"I am queen of the house. Undisputed. Irrevocable. It's
a fact. I wonder why my pets keep putting me outside
whenever they discover I've snuck back inside?" This
quote and more like it can be found in the Teacher's Pet
section of Renae's Room.
Hi Everyone:
It's been an interesting past two weeks. We've had two
ice storms that have left the state in shambles. I
think I mentioned in the last newsletter than my son had
come up from his home in east Texas to stay with us because
the ice caused power outages in his area. It was a week
before his power was restored. He got back home
seemingly almost in time to turn around and come right back
to weather out the next ice storm. He ended up stranded at
our place for nearly a week, unwilling to attempt driving
back on the icy-slick roads.
During this last storm the power at his place survived but
ours didn't. Early on the day after Christmas, I turned on
the computer but was unable to logon to the web. We did
some checking and decided our ISP must be down. About the
middle of that same afternoon our lights went out just after
we had popped a rented video into the VCR. (Abe ended up
having to take the VCR apart in order to retrieve that video.)
We had heat, water, and lots of candles so we fared rather
well.
That first night without electricity was an eerie experience.
Not having anything else to do, Abe went to bed early while
Eth and I sat up for awhile just chatting. All the streetlights
were out and there was heavy cloud coverage which made for
an unusually dark night. The eerie part about it was that
every so often we'd see the sky light up and glow briefly
then we'd hear a loud "POW!" During one of these episodes
the "pow" was extra loud and accompanied by the sound of
power surging through what we assumed to be the power lines.
The "pow's" were bad enough but that experience was startling
for both of us. We decided the commotion must be caused by
transformers in the area blowing. Later, when I went
to bed, sleeping turned out to be difficult. Tree limbs in
the neighbors' yards kept snapping and falling to the ground
with a loud thud. Neighborhood dogs were unaccustomed to this
and responded by barking all night. And during it all, the
ice continued to fall.
According to the news that I heard just before the lights
went off and that others were relaying, there were entire
counties in Arkansas that didn't have electricity and some
places didn't have water. We heard rumors that our water
would be turned off so I filled all the containers in my
house but, as it turned out, we didn't need it.
But, as it turned out, we really did need it. The temperatures
were dipping rather low for this part of the country and
our pipes couldn't handle it. The day after I poured all
that water down the drain one of our pipes froze and the
water company came out and turned off our water. It was
about 22 hours before the plumber made the repairs and
turned the water back on.
On Friday morning during that power outage, my son took
me to the library to use one of their computers. The
plan was to put a note in a conspicuous spot stating that
I was unable to work on the site because of the weather,
but would be back at it soon as I possibly could.
When I got to the library and Renae's Room was online and
staring me in the face, I was not a happy girl. For some
reason the site had been rearranged and looked strange. I
didn't know enough about it to make the repairs so I placed
my message at the top of the site then went to the bottom
and changed the date to indicate that I had made an update
on that day. I reloaded RR to make sure my addition had
beed uploaded successfully and found that it had. My
husband was in Little Rock doing his radio thing (among
other things, he's a jock on a clear-channel station that
many of you in the U.S. and in some other countries could
hear) and when he got home we went to the library where he
could see what had happened. What we found was disturbing.
A command line had been inserted and neither of us had put
it there. He checked the permissions at our host then
changed the password. As soon as the power was back on
and I was able to go back to work on RR, I found that the
Teacher's Pet section had been disabled. It was all there,
but the coding had been switched from lower to upper case
letters and it just won't work that way.
After that was repaired I went to work finishing the
conversion of Smart Alyx from Angelfire to Renae's Room.
That was confusing for me and Abe stepped in to help.
He discovered that the link to Smart Alyx had also been
disabled and again, it was a switch in capitalization.
Hopefully everything's been repaired by now.
Amid all this confusion I was able to get a few changes
in place. As mentioned above, Smart Alyx has been slightly
redesigned and moved from Angelfire to Renae's Room. A
lot more links have been converted and uploaded in the
links section. In this newsletter I've included a select
few for your use and enjoyment. I also managed to get a
few more fonts prepared and uploaded. Their list also
follows.
**************
Links - Home Economics
This is a small selection from the Home Ec section in
the 9-12 Curriculum area. This is by no means a complete
list. Please feel free to send your own suggested links
and I'll review them for inclusion on the site.
Learn to Knit or Crochet
http://www.learntoknit.com/
And the Bride Wore...
http://www.visi.com/~dheaton/bride/the_bride_wore.html
On this particular site I have to add that the only
thing to be learned from this site is how NOT to look
like a complete freak on your wedding day. My sides
were hurting from laughing so hard while I looked over
this site.
***************
Fonts
Below is a listing of the fonts added since the last
newsletter was mailed.
Hollow
Darkside, DashDot, Electric Hermes, Flashback Version 3,
Futurism, Impressed Metal, Ingothical Weird, Jasper and
Jasper Solid, Junebug, Mashy Droop Shadow
Gothic
Jasper and Jasper Solid
Munchies
Junebug
*****************
That does it for this issue. See you again in two weeks.