Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto
Wordless Wednesday
Malva Sylvestra Zebrina – that’s the formal name of this flower. what a mouthful for such a pretty striped mallow flower.
I love this dependable little plant. I grow Malva in front of my William Baffin rose bush er tree. The flowers bloom in front of the roses bare lower branches hiding it’s ugly “knees”. It makes a great combination along with some lavender and some phlox.
Twenty two days and counting. Halloween will soon be here!
Are you ready for Halloween yet? Do you have your costumes, party supplies, decorations and so on? No? Well what are you waiting for? You’ve got to have a costume for Halloween.
If you don’t have a costume for Halloween yet you might be in luck! Costumes Inc is offer a coupon which will give you 10% off all orders that are between $40 and $75, or if your purchase is worth more than $75 you’ll get 15%.
Costumes Inc has a large selection of Costumes for adults and children. They also carry just about everything else you need to celebrate Halloween such as decorations, costume accessories – wigs, makeup, props and party supplies.
I know that whenever I write about Halloween a number of people leave comments stating that it’s one of their favorite holidays. Why, of course it is! It’s a fun holiday. You can dress up as your alter ego, in fantasy costumes and pretty much be anything or anyone you can imagine just for the day.
You always hear about costumes at this time of year, but I’ve always though of costumes as a year round kind of thing.
I mean people have themed dress up parties all the time, and who hasn’t heard or perhaps even been to a college Toga party? I really enjoy costume parties and wish people had them more often.
If you are planning on attending a party on your own you might be interested in looking at some of the Sexy Costumes at Costumes Inc. While I’m sure that sexy nurse costumes will always be popular you can now dress up as a sexy pirate, Buccaneer Wench if you want to stand out from the crowd.
If you are married or otherwise taken you and your significant other could find costumes that compliment one another. Perhaps a group of your friends are getting together? There’s nothing wrong with finding costumes for everyone to match a certain theme or genre.
That’s the great thing about costumes. You can create your own unique look starting with a basic costume and add accessories such as wigs, hats, makeup and props or you can purchase a costume that comes with a few accessories to complete the look that you were aiming to achieve.
If you visit the site be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the page of each costume that you like as you’ll be able to see some of the suggested accessories for that costume.
The costumes come in a variety of sizes ranging from infant to Plus size costumes which means that you should be able to find a great costume for anyone at Costumes Inc.
So remember there’s only 22 days left until Halloween arrives so if you haven’t yet picked out your costume you should take a look at the selection at Costumes Inc.
You know how I mentioned in my Thanks Giving post that I bought a new all in one printer on Saturday? Well, after I was done installing all the software for that on our desktop computer and my laptop I finally decided to install the software that came with my husbands HD video camera when we bought it three months ago.
I’d hesitated to install that software because it said it might cause problems with computers that had Roxio easy cd writer installed. I had a feeling that our laptop had that so I was really leary of adding the software. I hemmed and hawed about it for months as you can see …
Anyway, Saturday rolled around and I put the video camera software on the desktop and that seemed to go well so I went over to the lap top and I did a search on it for easy cd writer. I didn’t find any files that had that name or that phrase within them so I decided it must be safe to install the software. So I began installing it and went to do something on the desktop computer while it was installing.
When I came back to the laptop the software install was finished and there was a message to reboot the computer. So I did.
Bad Move!
The computer restarted and all I had when it was finished was a black screen with three of the scariest words that I’ve ever seen printed across the top left of the screen:
NO OPERATING SYSTEM
Ahhh! What? What did I do. What did I do? Why didn’t I listen to myself? I shouldn’t have installed that software! Ahhhh!
I rebooted the laptop a few times to be greeted by the same horrifying message.
I eventually shut down the computer in despair. I had the very tiniest hope that if the computer was off for a little while it’s memory might clear and if I was really lucky I might get a different message the next time I turned it on. Small hope I say …
In the meantime I remembered that I had tried to make restore disks when I first got the laptop last year. It took forever. I think I made 17 cds or something. I had the distinct feeling that the restore disks were not being created properly at the time, but I know I saved them. After all you can only access the system once to create restore disks so if they didn’t work I’d be up the creek without a paddle.
I went to look for the restore disks. I searched every room upstairs, the living room, dinning room and the basement. Chris was out at that Saga concert at the time so I was on my own in my search.
I never did find the restore disks. More than likely Chris moved them to some obscure place that I didn’t think to search, but I believe I searched through at least 70% of the house in all the obvious and not so obvious areas that one might hide 17 restore cds.
Eventually it was time to look at my dead laptop. I approached it slowly, sure that I’d see that terrible No Operating System message again when I turned it on. Much to my surprise and joy the computer actually booted into windows when I turned it on.
