It's been a long, long time.

When you start a blog you usually have a reason, something you want to write about. You have some kind of niche, a passion, some category you fit in. I did too, at first.  For a very short time.  It was about my Etsy shop, about making and selling jewelry.

The last time I made jewelry it was for myself.  My Etsy shop hasn't been open for 3 years.  I've wanted to get back to this, but where do I fit in now?

Do I speak to what Maxine has been doing while I haven't posted her? Do I tell my cancer story?  It was just a little cancer, promise.  Or do I talk about my cats like I do with photos on Instagram each day?  My job?  My family?  Crazy people on the road?  Politics?  No, probably not politics.  :)

No niche for me.  This would qualify as a "personal blog" I guess. Not sure if that's interesting. But I'd like to give it a try again and see how it goes.

Oh my gosh it's been so long that Google just sent me an email warning me that someone signed into my account.  Wow.  Easing into it is the way to go, not with a long post explaining everything.  I'll just close with a picture I got from a web cam today, of the Statue of Liberty and a beautiful pink sky.  It's my desktop wallpaper now.

Later!

My name is BetteJo and I have a problem.

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It's blogs. My blogs, your blogs, everybody's blogs. I bought some blog software for myself because I can't stop playing with stuff!! It's a sickness! I've redone one blog and am now designing random templates for nobody and nothing, just practicing.

I seem to have a need to create but when I start - I cannot stop. It's 11:30 right now, I am usually in bed by now with 2 tea mugs ready for morning as well as my meds in a little cup, my glucose meter and glasses in place, and cat food on the counter ready to be dished out. My lunch to bring to work is usually made, my makeup is off and I have lotioned and paid attention to whatever needs tending to.

UH UH! Not tonight. I can sit here and say "I'll stop in 10 minutes" all night long and next thing you know I've used up an entire evening or like last weekend - a whole weekend. And all I'm doing is PLAYING!

No discipline at my house.
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From here to there.

Went to work Monday morning, and after punching in and getting my laptop docked and what-have-you, I took my mug of tea and went back home. Just wasn’t feeling good, had a touch of the BetteJo flu which basically involves stomach and gastrointestinal issues you don’t want to hear about. Feel MUCH better now. Ate soup today, some things are just necessary after being sick and that hit the spot.

I napped most of yesterday and part of today but I did finish (well maybe finished) the work I have been doing to change the template on my picture blog. I liked the one I had but I wanted something where the pics could be bigger. Please do me a favor, take a peek and let me know what you think. I discovered that I need to upload pictures using Windows Live Writer because of the way it allows me to enlarge pictures, whereas doing it in Blogger makes the photos blurry. I was not pleased. But finding a simple way around it made me happy. I am sure I will continue to tweak the site because the format is so foreign to me, but for the sake of bigger pictures I think it’s worth it.

And lastly (but of course not least) (leastly?) my daughter is graduating from college on Saturday. She took a long time deciding whether or not she was going to walk – and almost didn’t give me enough notice when she made up her mind. But no matter, Andy and I will be heading to Dani’s school on Saturday, possibly Friday night if we can manage a hotel somewhere nearby. She stayed an extra semester so she could graduate with a double major, one in English and one in Women’s Studies. I am very proud of her as you can imagine, especially because – as I have mentioned before, she has done all of it herself. She got no free ride from anyone and she has worked very hard. Excellent grades as well! Yay Dani!

The other one has gone somewhere else.

Recently I wrote about my other blog, and the problems I was having with it. I could not get the format to change in the date stamp and comment areas. I mean I tried everything I could think of and a few things other people suggested. I loved the template and the whole look of the blog but those 2 things I could not change made.me.crazy. I think I am learning from this blog just how anal retentive I am about some things.

In the end I decided to do what any other normal (read-neurotic) blogger would do. I duplicated the entire freaking blog using a new URL, with just a one digit difference. I did not know of a way to transfer all of the old posts to the new URL so I laboriously copied and pasted every detail, down to each posts' date and time, from the old to the new. If there was an "export" function I did not know about in Blogger - DON'T TELL ME NOW!

