Posted by: Andrea on 
Sep 17th, 2009 | 
Filed under: History & Geography, Photos, Site Updates
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Posted by: Andrea on May 28th, 2009 | Filed under: Site Updates
Yesterday I signed up for a del.icio.us account, and finally buckled down and created the link directories I’ve always wanted. All pages and links are now officially done! Visit my brand spankin’ new:
I’m so excited! Please do feel free to suggest any links I might have missed in the contact form at the bottom of each page, and let me know what you think. 
Posted by: Andrea on Jan 23rd, 2009 | Filed under: Freebies, Internet Resources, Lapbooking, Site Updates
I’ve finally fixed the bug on the forums (I just haven’t uploaded the fix) and have also gotten my new links directory working, so over the weekend, I plan to buckle down and enter my 1000+ links in the link directory. It’s a Yahoo!-style link directory just for homeschoolers of all kinds, working parents, work from home folks, and single parents. I was considering just doing a StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us account instead for ease of use, but those aren’t as comprehensive or descriptive and aren’t easily ordered either. This software I’ve installed is easily customizable and checks dead links with one click, so I’m very happy with it and hopefully people will find it useful.
There are so many things I’d like to blog about, but as always, “free time” is a scarce commodity around here. I really do intend to stick to my New Year’s resolution of blogging 3 or more times per week beginning today, so brace yourselves.
In the meantime, here is a huge list of free homeschooling curriculum resources, geared mostly but not exclusively for lapbooking and paper crafts, courtesy of Diana from the Lapbooking Yahoo! group. I should say, MOST of them are free, and all of the ones that aren’t, are very low cost.
Posted by: Andrea on Nov 25th, 2008 | Filed under: Family Life, Freebies, Humor, Internet Resources, Site Updates, Weekly Rundowns
It’s been very quiet around here. I have a lot of work these days, which is good – it’ll be a decent Christmas, at least – and we’ve just had a lot going on family-wise. Over the next few weeks, I intend to expand SPH significantly:
In addition, I’m giving myself all of January to finish my book about single parent homeschooling, with the goal of editing and self-publishing it on Lulu.com in February/March. I am also launching a web site right now which I’m really excited about. And I’m working full-time now, and eBaying quite a lot, and in my spare time I am solving complex mathematical equations and curing cancer… no, I’m lying about those last 2. 
We don’t do any schoolwork the week of Thanksgiving. For the first couple of years, I tried to squeeze in some schoolwork Monday through Wednesday, but it was always a bust because usually I had family coming in from out of town (Shorty’s dad usually comes to visit) so things always get a little crazy. Also, I cook the entire meal for everyone, about 5-8 people, each year, since my family is Cuban and clueless in the ways of Thanksgiving. I will transcribe a conversation I had via IM with my friend IB, who is African-American, about ethnic Thanksgivings, to illustrate:
IB: I’m off to the grocery store in a few >.>
Me: ME TOO. Hold me, I’m scared.
IB: Stay strong, girl.
Me: I am going to a grocery store in Little Havana so you know it will be crazy because my people will be all, “And I totally have to freak out and buy enough rice and beans and green plantains to fry, enough to feed 29572352 people because those are totally traditional Thanksgiving side dishes.”
IB: The one in my neighborhood will be packed because “You know that 12 pounds of greens is not enough, child. Go over there and get me two more bunches…” *me watching as the little girl picks up 5 MORE*
Me: THE PILGRIMS HAD THOSE, YOU KNOW.
IB: OF COURSE.
Me: I tried to convince my family to let me make a goose one year and they looked at me like I had just suggested they have roast puppy for Christmas.
IB: Nah, that wouldn’t fly here either. Of course, when I offered to make pumpkin pie one year my mom looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “What’s wrong with sweet potato?”
Me: When I made a pumpkin pie one year, my mom thought I had lost it, too. She was all, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? THEY’RE ON SALE AT PUBLIX! TWO FOR $6!
So what I’m doing is having Shorty do some fun Thanksgiving arts and crafts. Here is a great free Thanksgiving activity pack with copywork, place cards (Shorty LOVED doing those – I printed them out on cardstock) and arts and crafts. There are also tons of really cute Thanksgiving printables and activities here for a wide variety of ages. I’ve printed out a bunch, but who knows how much we’ll actually get done. Anyway, for those of you in areas that celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope you have a wonderful and blessed one, and for everyone else, have a great rest-of-the-week! I’ll be back on Friday, with pictures, and hopefully a little progress on the above list. Hopefully.
