spoken for

Thursday, 4/1:
Started the Atkin’s Diet. Mom’s lost a lot of weight on it, so I figure I’ll give it a go.

The Enemy Among Us: POWs in Missouri During World War II…
Went to a local community college with Steve to hear a short talk on the Prisoner of War camp that was located in Weingarten, MO 1943-45. It was one of the four main camps in Missouri, of the many more in the United States. During the later part of WWII, we had to bring prisoners over here – no more room really left in Europe, besides the security reasons. It’s strange that Weingarten was ever chosen. Our camp had Italian prisoners only in it. Several even came back here to live after the war! That’s how good we treat our prisoners, in comparison with how other people treat us it kind of sucks, but it is good that we treat our guys good. However, it’s not a part of WWII that people really talk about anymore. I didn’t even know of it until we drove by the area just before we were married and Steve told me about it. The talk was given by the author of the book, titled The Enemy Among Us: POWs in Missouri During World War II, David Fiedler. I have known of this book for a while now, on a site of mine, stegenevieve.net, I have an excerpt of the book that the author gave me to put up just before the book was published. Actually, I’m surprised that it’s been this long and I hadn’t bought one until Thursday night.

It was funny… the thing was supposed to start at 7, but got started about 20 minutes late because there were so many people there that they had to double the room (had it split in half) and that took a while. So Steve and I went down and got in line, I decided I was going to buy the book, gosh dang it. We were standing there and the author, David, was saying something to the woman in front of me. He turned to me and said, “Valerie, right?” I was like, yeah, lol. I figured I was going to have to introduce myself like I have to with everyone else, but he knew me right off, it was totally cool. He was also signing books and signed mine, “For Valerie – Thanks for all of your help with the on-line stuff! It was great to meet you in person! Best Wishes – David Fie dler April 1, 2004.” Cool. :-)

Anyway though, this book is totally cool and I really recommend it to anyone who is interested in WWII, POW camps, or the Wein garten area. More info… Read the excerpt

Friday, 4/2:
Stupid me, I dented the car. But then again, who is the bonehead who put that curb there? And I’m not being stupid either, I totally didn’t see it, and I was even going really slow. It was sticking way out there. And of course, there was a HUGE pointed rock right on it that the car came down on and is where the dent is. Steve was pretty mad. Of course, he saw it and should have said something. Grrrr. Well at least you can’t see it unless you get down on your hands and knees to do so.

Saturday, 4/3:
Went to my great aunt & uncle’s. They are being bought-out, a shopping center is going in. So that was the day for them to get to tear apart the house. A lot of other people on the street were doing the same. They’d given the inside doors to my mom, so we went up to help out for a bit. Such a pitty, it was such a nice house. Small, yes, and in the city, yes, but considering all that, very nice. Built right before the Depression it had a couple of stained glass windows, real wood features, very sturdy; and plus they’d recently remodeled parts of it. Oh well.

So then we came home and I showered real quick and Steve had already gone out, but then I went out to our friends’ house for that Lewis and Clark Expedition thing. They were cooking like L&C, the kids learned about and even got to shoot black powder rifles, Steve was heading up the learn-about-fur-”making” and stuff table, & etc. Was pretty fun. But I went home early because Elijah was being a pooty-head. He’s been doing this to me lately, today included, he has decided that he will only take naps in the car. So then he is really stinking cranky all the rest of the time. When he’s supposed to be sleeping, he’s in his bed, pulling to a stand. While that’s all great & dandy, he does it, then screams cause he can’t figure out how to get down. So he needed a nap, and I KNEW he wouldn’t take one there. He was asleep before I even left the driveway, I was really surprised, he usually waits until we hit the interstate. That and the fact that they weren’t going to be eating anything for supper that I could have. Besides jerky that is. And I knew I’d be really stinking hungry if I sat around and watched everyone else eat.

Also FINALLY received my Dr. Mario NES game from Ebay. I won the auction on March 9, it was a week away from it being a month. I’d even paid immediately with PayPal. The seller claims he mailed it out and it was returned to him. However, why I don’t know, and why he didn’t email me and tell me I don’t know, and why it was just sitting around instead of him sending it out I don’t know. I think he just forgot. Oh well. Now my only desicion is should I leave positive or neutral feedback for him? Him and the other guy – sent me a cartrige that is coming a bit apart. While it works, he coulda said that that was the condition it was in.

Sunday, 4/4:
GET THIS.
I almost forgot about this while writing the rest of this crap.
Okay, so here was how my day went….