Of course it was full of error messages and my cd wouldn’t work right. I decided to go to the system tools folder and try system restore. My system wouldn’t restore itself back to the last restore point! I tried it a few different ways several times, picking different restore dates and it still wouldn’t work. I don’t believe I’ve ever had any errors on the laptop so I think this was the first time I’ve used system restore on it. I’ve used system restore on my desktop computer and it works fine. So I don’t know why it would on the laptop. I’ll have to try it sometime in the future.
I spent several hours using my “nurse” healing powers on my laptop. Manually uninstalling every program that the Video software program had installed. 20 programs installed – 20 programs removed. Finally … finally … the laptop worked with only one error for HP Photosmart Premiere (software installed for the new all in one printer).
That error seems to be sticking around, but I can live with one error message for a while until I figure out how to get rid of it.
The main thing is that the laptop is working again! It took hours and a mini heart attack to get it working again, but it’s running and I’m not going to try to install that video camera software again.
Hey have you been watching the new teen drama Gossip Girl on The CW? The series began on September 19th so if you haven’t caught the show yet it’s not too late to start watching.
There’s been a lot of buzz about this show on the internet. I know some people have created Gossip Girl blogs and fan sites. Of course, the best source of information about the show is the CW site itself where fans can watch full episodes of the show, chat to one another about the shows characters or the latest shows plot lines, learn about upcoming episodes, learn more about the cast, music used on the show and a whole lot more.
If you’ve been watching the show you already know that it’s about some very privileged Manhattan teens. The teens first learned that their friend Serena van der Woodsen was back in town through the blog of the ultra secretive Gossip Girl. No one has a clue as to who Gossip Girl really is, but they all rely heavily on the information provided in her blog or via text messages.
I would expect that a lot of bloggers like this show. There’s no other show on TV that has it’s weekly plots built around blogging!
Of course we all know how persuasive the information gleamed from a blog can be. They can be used for good or bad! This blog for example is my every day blog where those who want to learn more about me can come for a little peak into my day to day life. My gardening blog teaches others about gardening and my Celebrity blog, Celebrity Scoop … well that’s pure gossip.
I guess my Celebrity blog is the closest of the blogs I write to Gossip girls blog. I mean, it’s all about what’s happening in the lives of the rich and famous – just like those Manhattan teens on the Gossip Girl television series.
I’m curious as to who Gossip Girl really is. I wonder if they’ll ever let us know? Do you think you’ve got it figured out yet?
Gossip Girl is on, on Wednesday evenings at 9/8 c. Wednesdays show looks like it will be a good one too. It looks like Serena’s best friend Blair may finally have a chance at the spotlight, but her time in the limelight is short lived, and she soon feels betrayed by Serena who’s shadow Blair is always in it seems. I wonder if Blair will ever be able to forgive Serena? You won’t want to miss the episode!
Want to see a preview of the next episode? Click on the video tab in the widget below, and don’t forget to read some of the juicy gossip about Gossip Girl and other shows that are listed in the widget too.
So …. Did all my fellow Canadians have a great Thanks Giving?
We mostly did things around home this weekend.
On Saturday I ended up going out on yet another shopping spree! Our printer hasn’t worked for ages and each week it seems I’ve been getting someone asking me to sign and fax something back to them or when we purchase something like tickets to a concert the tickets are electronic and must be printed out. So we needed a printer.
I got an HP all in one printer. The all in one includes a fax, scanner and printing capabilities.
We actually had to use it as soon as we finally got it set up on Saturday because Chris bought tickets to see Saga play in a Toronto bar and of course the tickets were electronic and the only way he’d be able to get his tickets was to print them out. I was also able to print and sign our confirmation for our airline tickets for our Las Vegas trip and then fax it back to the company from which we’d purchased our travel package.
Sunday was just a lazy day. I wasn’t feeling well at all so I spent way too much time lying on the couch. Thank you Crohns. I did however pick out some new themes for a few of our sites and I will be updating this site and a few others sometime this week. Especially now that I really know how well widgets work. Perhaps I’ll finally get this site to load quicker! Yeahhhh! Oh yeah, the new theme will load the content first – not the sidebars first like this theme does. I hate that. I’m sure you do too.
Earlier today we went to my husbands home town and had Thanks Giving dinner with Chris’ family. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, my mother in law cannot cook. She bought preformed chicken breasts – you know those pressed boneless ones? Yuck. There was also sausages, milkless mashed potatoes, squished turnip and stuffing. Needless to say the only thing that I found decent was the stuffing.
I guess I’ll be cooking Chris and I a small turkey dinner sometime this week as I was really looking forward to turkey and what we did end up eating was really disappointing.
How was your Thanks Giving?