Last Day!

It is the last day of 2008. It is also the last day I will be a part of corporate America. I'm just wrapping up a couple things to hopefully make it is easier for my successors, but I'm pretty much all done.
I won't pretend I'm not completely thrilled. It's been a wonderful job, and I have nothing but nice things to say about Omniture. But it's also been a huge source of stress and a huge burden. Lori and I have talked about the pain of being a WAHM (that's Work-At-Home-Mom)- you can' feel like a good employee because you spend too much time focusing on your baby, and you can't feel like a good mommy because you spend too much time focusing on your job. No matter what you do, you fail. "No man can serve two masters" I guess.
It has always been my goal to be a stay-at-home mom. I've never been interested in permanent career life. I've known many admirable women who either by choice or obligation have worked after having kids- my mom was one of them and she did a great job of being both an employee and a mom. But then, I think she likes being busy. She's a very productive woman. I'll admit, I like my life a little slower than that. I get easily overwhelmed.
When I married Kenny, I knew there would be both advantages and disadvantages to being married to a school teacher. The last 2 weeks have been great, I LOVE that he gets to spend holidays and summers with his family. But living off just a school teacher's salary will be difficult- neither of us have any delusions about that. Fortunately for both of us, neither of us are big spenders. I would never have quit until we had proved we could live off of just his salary- my last 6 or so paycheck have gone straight to savings, so we're in decent shape.

So anyways, I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders, and we're very happy (all three of us, and Lucy too). Like, I don't know when I've felt more relieved.
I wonder how long it will be before I stop dreaming about how to track website info using javascript.

P.S. If anyone knows a techy person in Utah valley looking for a job, Omniture is a wonderful place to work!

BTW, I will be mailing away my cell phone back to work this week, so if you have my cell phone number (801-471-4658) you will need to change it to my home number (281-two five one-two four zero seven). You can always call Kenny's cell to get me too (which is t-mobile, if that makes a difference- 801-four seven one-four six five six).

Sub for santa

There have been a LOT of lay-offs in our ward recently and a lot of families are having hard times, financially. So our Relief Society presidency decided to do a Giving Tree/"Sub For Santa"- a tree with ornaments that has the name and christmas wish list for one member of our ward. In the end we had 30 ornaments (for 30 people- 5 families in our ward and 2 large families in a neighboring ward).

I was in charge of making the ornaments and collecting the gifts. People had from December 5th to December 21st to buy the stuff and get it to me.

First, I am amazed that everyone got their gifts back to me by the deadline on Sunday, with no reminders, no phone calls. That alone is a christmas miracle.

Second, the generosity was truly incredible. Our whole house was covered in Christmas presents. Each person on our tree got at least 4-5 gifts, in some cases as many as 15! Skateboards, church suits, DVD players, 100 dollar gift certificates... all for anonymous strangers in need. Even though it was a huge hassle, I'm so glad I was involved and got to see what goes on behind the scenes in our ward at christmas time. It was very touching.

PS I have the most wonderful husband in the world, he helped wrap the presents for 3-4 hours while I went on and off client calls. Hooray for Kenny, Husband to the Relief Society Secretary.

Someday I'll blog for real again

But for now, have more Daniel giggles (this time with video not just audio)


Yeah, sometimes I eat babies. They taste yummy.

Tis the season to be jolly and joyous

Fa la la!


You can't tell me that doofy, goofy grin didn't make you crack a smile:)
And my new siggy for the month:

Things I like

So in the last month, I've found a few new things on the internet that I love enough, I just have to share:

Motionbox.com-
This is actually an old client of mine I had completely forgotten about until recently. It's like youtube- you can upload and share films. But it's better, because you can actually EDIT the film ONLINE. You can even mix them- upload 5 videos and cut out pieces of each and make a new ubervideo, then share it. Since most of my baby videos are long and boring with short spurts of cute, this is a huge bonus. I find it very user-friendly too.

