While at school learning how to operate a Bobcat, we did many other training sessions that involved our heavy equipment.  Such things as simple maintenance and care of the Bobcat was an essential component of the course.

One of the hardest parts of the course (for me at least), was to change the rubber track for Bobcat mini excavator.  It was not like it was hard or anything, but for whatever reason, I just had a lot of problems to get it to work properly.

It got to the point where I had to have separate instruction from my professor just to get me to figure it out.  After a lot of trial and error, I was eventually able to get things worked out.  I was able to barely pass the practical test on changing them, but I did finally make it out of school.

Honestly though, I still struggle each time that I have to change a rubber track - I just hope that someday I will figure it out.

I have been trying to get an ecommerce solution in place so that I could sell my artwork online.  I have tried quite a few different scripts and I have had little luck setting them up myself.  In fact, with the amount of time that I have wasted trying to do it on my own, I could have just paid someone to do it in the first place.

So, now that I am fed up with trying to get the shopping cart software to work, I have decided to outsource the store setup to another company that actually knows what they are doing.

I searched for a company that specialized in asp shopping cart scripts and contacted them to see if they could help me out.  As it turns out, they were happy to have me as a client and we have discussed what I am expecting out of my store.

Hopefully in a week or two, I will be able to sell something to my first customer - I bet that will be the best feeling in the world.

Ever since my oldest son was little, I have always made Halloween costumes for my kids. I think that the store bought ones are way too expensive and way too flimsy. We have had such a wide variety of costumes and I always get great comments on them.

One year, the kids were Goldilocks and the three bears. Everyone loved the idea and everyone got a good laugh over it. This past year, I made the kids all Jetsons Costumes and they were really cute as well. We even dressed the dog up as Astro. That was a lot of fun.

My two older kids are getting too old for trick or treating, but I have such a good time with the costumes that I am sill going to make them dress up. They can hand out candy. They may complain, but I know that they will humor their mother. After all, if moms happy than everyone is happy.

When I was in high school I remember writing a big essay about dinosaurs.  I did not realize how handy the information would be one day.  Ironically, he came in most handy in my job as a mother.  I have a little boy who loves everything about dinosaurs and probably knows more than I do, but at least I still have some knowledge left from the essay I wrote in high school.

A few years ago when I was working on my dissertation, I drew from the work I had done in high school, as that is when I first realized what I wanted to study when I went to college.  To this day I think I made the right choice.

It has been very interesting working on a thesis and being a mother at the same time.  I think that it has been interesting for my son as well.  He has his own little desk in my office where he is apparently working on his thesis as well.

I met one of my heroes the other day. It was a man by the name of Doctor Kramer and the reason he is important to me is because he did the surgery when I had my kidney transplant. He was really amazing with me and he explained everything he was going to do and reassured me so that I would not be scared.

He is a big name in the medical community and is one of the top rated transplant surgeons in the country. He does many of them and has an extremely high success rate. I am sure that my story is only one of thousands and I am sure there are thousands out there that are as grateful to this man as I am.

Dr. Kramer is one of those people that you just trust as soon as you meet him. He is both serious and easy going and I know that I owe my life to him. I only wish that there was a way to put into words how I feel about him. But, really there is no way of saying thanks enough for someone who saves your life.

I have never written an arts essay that I was not completely satisfied with the results when I was through with it.  That is not to say, that my professors agree with me.  Even though all I completely like the essays, I did get bad grades on some of them.

One in particular, a sociology essay that I wrote in my second year of college, seemed to me to be a very brilliant piece of work.  However, my professor disagreed.  I barely achieved passing grades on the essay, and I was actually shocked when I found out.

On the other hand, I wrote a management essay in my third year of college and I thought that it certainly was not my best piece of work.  Again, the professor who had assigned the project, disagreed.  It happened to be the very only essay that I got over a 90% grade on.  How ironic is that?

Some people would think that I have a death wish of sorts since I decided to continue my studies all the way to working on my PhD.  I think that there is only one other student working on his graduate degree that I started out with in college so long ago.

But the truth of the matter is I love what I do.  I have been studying to get my doctorate in philosophy and I think it is really cool.  There is nothing I like better than pondering thoughts and coming up with my philosophy on them.

That makes me think of the topic of my PhD dissertation:  I have been studying what students think about others who buy essays.  It has become an increasing problem especially for students that are submitting philosophy essays and I thought it was a good topic.

Anyway, I should get back to writing - if I just sit here and blog, it will never get done.

The summer after I finished high school, my friend and I decided that we were going to take a trip backpacking through Europe.  I enjoyed everything about it and knew that I wanted to be a part of this culture so when I got home, I started looking into possible job prospects in England.

I found quite a few advertisements looking for teachers to help people learn English UK and I knew this was something that I could do, as I had always planned to be a teacher anyway.  I decided to do a little bit of further digging to find out what I had to do to get a job and work over there.

I contacted a UK language school to inquire about their policies for hiring American teachers and during that first phone conversation, I found out that it would not be a problem at all for me to get hired on there.  I started the process right away and soon I will be packing up and leaving for England for good.

While on a credit card reviews website the other day, I made the choice to enter my name and e-mail to subscribe to their mailing list.  They promised to send new credit card offers on a weekly basis to let me know what new cards are available.

I thought this would be a great idea as I am in the market to get a new credit card and it would be nice to see what kind of options I might have.

Boy was that a mistake.

Not even five days after I subscribed to the mailing list, I received five offers for different American Express credit cards and I’m getting one in my inbox each and every day.  This is definitely not what I was expecting when I signed up for their "service" and I am very disappointed.  I think I will be unsubscribing from the newsletter.

Every Friday night, my girlfriends and I go out for a night on the town. It is our night to unwind after a busy week at work and get some much needed social time, as well as some much needed partying time. We all like the same kinds of music and clubs and we never miss a Friday together.

On Sunday afternoon, we get together for coffee and then decide what gigs we are going to hit up on Friday night. We talk about what we are going to wear and then we basically sit and gossip about what cute guys we met on Friday and what places had the best music.

It is a ritual for us and I don’t know how we are going to survive without it when we get married and start to have families. It is our moment of sanity in our insane week and it is the day I look forward to most of all. In fact, thoughts of Friday night are what gets me through Monday morning.