Finally, today, I moved the last old post to the new location and then - put up a "moved" post. Unfortunately I was not able to move any comments I had, and I cannot move the few followers I have. I am hoping anyone who follows that blog - will do me the huge favor of moving on to my new one. It's exactly the same except for date stamp and commenting features I was finally able to get just the way I want them. So please update your bookmarks for A Picture a Day, and come have a look. What? It doesn't look any different? Yeah, I know. It's supposed to be that way. Except now if you want to comment it's at the BOTTOM of the post. Like normal! (But it is still a difference blog address. Really.)

Words

I am one of those people who loves words. I have no control over how I use them myself apparently, but I admire how others do. I have been known to compliment someone on a sentence, a perfect turn of phrase, something that says something I know I could never say. At least not in the same way.

People have told me since I was a kid that I should do something with my writing but what I could not explain to them was that I am not a writer. I talk. I give good letter. That's my favorite way of saying it. I am long winded and take 7 paragraphs to say something most people can say in 7 sentences. My grammar is bad and when my daughter the English major tries to tell me something about sentence structure or any of the "rules", I have no clue. But oh, I can appreciate good writing. That does not necessarily mean that what I consider good writing is all grammatically correct. :)

I have my favorite blogs, I'm sure we all do. Some I read because they are so clever and funny I am almost always guaranteed a laugh out loud moment every time I read them. Some I read because they are so doggone relate-able that I feel like the authors are reading my mind! There are some that I read because I simply want that person's life, so I stalk them and see what I can do to that end. And then there are some that just make me weep.

The blogs that make me weep are not necessarily what you would think, not always emotional or tear jerkers or full of drama. Some are just written so beautifully that I will literally be brought to tears by reading the description of a wonderful afternoon, a day with the kids or a story about the joy of a sweet relationship. There is one who can do that on a regular basis, and that is Amanda from the wink and tumble dry. Oh how she writes. And oh how she lets you in.

Tonight I stumbled upon a new blog, for me, anyway. Cry it out: Adventures of a stay-at-home dad. For some reason the post from today "A song of the city" touched me and brought tears to my eyes. I don't know, maybe another day the author, Mike, will make me laugh or something totally different but today, he touched my heart.

It's a good read, truly.

I love my reader!

I love Google Reader! I am sure the other readers out there are wonderful too but Google Reader is the one I tried and have been using since the day I read that Brillig over at Twas Brillig "zeroed out her Google Reader." I was like, huh? That sounds interesting, I need to check it out.

That is how I have found out almost everything about blogging, by reading blogs and clicking on whatever they have to click on, on their blogs. I have found slide shows and blog logs and site counters and on and on. But Google Reader is the best thing I have discovered so far.

I'm sure I am last to the party on this one, but oh my gosh this thing is a miracle worker! It saves time for me, I don't have to go through my list of daily blogs and click on each one a few (okay several) times a day to see if there are new posts. I don't have to keep up with my every once in a while blogs - manually. Google Reader has allowed me to add blogs to my reading list and while I know it's not as many as some people, I think 46 blogs are a lot to keep up with!!!

Right now looking up at the top of my screen I see that a new post has been picked up and as soon as I am done with this I will click over and read it. The reader is allowing me to be a functioning addict, not one that is tied to my computer all of the time. I can do some other things knowing that my reader is keeping track of all my reading and I can count on it implicitly. Oh yay. Sigh-h-h. If only everything else in my life were as reliable, I would be a happy lady. Now I need to go see who has posted. Oh who am I kidding - I clicked over to see right away - so now I am just going back to read the post I know is there. And doing it very happily. :)

There is just nothing easy about it. Part III

That title is looking a bit pretentious to me, sorry. Part III. Oh well. For anybody using Firefox I'm sure you can see I got my way and the blog looks busier for you. Hope you can take my widgets! At the end of this post I will tell you how I fixed it. Now on to fixing me. :)

Unfortunately there never really is any fixing me. And that's okay. It's a matter of coping with a disorder and I'll be damned if anyone makes me feel ashamed about it. That's one reason I talk about depression. I have run into several people over the years who think someone who struggles with depression is literally just being a baby, they need to stop whining and move on. Honestly. I am never completely ready for that kind of response because to me it is so bizarre. People just don't like disorders of the 'mind', *creepy music plays*.

