Eileen Mullin

Lately I’ve been feeling this huge need to clean out stuff… here are two upcoming local events that I am looking forward to donating stuff to (and hopefully coming home empty-handed from…):

Spring Cleaning? Don’t throw it away, bring it to the
FREECYCLE™ NEW YORK CITY
SPRING CLEANING FREEMEET!
at the It’s My Park Day Eco-Fair

Saturday, May 17, 2008, 11am - 4pm
JJ Byrne Park (5th Ave between 4th & 5th Streets)
Park Slope, Brooklyn

Cross-Island YMCA
Sunday, June 1 10:00am - 2:00pm - Baby Elephant Sale
Used items in good condition for children from birth through age 12. Items can be children’s clothes, toys, car seats, high chairs etc. For more information contact Pat Matos at 718-551-9313. If you have children’s items cluttering your garage, basement or home please donate them. Donations will be accepted on Thursday, May 29 or Friday, May 30 or @ 9 AM Sunday morning, June 1. All Proceeds go to the Strong Kids Campaign.

After Ross first sent me this cartoon a year ago, it became a catchphrase for us: “Still not happy.”

What a rainy New Year’s Day! I was out way too early to go to the Upper East Side to hold a tutoring session… then took LG to Funtopia for, well, fun of course.

While LG recognizes who Santa is, we’ve never explicitly explained the concept to him. I wanted to suss out exactly who or what he thought Santa was. I asked LG, “What does Spiderman do?” He answered, “Spin a web.” I then asked him, “What does Santa do?” He answered, “Is chocolate!”

I really needed something like this today and was thrilled to find it without too much agita: Chunky borders with curved corners. It is CSS markup for rounded corners with no images. I’m a new and huge fan…

As in the previous post, there are lots of little WP tweaks I need to infrequently enough that I need a reminder of the steps in the checklist:

• What permissions to use — and where to place — a new .htaccess file (for updating permalinks)

• Google Analytics and Feedburner plugin for WordPress
• Put a different sidebar on various pages/sections of a WP site. I’m using this one for converting a plain-jane HTML site to WP.
• WordPress Contact Form with Spam Protection. Every new WP blog I do seems to want this.

The other day I received the following e-mail regarding my online wordsearch game on the GC site:

I am looking for word searches that I can make for children with special needs. Searches that have the words going backwards, upwards or diagonally are not great for the children I work with who have difficulty locating these particular words. Any suggestions?

This game is powered by a script that I basically found and posted and forgot about… maybe five years ago by now..! So I FTP’ed it back down and took a look and saw that I could fulfill this request — creating a simpler version of the wordsearch, from words in eight directions to just one — in about four lines of code.

So after another brief e-mail exchange, I did it, and came up with this:

GenuineClass Word Search 2 (Left-to-Right only)

The gushing thank-you note I then received back was so wonderful to read — and I marveled over the code-to-karma ratio there. How great to be able to make a difference to someone by expending just five minutes of effort — how many other opportunities like that are there that I may just be missing?

LG jokes about everything. Every little everything. Most common is his substituting a silly word or substitute word for what he knows we expect him to say. So instead of “I love you Mommy” he might say to me, “I love you… Daddy!” or “I love you, Bopshops..!”

I really enjoyed this post on 39 ways to live life and not merely exist… some good reminders on how to snap out of your day-to-day rut…