait in line to get an appointment to make an appointment and it was a big consumer of frustration. Maybe now it wouldn't be so hard because I could bring in Kindle, but it looks kind of silly having a Kindle when you're so poor. It was last year's Christmas gift though so I don't want to feel bad; I mean it was my mighty big gift, and I love it.

I'll let Dr. Marvin help us figure out what to do with that next. The problem is that we have a broken tooth on the bottom right side of her mouth and we have a problem with the gums aching on the top right part of the mouth where the partial is. We have to be very careful about making sure that we don't get food caught in the wrong place. It is becoming a bit of a preoccupation. I know Rich is right about having to go to the dentist, but there's no easy way to do it and as we mentioned it was really something I don't think our dentist will do – take us with no insurance. It's going to hurt to hear those words, but I'm pretty sure that the last time when Rich had a different insurance, they wouldn't take it, which meant he had to go somewhere else, but they didn't take him either with no insurance and that's really the question here. I'm not ready to handle anything there on my own again – we will talk to Dr. Marvin when we see him.

We'll have to talk to school about him. I think I pretty much covered that area. We are not going fast enough to keep up, and we cannot afford to get behind so were in kind of a bad situation. Again I think it's a matter of budgeting more time to sit down and make ourselves through it. It seems harder than normal to be just answering the questions probably causes so many questions, for example this week the assignment were working on has about 15 questions but they only expect 800 words and it's like how, I can’t even make an outline in 800 words. Vince used to always tell me that I'd put too much into it then they were asking and that slowed me down and he was right and were still having that same problem now. We're also not forcing ourselves to stay up and do it later than we could be. There was a time when I would race the clock till midnight trying to get it in on time and maybe I'll do it again it's just that most often when it gets late, I am more like so who the hell cares. I know it's a bad attitude but again that's a good thing to talk to Dr. Marvin about although were not looking forward to it.

That's about as much as I want to talk about that now, we will just want to make sure that we get to school and allow 2 to 3 hours at least before Dr. Marvin's appointment hopefully we should be able to finish the paper about and write at least to the rough draft stage. I am happy that yesterday we made some improvement in that we were a least working on it before we had to leave for dinner.

We decided our topic with Bob and Linda was going to be talking about twitter. We didn't know if Linda was using it, but we were interested in finding out. As it turns out she's a big Facebook fan but we have been edging away from that as we look into the twitter and some of the other social media platforms. We wanted to let her know how excited we were, but it seem like we're making no progress there within a couple of really good minutes. We could feel that she had turned off the conversation as to being anything she would want to have been a part of. We did try to introduce that discussions all and just because it was like one real discussion this remarkable at this point, just sad that we are also off-sync.

There's a little bit of a note as to my kids. This'll only take a few minutes to update, but we understand that in a few days Duyen will be leaving for Vietnam for the month. She is very excited, but going without Thom. Originally we had all plan to go to Vietnam, and you know that Thom put a damper on that at one point. We haven't heard from either of them lately, so that we have much to do there. There is a picture of Joe in Facebook this morning and he's partying with a bunch of other people. I don't know whether it was through karate, or was that through Herbalife, or other, but Joe has on a yellow wig the Afro cut and he's wearing strange clothes including vertically striped pants and there's one picture where he's doing the splits. He just looks like the wildest craziest kind of kid. But, then I remember that although my ex-husband was not gymnastic orientated, he'd like to do things that would put him in the middle of what was happening at parties. My boys are much like my ex-husband as to meeting new people they are very able and have good people skills. I am much more restrained and don't have a lot of confidence around large groups of people. The last picture was actually a video and my granddaughter Jade had put it on her Facebook site, but it's a picture of Maury and I think it's called the zip line because it's like a line that goes from one point to another and then he's like sailing in the air. We have seen the sailing in the air part, but we hadn't understood what he was connected to.  The video that showed up today shows him coming down and swinging back and forth of free flying blind and it seems like just the scariest thing, but he made it look like he was having a great time. Because Jade was videotaping it she was cool in that her stepfather would do some something this crazy so all of that was good. Sometimes I wonder though where my boys come up with these ideas. It is nice to see them that they are having really nice enjoyable experiences in life. That is about as much as a mother could ask. As always we are so proud of them.

