I am a Host Mother

We are hosting an exchange student from Japan for the school year and she arrived this week.  She wasn't the only excitement in our week: my youngest son Jason came back from a week in Indianapolis with his uncle on Tuesday, my daughter Jessica came back from 6 weeks in Japan as an exchange student and a week with her great-aunt in California on Wednesday, and our host-daughter Aya arrived on Thursday.  In a mere 3 days we went from one mostly adult kid at home to 4!  I am happy to have them back and to add one more to our family. Friday we took our Aya on a brief driving tour of town, including the town beach.

Aya and Jessica at the beach

So far everyone is working hard to communicate and mostly succeeding.  Aya has jumped right in and helped with setting the table and cleaning up after meals with the other kids.  The other kids have been open and helpful and I am enjoying it all.  I know there will be some difficult times in the year to come, but it's a good feeling to see everyone start out with such positive efforts and good intentions.

This coming week we go into the school to register Aya for classes, Jessica has band camp all week, and I have my final week with Jeff, my oldest, before he's off to college for his sophomore year.  The summer just flew by and I hate to see him go.

Soon school will start and we will all settle into a routine, but until then, we have 2 more weeks of relative freedom to take advantage of.  I'd better get busy.

Shelley in CT

It's the little things...

I've been trying to catch up on the mending in addition to all the summer outside projects (like weeding, mulching, sealing the driveway, cleaning the gutters) and have only been sporadically successful.  There are still a number of items in the mending pile, but I actually did some sewing from scratch!  It was not a romantic item, but rather a practical item that I found I needed after I bought the umbrella clothes dryer.  I found that as I put the items on the line it was a real pain to keep reaching down to a bucket of clothespins.  I needed an apron with a big pocket.  One that I could access with either hand.

Voila!

 I took a regular apron pattern and shortened it, and cut that main pattern piece out of red fabric.  Then I cut out a second piece in a blue print, but I had folded up about 4 or 5 inches of fabric in the middle of the apron before I cut out the piece (so the sides of the two pieces had the same shapes but the blue print piece was wider).  Then I cut out a curved piece from the top outside corners of the blue piece and bound that edge with bias tape.  I placed the blue print piece on top of the red piece and took about 4 pleats across the bottom of the blue piece so that the curved edges matched up.  I bound the entire edge with bias tape.  Then I attached it to the waistband and I have a wonderfully efficient clothespin apron!  It didn't take very long to make and I am so pleased with it.  I have been using it regularly as I put out my wash in all this summer sunshine.

Hard Drive Crash !*%#@!

Well, it happened again, This is the second laptop I've had whose hard drive has failed (so I've been spending my computer time on fixing problems rather than surfing and posting).  I was very proud of myself for buying a new hard drive, removing the old one and installing the new one all by myself (I found instructions online, using my daughter's computer).  I reinstalled my operating system and drivers and updates and antivirus program, and then I went to my backup to try to restore all my data.  Sadly, this is where everything went wrong.  My external hard drive with backup program didn't come with any instructions; I plugged it in when I bought it, the program downloaded, and I worked my way through it.  I've even used it to restore data from earlier computer problems.  Unfortunately, this time, because I had replaced the hard drive and had to reinstall everything, I should have restored in a different way, but there was no way for me to know that because there were no instructions with the backup program!  Once I had connected and installed the backup disk and started figuring out how to restore from my backups, the program started an automatic backup all by itself, which rewrote the file that organizes all the backups and thereby prevented me from accessing any of my older backups.  I emailed the company for tech support, and they helped me retrieve a little bit of my data, but the bulk of it is inaccessible.  What really bothers me is that all the backups are still there on the disk, but the program cannot access them, and there is no other way to access them using another program.  BUT, I did a little more searching online (google is my friend!) and discovered that there is such a thing as a hard drive enclosure with a SATA-usb connector, so I can try to connect my old hard drive to my computer and possibly access the data (pictures and documents) that way.  I have ordered this wondrous tool and now can only hope that my old hard drive is not so corrupted that I cannot access anything at all.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed, and being very thankful that my son is a computer science major and will help me in my quest!

Shelley in CT