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Since it has been almost two weeks since our stove crapped out on us, Ron got on the phone again today. He started calling people from work around lunch time, and spent almost an hour on the phone here at home before he could finally talk to someone who knew what was going on.

The control board hasn’t even been shipped yet.

Why? They are waiting for a purchase order from the place we bought the stove from. This, despite the fact the item is not on the dealer or service company’s parts list; we have and freely gave out the part number for it in every phone conversation; we were and are willing to pay for the part AND for overnight shipping; Ron was told late on Friday January 25th by someone at the manufacturer’s head office that they would send it to us directly and we should have it the following Friday.

Now, the part number was verified the first time around when Ron initially called the number on the stove manual, only to be told they did not deal directly to consumers. The customer service rep gave him the number of their distributor which Ron immediately called. The distributor promised a return call because he needed to get a price for the board before he could ship one. After an hour and a half Ron called him back to find that he was still waiting on a price. The distributor referred Ron to a dealer and/or company that services the stoves. The third set of conversations went pretty much like the second. Finally, Ron called the franchise of the chain store where we purchased the stove. Having the backing of representing a huge block of consumers the chain’s customer service group was able to prompt the final call described in the previous paragraph.

And now we’re told they are waiting for a purchase order???

To top it off, the guy Ron spoke to today said, when told our stove model number, “It’s only 45000 BTUs, you can’t heat a house with that!” (This despite the fact that we obviously had through the coldest weather of the winter. Although we didn’t run the stove on highest setting, the electricity to create 45000 BTUs 24×7 is in the range of $1000/month)
This is from the guy who works at a pellet manufacturing plant. Seriously. Way to sell your product.

Is anyone else as dumbfounded as we are???

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Original post by Andrea

With part of my shift more towards work-at-home-schooling-mom, I pared down some of the networks I was on, and joined a business one.

I’m finding I use twitter more often now that I’m in “work” more, and I find LinkedIn to be possibly quite useful in the near future. (Boy, that was cryptic. )

Follow my tweets here.

Make me a linkedIn contact here if you haven’t already.

No idea what either one are? It’s okay, at least it’s not mySpace or Facebook.

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Original post by Andrea

Oh dryer, dear dryer so shiny and white.
When I open the door, you turn on the light.

So sparkly, so clean, so energy-saving,
You dry clothes in the same time it takes to clean them.*

An averge energy cost of seventy dollars per year,
I can give the power company a kick in the rear…

Since I only plan on using you half the time.
In summer, I’ll hang my wet clothes on the line.

The noise level too, is lower I find.
No longer will rumbles drive me out of my mind.

The door and the inside are impressively large.
I bet we’d fit inside - and I’m the one in charge.

I go on about you till folks think I’m lame.
But I wrote this and posted it, so I can say the same.

*Artistic license on the rhyme scheme there. I can do that. Also, this is evidence why I should not write poems, possibly ever again.

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Original post by Andrea

If you’ve recently downloaded a newer version of MU, you may have noticed on a fresh isntall that the plguings folder and the mu-plugins folder are not there. Or, maybe you’ve seen them referenced, and fidnign them not where they are suposed to be, got horribly confused. No worries.

There are not there because in the latest system they are empty, and thus not created in the zip. There are no default files included in either folder anymore, leaving that up to the site admins.

Just create them on the server, and you’ll be good to go.

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Original post by Andrea

- we went to Freddy Town on Saturday after the storm cleared up. Driving was fine, shopping was okay. We got some fun stuff, it was like Christmas all over again but without the $20 budget.

- we had supper at Wendy’s the fast food place and a basketball team showed up right when we came in, because we said “we’ll eat inside because it’s empty”. HA!

- the overhead music played “Love is a battlefield” and I spoke the lines before Pat sang until Meaghan almost crawled under the table with laughter and mortification. I even offered to do the dance routine from the video but she insisted I stop. When explaining the video of the song - girl runs away from home, becomes a prostitute, overthrows mean pimp in a dance-off at the bar and the girls scare him away with their shoulder shake (here I demonstrated) - well, let’s just say she wasn’t sure to believe me or not. In her mind, the eighties were a scary time. Parenting is a battlefield, I tell ya.

- almost daily I get a fabulous new and great idea of some possible website we could do. This time, we were discussing paint colors for the house. It needs to be painted at some point, and we haven’t really decided what colors. My great idea? Let the Internet pick. You know, grab a domain like paintmyhouse.com or pickmyhousecolors.com, slap up some photoshopped pictures of my house in various paint schemes and let the internet vote. We paint the house whatever scheme wins and we post the process and the finished result. Slap up some ads, maybe get a sponsor - ba da boom, ba da bing. Ron’s not sold on it though. Something about being stretched too thin and possible write-in votes.

- while thinking up paint schemes for the house, we took a drive downtown Woodstock and gawked at all the fine Victorian homes. And some not so fine. From the backseat, Emma said, “That house back there, the green one with the pink trim? Those people have no taste.”

