Getting Ready for the 1st Contributor Weekend

This coming weekend is the first WordPress global contributor drive and I’m looking forward to trying something new. So far my experience with contributing to WordPress has been through creating subtitles on videos and attending WordCamps. So it’s kind of exciting to be venturing into a new realm.

It’s an online thing that lasts all weekend long, but here in Oklahoma City a few of us in our meetup group decided to get together at Chick-fil-A and work together. For me that means breakfast, a place for our girl to play, free WiFi, and seeing some familiar faces (we go there so much the staff greets us by name when we arrive).

So, between now and Saturday morning I’ll be reading all the info again to make sure I’m all set and ready to go when we get together. I haven’t looked at the support forums before so I have no idea if I’ll be able to answer any questions, but I’m looking forward to checking it out.

If you’re here in Edmond please join us if you can, and if not, you can join in online 🙂

Giving Amazon Prime a try…

Here’s a good one…the day our exchange students arrive the light for change filter in our fridge came on. It’s red and noticeable right by the water button.

I checked prices for a replacement at Lowes, Home Depot, and Amazon. In case you haven’t had to shop for one of these recently they aren’t cheap! All 3 places have the same one, for the same price at Lowe’s and Home Depot, but $20 less at Amazon.

So, we’re jumping into Amazon Prime – free 2 day shipping all year along with music, movies, and whatever else we’ll find out about. I figure just getting new filters throughout the year will almost pay for the membership, along with free shipping for anything else we decide to get.

Have you used Prime in the past? If so, what was your experience?

Wishing I’d read some reviews first

I tried a new toilet cleaning product yesterday. It was a total fail for us! The 4-year-old kept telling me “the blue thing has a strong smell”. She was absolutely right. Such a strong smell it permeated the front half of the house and the hallway. Yuck!

Here is the product (available at Amazon, but I picked it up at Target):

With two extra people in the house for a month I thought a little extra help cleaning the toilet could go a long way toward making it a clean space for everyone. These seemed like a nice minimal effort way to add a bit of cleaning. Bummer that it didn’t work! 

So, today after another complaint by my daughter and also kind of hating how my house smelled myself, I scraped it out of the toilet and thew it away, then took out the trash, burned some candles, cleaned the toilet again with our normal stuff, and am getting ready to bake some brownies, hoping the house will then smell like chocolate instead of yucky toilet cleaning gel.

Amidst the cleaning I took a quick peek at reviews and discovered many others had the same experience as me…the scent is just way too strong. Too bad there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to return a partial box with an excuse of we just couldn’t stand it.

Hopefully you’ll learn from our experience and try something else, as this one really was a bad choice.

Thankful for our village!

Last Thursday we decided to host 2 exchange students. We’d seen a friend sharing on Facebook that more families were needed and decided that if we moved Morgan’s office out the back room and into the front room/dining room/library it could work. The girls could have his office – since it’s actually a bedroom for the month.

Of course, we didn’t have a bed, let alone space for 2 to sleep! The guests will be middle school girls from South Korea. They arrive today. Yep, we decided on Thursday to host 2 girls arriving on Tuesday 🙂 They’re scheduled to stay about a month.

So, here’s where our village came in… a Facebook request for beds worked! We got a trundle frame and mattress from a friend. Conversations with other friends resulted in another frame, mattress, sheets, comforters, and a vehicle to pick them up in. Yep, a minivan to use – one that is brand new to the friend who loaned it!

So, we’re almost off to UCO to pick up the first girl and are looking forward to meeting both of them and learning a lot in the next month.