2012 New Year's Resolutions

1. Stop procrastinating.
2. Lose weight but not until I stop procrastinating.
3. Take a photography class to learn how to use my new Canon Rebel Ti3 and all the lenses and filters.
4. Talk less, listen more and laugh even louder.
5. Eat more vegetables.
6. Purge 1/2 of my wardrobe because I only wear 1/10 of it.
7. Attempt to wear something other than black pants to work every day.
8. Blog more often without worrying about how it may be interpreted.
9. Learn how to bake something that becomes my signature dessert.
10. Not eat the dessert in its entirety. (See #2.)
11. Make more playlists.
12. Share my love of reading with Troy.
13. Teach the puppy how to sit, shake and stay
14. Grow pumpkins for Halloween.
15. Print some of the 15,000 pictures off the hard drive and put them in an album.
16. Go water skiing again.
17. Go snow skiing again.
18. Shoot a gun again.
19. Play golf again.
20. Go to the beach more often.

Likelihood that I'll do all of these in 2012: 60%.

*Photo by Julie Dreelin's Beach Productions

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Pinterest has my Interest

It’s safe to say that I spend a ridiculous amount of time online. As I joked recently, if my digital footprint were an actual shoe, I’d be shopping with Kobe Bryant.

Recently I have been turned on to a site called Pinterest.
(This is not paid, they don’t know who I am past my profile that I created, WebSavvyMom.com.)

It’s a wonderful arena where like-minded individuals you may follow on Twitter or are friends with on Facebook post things of interest to them. However, for me, it opens up so many virtual doors to things I may not have otherwise found by surfing the internet.

You can create pages to group similar items for your own reference but Pinterest friends can follow them or repin to their friends.

I have created an account and when I open up Pinterest, here is what I see initially. You can use your Twitter or Facebook logins to avoid having to remember yet another password.



The site is showing a variety of recently pinned items.

You can narrow it down by category. I selected Crafts and DIY.


I haven’t been on this time wasting website long but I have created a few boards of similar things.



I’ve already purchased Dr. Suess’ “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” with the idea to have Troy’s teachers secretly autograph it, leave a story about him or provide words of wisdom each year until he graduates from high school after seeing the idea pinned on this site.

I try to remember as I’m browsing through other websites is to pin items that I find interesting for others to find. I did it recently with the photos from the very talented Julie Dreelin. Someone has since repinned the untraditional engagement photos that I liked so much.

Happy Pinning….and repinning.

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Random Thoughts

It’s been raining here so much lately that there has been an outbreak of wild mushrooms growing.

Last Friday night while eating dinner at Mona Lisa’s with The Neighbors, we saw a double rainbow. It was the first time I’ve seen a full double rainbow.



My newest favorite thing on my iPhone is Words With Friends. Where else can you make up words and get points for it? I can be found @DebThaxton which is the same for Facebook and Twitter. It’s just easier to remember.


This is us Hanging With Neighbors playing the horse racing game. It's like gambling for dummies.


Tucker, the black lab puppy, has gained 10 pounds in the three weeks we’ve had him. I think it’s all gone to his legs. He constantly attacks Sandy Paws and I think it’s keeping her “young” but more likely she’s just tired from the constant harassment.


I loved how the medical school celebrated their new building.


In the rain, we participated in the American Heart Association's walk on Saturday.


There is less than three months until Christmas.

It's almost October which means I have three months to complete my 2011 new year's resolutions. One of which is not procrastinating. I may just save that until 2012.

Here was my last installment of random thoughts.

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Blog Anniversary = Facelift

I started this blog two years ago and have nearly 400 posts. Although I still loved the green header I have been frustrated with its limitations.

Since I changed this blog to the correct spelling of savvy six months ago, I have been anxious to change designs. Although I've looked and looked and looked and looked at thousands hundreds of other blogs and templates, I still couldn't decide what I wanted til yesterday.

I found a free simple template that was going to allow the functionality to change out the header easily and still allow a wide column for the pictures I include in every post. Plus, I'm still in Blogger. If you use blogger and want to know how to drop the blogspot.com from your address, click here.

I'm likely to be tweaking things here and there but I hope you like the changes. I may work on a few new headers to have ready to switch in and out that reflect more of my personality. I just need graphics of a curly-haired freckled person talking a lot while drinking beer and holding a blackberry. Piece of cake!

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Tech Tip: Creating an Add This Button

There are plenty of websites that preach the benefits of having your blog posts being stumbled upon, shared on twitter, delicious, etc. for increasing your search engine optimization (SEO) and increasing visitor traffic to your site.

To make it easier for your visitors, there is a free tool that I've found called Add This that can be installed in Blogger or Wordpress.

Here are the step-by-step instructions for installing it in Blogger as it worked for me.

1. Go to the website http://www.addthis.com/.
(To learn how to create external links that open into a new page, click for my other tutorial.)

2. Select the Blogger service, what type of button style you'd like, if you would like the analytics tracked and then the final button of Get the Button.

3. Create an account with your contact information.

4. If you'd like the new button to be in your column, select the top option to add it directly to Blogger. I choose the more complicated step of actually copying the code to install in the HTML section under settings.

5. Open the HTML editor in Blogger and select the box above the code that says "Expand Widget Template." I recommend saving a copy of your template at this point in case you run into problems.
Do a Find (CTRL+F) for tag and paste the code (CTRL+V).

6. Save the template.

7. View your blog to see that it's appearing correctly. It worked out for Suzy at Hollywood: Where Hot Comes to Die.

8. Now, please share this on StumbleUpon or another option in this button by clicking below.

If you still have the blogspot.com in your Blogger address and would like to learn how to get a custom domain name for $10 a year, click here.

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