There was the day when I asked my husband "if you get rid of the girlfriend, can we go to counseling and at least see if there is anything left to save?" He replied - "What? You think she's the first?" At that point my world turned upside down. Not because I was crazy in love with him because by then I wasn't. It was because I had this plan in my head, the white picket fence, home, husband and kids plan, and this simply did not fit. Beyond that - I thought I knew him. All of a sudden this man I thought I knew better than anyone else in the world - was a stranger looking back at me. It sounds so trite but it was as if suddenly I was seeing him as a different person entirely separate from me and my life. Totally disconcerting and mind bending. For quite a while after that day you could have told me the sky was green and I might have questioned what I was seeing when I saw it to be blue. More than anything - more than crushing my 'plan', more than hurting me, my faith in myself was crushed. If I did not know this man, what did I know? Was anything what I thought it was? I could not trust my judgement anymore.

The day after that wonderful discourse with my husband, I made an appointment with a lawyer. Shortly after that - I made an appointment with a therapist. There was a little secret place inside me that was acknowledging that I probably needed to see a therapist anyway and this was as good a reason as any to start. I went for about 8 months and this Doc was wonderful. He reaffirmed the idea that I wasn't 'crazy' - that feeling disoriented in the midst of my own life was quite normal given the situation.

We started with my marriage, but slowly things turned more toward me and my IBS symptoms, my panic attacks, and finally - to my lack of happiness. For me - I couldn't even call it sadness most of the time. It was more - I lived my life at this flat line kind of place that was steady with no blips rising above the line, only dips where I would go below at times. Blips above the line would have been excitement and joy, all the things I did not feel. Dips below the line were anger, hopelessness and feelings of worthlessness. So either I was just at the line, or below it. I only recognized the bad feelings as self esteem issues which they were. But they were also symptoms of a low-level, chronic depression.

We did a lot of talk therapy, working on issues having to do with my Dad, the old - I married a man just like him while not staying with the original guy who simply treated me way better than I deserved. I thought. Eventually we came to a place where I was feeling healthier, not so disoriented and starting to understand why I did some of the things I did. I know I am being overly simplistic but I tend to dwell on the little details too much. The Doc and I also realized that I wasn't moving beyond a certain point and it was time to address the depression head on, as something chemical.

I don't know if I welcomed the idea of medication, I think it frightened me a bit. I asked how I would know if it was working - and if it wasn't the right one - what would it do to me? He told me that if it was the right one I would simply begin to feel better. If it wasn't the right med - it would just do nothing. The difficulty was that all anti-depressant medications have side effects, and it can take up to 6 months to judge the effectiveness of any one drug. Everyones chemical make up is different and what would work for me was an unknown at that point. And so began a medication merry-go-round that lasted for a very long time. There were times I didn't think I would ever find the right medication and doubted there was one for me. Thank God one thing I am - is stubborn.

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As promised - how I fixed my blog. I contacted a brilliant man named Stavanger at Blogcrowds, he is the one who originally helped me add my 3rd column. I posted my problem in the forum on his site and received an email that an answer had been posted. This is the answer I got:

change the 150px in .sidebar to 149px.

.sidebar {
width:149px;
float:left;
padding:6px 0;
margin:0;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}

So I went into edit HTML, found the spot he mentioned and changed ONE number. I changed 150 - to 149. Saved it, checked the blog using Firefox and it looked the way I wanted it to. I'm telling you - I know I don't much about code or what makes the Internet work. But when someone can look at my blog and figure out I need to change ONE number - I think they are a genius!! Stavanger is a genius and I am a happy girl. :)

Just a question ~ input?

Tonight I downloaded Firefox - I had heard, oh - it doesn't matter why. The point is - I was making sure I had all my favorites and such, including this blog. I opened it and - wait - it looked weird! Using Internet Explorer - I have 3 columns. A sidebar on the right, one on the left, and the body of the blog is in the center. All my colorful widgets and blidgets and lists and pictures are on the sidebars. Except on Firefox. On Firefox I have the sidebar on the left, the middle body of the blog, and on the right where there should be a sidebar - well - there IS one I guess, but it's blank! All the 'stuff' I should be seeing there - is tacked onto the bottom of the LEFT sidebar! So - please please tell me, if you have stopped by, what do you see? I mean - I find it somewhat disturbing that for the last couple of months some people may have been seeing an empty spot that looks really stupid! So ... A on the left or B on the right?