My Guideposts--Number 107

Fail to plan? Plan to fail!

 The saying has been attributed most often to Ben Franklin, who is also credited with having said, "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

More recent variations:
“Fail to plan, plan to fail.” Carl W. Buechner
“Failures don't plan to fail; they fail to plan.” Harvey MacKay
"He who fails to plan is planning to fail." Winston Churchill (during WW II) 

 

My Guideposts -- 106

Live strong.

Act bold.

Be brave.

Nothing's too hard to do.

 Always believe.

~James Hellwig

The Ultimate Warrior 

Friday Favorite -- Fuzzy Flannel Sheets

Growing up, my least favorite part of a northern California winter was climbing into a cold bed. My toes took eons to warm up in those cold sheets no matter how many of Aunt Mabell's quilts and wool blankets were piled on top!

Brrrrr.  Still makes me shiver thinking about it.

The high desert is a lot more comfy in winter even if it is a whole lot colder since we have such low humidity.  Sheets seldom get clammy-cold.  Which explains why this is only the second year we've owned a set of flannel sheets. What a luxury!

When the nights drop into the single digits or teens, I make our bed with a set from Costco.  They are the same color as a tub of vanilla bean ice cream. These sheets feel as good as ice cream tastes!

I hop into a vanilla-colored nest of warm fuzziness, top and bottom.  No cold toesies.  No shivers.

Just fine, fuzzy, furry, fluffy, fizzy, fabulous, friendly flannel.  Yum!

 

How to Easily Backup Your Blog at Blogger/Blogspot

The beginning of a new year is an ideal time to backup your blog.  

I was a good girl and just saved all my glorious pearls of wisdom from 2014.  I'm no computer whiz but it's easy!  Really truly pinky promise!  At least, it is on Blogger aka Blogspot.  

I can't speak to any other platform.  Sorry 'bout that.

First, you'll have to open your blog in Blogger (preferably in a separate window so you can read these instructions and toggle over to your blog to carry them out.)
 There on the left side, all the way down at the bottom, is a little wrench icon called SETTINGS.  You'll want to click that.

At the bottom of the menu you just opened is the completely uninformative word OTHER.  But that's the one you want. Click.

Near the top of your page you should see the title BLOG TOOLS and in blue it will say 

Import blog     Export blog     Delete blog

You want to select EXPORT BLOG.  Don't worry, your posts aren't going to disappear.  What you are doing is copying the whole shebang to a safe and secure location where Blogger can't accidentally lose every word you've ever published.  Your blog may not be Tolstoy (or maybe it is) but you've put time into selecting photos, writing and editing, reading comments and, as unlikely as it is, I've heard of bloggers whose posts that simply up and disappeared into the North Woods one day, never to be seen again.  

Big collective "ouch!" here.

A window will pop up to reassure you that you are doing the right thing and merely backing up your blog.

So select DOWNLOAD with a happy heart.

Yet another window will open asking you if you want to Open With (a default program) or

SAVE FILE.  So select SAVE FILE and push OK.

Great!  You've downloaded your blog, every comma, every paragraph, every comment.

You've essentially copied your blog from Blogger/Blogspot to your own hard drive.  But your hard drive is subject to various ills--viruses, malware, old age--so you need to find secure storage to park all the info. Here in the cottage, we have an external hard drive which is where I save my valuable photos, videos, blog data, etc.  You could choose to put yours on a DVD.  Or maybe up in the Cloud.  I share the external storage with my sweetie so I have my own section and a file I have brilliantly named Blog Backup.

Ahem...moving on.

You'll find your downloaded blog under My Documents (click),  Downloads.  I find My Documents when I push my Start button.  It's also under My Computer/Local Disc (C:)/your Documents.  There's always more than one way to access data. 

There, you'll find it listed alphabetically under "blog" along with the date you downloaded it.

i.e., blog-1-14-15

Right click on the icon or title and CUT (or COPY** if you're the nervous type), then PASTE in your chosen safe storage.

**If you selected COPY, you can now first check that you successfully exported your blog into your safe storage before you go back and hit CUT.

YOU'RE DONE!

See, told ya it was easy. 

I'll bet the hardest part was deciding where to save it.  Am I right?

One last trick.  Copy this post onto your blog, give it a catchy title like HOW TO BACKUP MY BLOG, and save it as a Draft rather than publishing it.  You've put it into an easily found and easily remembered place so next January you can do the same thing again. 

Stay shiny,


Parties to visit for more fun, inspiration and eye-candy and how-to's:

My Romantic Home: Show and Tell Friday 

French Country Cottage: Feathered Nest Friday 

Funky Junk Interiors: Party Junk 

Between Naps on the Porch: Met Mondays

Miss Mustard Seed:  Furniture Fridays

 

Chic Calfornia Be.YOU.Tiful Party

My Guideposts- Number105

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves. 

