Portland, OR

Hi friends! I've fallen behind on my posts. On a good note, we're finally fully relocated to Portland, OR. 

I must admit that I was a bit worried about getting lost. My worries were not unwarranted since Siri is constantly getting me lost. The good thing about getting lost is that you get acquainted with the city much faster than if Siri gave me the right directions.

For some odd reason the worst traffic day is Wednesday. Isn't that weird? not Monday but Wednesday. Portlanders are an interesting breed.

New Adventures

"The biggest adventure you can ever take is to live the life of your dreams."   - Oprah Winfrey

Today I start a new adventure, a new chapter in my life. I moved to Missoula, MT - 14 years ago with my family. This time I'm moving to Portland, OR with a family of my own. It's such an exciting time in our lives! 

Let's face it though, it was time to move on and I couldn't imagine a more perfect time than now. I've met some wonderful people and made some long lasting friendships.  I won't lie and tell you that I'm not sad to leave. I just never thought I would become so attached to Missoula, it must be the fact that this is where Little E. was born. I'll take all of wonderful memories and keep them close to my heart as we embark on our new journey. 

Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day to all of the wonderful moms! Being a Mom is a 24/7/365 type of job that never ends.  Today, I am thankful that I got to spend the day with my mom and my daughter. 

Stuff

How much is too much? Let's analyze this in terms of "stuff" and I say stuff because it can be related to almost everything.

We go to the store and buy things, we shop online and we acquire things through our friends and family. What a lot of us don't realize is that we really don't need everything we think we do. I've talked about Spring Cleaning and de-cluttering your electronic equipment and files. But today, I want to talk about the material things.

There's nothing like cleaning or even better yet moving to realize how much stuff you don't use. Yet, these possessions take up a lot of room. There's a rule about getting rid of anything you haven't used in a year. That's when the emotions start setting in. We become attached to things we no longer use because it was either worn or received for a special occasion.

That's when we need to gather the courage to separate our needs from wants and give these items a new life. Instead of accumulating dust, said items will receive the love and appreciation they deserve. So take sometime and clear out the stuff that you've been meaning to get rid of for years but haven't been able to. Think of it this way. Get rid of it in your own terms, otherwise you'll have great items tucked away in a box.

Government Alerts

May 1st, 2013

I woke up to my phone beeping at me, and for the second time in a week it wasn't my alarm, or my child (which should technically count as an alarm!). Nope, it was a Weather channel Freeze warning. Having lived in Montana for a longtime I'm used to such warnings. Except that instead of having to get up and watch he morning news, these alerts are conveniently delivered to my phone. I did mention that this was not the first alert of the week.

The first alert was an Amber Alert on Monday morning. A little boy had been kidnapped by his parents in Kalispell. The fact that the Amber Alert when out to everyone with a smart phone at 7:00 am as soon as it was reported by the police department. I was surprised that it took the media 30 min's to report the Amber Alert, by then all of my friends on Twitter and Fb had posted and "re-tweeded" or "shared" the car and suspects information. When the suspects changed cars once again Twitter and Facebook were the first to report it. Thankfully it only took a couple of hours to track down the suspects and quickly get the little boy to safety.

Thanks to technology the Amber Alert received enough attention to make a difference in a little boy's life. Shortly after, everyone wanted to know how they had received such information since they had not signed up for any alerts. Turns out that most people are not aware of this feature in your phone. They're under Government Alerts and you should have two options Amber and Emergency. These are set to on by default and can be manually turned off at anytime.

Personally, I wouldn't turn these settings off for many reasons.
1. I am a mom, and I just couldn't imagine not being able to help bring a child back to safety.
2. It's simple. Can you imagine how much faster it would've probably been to issue an Emergency alert for the Boston bombing suspects in Watertown when the mad search started?

I am glad that these safety features are incorporated into our phones. I know that in the future they'll probably be more useful than they currently are. It's good to see first hand the difference that these alerts can make in someone's life. I just hope that everyone checks their phone and doesn't turn these alerts off.

What do you think about these alerts? Would you change anything about them?

Coworkers

When we go to college we dream about having that perfect job. For some people the perfect job for some means that everyone gets along and is also treated fairly, you move ahead ad you never worry about anything else. Then there are the nightmare jobs. Those are the ones where very unprofessional, backstabbing, people work and you have to deal with them or do you?

The following article provides tips on how to deal with these situations. I found it quite interesting because it's a topic that a lot of people are not willing to talk about but it impacts the entire company.

http://www.divinecaroline.com/life-etc/career-money/ten-tips-dealing-backstabbing-coworkers

Not all jobs make you miserable, because if they do, you should reconsider your employer. At the end of the day you'll always find nice people and mean people. Just follow the guidelines in the article and you're bound to find success!

Information

How much reading material is considered normal? I recently (2 months ago) discovered an app called Pocket. Pocket is so wonderful, that I wonder why I had not discovered it earlier. Pocket allows you to safely send an article to the Application, and read it later. What? Are you so lazy that you can't just look it up later?

This is not about laziness, it's the fact that there are only so many articles that a person can read in one day. I bet that if I stop Facebooking so much I could get more accomplished. But, let's be honest if I don't read something the minute that it comes out, I will probably forget about it. Unfortunately That leaves me with two options. Option 1: Save the article as a tab in my browser. Option 2: Email myself with the article url to read later.

Here's why both options failed:

Option 1: Failed when I realized that Safari on my iPhone will only allow me to keep 8 tabs open. Who on earth made that decision? Why 8? Ten would have been nice if you ask me. So what do you do when you run out of browser tabs? If you're me you install a second browser! Ah ha! I was so proud of myself for solving my dilemma. I'm sure that this is something that most people will never encounter. This was all fine until one day Peter asked me to look something up while we were driving and I couldn't. What? That's right. I had maxed out Safari and Chrome doesn't work without Wifi. Ugh! Back to square one.

Option 2: The old, I will e-mail myself so that I don't forget. Except this doesn't really work when I have to dig through my 5 email accounts to find out where it went. See how inefficient that is? I'm sure that most people don't need FIVE e-mail accounts, but that'll have to be another post.

In comes Pocket to save the day. If I'm on Twitter I can save it as Read Later and the article will be safely stored. it's way that Pocket displays the articles I send is by showing them like Google Reader would. A nice organized manner, I can read offline without any hassles.

There is so much information that comes out on a daily basis that this is the only way that I have found to stay afloat. This is the risk of being connected and staying up-to-date.

How much reading do you do online? What do you like to read?