The other obvious things that were doing lately are the tweeting from the TweetDeck, looking up information and saving it in in Diigo, and using our blog more effectively. This morning we found a site that had a periodic like table of some of the more popular social media platforms and we checked out one called Technorati, and the second one named Klout. The first one we were aware of a long time ago probably back in seven or eight years ago and at the time we had been mentioned in it as to ranking with the multiple’s blog. We were like the 60th percentile as to popularity with AOL. I'm sure that didn't last very long and we might've gone over that number, but I think it was pretty much in that area. We might go back to technorati and see if they have anything really to offer us but for right now… To put it back in our memory. The one on Klout gave a few more interesting numbers. Like we have a ranking of 20.08 as to effectiveness out on the Internet by comparison somebody like it Anderson Cooper has about 83%. I'm not sure exactly of what things they rank you, but I know that they do include twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogger, and others. But those were some of the ones that we were actually connected to enter up to data. They did give us a score of about 31 as far as influence which meant that we could influence about 31 people a day. And they give some names of people that we were being connected to but I'm not sure again where they got those names or why those people were connected to us.

The periodic table social media was kind of fun. It was slanted more towards SocialOomph, though I didn't like the way that was panning out. We did look at their site too, but it was another site where you could get the free account or you get the one that was paid, but basically I think it just does a lot of things we already do between our accounts. It is like a management tool, but I like going each site myself as far as Twitter, Facebook, and blogger, and all that. I don't like the thought of automatically posting without seeing the context directly. But, the periodic table it was pretty in design and had some of the top networking sites they classify things as to social deals, Facebook related, nontraditional social networks, blogging tools, management feed generators, mobile devices, Google planet, content aggregators, article sites, twitter related, visual tools, and photo sharing tools. And in-between those they had what they considered element states and those were website, tools, platform, hardware, social networking, and social bookmarking.

The coding allowed that the first set of element categories were the background of the square boxes and the letters signifying the elements were color-coded different colors so it was easier to see the difference between the two parts. I have to do some more studying of this form to understand the different categories at this point of our life, like I don't know exactly why LinkedIn would be a "social deal." I understand why Amazon or the Apple App Store is, andthey've also got things like Wikipedia, a company called kick starter, and sites for people who like special money deals. I'm looking at it now and thinking in the blue section on reviews, we have Facebook, and on the green category of social deals we have LinkedIn, Amazon, and Apple App Store. Sometimes we look in, Wikipedia for general information and I guess we use that encyclopedia more than others although we're not using it for school because it's not qualified professional enough. In the brownish gold section we use blogger, and we utilize Facebook’s comment buttons although I'm not sure we don't have any specific plug-in for that. Usually you see it on sites that are fairly popular.

For the darker green we use the TweetDeck, and then we signed into the Klout as mentioned. On the green blue green squares for mobile devices we use Android and Kindle, on the dark green squares we use Google, Google plus, and we have used Google Analytics. Those are under the section marked Google planet they've got listed for a few visual tools. They have the visual tools and from that area we use YouTube. We have taken a look at slide share and the Vimeo, but we will get back to them later We do have and under the pink area under content aggregators, such as we do have an account on Pinterest, but that's about it - we really should check Digg and Reddit again. On the lime green section s for photo sharing tools, we have used Flickr before, but we would use most often photo bucket over the others. I'm really not understanding quite what Instagrams, but that's really the rage right now so that we should probably check on also, and then in the last group it's twitter related tools and there we have twitter obviously that were looking at but we don't other twitter tools.

That's where we are it seems like a lot of times we have at least something in one of each of the categories so maybe we've made choices on some although we haven't tried all of them. We do know by the ranking as far as popular being on the top of the charts and less popular on the bottom that were doing okay with what we do have, but probably we are not really refined in our interests.