Mint.com-
K, I know it sounds sketchy but hang in there: this is a site where you can view all of your online financial accounts together- and it's free (think quicken, but online and free). So I can see my bank account, mortgage loan, student loan, brokerage account and credit card all in one place. You can have it send weekly emails summarizing ALL your finances together. It even sorts it for you into categories (for instance, groceries vs. utilities vs. entertainment) to make budgeting easier- and it will tell you "you've spent 60% of your monthly allotted budget for groceries" or "you've spent 20 dollars more on utilities this month than last month". It has nifty graphs and charts. You can set up alerts, too (which is really handy)- for instance: send me an email whenever my checking account gets below ___ dollars. It will also notify you of any banking fees that come through. It makes its money by having suggestions/ads on some screen letting you know where you could bank cheaper/with better rates- not intrusive and actually kind of helpful.
Here is where I sound sketchy but I promise it's not: to get it set up, you need only give it your online sign-ins and passwords for your accounts- no account numbers, routing numbers, nothing like that. It uses your sign on information once to find your account, then dumps it once it's established the account (so no, there is no hackable database out there storing ALL my personal sign-in info together). It is read-only- you can't transfer or withdraw money, or even get an account number off of it. It doesn't store any of your personal information- no SSN, no address- so in that way, it's safer than a lot of online banks if someone does happen to get your mint.com logon info. It's been recommended by PC World, PC magazine, it's backed by Verisign and TrustE... so yeah, GREAT free tool.

Gmail-
k, I know this is old news now. But I love the new themes and the options from the labs- I now have a pretty skin, tasks, calendar, news forecast... all on my gmail screen. Very nifty.

ChaCha
"The Human Search Engine". You can text from your phone (242-242- it spells "chacha") any question and a human will receive it and research it for you. For FREE! For instance, while on a long drive, you get in an argument with your husband about the name of an actor in a movie, you can text "who is the guy that plays Smee in Hook?" and some stay-at-home mom or starving college student will look it up for you and text back as soon as they find the answer (almost always within 3 minutes). It's true just texting google can give you an address... but chacha can give you human directions. They make their money by attaching tiny little ads at the end of their responses.
I'm a chacha guide (question answerer), I make a whole 20 cents each time I answer someone's question. General Conference was fun, I got a lot of LDS questions- "Where does Elder Marcos A. Aidukaitis's accent come from?" (brazil-born with scottish parents). So next time you have a nagging question but no access to a computer, text Chacha.

Goodreads.com
Great way to keep track of books you've read or want to read, review them, and compare to your friends and see their reviews. If you're on there, find me- just use my gmail address.

Hi there

Not too much to share this week. We are feeling completely better from what I've now concluded was the flu. Works has been overwhelming- I'd say this last month of my life has been perhaps the hardest. Not the worst, just the hardest. I've definitely grown a lot from stretching so much, if that makes sense.
I'm still playing with and LOVE my new camera. Recent pics:


Daniel and Santa Clause at the church Christmas social the other night(I wasn't there to see the santa, I was getting ready to perform O Holy Night in the other room*, but check out our awesome santa). Daniel was exhausted so this was the best we got:


Our christmas tree is up:

From December 2008

Also, tons of videos up on youtube now (mostly for my mother's sake... they aren't anything too exciting, just Daniel being his adorable self).

*which I failed spectacularly, by the way. It was my first time playing harp/singing at the same time. Unfortunately the mic set up wasn't great, the mic was on my right but the sheet music was on the left. I was trying to sing into the mic so I wasn't looking at my music and I lost my spot really bad- had to retry a measure in the middle FOUR times. Eh, well, it was just church, right? I am happy with how my voice sounded at least, even if the performance stank.
I actually had a bunch of people tell me today they liked my imperfect performance, they can tell I'm not without talent and they appreciate that I didn't let it kill the rest of the song. And now a bunch of mommies want me to teach their kids how to harp.

Thanksgiving Break Pictures

Well, we survived. Kenny finally got feeling better yesterday, and I'm pretty sure any residual exhaustion has more to do with Daniel teething than with me being sick.
As discussed in my last post, here's our thanksgiving "Feast"- turkey sandwiches, potato chips, stove top stuffing, hawaiian sweet rolls, grape jello with marshmallows, pumpkin pie, and Martenellis.

Unfortunately, between the two of us we only managed to eat one sandwich, a few bites of stuffing, and some jello. I even managed a few bites of pie before we had to throw it out yesterday. Such a waste.

The good news is Daniel got lots of good Daddy time in over the break. He learned about the nintendo DS:



Played with daddy's face:

Watched daddy play Smash Brothers:

Danced:

And giggled:



and was otherwise stinking cute: