Anne

I got this quiz from Mrs Blythe, whom I found through someone else whom I found through Mama...


You are Anne. Find out more about her here.

Then I got this one off the site the other was on:



I can't remember the first time I read Anne of Green Gables or watched the movie. It seems like I've always loved Anne Shirley. She's one of my favorite literary characters, and I read Anne of Green Gables many times growing up. I'd like to read the books again. I love the first two movies though, but refused to see the third after hearing how dreadfully inaccurate it was with all the characters. They changed them up terribly and messed up everything.

Now a few quotes from Anne:

"Isn't it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive--it's such an interesting world. It wouldn't be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it? There'd be no scope for imagination then, would there?"

"Marilla, isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?"

"There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting."

"And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?"

1958

You Belong in 1958

If you scored... 1950 - 1959: You're fun loving, romantic, and more than a little innocent. See you at the drive in! 1960 - 1969: You are a free spirit with a huge heart. Love, peace, and happiness rule - oh, and drugs too. 1970 - 1979: Bold and brash, you take life by the horns. Whether you're partying or protesting, you give it your all! 1980 - 1989: Wild, over the top, and just a little bit cheesy. You're colorful at night - and successful during the day. 1990 - 1999: With you anything goes! You're grunge one day, ghetto fabulous the next. It's all good!

What Year Do You Belong In?

I figured I'd get something in the 50's. :)

Removed

Post removed...

Updates

I updated my menu with a few more blogs I read. I've been meaning to add the rest since I got this blog, but just never took the time to get the links together and add them. There are some others I read on xanga which I didn't link to because I have them in my xanga subscriptions, and can keep up with them that way. I have a xanga because you can't comment on one if you don't have one, but I don't update there much. Sometimes I'll copy a post from here and post it there, but that often.

Rescues and Rulings

The circuit court judge today ruled that Abraham Cherrix would not have to report for chemotherapy, and that his parents should have full custody of him. A new court day has been set for August 16.

This is an incredible story in which some IDF soldiers made a daring rescue of Israeli and Jewish hostages from Uganda in 1976.

Various Updates

Here is an article by WorldNetDaily regarding Abraham Cherrix and the judge's ruling, but I can't find anything about the appeal they made today. The state has threatened to put him in juvenile detention with drug dealers if he doesn't comply, or to put him in a foster home. Whatever happens, they're determined to give him the treatment, if they have to take him away and strap him down in order to do so. I find it astounding that they can take someone away and do that because they don't like the medical decision a person made. I fully agree with the decision Abraham and his parents have made, and I think it's tragic that the government is trying to control this aspect of our lives. Please be praying for them as they continue to fight for their rights. I'm about to watch Abraham on Hannity and Colmes.

I had a lot of fun Saturday. I took a class on Sacred Harp singing, which I enjoyed. I took that workshop last year as well. I love singing the harmony, though we had to hit some rather high notes in the section I was in! I also took a workshop on playing the tin whistle, which I'm learning. Then I took a beginner's flatfooting class and learned a few basic steps. Two of the people in that group were cloggers, so they told us about clogging and its history and taught a couple of clogging steps. I think that was the part I enjoyed most. I also played in a few hours of jam sessions. My favorite part then was when most people were eating dinner; we had a smaller group(about ten people) and we played a lot faster. After all that, there was a concert, which I enjoyed a lot. There was a wonderful autoharpist, Jo Ann Smith, who played the autoharp beautifully. You can listen to clips on her site.

As a lot of you probably know, I joined a traditional music group back in the spring. They're breaking for the summer and starting up again in September. Even before the break, I was trying to decide if I wanted to keep playing with the group or not, but I've decided not to go back. The music is nice and I enjoy it sometimes, but that's not the kind of music I want to devote a lot of time to playing. It would take up one night a week to meet with the group, practice during the week, then possibly performances from time to time. I'd rather spend that time on other things, or other kinds of music.

I've also decided I'm not going to be doing much more running. I haven't been running in about two and a half weeks because it's just so hard on my lungs. Even if I'm not feeling bad from the asthma, if my lungs are bothering me in the least, I can't push myself to run because of the asthma. Even if something like dancing or walking doesn't bother me, running is much harder on my lungs and I can't take a lot of it. The times I can run are so sporadic, I'll start getting my muscles and feet used to it, then I won't be able to run for a while, so by the time I can run, I'll have to get used to it all over again. Then after running once, I might not be able to run for a couple more weeks, then I just have to start all over again. So because of my health, I think it's best not to push it.

