The original thinking when embarking on this Life of Leisure is to take about a year to relax, hang with the kids, and explore the next big idea. Here we are in week 4 and I’m officially bored. I’m obsessed with reading everything on Mashable, TechCrunch, Engadget, and now posting to the Snaptu forum because this application doesn’t work properly on my Blackberry 8350i. I know it’s not working right because I had it on my Nokia E71 and it worked perfectly there. By the way, just sold the Nokia E71 on Ebay, selling my Motorola RAZR on craigslist so I am officially getting rid of all my phones except for the one I’m currently using.

I’ve officially decided I need to return to the workforce before my mind turns into jello. I even begged my sister to let me redo the powerpoint slides she was working on for a company called Isilon. I’m sure this isn’t normal behavior to volunteer to do powerpoint slides just to feel like a contributing member of society. Thankfully, she let me help her and it turns out her boss and the channel manager loved the deck, whoo-hoo!

Laptop Keyboard
My geek girl project for the week is to replace the keyboard on my mom’s laptop. I’ve already done the research and bookmarked the site detailing how to take the laptop apart to replace the keyboard. It seemed easier to replace the entire keyboard than to try to replace the 2 keys which kept falling off her keyboard. We initially took her laptop to Best Buy since it was still under warranty to get the keys replaced. Geek Squad said, they needed to send the entire laptop to California and it would take a month to get it back, then she would have had to pay $100+ to get a couple of keys replaced. I told my mom, no don’t do that. I will order an entire keyboard and replace it myself, should cost under $30. I ordered the new keyboard on Amazon and with shipping it came out to about $28.

I received the keyboard today and my family thought it someone was sending me a birthday gift but it was actually the keyboard. I will update this post with how the installation went once I finish it.

Learning to Create Dynamic Websites
To keep my mind working, one of my goals is to create dynamic websites using SQL and PHP. I’ve come across an ebook from the library which will help me accomplish this using Dreamweaver as a shortcut, score! I already installed Dreamweaver so my next step is getting the server setup with GoDaddy  then I’ll be ready to get started. I can create the static websites but that is unexciting and I want to be able to create forms and get the form data into a database which sends out automated emails, etc. One of the reasons I wanted to learn PHP is to be able to prototype any Web 2.0 ideas.

Week 4:

This weekend I planned my daughter’s birthday at an indoor amusement park which was recommended by someone from my sister’s work. I looked at the website and the birthday packages and it all seemed pretty good. I filled out the reservation form online and it said you should expect a call within 24 hours to confirm the reservation and collect the deposit. Not receiving the phone call at all should have been the warning to select another venue. Not heeding this, I called Jeepers Amusement Paradise, made the reservation and gave them my credit card to charge the deposit. I also called a day in advance to confirm they had my pinata order and they would fill it with candy. Sounded easy enough, didn’t go through the normal due diligence of checking out the venue and speaking through the party coordinator in person prior to booking the party since this place was recommended to my sister.

Sunday, October 25, 2009
I planned to wake up early to make cupcakes for my daughter’s birthday party but ended up staying up too late so I woke up shortly after 9 am. Thankfully, by the time I woke up my older daughter already baked the cupcakes, I just needed for them to cool so I can frost them while they were at church. Thanks, Mariss!  The picture above shows the finished cupcakes that we brought to the indoor amusement park.

12:45 pm
My kids get back from church with my parents and my daughter changed into her casual party clothes, then went next door to get her friends who were riding with us for to the party. My nephew’s friend arrived with him earlier so he had a buddy too. After my daughter’s BFF was dropped off, we all loaded into my sister’s SUV on the way to the party. My sister has a rule in her car called “Dance Car” so during one particularly long song, we kicked off dance car and everyone had to do their seated dance moves, this was a great ice breaker for all the kids. We “danced” to Miley Cyrus’ song and I got some video of that which I will upload to Facebook.

1:20 pm
We arrived at the venue a little before our party time and it seems they don’t have a record of our party at all. I requested the ride wristbands for the kids then got them off to ride the rides and play while I sorted out the situation. While waiting for the table to get setup, my sister and I ordered the pizzas for the party. We ended up hosting our party getting the kids rounded up to eat, do the cupcake, ice cream, and finally the pinata. We let the kids loose after doing the pinata to go spend their tokens and ride the rides again. Despite, the snafu with the party details, the kids had a blast! I’m so glad my parents, my sister, and my older daughter were there to help keep track of the kids because the security at the place was pretty lax. I think my head was spinning the entire time from all the noise, kids running around, and trying to make sure we knew where all the kids in our party were.