~His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

Je suis Charlie.  Islamic State urging producing babies as future jihadists.  North Korean bluster.  I can't change any of them, but I can produce an expanding bubble of peace in my own space that will reach others and bring them peace.


Mindfully,

Friday Favorite - Simple Enjoyment

In the "Trying To Be A Better Blogger and Post More Often" category, I've had the idea of featuring one thing that's brought me joy during the week for a while but I never followed through.  I regularly find myself looking at something I'm using and thinking, "Gee, I love this".  They are almost always vintage items I've had for years, but sometimes I discover that things I didn't know I needed are amazing additions to daily life.

So here goes, my first Friday Favorite: My Dish Drainer.  Exciting beyond belief, right?  But honestly, every time I look at my dish drainer recently, I smile.

I have a dishwasher that I could (but don't want) to live without.  Our '50's bungalow didn't have one so I was more than a little excited when we bought a new house With A Dishwasher. 

Although it turned out to be a dishwasher that I'd turn on then leave to grocery shop.  Or go upstairs and use the sewing machine.   Or wander outside to pull weeds.  Noisy, much?   We never started it up when we wanted to have a conversation or watch TV or eat dinner.

There are some things that are not meant to go in dishwashers though--like wooden knives and cutting boards, aluminum measuring cups, melamine bowls--so they get washed by hand.

After twenty-five years of noisily but efficiently cleaning dishes, Dishwasher #1 began having issues (I can relate) and a new quiet model has since been installed (thankfully my husband has not replaced his older and noisy Wife #1). 

Those wooden/aluminum/melamine items still have to be washed individually though.  Hence the dish drainer. The current one is as old as our granite counter tops. Well, not as old as the granite pluton that spawned them originally. 

That would be silly since plastic didn't exist then.  

Neither did humans, now that I think of it. 

When we gleefully demolished our ceramic tile and grody grout a few years back, we bought a clear plastic dish drainer that wouldn't obscure our amazing smooth granite counter.  Years of cradling wet dishes left the rubber with a cloudy residue from unknown minerals in our generally fabulous water straight from Lake Tahoe.  Not pretty 'though still fairly see-through.

New Year, new eyes.  As I dried the dishes recently I actually looked at the drainer, saw the residue and made a change.  Not by buying a new drainer--applying a bit of elbow grease showed how easily the cloudiness could be eliminated.  A baking soda paste and a soft cloth revealed a clear, good-as-new surface.

So humble dish drainer, thanks for making my dishwashing chores a bit more beautiful and satisfying.

And the moral of the story (it occurs to me as I type) is that I have the power to improve life in lots of ways if I just open my eyes and make the effort.  I'm betting it works on people and relationships as well as dish drainers.  Grin.

Stay shiny,

My Cool Old Horse

Last October I bought a cool old horse at My Friends and I in Niles.

The horse caught my eye immediately.  I loved that it was a draft horse (my ranching family has a history of draft horses: my grandpa's Star that my mom drove during haying season, my uncle's Belgian mares, and a hitch and wagon owned by some cousins currently.  I loved the patina--but a bargain it wasn't. I walked past it a second time and found myself envisioning a Christmas tree being hauled home and was tempted, but the price still made me think twice.  Well, the third time I passed it...I gave in.  If an object is calling your name that insistently, what else can you do?

When I got to the register, my saleslady said she was glad someone wanted it.  She just thought it was a cool old horse so she'd obtained it for her booth.   I laughed when I saw my receipt.

(It's a bit faint, but it says "cool old horse".) Yeah, that's the price too.

Getting a Christmas tree for my draft horse to pull was easy--Walmart has bottle brush trees in various sizes and guises every year. 

You might notice that the tree it has a very realistic trunk.  I just pulled off the white plastic base, used my pruning shears to cut a branch the appropriate length, drilled a hole in said branch and glued the tree wire into it.  Easy upgrade!

Next project was giving the horse a harness.  I Googled "horse collar harness images", then grabbed some Sculpey and shaped my own version.

 After baking it, I painted it and then rubbed it with dark shoe polish--it looks just like leather!  All of the sudden you can see my cool old horse leaning into her load.

For the holidays I used doubled-over brown binding tape as traces (the straps that attach to the load being pulled) to let my cool old horse haul the tree home from the woods.

I plan to find some leather shoelaces to create traces as well as attach a swingle tree for a bit more authenticity.  Don't you love the evocative sound of "swingle tree?"  You can almost tell what it is from its name:  a wood piece between the traces and the tree   There would actually be several more pieces to a working harness but a harness, traces and swingle tree will do the job.

I'd been on the lookout for a vintage pickup that needed a Christmas tree on top but obviously the Universe thought I should use a horse instead. Good call, 'Verse.

 Stay shiny,