Also, I think we have a cold going around the family now. Hannah, Rachel, and I all woke up feeling bad today, and it seems to be a cold. At least, I think that's what I have, and they're having similar symptoms.

You can't see any changes yet, but I'm working on changing the layout of our evangelism site now. I'm hoping to get that up within the week. After that, I'll probably work on changing my other site around and fixing it up.

Abraham Update

Friday, a judge ruled that Abraham Cherrix, the boy I wrote about in my last entry, must undergo the chemotherapy. An article about the ruling can be found here, and more information here.

It's sad that the judge can make such a ruling. A girl his age could have an abortion without parental consent. In Virginia, where he lives, someone his age can appeal to be emancipated
from his parents. However, Abraham can't make the decision to treat his cancer naturally, even with his parents' approval. Please be praying for them as they make an appeal to have the judge's ruling stayed.

Medical Treatment

I think this is a very sad example of both how our rights are being denied and how our lives are trying to be run too much by others. This 16-year-old boy is having to fight for the right to decide how he should be treated medically. He went through chemotherapy for Hodgkin's Disease, and was effected so adversely from the chemo, he almost died. He feels certain that he would die were he to undergo another chemo treatment. He and his family want to try to treat the disease naturally because of the effects the medical treatments had on his body. However, social services have stepped in, charging the family with medical neglect and trying to get a court order saying Abraham must go through another round of chemo, and the family is facing the possibility of losing custody of him. I'm trying to find a more recent update on the case. It is interesting to note that the family homeschools. Here is the link to a good blog entry about the issue, and this article speaks of the possibility of Abraham being put in jail for refusing the treatment.

Though much milder in comparison, I've gone through a lot of trouble with asthma medicines making me really sick, so lethargic I was doing well to walk through the house, and the doctor wanting me to take a higher dosage. I could tell how my body was reacting well enough that I knew the medicine was making me sicker, and more medicine would only make me worse. The doctor didn't think that was it, but it was later proven that medicine could indeed have those side effects, and up to 80% of asthma deaths are caused by those so-called preventative drugs. Sometimes patients can tell better than doctors how their bodies will respond to something, though doctors can think they know everything and should have the right to decide. We should have the freedom to decide for ourselves. It's also tragic that the parents could be threatened with losing custody for simply trying to do the best thing for their child's health. It's not as if they're against it while the son wants the care. It's astounding to me that the doctors and social workers want to be able to tell this boy what to do when it's his life and his body, and he even says another round of chemo would kill him. What kind of "American freedom" is that?

Music

Saturday, I'll be spending my day at the second annual Bayou City Old Time Music and Dulcimer Festival(that's a mouthful!). I went last year and enjoyed it immensely. They hold workshops during the day, with jam sessions constantly playing in the main room, and there is a concert that night. Last year, I took a guitar workshop and a class on shaped note singing, and played in a total of approximately five hours of jam sessions. It was quite an experience to play in jam sessions with so many other instruments! You can read more about my thoughts on that here, in the blog entry I wrote afterwards. I'll have to get in a lot of practice before Saturday to toughen up my fingers, but I think it will be a lot of fun.

Decisions

It's taken me a few days, but I've finally decided I'm going to stick with Blogspot for my blog, and just make my other site for things like my writings, etc. I can be so indecisive at times, so I couldn't make up my mind at first. I like the simplicity of Blogspot, but I do like being able to have the other pages on my site when I want them. What finally settled the decision for me was the issue of spam. I have to delete two or three spam comments off my other blog every day. I get email alerts when someone comments, and I would get alerts each day about a comment being posted on some old entry. I'm getting rather tired of that, and the security step I tried before didn't work so well, as some people weren't able to comment then. At least if I start getting such comments here, I can use their word verification setting to cut back on that. I've been wanting to post some lately, but haven't been able to decide which blog to use! I'll post a notice over there, then only post here after that. My one hangup about not using that one anymore was that I wanted to keep my archive, so I'm going to work on a way to link to them from here. I'm going to be rebuilding our evangelism site soon, and I'm working on other websites for family members, so I've got plenty of computer work to keep me busy already. It feels nice to have something simpler for myself now.

