It will (should) arrive tomorrow, but I have no fabric or anything yet.  Picked out a pattern for a dress for my daughter but, since I’ve never used a sewing machine in my life, I’m probably setting my sights pretty high.  It seems like a simple pattern, but knowing my luck it may not be.

So um, maybe I’ll find a pillowcase pattern somewhere and make her that first, instead.  Start easy and work up to the dress. LOL

I also plan on using it to make keychain fobs out of cotton (or polypropylene) webbing and ribbon. I decided I am going to try my daughter’s school’s Spring Carnival again this year and need something simple that might sell (hopefully?) so I at least make some money, since my jewelry and bows went over SO well last year (sarcasm).  Anyway those should be pretty easy as it is just stitching straight lines to secure the ribbon onto the webbing.  We’ll see though.   I have to figure out how to use the thing first.  I’m a ‘by the seat of my pants’ learner, I am.  Figure it out as I go, free tutorial searchin’, video how-to watchin’ kinda gal.  Hopefully by this time next week I haven’t tried to pitch it out my workroom window.

Thankfully it wasn’t for too much money, but any amount of stolen money is bad enough in the scheme of things.

His XBOX Live account was hacked today.  Around 2PM he texts me and asks if either our daughter or I had purchased anything on XBOX.  Not that I was aware of, because my daughter had been playing the Disney Kinect game, and we purposely log out of his account and use hers since it has no payment methods on it, every time she plays.  And anyway as far as I could tell, the game she was playing wasn’t even capable of making Points purchases.

He tried logging into his Windows Live account and found it was inaccessible, or didn’t exist.  I tried logging in under his gamer tag on the XBOX and got in OK, and it immediately popped up saying he had been logged in from another console.  Since I know his gamer tag had been logged in just before my daughter started playing her game, and my husband was at work, I KNEW that was fishy.  Uh-oh… HACKED!

Apparently MS tries to blame this issue (which is fairly common we came to discover) on phishing scams or social engineering.

Sorry MS, but we’re not that stupid.  We fall for none of that crap that those sorry saps try to pull.  Which leaves either brute force attack attempts at password guessing, or some kind of flaw in MS’ system.

Whatever the case may be, MS has to lock gamer accounts down for nearly a full month in order to “investigate” the matter.  Thankfully it seems like my daughter’s gamer tag is unaffected, as mine probably would be OK, too (we have the Family pack, but my husband’s tag is the primary one with all of the billing information tied to it).  He called the bank and they canceled his debit card (which was on the Live account), and he also notified PayPal of the open dispute with MS since THAT was also associated with his Live account, and which appears to have been the source of the charge that was made.

The nefarious intruders seem to be using hacked Live accounts to buy FIFA 12 downloadable content.  So if you happen to check your Live account online and see you’re logged into a console and playing FIFA 12 while simultaneously sitting at your computer (and no one in your household plays that game, either), well, your XBOX Live account just might be hacked.

When we get his access to his gamer tag back, our plan is to get a re-loadable prepaid card and tie it to the account (since Family Live accounts require some form of payment method to renew it every year).  This way if it only holds the minimum balance needed to pay that renewal fee shortly before that due date arrives, and in the interim, has pennies sitting in it, we won’t have to worry too much about potentially losing more money should a greedier hacker force their way into our XBOX account again.

I think I like this one better than the other though.  It looks more similar to how I write.

I still haven’t really gotten past the “wanting to” stage, but I have been rethinking whether I should stick with this CMS, ExpressionEngine (EE), or change back to….

WordPress.

Yes, I know.  That program frustrated me with the two times my site got hacked, and was the reason I switched over to EE.

But designing in EE was challenging, mainly because if one cannot find free plugins to do what one wants, or is not willing to cough up the dough to pay for a plugin that does do what one wants… One needs to be a software developer to make ones own plugins.  And I am not that, nor am I willing to cough up the money to pay for plugins that will do what I need or want them to do.  The free ones are somewhat lacking.