4:30 pm
We arrived back at the house, Giovana opened her presents, then went with my mom to drop off her BFF. I was exhausted and wanted to go back to sleep but my mom invited the kids next door to swim. My mom stayed out there with the kids at the pool, I think I fell asleep in the patio for a little bit. I’m a bit out of practice on the kids parties.

I’m officially three weeks into the “Life of Leisure” chapter. To recap, I’ve moved to Arizona in less than 3 weeks by getting rid of all my furniture, sending my car full of things on an auto transporter, this is the big truck with a bunch of cars hanging from it, then renting an SUV to drive my clothes down with a quick stop in LA.

The Drive
I drove down to LA and stayed at my cousin Genelle’s new apartment and we had a great time catching up at Roscoe’s House of Chicken & Waffles. I had the chicken breast and waffles, she had the chicken salad sandwich, which I’m planning to get next time, it was yummy! The next morning we had breakfast at Good Stuff in El Segundo, so glad we had the big breakfast because I was able to drive straight through to my mom’s house with just quick stops for gas and snacks. By the way, it’s not a good idea to have Pop Rocks as a road trip snack because you have to keep tilting your head back to get the candy in your mouth. If you’re driving by yourself, I learned it’s best to keep eyes on the road because there were giant semi-trucks I had to zoom by. I made it to my mom’s house a little bit late because I exited too early on one freeway, thankfully my sister Czarina got me back on track, she is my personal positioning service (the GPS died because none of the cigarette lighters would charge it).

The first few days in Arizona, I would read a lot and take naps during the day. Now that the kids are back in school, I get up around 7 am to make breakfast or pop Eggo waffles into the toaster and drop off. Then it would be time to hit the gym, afterwards I can work on my various projects.

The gym
About the gym, I’ve had a membership to 24 hour fitness for ages and paid $5 a month. However, the closest one is about 30 minutes away. I went once to see how I would like the gym and I was underwhelmed by the experience. As motivated as I am, I don’t really want to drive that far to workout. When telling my family about the trek to the gym, my mom mentioned LA Fitness was close and it was a new. I went to check it out the next day and upon walking in saw about 3 cute guys, bonus! OK getting back to the gym, they had a ton of fitness classes, cardio equipment upstairs, new weights, huge basketball court on a bouncy floor, a lap pool, and one free personal training session. The rates were pretty reasonable so I decided to sign up. By the way, I don’t play basketball at all and I have no intention of doing laps in the pool. I was pretty much sold by the new facilities and the cute guys. It’s great to have good scenery while working out because it breaks up the monotony. At the end of the week, I convinced my sister to go to my personal training session with me and after our session, she ended up signing up too. In the last week, we’ve gone to Zumba twice, we worked out with weights, did cardio, I also went to yoga. She went to the gym with me 4x in a week and that’s more than she’s ever been in her life!

The rest of the family is now getting on the fitness kick. The kids are taking turns using the Wii fit program and everyone has a Mii which is to track BMI. Sadly, I have a fat Mii but she’s steadily inching that BMI down to normal levels. My dad remains an inspiration because he bikes for 30 mins and does his dumbbells 6 days a week. He also tracks everything he eats and logs his fitness activities in Excel spreadsheets, this is something I need to incorporate.

Getting organized
So perhaps I’m a little OCD when it comes to getting organized, this week I created spreadsheets on my phone with the house budget, my budget, and my sister’s budget. This way, we can add things we need to purchase on the fly and see how it affects the remaining budget for the month. I’m also creating a spreadsheet of what will go into each room, what is needed, which are wants, and how much will all cost. We kept talking about all the things that we wanted to get for the house without really knowing how much we had to pay for so the spreadsheets should keep us grounded in reality.

Love my calendar
Today, I was reading the paper and found a couple cool activities to do with family but the events were in December. I decided to put them in my Google calendar then invite the rest of the family via email so they can get it on their calendars too. Now I don’t need to keep the newspaper because I put the date, time, the website, phone number, address, and a summary of the activities we can do at the event. I showed my dad how to add things to his Google calendar and my daughter said she would teach him how to use his calendar because she already figured it out on her own. She’s super cute, she changes the themes in her email and shared her Google calendar with me as she was exploring Gmail.

I also booked my daughter’s birthday party, created the invitations with her, and put the invitations in her backpack to give to her friends at school on Monday. We just need to wait to see who RSVPs so I can adjust the reservation then we’re good to go.

It’s about 2 am now and I spent the day cooking. For breakfast, chilaquiles in salsa verde, lunch was shrimp penne alfredo, the kids liked that so much, I had to make a new batch for dinner. The dinner version was shrimp, broccoli, mushroom rotini alfredo and my sister is packing that for lunch. I also made trail mix: raw almonds, dried cranberries, and white chocolate chips, then put those in sandwich bags as snacks for everyone on Monday. With that said, I’m logging off and calling it a night!