Happy Mother’s Day

First off, Happy Mother’s Day to all the wonderful moms out there. Women who more often than not, lead busy lives and work hard to put the wants and needs of others ahead of their own. Being one of those myself, I’m always on the hunt for things that will help make the daily stuff just a little bit easier. And today, I thought I would share a couple of my recent finds.

First up is Windows Live Writer. WLW is a freebie you can download from Microsoft.com (it is one of the Windows Live features). I’ve had it on my computer ever since I upgraded to Windows 7, but never tried it out because I post my blog updates through blogger. Well, if I had only known how great WLW is, I could have saved myself months of frustration.

I don’t know if anyone else has this problem with blogger, but I had two main frustrations. The first being that blogger always inserts my pictures at the top of my post. I have to remember to upload my pictures first so that I don’t have to then spend 10 minutes fixing my dialogue and getting the pictures in the right place. My second frustration is that blogger never seems to like my hard returns and thus jumbles all of my paragraphs together. Again, causing me to spend a good 5-10 minutes monkeying around with it to get it to look right. Almost makes me want to throw in the towel.

Well, WLW fixes all of that for me. WLW keeps my paragraphs separate AND it allows me to insert my pictures when and where I want. It is beautiful! And with a click of a button, I can publish my post to blogger.

The next thing I would like to share is Amazon Fresh. Now, you do have to live here in the Seattle area for this one. But, oh my – I seriously do not know why I didn’t try it out sooner. I thought home grocery delivery was just plain lazy. So for all of those who saw the light before me, I apologize for passing judgment.

As is typical of our weekends, last weekend was jammed packed with errands and what not. And come Sunday evening, the last thing that I wanted to do was head back out to go grocery shopping. But Miss B had a field trip the next day and I needed to pick up a few things for her sack lunch. I already had my laptop fired up and was browsing regular Amazon.com for a couple of books when I noticed that both books I was looking at were available through Amazon Fresh. What? Seriously? I could have the books delivered with my groceries? I can save money on shipping and have my books the next day instead of waiting 10 days? SOLD!!! So grocery shopping I went. And just another added bonus – it would all be delivered before 6:00am the next morning.

It was a beautiful thing! I have no idea what time they delivered. It had to have been before 5:00am because I never heard them come. I had the things I needed for Miss B’s lunch, I got my books, AND they threw in a bouquet of flowers for being a new customer. What a great way to start off my Monday morning!

Now, Amazon Fresh isn’t going to be my go-to for ALL groceries. There are some things that I can get a better deal at Costco. And we’ll still continue to get produce through our CSA. But overall, it is a great service and I’ve already got my order in for tomorrow morning delivery. If you live in the area, I highly recommend checking it out.

Well, I suppose I should get off the computer. We’ve got to be out of the house by 10:00 and we’ve got visitors stopping by before then. Which means that I better go get the house straightened up. Not exactly how I would have picked to spend my Mother’s Day morning. But what’s a girl to do. Life doesn’t stop just because it is Mother’s Day. Hope you all have a good one!