Winter is back........

Mount Rainier Sunset

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mount-ranier-sunset-by-m-donna/

Wow, but winter came back to Washington state with a blast from the Fraser River Canyon. We got a northeaster from Canada and it is soooo cold. We lost power yesterday for a while and TV/Internet was out longer. Luckily we had just gotten home from visiting our son and daughter in law or we wouldn't have been able to get in the house because the garage door wouldn't have opened. I didn't take my purse with house keys!

We didn't lose any trees but our neighbor lost several of his 50 yer old pine trees. 

Our daughter had us over Saturday to celebrate my birthday a bit early because her daughter's family was up for the week end. We had a baked potato bar with all kinds of toppings. I love baked potato's and don 't make them for myself because I never have sour cream. (Hubby doesn't like it) Birthday cake, ice cream and all the trimmings. 

I can't believe I will be 79 next week. I don't feel that old, most of the time anyway. But the calendar doesn't lie.

We had a nice Valentines Day. I made my hubby some of his favorite foods and a cherry pie that I put a heart cut out on the top. At our ages we don't give each other gifts anymore. Just happy to be together...and eat cherry pie.

Since we couldn't watch the tube last night we read for hours. My hubby finished his book and I couldn't download another one for him because internet was out. I had just cleaned out his Kindle because he had so many books in it. I think I will leave a few in the device from now on. We had the kerosene lamps lit and with my tablet and his Kindle we could read because we keep them powered up. But you do need a book in it! I am signed up at freebooksy.com and Book Bub and get emails each day that have free or lower priced ebooks so I actually get most of my books free. So I have tons of books in the cloud. And the books that are too expensive I can usually get them from the local library and download them so I have it for at least 21 days. 

Have been waiting for our property taxes to come. We always dread that. We have paid taxes on our place for almost 51 years so we have paid more in taxes than we paid for it originally. I don't know how they expect elderly people to be able to stay in their homes when the taxes keep going up but the income certainly doesn't. With the current administration I don't think it is going to get any better, either. They don't care about the children or old people. I think they care more for the fetus and rich people. Have to make sure they are all doing well...but if you are born and old....the hell with you. 

Oh Oh! More politics so I better sign off for today. I have to figure out something for my blog for March since Feb. is almost in the books for this year. I like to change the graphics to match the month.

Can't wait for Spring and Summer!!!

~Have a great week~

Spring Garden Serenity

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/spring-garden-serenity-madonna/

Ending January

Snow Flakes for Blue Eyes

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/snowflakes-for-blue-eyes/

We are looking at the end of January already. I have to admit I am tired of the cold and wet. More on its way. too.

My 79th birthday is next month. I find it hard to believe next year I will be saying, (hopefully) I will be 80 years old. That sounds like a really old lady, doesn't it? I have to admit sometimes I feel old, but not most of the time. My problem is my mind feels young but the body doesn't want to move as fast as my mind. My husband tells me to slow down all the time! And I mean all the time. 

Our oldest grandson gave us DNA kits from ancestry.com and we sent them in right away and I am so anxious to get the results. I have done years of work on the genealogy on both of our families so I know some of what I will find out, I think.

I have had some very bad dreams in the last week and I don't want to say anything to the kids because they would worry. One night I dreamed that my husband was lost and I couldn't find him. I woke up with my heart pounding so hard I think my husband could have heard it if he was awake. It took me a long time to start feeling normal and I can still remember how I felt in the dream. Then two nights ago I dreamed he had a heart attack and I was trying to get him to wake up and I felt so lost. So frightening! We have been together for almost 62 years. I doubt if I could be without him. I just hope the bad dreams are over. I don't like them.

Desktop Nexus has been having problems for this past week. I couldn't get to any of my wallpapers for several days and none of the older ones show up yet. Several people have written and asked me to send them the wallpaper they wanted to match the theme they were using. Luckily I save most of my "stuff" so I can do that "if" I can find it. Sometimes I change the title on line but not in my file so if I do that I will never find it.

Have been working on some Valentines themes. I got the valentines this morning for the great grandkids while we were shopping.  I get our greeting cards at the Dollar Tree all the time. You can get some pretty nice cards there for 2 for $1.00 and you can't beat that. I used to make them with Print Shop. But the program doesn't want to work with Windows 10 very well. It says it won't, but I can fiddle with it enough to get it to work long enough to make the family calender each year. I don't want to buy a new version of it so I hope it will keep working.

Now to the present day news! Wow...When I wake up in the mornings I can't wait to turn on the news. The local radio station that had all my favorite talk show people on recently changed to "old music" so I found i♥ Radio on line and found a station I can listen to on that. All of the sexual harassment that has been going on and no one either said anything or just kept quiet is amazing. I can't believe some of these guys have gotten away with it for so long. In another way I can see it. I have only worked at one outside job in my life so I don't have any experience but when I was interviewing for it,  the "man" did ask a totally unprofessional, totally embarrassing question. I was dumbfounded at the question BUT I STUPIDLY answered him. I should have said that it was inappropriate for him to ask that and if it happened now, I would. But back then I don't think I had ever heard the words, "sexual harassment". To think that we have a man at the head of our country that has gotten by with that for years and is STILL the head of our country is unbelievable. I can not understand the thinking on the right side of the aisle right now. I am glad women are speaking out and standing up for themselves. I think we need more women in the government and business. If I were younger I would definitely run for something. I was asked to run for County Council in the 1990's when we were fighting the Japanese corporation that was trying to build a huge housing development on the farm land that surrounds us. I imagine they will start that up again this year since everyone says there aren't enough houses available on the market.  I feel very strong about not developing all the farm lands. I believe that there will come a time when we can't depend on CA for growing so much of our food supply. WA and OR weather is changing and it may come a time when these two states may be where you purchase your vegetables from. If there are houses covering the landscape...they won't tear them down to grow food on. 

I better quit the preaching! Once I get going on this I don't shut up.

I hope you all have a good week end and stay warm. 

Sunrise Winter Cabin

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sunrise-winter-cabin/

Brrrrr!

 Spring Farming Theme

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/spring-farming-theme/

 

I hope everyone is keeping warm.  We are warming up a bit here in the Pacific Northwest. I Have a bud on a rose! If you have read some of my posts, you know that we took care of my Mom when she was dying from ovarian cancer in 2002. She wanted to stay in her home, so my brother and sister-in-law, my sister and my husband and I took turns staying with her so she could be at home. Anyway, she had this beautiful rosebush and no one wanted it, but me so we got it. My husband dug it up and planted it. New Years day it had a bud! It was only 28 or so out so it really surprised me! Mom was wishing us a Happy New Year!  But last night the weather guy said we had more sunny days in December and lots of plants were showing new growth. It was a nice thought, anyway!

I keep finding new things about the new Firefox that I like. I have a large monitor on my desktop that I do all my work on and the address bar on FF was just too long, so I opened up Customize and added three spaces to it so it made the address bar smaller and you can see  lot more of the theme you are using. I am sure you all know that but I didn't! 

On Tuesday morning when my husband went to go out to his shop he found a stream of water running on our garage floor! Our hot water heater sprung a leak so we had to replace it. He wanted to replace it himself but had never installed a propane hot water heater so we decided to have it installed by the local company that originally installed it. They thought it would be 3 or 4 days! But they called that evening and said they could be out the next morning! It is funny how you just take it for granite that when you turn on the hot water faucet, you get hot water! So I only had to go two days without and I managed but hated it. What was so funny about the whole thing was when a grandson called and told me his folks hot water heater went out a couple days before and his Dad had to take the day off to install a new one! So our son's went out the say day as ours.....he heard water running in the middle of the night and looked into their garage and it had water running out the doors! So they had a bigger leak than we did. But it was sure a coincidence! 

Can you believe the politics in our country? I have become such a news junky because of it. I truly believe we have a man as president that acts more like a third grader than president. It is embarrassing. 

Well, my football season is over. I don't watch any except the Seahawks and they had an embarrassing game last week and that ended the season. I will miss them. Our daughter comes out every Sunday and brings tons of food and we really enjoyed watching the games. She never liked football before, even when she was a cheerleader! 

I am going to sign off for now. May write more tomorrow since there is no football and our daughter is visiting her children.

Have a great week end.

Winter Retreat

Winter Retreat

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/winter-retreat-by-m-donna/

Christmas is over and every one can start making their New Years Revolutions! I guess lots of people make them and lots of people break them. I made one last year and broke it the 2nd day of January. 

Sounds like most of the US is having winter weather. It has snowed here for several days but just a bit on the ground now and supposed to warm up and probably start raining soon.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas holiday. I feel so lucky and almost guilty about it at times. Christmas eve day was very busy. Our oldest grandson and family came with Christmas cookies and a gift for us. I have always wanted to have the DNA tests done at Ancestry but just didn't feel like we should put the money out. But they gave us each one and we are sending them off today. Am very anxious to get the results. I have worked for years on our family trees and gotten way back to the 1600's so will find out if everything is accurate.