Posted by: Andrea on Nov 3rd, 2008 | Filed under: Site Updates
Just a short note to say that I have finally written and published the Work at Home page that’s linked on the home page of this site. Please click here to see it. There are over 100 free resources there with hundreds of legitimate jobs and income sources, but needless to say, it’s neither intended to be exhaustive, nor guaranteed to offer any employment or work to you. I’ve tried to post only resources I myself have used, but as always, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please do feel free to post a comment or shoot me an email in the contact page!
Posted by: Andrea on Sep 8th, 2008 | Filed under: Internet Resources, Site Updates
I have a lot of specialized interests, including theology and spirituality, photography, debt management and personal finances, web design, homeschooling, frugal living and gardening, so I’m in the process of developing a few blogs and web sites about more narrow subjects that might still be of interest to some of my readers. I’m going to put them in a little side bar with graphics, but for now, here’s a quick list of links – they all have RSS feeds in case anyone uses them. Some of them have cross-posted posts here and there with this one, but as I update them more, that might happen less and less.
My other blogs and web sites:
More to come soon, I’m sure. Blogging can be a little addictive!
And in other site updates, I’ve completely redesigned SPH and added a main sticky post at the top of the home page, to hopefully make it easier for people to navigate. I’m also going to be adding some major new sections slowly over this week, and have completely re-structured the forums, so keep an eye out and join in whenever you feel like it – even if you’re not a single parent or a home schooler!
Posted by: Andrea on Jun 10th, 2008 | Filed under: Family Life, Freebies, Internet Resources, Site Updates
So yesterday I discovered the many joys of RSS.
Let me back up a little.
I have a rich and full online network of friends that number about 400 or so. I would estimate that I have met about half of those people in person, and talked to a few more of them on the phone, so know that if you are reading this and we’ve communicated in some way, you are likely not at all a faceless, expendable stranger to me. I’ve been on the Internet since 1993. I had AOL v1.0, you guys. It was very exciting because it introduced new fangled wonders to online life such as… colors. And pictures. I had a speedy 14.4Kbps dial-up modem, which was blazing fast and top of the line. Also, I walked to school uphill both ways in the snow every day, and I liked it that way. Now get off my lawn!
Anyway, I know a lot of people and I have a wide variety of Interests and an open mind to trying new things. As such, I have:
i also have a Facebook and a Twitter account, as well as a LiveJournal for my fanfiction and a LiveJournal for my graphics, but let’s be real, THERE ARE ONLY SO MANY HOURS IN THE DAY HERE.
The end result is one that I have found increasingly unsatisfactory. Not only am I spread too thin, but I feel like these blogs all represent an incomplete picture of who I really am and what I’m really about. Not only that, but none of them get updated very often and I have a hard time keeping up-to-date with everyone on all the various services – to say nothing of those lone stragglers with random Tumblr, Blogger and Wordpress accounts. Don’t get me wrong, I love niche blogs just as much as the next Internet geek, but the thing is – most of these aren’t really intended to BE niche blogs. They’re supposed to just be blogs about my life, but it’s just too time consuming to remember to cross-post to everything and then check the friends lists and blogrolls of each service. As a result, my blogs are all out of date and so are my many connections to all the important people in my life.
So my solution, thanks to a lot of hand-holding from a lot of you reading this, has been a two-step process:
Scribefire, a Firefox plugin that allows me to cross-post to LiveJournal, InsaneJournal, MySpace, and WordPress all at the same time, respecting the default privacy levels of each one, since they each have different audiences, and
Sage RSS reader, a Firefox plugin that allows me to read ALL my friends’ blogs in one batch. This one has been a little more involved to set up because my friends lists on the various LJ clones don’t have RSS feeds – just the individual journals and communities – so I have had to go through and manually add some 250 journals to that. But that’s just up front work – I just do it once and then I’m done. I’m still working on it, actually.
The good news is, as long as Firefox has a log-in cookie and I’m logged in to LiveJournal, or whatever, I can read all the friends-locked posts on my various friendslists with RSS right along with my other friends’ public blogs. I’ve also been able to set up folders and input the RSS feeds to various types of news services (e.g., for entertainment news, I put in LJ’s disneychannel and the JustJared newsfeed, etc., for homeschooling news I have the HSLDA.org newsfeed, etc.) Theoretically, I can set up newsfeeds for any topic I can think of.
I also installed the Firefox extension for Sage that checks all my feeds every half an hour for me (by default, you have to choose “Check Feeds” to see if there are any new posts in each journal’s feeds) so I can tell right away whenever any of you (or my news feeds) have updated. I would prefer that Sage have an option to open ALL the feeds chronologically in the rendering box so that it looked more like a traditional friends list, instead of loading them in individual Firefox tabs, but I’m told that’s planned for future versions, and anyway, it’s a lot less effort to scroll through the list and click on the journals that have new content than it is to visit 23859258208 different sites a day.
