7 Quick Takes: November 18, 2011 (Vol. 104)

~ 1 ~

It seems like the weather lately has been so crazy!  In just the last couple of weeks, we’ve had lovely weather with no need for even a jacket, several hours of snow, and then one day of a crazy storm with tornado warnings and hail.  Not just little hail either.  This was what it looked like part of the way through the hail, as I tried to take a picture through some driving rain (so that’s why it’s not so crisp of a photo):

Yep, that’s our bed of red mulch.  By the time the storm was done, I couldn’t even see the mulch at all.  And, I was able to pick up some hail stones to show the kids a few hours after the storm.  Crazy!

~ 2 ~

Sometimes, you have to take extreme measures.

Today was my first day of having LeechBlock reinstalled as an add-on with Mozilla Firefox.  (I wrote about LeechBlock before when I first installed it in June 2010.)  I have slowly allowed myself more and more time allotted on the sites that I have combined into one category “social media.”  Finally, when my Firefox was running slow one day, I just deleted several add-ons, including LeechBlock.

Let me just tell you, I am not particularly productive when allowed to visit all of the sites in my custom “social media” list.  Sometimes, I’m barely even really visiting the sites, I’m just clicking between them because I want to see if anything is new or, more likely, I’m just procrastinating something else I should be doing.

I have now set up LeechBlock again, and I’ve put on the strictest limits that I have ever put on myself.  I ended up adding 10 minutes to my 24 hour allowable amount, but the time is still way under (WAY UNDER) what I would normally allow myself.

Want to know an unsurprising secret?  I actually got a lot of stuff done on the computer today that I haven’t been getting to lately.  I knew it should happen, but was still shocked at how much I got done while not mindlessly looking around somewhere like Facebook.

~ 3 ~

Social Media Tip: When you know that you’re on the clock (literally) every time you go onto a social media site, your visit suddenly becomes a whole lot more purpose driven.

Cheater Tip: If you feel like you need to stop by a Twitter party that your friends are hosting, you just might decide to use Tweet Chat to be able to follow the hashtag and participate for 15 more minutes than what I was allowing myself today.

~ 4 ~

Speaking of the computer and being online, I have a tip that could very well blow your mind, if you don’t already know it.

If you are browsing with multiple tabs and you accidentally close out a tab you didn’t mean to, you can press CTRL + Shift + T and it will reopen the last tab that you just closed.

Isn’t that awesome?  Or, maybe I’m the only person that sometimes mindless clicks away closing tabs only to say, “NOOOOOO!” because, invariably, it’s always a tab of something I have just happened upon that I have never seen before and can’t remember without going into my history for the day.

~ 5 ~

As long as we’re talking awesomeness, have you checked out my review for my Oreck Steam-It Steam Mop?  If you haven’t, be sure to click over to the review because I’m thrilled to be giving one away as well, thanks to Oreck. (It’s a $179.99 appliance, and I love it!  Plus, even if you think you don’t need it, enter the giveaway to have an amazing Christmas gift to give someone.)

~ 6 ~

I have finished two design projects in the past week.  The move from Blogger to WordPress (and a variety of other technical, behind the scenes tasks) for Lacy of Catholic Icing.  She wrote a very nice post about it too!

Also writing a nice post was Jen from Gricefully Homeschooling, for whom I just finished up a header, button, and set of custom social media buttons.

Know what else I finished this week?  Christmas shopping!  WooHoo!  (Oh, and the 125×125 button for my design site that I have here.  Double WooHoo.)

~ 7 ~

This weekend, I’ll do my second of the two craft shows that I signed up for this fall.  This is a more established, larger craft show, and one I have done in the past.  I’m excited to go and I’m hoping that it will be as successful for me as the small show that I went to two weeks ago.

As much as I love doing the craft shows, however, I think I’m going to be glad when I feel like I can put everything away and not really think about the craft shows again until next year.  Then again, maybe that’s just because I have my things sitting in our dining room area.  (Alas, my craft room is a crazy mess again.)

This post is linked to 7 Quick Takes and Weekly Wrap Up.