In the afternoon our daughter came out with a bunch of food to munch on while we watched the Seahawks game. We were so afraid they would lose because we have lost so many of the players with injuries. The game the week before was just horrible. Worst game we have ever watched! But this was a totally different team! Anyway it seemed like. Our daughter and I have very loud voices and my poor husband's ears were burning! I think he will get his shooters muffs for Sunday's game! 

Not long after the game was over another grandson and family showed up and we got to visit with them for awhile. They had to leave so the boys would get home and to bed before Santa came.

Christmas day all of our kids came and we had tons of munchies. Everyone brings snack type stuff and then I let Papa Murphy do all the prep work for our dinner and I bake it! We started doing that several years ago and that makes the holiday a lot more fun (for me anyway) than preparing a huge Christmas dinner. We had such a nice time and I know I am lucky to be able to spend time with our family. Now we are eating left overs! 

How are you liking the new Firefox Quantum? I am very happy with it now. I did have to get used to a few things though. I am using an extension called Tab Close Button that I really like. It put a big X on the address bar and will close the tab that you have open. I usually have lots of tabs open and would sometimes close the wrong tab with the new Firefox so I got this extension and works like a charm. 

I am finally using the Pocket also. With the older FF I used the new page to have the sites I used most saved but it isn't as easy to put them and keep them on the New Page now. So I broke down and started using the Pocket. I can't say I am thrilled with it and I could adds a few "ticks" to it if it was my extension but had to break down and learn how to use it. I used to have my tabs on the bottom and liked them that way but the extension that trick was on doesn't work with the new FF. I am hoping someone will figure out an extension so we can do that again. 

We got the pictures back of our surprise 60th wedding anniversary and am going to post a picture of our cake. I think I wrote about it a couple blogs ago so now you can see it. I am sure it is one of a kind. They asked for mountains, flowers and Seahawks! And we got it all.

 I want to thank all of you that have become fans and use my wallpapers and themes. So many of you have posted such nice reviews and I really appreciate those. I try very hard to reply to each one. I want to wish you all a wonderful 2018! Don't know how prosperous we will be with the new Trump tax. I know the corporations and businesses will do very well. I just hope they pass it on to their employees but am not so sure about that. I would love to have a more tranquil 2018 than 2017 has been. I am very tired of the drama and hate that has ramped up this past year. 

Bucks at Sunrise

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bucks-at-sunrise-by-m-donna/

Mid December

Country Home Winter

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/country-home-winter-by-m-donna/

Christmas is less than two weeks away. Are you ready? We don't buy gifts anymore but I do write checks to the great grand kids which isn't very Christmasy but they get so many toys and clothes I figure they can put the money in a savings account and use it later. They won't get much interest now but hopefully someday that will go up. I am giving them each an old Christmas ornament from the trees we have had on our trees for many years. 

I think we (I) finally got our new internet modem and phone working all right. That was a huge challenge. I did find out that when you fill out a survey for a company they actually read them. When we got our Sleep Number mattress I filled out a survey they sent me and was very truthful on it and several days later they called me and actually sent us out some extra foam to use at no charge. So I filled out the Comcast survey. I actually gave them 4 stars which wasn't bad but they still called to find out why I only gave 4 stars. So I told him about the whole episode and how it took me 3 days on the phone, a tech guy coming out, etc. He was very honest and said it sounded like they needed to have their tech people have more training. What irritated me about the whole thing was I actually knew that Comcast would have to send their firmware to our modem, since it wasn't a Comcast modem that you rent. But I never thought about asking the tech support on the phone if they had done that! I figured that would be the first thing they did.  But it took the tech guy that came out go get to the 4th tier of support (which I found out was the engineering dept.) to actually push the firmware into my modem to get it to work. I had done a lot of research on line before I ever ordered the modem from Amazon so things would go smoothly. But as I have said, they didn't. But we cut the phone line and that will save us a lot of money over a years time. Plus we didn't even have long distance service because that cost $10 a month more!

My husband will be 82 on Sunday and we are going to our daughter's house to celebrate and watch the Seahawk game.  Her kids will be up so it will be good to see them since it has been a few months.

Our weather has been beautiful this week but sounds like it could start to get rainy tonight. Yuk! 

I don't know if I will get back to the blog before Christmas so if I don't I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season.

Snowman Lights the Way

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/snowman-lights-the-way/

Firefox 57 Updated!