So between WP’s recent updates… and coming across some external tools that may help prevent the scenarios that led me to leave it in the first place, I’m reconsidering WP.  It has loads of shiny plugins & widgets, most for free.  From what I’m learning, using those that are kept up to date, is key.  Not only because there could be conflicts between an out of date plugin and WP when it does update, but also for potential security holes that a plugin developer may discover and patch.

I suspect I had a few plugins installed that were a little on the old side, which could have contributed to the issues I had.  I’m willing to try it again, being careful with the plugins, although I am not sure whether I should try moving everything from EE, into a fresh install of WP, or just play around in a test version.  Still contemplating everything, really.  But leaning toward moving it all back.

Hmm. Decisions, decisions.

On a completely unrelated note.. I think I want a stick vacuum for sweeping up the bits of cat litter that my cats seem to trail from the laundry room down the hallway.  Much easier to use than my huge vacuum, and quicker than using a stupid broom. 

I was kind of looking for something fairly cheap, probably this from Shark:  Shark VX1.  What do you think?  Any recommendations?

Done.

I like how they try to fake things by trying to make the comments look related in some way.

The lastest one even carried the same topic of their comment into a different post, like it was a continuation of their thought but they didn’t want to leave it on one post, they had to spread it around.

Psh.

You spam, you banned.
Enjoy reading all you want, Mr./Ms. Spammer, but you won’t be able to comment anymore! 

One day I decided I wanted to try making my own vectors, and downloaded a trial version of Illustrator.  Worked for several hours relearning it (been a while since I took classes), then maybe played around with it one or two more days, and haven’t touched it since.

Got some inspiration to try some techniques with polymer clay, but once I got to a certain point, inspiration went *poof*, so I set that aside for now.

Then I joined deviantART, and spent hours looking at various things – digital drawings (horses, dragons, etc), traditional drawings… found my fave watercolor artist and other new ones… then got inspired to start sketching again, decided I want to learn how to draw people (without tracing like I mostly did for my daughter’s still unfinished watercolor painting from last summer).  Hands trip me up – they’re HARD to draw!  Feet will be too, I imagine.

I couldn’t find any stock hand poses in dA that i liked, so I took some of my own hand, and when I have some free moments I’ll try sketching those.  That is my latest interest as of late.

Then…. THEN, I stumbled across a couple of mom bloggers, who have been doing organizing and even renovating/remodeling of their homes… and wouldn’t you know it, I started getting the itch to get crap organized around here.  But time – where’s the time?!  And I even started thinking… well, if the housing market is so awful around here that we’re upside down on our mortgage, we probably won’t be going anywhere any time soon, so we may as well start thinking about updating this place… But really, that is long term stuff and not likely to be happening any time soon.  I’ll be the first to admit, we’re not exactly handy-manny’s around here.  Can’t hurt to start getting ideas though.

Maybe this weekend I’ll find where my gumption went and have a go at some organizing.  Maybe. 

You’ll need to be seeing my blog in a browser to see the spiffyness, so if you’re peeking at this via a reader or FB or something, please click through and have a closer look!

Besides… I need for people to let me know if it worked! I know *I* can see it, but can you? 

Ok, anyway.  I’m finding myself contemplating redesigning my blog again.  Getting bored with it already I guess.

The tough part?  My blog software doesn’t really come with any templates.  This one, and any new ones, will have to be hand made by me.

There are *some* places that make templates for this platform, but very few free ones; and if I felt up to it, I could probably find one for another platform and port it over.  But I tend to like to get my hands dirty with my site and create something from scratch all my own.  I could go dig up one of my older ones and port it to this version…

I’m just not speedy about it… So don’t expect to see it very soon – heck, I don’t even have any idea what I want to do with the place yet!   

Mainly this is a forewarning, that if you come across my site one day and it looks….funky, that I’m probably trying to update it and things aren’t going my way. Haha!