- our pellet stove is still not fixed. They sent the part by regular mail, or maybe pony express. If it’s not here tomorrow, we’re calling. probably quite a few people.

- yesterday I cooked. I made won ton soup, spring rolls with rice paper wrappers and homemade sausage rolls. I am a really good cook. Just sayin’.

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Original post by Andrea

Like these.

Now some people like to know where they’re clicking, so put down any food or beverage and I’ll tell you. Ready? Okay.

They are mac-n-cheese nuggets. That’s right, macaroni and cheese. In nugget form.

My kids will eat a lot of strange things, and for Emma, mac & cheese and chicken nuggets are two fo the handfull of foods she *will* eat, but this?  The pictures of this item in our local flyer was met with “THAT IS SO WRONG!” and “Ewwww, grooosssss…”

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Original post by Andrea

This time last year, we bought this house. See how sad it was?

All cold and empty and neglected. Poor house. So we bought it - rescued it really, loving it and now fixing it up. Admittedly, we haven’t got very far yet and there’s still boxes everywhere. But look at it now.

Doesn’t it look happer? I mean, even despite the better lighting and the still-falling-apart-ness.

I love you house. It’s okay, we’ll have you all better as soon as we can. Starting when the mountain of snow melts. (We’ve made lists. Lots of them.)

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Original post by Andrea

The absolute first thing you want to do when your site is installed and running is change it off the default theme. There are actually two copies of kubrick bundled in MU. One is under the default folder, the other is under a theme folder called “home”. The only difference is this one makes use of the home.php file. You can see it in (naturally) wp-content/themes/home/home.php.

This follows WordPress’s template structure explained here. If you would like a relatively static home or landing page, this built in function is a handy way to get thing looking the way you want. Since you can literally put whatever you like it in, it can also be a nice workaround if you previously had some information on the main index page you’d like to integrate.

(As a side note, I feel it is a misnomer to call it a static page, when you’re running php on a dynamic page and can still pull in the loop of posts if you want.)

You can always whip up your own theme, if you are able, but then you probably won’t need the following advice if you can. Pick a nice well-designed and flexible theme, then get ready to dig around in it. Strip out everything you don’t want, but unless you change the theme a serious amount, please leave the designer’s credit in there. It’s just a nice thing to do.

There have been a lot of new themes cropping up in a magazine-style format, and I find they lend themselves well to the main blog on an MU install. See Mimbo, The Morning After, and for paid, Revolution - just to name a few. More are cropping up weekly.

The most comon question I see in the forums is people asking how to pull the most recent posts from the site onto the front page.

Easy. I use this plugin, mostly because I asked my handy hubby to do the hard work of writing the SQLs. All I did then was called the function right on the index.php page of my chosen theme.

Other people have used the sitewide feed plugin, then parsed it to display on the main page. (This also involves pasting code.) An example of how to parse a feed is on the dashboard page. Read how it’s done and follow along in that file. (wp-admin/index.php and index-extra.php)

Another handy plugin for the main page is the List All plugin. You can create a full list of all blogs (excluding ones marked private), and even use it again to show only the last x created blogs.

See a working example on my main page at homeschooljournal. It uses the most recent posts plugin in the “Lastest Posts” section, pulls a feedburner feed with code provided by them to show the latest comments sitewide, and uses the list-all plugin to show the last 5 blogs created on the right sidebar.

Don’t forget to disable the theme in the backend so your users will not be able use it on their blog.

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Original post by Andrea

I took the suggestion from Heidi in the comments and did indeed pull a two-in-one shot. First, my hair. GAH. Maybe we’ll move on. At least we cannot see the grey. We shan’t speak of it either, ‘kay?

Allrighty then. LOOKIT MY NEW FREEZER. Isn’t it shiny and white? And so, so empty. Actually, I noticed there was a block of shortening in there getting very cold. You know what that means? Pies. Meaghan pies.

Y’all should be way jealous.

Grocery day is on Thursday. Methinks this is gonna hurt a bit.

Coming up: I extoll the virtues of my new dryer. It is even more awesome and fabulous than the freezer. Seriously, I have to stop typing now and post or I’m just going to go on and on about it.

*bursts*

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Original post by Andrea

The new things are coming today. We get a bedframe! And a new dryer! (OMG, it’s *huge* inside!) And a chest freeze! Then we can FILL IT with yummy goodness! And Sarah gets a box spring!

YAY! (insert Kermit arm flail here.)

When she asked about delivery, and what time, all I said was not before 10am, and she said they’d call first. There’s no call yet. I bet they’ll make me wait until the afternoon. I even cleaned. Yeah, it’s that serious. (Okay, technically I am in the middle of cleaning up some limited areas, but still. Go with me on this.)

Should I be this excited about new appliances? Please tell me you are as freaky as me. It’s okay, it’ll be between us.

Want pics? I should post pics, shouldn’t I?

Oh man, I have it bad.

I have to go watch out the window now. You know, in case they got tied up and forgot to call and just come lumbering down the road.

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Original post by Andrea