Looking at our library from Diigo, we have only one other section that was saved today and that was from Marshall Wieder on five principles that would change your life. This one was kind of a simple article but it gave us a few cue words that we might want to go back to later. They say basically, that if we want to have help achieving our dreams that we should look at intention and this is toward resources, opportunities, and people and that has to do with living your life more on purpose again like the word, we been using for so long self-regulation. The second principle is integrity. These are the things that we value most and doing things like keeping our word and doing things more like staying in the present instead of the past or future.  The next principle was on sharing our dream and under this section it stated basically that you know we would get newfound freedoms from living with integrity and intensity and so that we had to create a vision that other people could step in and out of and that it would give us confidence and trusting ourselves and others which is something that was very positive as far as our worldview they also talked about seeing things with clarity almost from a visionary standpoint. The fourth principle was taking action and this is pretty much that if whatever you have come up with in your head so far as to actually be putting into action like the Nike symbol for do it. They say that and the section that we should get some help before stock and there's plenty of resources around the world and that people judge is more on what we do than what we say so specifically we want to make our dreams into our reality and we have to demonstrate some kind of commitment toward that.

And then, the fifth principle was building our dream circle, so they say basically here is it is and that whatever you want to accomplish, we can receive a level of ease and joy from sharing our dreams with others and so that the most powerful single powerful thing that we could do is to build a dream circle with like-minded people who support our ideas. As smaller group I think of this as what I do with my family and Rich and my friends from quilting and my Facebook friends, but is now also starting to include the twitter friends and were really fine-tuning it on being with people that enjoy our same interests. To be part of our job to extend our interests to become a more holistic person for example including something on philosophy or spirituality, or may be looking toward individual writers who have stated things that were important to us. We’re thinking here are some of the classic writers like from the great books series. They also talked about being with the one person who believes in you and your dream and how we inspire each other with passion and vision and we have to think really seriously about the issues that we come across every day and this is obviously to do with how we relate with Rich and how we encourage each other with the bigger dreams. We’re still working on this area but I think both of us at still trying to define what our best dreams are going to be. And then lastly, it talks about standing up for what matters to you us and that might impact the life of others more like your own manifesto or destiny, and this is something which is learning to do.

I like the basics of this. I'm not sure how conclusively all these terms tie together, but I was like pulling in words with meaning. Maybe one day we'll come up with our own list of significant words in our life or terms and maybe blend them together. Yesterday, we were really into the thoughts of blending thoughts and behaviors of multiples back to making choices and looking at consequences for our choices and I think that is going to be the way to go in the future. We haven't developed that area much further than we had yesterday, but we would like to think about it for a few minutes here just because it would be something that we could talk to Dr. Marvin about.

One of the things I would like to include within those ideas of pulling multiples together, if of course they so choose to be pulled together, who are interested in expanding outward to interacting with others. It would be things that I'm learning from the schoolwork and so maybe were going to look at that a little bit more now in depth and see if we can kind of get through to being able to integrate some of those thoughts that we read into not only the course assignment, but into our own conceptualizations.

More to come later. I think we're looking at about 14 pages of editing.  Yeeks!!

Okay good girl. It is now 1:15 PM and were going to have to give this next 75 min. to proofing this copy I'm pretty sure that's good go over but will stop and take a shower at that point and then we'll have about 45 more minutes to finish up before going to Dr. Martens. If we get this put into the blog and tweet it before the appointment it will be sincerely very important to us. At least we can say we've got this next point it seems like it's taking us a lot of effort to comprehend the information that we didn't get it by just reading and I mean we were thinking of processing and having all kinds of ideas while we were reading it, but now that were going over it for our key ideas it seems were trying to started our memory so that we can be able to use it more fluently. I know this is a part of learning and it's a good part unfortunately it's taken a long time this time hopefully the deck section will be so difficult. I am looking forward to getting the three books in and time to read it on our own because I don't think the teachers could go back to this particular book will see. Okay that's it for now I'm going to go back in reedit.

Ok, now it’s 3:20 PM and we’ve only got about 10 minutes before leaving .  I better post this much now and then I'll post the rest later. It would give us a chance to talk to Dr. Marvin about what we’re doing. He's never been able to get me to cut down the model work we're doing to get the most simplest points, but I think that's a conversation were up to again. Later!