Light Your Firefox

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/light-your-firefox/

Well, I had to update to Firefox 57 and I am liking it real well. It is faster for sure. The reason I finally broke down and update was because the Personas Plus extension quit working so I couldn't test my designs. It takes me a bit longer to test but I guess I have the time! One thing I did find that may help you find a theme you recently had installed is to go to the 3 small lines on the far right, click on Customize. Go to the bottom of the page and you will find Themes. There should be a short list of a few of the recently used themes. That is faster for me to go back to my theme than going through the Persona Plus icon. 

I have mentioned before about my extremely dry eye syndrome so I am going to  mention an extension for FF57 that I am very happy with. It is called Owl. You can find it at: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/owl/ You can set webpages to be dark rather than the bright white. It doesn't seem to work on some pages but it is just a tiny icon on your task bar that you can turn off and on. Another thing you may notice is the way the new Themes site looks. If you like the old way, which I do, just go to the bottom of the page and click on View Classic Desktop. Someone had to tell me about that because I didn't  know it and didn't like the new site. You really can't see the latest or most popular on it. I also just had the latest big Windows 10 update and you can set your screen for night. So the screen automatically goes into night mode at a set time. It makes it a much more pleasant color than the bright white. 

Still working on the Comcast telephone thing. Getting our phone number switched was even a head ache. They gave me the wrong number to contact Frontier to get a freeze off our number so it could be switched to Comcast. After re-setting the router it seems to be working. Hopefully!

A beautiful day in the Pacific Northwest. Cold and sunshine. It means we have some fog in the mornings but it is beautiful out.

Got our tiny tree up and some of the decorations this week. Hubby got outside lights up. I went through a huge box of Christmas things that we had collected over the 60 years of our married life and let two of the great grand kids that were here pick out some things they wanted. I don't know how happy their mom was but it was a few less in our box!

Going to get back to work. Have a great week and don't spend too much money on shopping.

 Sparkle Snowflake Blue
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sparkle-snowflake-blue/

December

Moonlight Rising

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/moonlight-rising-by-m-donna/

December is here and 2017 is almost gone. It has been a very interesting year, hasn't it? The United States has lost a lot of its respect in the minds of the world. And I feel very bad about that. I am sure 2018 will be a very interesting year and hopefully better. Sounds like our income taxes will be going up for us that don't make a lot of money. Everything else is going up so I guess our taxes should too. NOT!!!

This week has been a very hectic one for me. I decided to save some money and cut the land telephone line. Since we have Comcast triple play but I didn't have a modem that you could connect the phone to, we weren't taking advantage of the telephone part. And I didn't want to pay rent on a modem so I called Comcast to find out which modems were acceptable by them. I ordered the one they said was best and acceptable to them. So, Thursday morning I disconnected my old modem and hooked up the new one. Got on line and had wi fi BUT when I called Comcast to get the telephone part hooked up....well, I will just say I was on the phone for 2 days, had to have a tech come out and then lost wifi. So I spent 2 1/2 days on the phone trying to save some money. It is all working now EXCEPT our old phone number hasn't been changed to the Xfinity phone yet. I have to work with Frontier to get that taken care of and apparently they have no one there until Monday. I have had a headache for 3 days. And have Monday to look forward to. Just trying to save some $$.

I didn't realize I had so many Christmas themes and wallpapers made so I started submitting them. I didn't have much time to work on any this week so am looking forward to having some fun making more next week.

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and got to spend time with family. I fixed the 59th Thanksgiving dinner in a row and enjoyed it. It was just 4 for dinner so tried to downsize my recipes. We used to have over 30 family members, but as time goes by and everyone gets older and families get larger things change. Everything was really good and our daughter in law made the best pumpkin pie ever. From a real pumpkin, not a can! One of the family traditions is making my Grandma's candied sweet potatoes. I know most people make them with marshmallow's, etc. Not my family. Grandma made the best sweet potatoes, not yams...sweet potatoes! (Some people don't realize they are different) You have to cook the butter and sugar to a certain point and then pour over the sweet potatoes and bake...and hope they turn out just right. And this year they did!

Have you downloaded the Firefox 57 update yet? I still haven't put it in my desktop and don't know when or if I will for sure. I can't test my themes on it very easy because Personas Plus is so different. Sometimes I have to test a theme 10 or more times and I am not a very patient person so don't like the extra time it takes to test. I try to get it so it looks good on all sizes of screens but sometimes it just doesn't work out.

It is a yukky rainy day here today so think I am gonna go read for awhile.

Have a good week and don't spend too much $$ Christmas shopping.

Best Bright Christmas

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/best-bright-christmas/