So it is that i’m about to consolidate all my online presences. YOU don’t have to change the way you read what I post, whether it be through LiveBookmarks, RSS, LJ friends, whatever, but unless I’m writing to a very specific audience, or want something kept relatively restricted, I will be posting ALL my posts to ALL my blogs simultaneously from here on out. Expect to see more real-life posts on my LJ; expect to see more media posts on my InsaneJournal; expect to see more TV and creative writing posts on my WordPress blog, and y’all MySpace stragglers, just expect to see more of me in general Brace yourselves!
Also, if you think this is a solution that might be helpful to you and need help setting it up, please do IM or PM or comment me and I’ll be happy to help. I anticipate that this will save me a TREMENDOUS amount of time AND keep me better connected. It’s win-win.
Posted by: Andrea on Oct 27th, 2007 | Filed under: Site Updates
It’s been just over 2 months since I updated this blog. In point of fact, I had all but forgotten about it. You see, a day or two after my last update in August, I came down with what looked like a simple flu.
I think I was at a disadvantage because I was already very worn out with the soft tissue sarcoma scare that I had had with my Shortie a few weeks earlier. I was already tired and run down, so I just didn’t think much of the flu. It was the flu; whatever! I’d get better soon enough and I reasoned that I was lucky I hadn’t gotten sick in nearly a year. In typical mom style (especially single mom style, but it’s not a unique phenomenon to single mothers) I simply didn’t take care of myself. I kept trying to work, kept trying to stay on top of homeschooling, appointments for my shortie, my work, my housework, etc. Needless to say, that didn’t last very long.
The last week of August and first week of September, Shortie’s dad came to visit from Boston. Shortie’s Dad is a good man, a good friend, a good person and desperately wants to be a good Dad to the Shortie, but he had just moved out on his own for the first time in his life last February, and basically – I’m just keeping it real here – mismanaged his finances the first six months on his own too much to afford his usual bi-monthly visit from Boston. So it was the first visit they’d had together since late January. I was still sick as a dog; having Shortie’s Dad around helped on the one hand (I didn’t have to feel guilty for not being very good Shortie company) but it completely wore me out on the other. Though he was not a demanding guest, I had to play hostess 24/7; I had to drive them around because Shortie’s Dad is from Boston where no one drives and it is not unusual to see a 30yo without a driver’s license; I had to cook three meals a day for three people instead of 2, because he’d come down with such low funds, etc. Basically, it was the last nail in the coffin for my health, so to speak.
Posted by: Andrea on Aug 21st, 2007 | Filed under: Site Updates
Today was a VERY interesting day. I’m a person who keeps friends for a long, long time. I get attached and that’s that. I’m still friends with people I met in junior high and high school, which was… well, it was a long time ago. But recently I heard from my two best friends from elementary school via my myspace. I’ve known both these guys over 20 years! The last time I talked to one of them was maybe 7 or 8 years ago, so it’s been a while since I heard from either of them. One wrote me a really funny message detailing, in a very silly (and trademark) way, all the fond memories he had of being a proto-mallrat and spending the day with me and our other friend at the now-defunct Astroworld in Houston, as well as recalling the way that we used to torture our very flamboyant and beleaguered music teacher in the fifth grade. Oh, Mr. Seigel. That poor, poor man. I can still recall his daily sighs of bitter, bitter resignation.
Some changes are afoot here at SPH. I’m about to launch a whole new look for the site. I love the colorful pencils and the adorably cherubic children, don’t get me wrong; it’s just that it’s a VERY VERY buggy template. I’ve fixed a few here and there, but there are just too many and frankly, I’m lazy. The new one isn’t quite as colorful, but hopefully it’ll still be legible, and much more functional.
I’m also working on the links section. I’m hoping that this will eventually grow to become a very useful resource for all parents and homeschoolers, single ones in particular. Right now it’s a big long illegible mess. I’m considering installing some kind of link directory script instead, a la Yahoo!. Part of this is for my own reference because I find so many great web sites and resources online that I later forget about just because I forgot to add them to my favorites or whatever. But of course, I do intend for it to be of use to other people too.
So without further ado – here’s my new layout for the site. Let me know what you think of the new look! I thought this was more universally accessible to the theme of single parent homeschooling than the little frollicking cherubs. Some of us don’t have very little ones… and some of us don’t exactly have cherubs, either.