I woke up to what I thought was 7:30 and was kinda in and out of sleep until I finally got up at 8:00. I showered and started getting ready for church. Steve was sleeping so good, and he’s been so tired lately that I just let him sleep. Elijah woke up, I gave him his bottle. Woke Steve up around 9 or 9:15, and was like are you going to go to church? He didn’t think he’d be ready in time, but he’d get E ready for me so we could both go. We got ready, we left. I’m driving along, looking at the clock, it says 10:15, I’m thinking, okay, I’m doing good for the 10:45 service. The guy on the radio comes on and says something about daylight savings time and, hey, it’s 11:33. (!!!!) I was like CRAP! But I went on my way because I figured I’d go up to the tv room and tell the guys what an idiot I am, plus I had a library book to return. Note the 15 min difference, this is due to Steve working on the car the day before and unhooking the battery which caused me to also lose those 15 minutes.

So I get to church and it’s about 11:45 (real time now). I figure why take E to nursery? There’s less than 15 minutes left, I’ll just take him with me. So I grabbed his keys, my keys, and him, locked the car and went in. P gets me in the lobby and gives me a cd of pictures to put on the website. One more thing to carry (and my skirt had no pockets), I also had to pick up a bulletin. I get up to the tv room and I only see B there. My first though is, Oh great, last week they must have told me that M was going to be gone and then I turned around and wasn’t here to help B out. I felt SOOO bad. (B also plays the organ, so M usually does everything himself until after the organ is finished.) After a few minutes of standing there, B turns to me and tells me what happened. Apparently M got mad and left, saying he quit. It’s a bunch of technical stuff I don’t want to get into. His wife always comes up after service and when she did B was talking to her. He came back and said that she had said that they were going to leave this church anyway, and had planned to talk to him soon. I figure that M just got stressed out and probably was having a hard time dealing with how to tell B, so he just kind of temporarily snapped, or something. So anyway, to make an even longer story short, B asks me if I want to step in and learn all of this stuff, which yes, I said. So it looks like my level of commitment there has risen incredibly. Now, instead of if I’m not there, I’m not learning, it’s if I’m not there, they’re in a pickle. While I figured that I’d be stepping up when one of them quit or retired (since I’m seemingly the only other person interested in this aspect of the production), I certainly didn’t expect it to be this soon. So there is a bunch on my shoulders in that area soon. Although I expect it won’t be tooooo much trouble. It’ll be fun, it’s just a lot of commitment. The thing I’m worried about most is the editing, though.

Oh yeah, almost forgot. So church also went to 12:30! I mean, cool stuff was happening, but it had turned into 45 minutes that I had E in the tv room and he started to get grumpy. So I had to break a rule of mine and let him play with my keys, it was the only thing that would finally shut him up. Arg.
Then we went home.

Grandpa and V showed up here, too. That is an unusual event, they don’t usually do that, as far as I know. And this house is a complete wreck, I was so embarrassed. I mean, yeah, it’s never perfect, but it’s always worse at the end of a weekend. They only stayed like 10-15 minutes.

Then we three went back to church for the choir program. Then we had to go to Walmart (yuck) then came home.

Monday, 4/5:
A boring day.

I tried to do stuff, but everyone kept demanding my undivided attention. :)

If it wasn’t Elijah, it was Elizabeth (who stopped by to work on her project again), or it was my friend who is running for public office. She is running for the Missouri House and I got emails from her on Friday asking me to do her a website. I already do one for her for a nonprofit organization she is in charge of. She also told me that if she gets elected, she would like me to do a “full-time” website for her – so that would be really really cool.

I watched like 4 hours of Law and Order while cooking, eating, and chilling tonight lol.

Just over the past couple of hours… been working out of my new book that I got from Amazon: Beginning PHP, Apache, MySQL: Web Development. COOL book, I must say. Some of the stuff I already know, but a lot I don’t. It’s cool too that they’ve got these “Try it out” sections, kind of like homework. They show you the code and what to do and what it should look like. While I’m not necessarily writing my own program, I’m doing what they say and in the process learning how things work. Some of the stuff I already know what to do to get the results, but now I’m learning why it works the way it does. This would be great if I could learn this. Got some ideas for scripts (or script enhancements) and would like to someday create them.

Anyway, my wrists hurt now, gonna go; I think E’s finally asleep, which means I can go to sleep so that I can wake up feeling like crap and start this all over again. lol (allergies, sinus, crappy in the morning).

Oh, btw: MS dates are set April 22 (late) or April 23 (early) through April 27.

Where have I been?
Around.

I was going to blog here real quick while I waited for E to go to sleep, but I think he just headed in that direction. So I guess I’ll write more tomorrow. A lot has happened this weekend. Everything from destruction to new opportunities, lol.

Stay tuned

Anyway, a normal entry now.
Last night got me thinking about my fears. And in the process of putting them behind me, I’ve written them down. I’m going to put those on the “the girl” page, so be looking for that hopefully by the end of today.
Elizabeth is coming over today to do her webpage for her mythology class. Just like what I did when I was in there. :-) She’s going to use FrontPage though, so I’m not going to help her, except to host her and show her how to use FP and the FTP program.
Elijah’s getting upset now, best go see what’s up.