Satori Smiles » Blogging about Blogging

Starting First Grade

Angela — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 05:46:49 +0000

This fall is the year that Satori would start Kindergarten if she were attending public school. I feel she is beyond Kindy at this point, so as of June 1, 2010, we are unofficially calling this her First Grade year. We’ll be homeschoooling most of the summer, taking a week off each month, and doing a bit lighter load than fall and spring semesters.

I’m having another bad batch of spam, so I’m trying a few new things. Spam is getting more clever every year and so far I’ve blocked 20,498 with something that worked great up until this spring. Please let me know if you can’t post to the comments and I’ll tweak the settings.

Some people asked about my retreat, I will post something about that soon, with photos. As for my personal life, I am on a super health kick at the moment. The family is all eating better, hiking beautiful hikes, and doing some geocaching on the side. Life is super fun!

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Blogging One Year Giveaway – First contestant awarded

Angela — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:06:02 +0000

Congratulations to Michael and his wife, who both entered the contest for an Amazon $25 Gift Certificate, in celebration of SatoriSmiles One-Year Anniversary.

There were 32 contestants who commented on my blog post, and several of them got additional chances to win by commenting or linking to us.

In two more weeks, we’ll be picking yet another winner! There is still time to enter!!!

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Blogging One Year Giveaway!

Angela — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:29:39 +0000

February 9, 2010 marks my one-year anniversary for blogging on SatoriSmiles! To celebrate, I would like to do a giveaway. Since I love Amazon so much, I will giveaway two prizes. Two $25 Amazon Gift Certificates will be given away in the next month. One on March 1 and one on March 15.

To enter, simply comment on this post! You can get an additional entry by linking to my blog from your blog/website. You can also get 3 more entries for each comment on this blog from now until the giveaway date – for a total of 5 entries.

Thanks for reading!

Blog comments (if you do not have two previously approved comments) will need to be approved before they go live. I’ll do this throughout the day.

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Adoption news

Angela — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:32:57 +0000

I just wanted to share a little update on what our life has been like in the week I haven’t been blogging. We are going to be adopting a child (or two), and it most likely will happen this year! Being adopted myself, this is something I have always wanted to do, and this year is finally the perfect time for our family to take on this next part of our life. We are pursuing the Waiting Child program, and are expecting a 4-5 year old child, perhaps even a sibling pair.

In just a short amount of time, David and I have had about 10 hours of training. Mama has been reading up about adopting an older child. We are trying to prepare the house for a home study. David thought it was time for us to replace my old furniture I bought straight out of college, and now we have a living room that I’d be proud to invite people over and hang out in. I’m also preparing the child’s bedroom and bathroom areas, which I won’t get around to finishing until we know the gender when we are matched.

Satori is sooo excited about getting a new baby sister or brother, she keeps talking about her new sibling. She knows that this new sibling could be up to 5 years old, but we had been talking about a baby sibling for several years now, it is hard to stop saying “baby”.

We are still doing lessons, and I’ll be posting about our days once again very soon…

No related posts.

Blog Commenters (specifically, those that are attempting to comment)

Angela — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:40:55 +0000

Thank you to those who went out of their way to email me this week about the message they are getting when trying to comment on my blog. I wonder if this is due to recent updates I made to all my blog plugins. I have looked at the settings for my spam protector and saw this:

Allow users behind proxy servers to comment?
Most users should leave this unchecked. Many human spammers hide behind proxies.

As you can see, I’ve checked it, so those of you behind proxy servers should now be able to comment! Just make sure you are not a human spammer hiding behind your proxy, hehe.

I used to be a web developer, so I know a thing or two about getting pages to the top in Google. Unfortunately, that also seems to bring out the spammers that try leave blog comments! Since I discovered WP SpamFree, I’ve had a relatively spam free blog. As you can see, it has blocked 17,473 spams so far! Before I added this, I had to delete dozens of spam messages a day. WPSpamFree is a WordPress blog plugin that gives blogs spam protection.

However, I now wonder how many valid people weren’t able to leave valid comments! I’ll try checking the above setting and see how it goes…

So comment away!!!

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