Last night, I practiced my guitar for quite a while, working on my flatpicking. I hadn't practiced much lately, so my fingertips are sore. The metronome I use is on my computer, and sometimes I play along with recodrding I have on the computer, so I play sitting in my computer chair so those things are easily accessible. Well last night, I was working on one of the songs, and had gotten it up to a decent rate of speed along with the metronome. I took it up a bit faster, then I just couldn't get it at that rate of speed. I kept focusing too much on either the playing or the metronome, and that would get me off on the other thing. I had a blog open on my computer, and something caught my attention and I started reading it while playing. After about a paragraph, I noticed I was playing perfectly in sync with the metronome, and having no trouble with the speed at all. I came to realize I try to focus too much on where my fingers are moving instead of just playing. I knew the song well, so there really was no need to think about it that much. I get so caught up with thinking I'm going to make a mistake, I overanalyze everything I'm doing, which then causes me to get off. I set the metronome to go faster, and just played, aware of the metronome, but not concentrating too much on any one thing. That helped me tremendously, and I began to see a great deal of improvement. I got down some of the easier songs, and moved to some with just about all eighth notes. I practiced until my fingers were too tired to keep moving so much, but it was great to be able to see myself making some improvement. :)

Repairs...

I just got part of my site fixed! So now the rest is in the hands of the tech support...I don't know how long that will take though, or even if they will be able to fix things. But at least I've gotten some work done on my blog, and I posted there referring people here and explaining a bit of the problem. I'm about to go fix Mama's now and do the same for hers.

Edit: I fixed it!!!! I'm so excited now! I fixed all the problems! Well, I found the solution and repaired one of the pages, anyway. I still have a few more to do, but I know how to do it now and it shouldn't take long.

I'm not sure what to do about blogs now. I was actually wanting to take a break from working on any website stuff for a few days. I decided Tuesday night to take a few days away from it, then I woke up to all these problems yesterday. I'm going to be completely rebuilding Daddy's site, and part of me wants to stick with the simplicity of this now. So I don't know yet what I'm doing with all my blogs.

Blogs

Things aren't looking too good for my old blog right now. Because of some of the problems the server is having, I can't use the blogging software. The main page of my blog is run through the software. I had thought about putting up a notice on my main page that the blog part wasn't working, and linking over to here. But the only way I can find to do that right now is to delete all the blog files, which would mean I'd lose my archives, etc. I'm going to try to find a way to back those up, which would be something good to do anyway, but if I can't do that, I'm not sure what to do. I talked to tech service about the subdomain problem, and they are supposed to call me back within 24-48 hours. I didn't talk to them about the blogging problem, as at that point, I hadn't yet figured out what was causing it. I know now, but I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is just one big muddled mess!

I thought of something good today. At least I hadn't made all those big updates on my site before this happened! I would have put in a lot of time on something that would have gotten all mixed up. Maybe I can keep up that Pollyanna-mentality and not stress out over all this anymore...

First post!

My first post here! Most of you reading this probably know already, but I had to switch over here from my other blog because of technical difficulties. The server that was hosting our domain has been making some changes recently, merging with another company or some such thing, and that's causing problems for many of the users. Our main site, Master's Key, is working just fine, but our other sites branching off of it aren't working properly. You should be able to see my old blog by using this link: http://lindsay.masterskey.org/index.php, but you can't comment, and I can't add new entries. Mama's blog is having the same problem. I think this is most frustrating because I've just been putting in all these hours trying to fix up Mama's site and get mine ready to switch around, and now I can't do any of that. Ah well. Life goes on.

Since I can't use that blog, I decided to set this one up, but it's taken me all evening to decide what to call it. I remembered I used this name for my old blog a while back, and had a layout for it, so I thought I might be able to use the same layout here. I'll work on it and see if I can
fix that up. I have so much fun fixing layouts, as I like being able to get creative with them and make new designs.

Why The Last Homely House, you might ask. The Last Homely House is a place in Imladris from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Nestled in the mountains, nearly impossible to find unless you know where to look, Imladris is a beautiful haven where elves reside. Music, singing, and storytelling abound, and the peaceful atmosphere is a welcome refuge for a weary soul. Since I love music, singing, stories, and nature, I find all that very appealing. Also, Tolkien's beautiful descriptions in Lord of the Rings are what inspired me to want to be a writer, which is another reason I like using something from his works.