Getting Rid of Twitter Trolls

Back story: Tweeted in response to a law Governor Moonbeam signed yesterday. Got back a series of tweets from an idiot who disagreed...and he quickly devolved into name-calling, invectives, blah blah blah. There's being an idiot, and then there's being abusive, so I reported him. I don't care about me so much as I care about my followers who have to "listen" to his garbage in my timeline.

In response, while Twitter is investigating they sent me a boilerplate letter about how to rid yourself of Twitter Troll Tweets.

It's pretty cool! You actually have several powerful options. Here's how:

Block or Mute the troll. Blocking seems to have the effect of not only blocking the troll from writing on your timeline, but also erasing the troll's posts. Muting removes troll tweets from your timeline but doesn't keep them from your account (or you from theirs.) So, if you don't like a particular thread I'm chasing, you could mute me for a while, then unmute me later. Blocking seems to get rid of ALL the troll tweets from that user, while muting only silences a user from that point forward.

To block a Twitter user:

1. Go to the profile page of the person you wish to block.
2. Click or tap the gear icon  on their profile page. This brings up a drop-down actions menu.
3. Select Block or Report from the options listed.
4. Select a reason for the block and click Block to confirm.

Blocked users cannot:

• Add your Twitter account to their lists.
• Have their @replies or mentions show in your mentions tab (although these Tweets may still appear in search).
• Follow you.
• See your profile picture on their profile page or in their timeline.
• Tag you in a photo.

• Muting users on Twitter

  Mute is a feature that allows you to remove an account's Tweets from your timeline without unfollowing or blocking that account. Muted accounts will not know that you’ve muted them and you can unmute them at any time. To access a list of accounts you have muted, visit your muted accounts settings.

  Some important things to know about mute:

  • Muted accounts can follow you and you can follow muted accounts. Muting an account will not cause you to unfollow them.
  • You will no longer receive push or SMS notifications from any muted account.

  For muted accounts that you follow:

  • The muted account can still send you a direct message.
  • @ replies and mentions by the muted account will still appear in your Notifications tab.
  • Tweets from a muted account before the time the account was muted will still be displayed in your Home timeline.

  For muted accounts that you do not follow:

  • The muted account cannot send you a direct message.
  • @ replies and mentions will not appear in your Notifications tab.

  To mute a Twitter user on the web:

  Muting from a Tweet:

  1. From a Tweet, click More at the bottom of the Tweet.
  2. Click Mute.

  Muting from a profile:

  1. Go to the profile page of the person you wish to mute.
  2. Click the gear icon  on their profile page. This brings up a drop-down actions menu.
  3. Select Mute from the options listed.

  Once you’ve muted a user on the web, you will see a confirmation banner. If you made a mistake, you can click Undo to unmute a user right away.

  To mute a Twitter user on iOS:

  Muting from a Tweet:

  1. Tap a Tweet from the user you’d like to mute.
  2. Tap the ••• icon.
  3. Tap Mute and Yes, I’m sure to confirm.

  Muting from a profile:

  1. Visit the profile page of the user you wish to mute.
  2. Tap the gear icon. 
  3. Tap Mute and Yes, I’m sure to confirm.

  To mute a Twitter user on Twitter for Android:

  Muting from a Tweet:

  1. Tap the ⋮ icon.
  2. Tap Mute @username and confirm.

  Muting from a profile:

  1. Visit the profile page of the user you wish to mute.
  2. Tap the gear icon. 
  3. Tap Mute and Yes, I’m sure to confirm.

  How do I know if I have muted someone?

  When you visit the profile of a user you have muted, you will see the red mute icon. 

  To access a list of accounts you have muted:

  1. Navigate to your muted account settings on Twitter.com. You will see a list of every account you are currently muting.
  2. From the top of the list, you can select to view Accounts you follow that you have muted, or All accounts that you have muted.
  3. You can unmute users by clicking the red mute icon to unmute. 

  Note: Accounts you follow will list the users you are both currently following and muting. The All tab will display all the accounts you’re muting, including the ones you are following.

Death of a Great Genealogy Program

I am incredibly sad to learn today that Ohana Software is shutting its doors for good. John Vilburn and company created a platform of wonderful, easy to use, intuitive products for the genealogy market. Tied to efficiently and easily work within the LDS Church's Personal Ancestral File, easily the dominant software (longevity, free, intuitive), FamilyInsight and its predecessor programs, worked seamlessly uploading and downloading data from the various databases housed on the LDS' FamilySearch.

Alas, when the LDS Church's genealogy gurus decided to be all things to all people (and marry itself to Ancestry.com), there were Tron-esque casualties in the cyber war: notably Personal Ancestral File itself. Ohana Software, tied so closely to PAF, has now become one of those casualties. The "new and (not) improved" Family Tree is just so anxious to be all things (a memory and stories repository, photo repository, blah blah blah) that, in my opinion, they have forgotten their core purpose: uploading, downloading, processing and sharing, data. Even with third party software, it is still exceptionally cumbersome, slow and lethargic to up and download basic data facts: the who, what, when, and where of a person. You've heard me rant before: data which used to take me 30 minutes to upload now take a minimum of 4 hours. Data which used to take 2 hours to process now takes the better part of 8 hours. 

It's ridiculous. And it makes you want to give up genealogy, unless your sole purpose in researching your family's history is simply to find or post stories and photos--kind of like an eternal Facebook. 

Sigh. I lived in and held on to eternal hope that Ohana would be able to come out with a program which works with that behemoth, Family Tree. It's going to be irritating to have to go through the process of buying, learning and researching multiple software programs to do what I need to do, efficiently and effectively. Drop a bazillion pound weight and steamroll over my soul why don't you? It would be less painless.

At this point, all I feel like doing is allowing this post to degenerate into name-calling, so I'm going to end with the public announcement from Ohana Software.

Rest In Peace, Ohana. You truly were family.

Aloha and Mahalo from Ohana Software

Ohana Software is closing. We at Ohana Software have enjoyed working with you these past 12 years. FamilyInsight has returned to its original purpose as a clean up tool. There are several choices of programs that will work with FamilySearch Family Tree. They each have different features. Some will download from FamilySearch Family Tree, Sync your records with FamilySearch, Add records to Family Tree , update your records etc. Visit https://familysearch.org/products/ to see all of the products that work with FamilySearch Family Tree. There is now a version of FamilyInsight that just has the clean up tools and comparison modes. You can also convert to different formats. As we are closing there will be no further support for FamilyInsight, or any other programs that we have sold in the past. We are putting a new version of FamilyInsight on http://ohanasoftware.wix.com/familyinsight and it will be available to anyone. The license key is on the webpage. Due to changes made on FamilySearch on 21 Aug 2014 FamilyInsight no longer signs into FamilySearch so modes requiring that will no longer connect.

Living Off Grid in the City (Sort of)

I think I need to write a book on living off grid in the city when you're not fully prepared. There's a scripture which states "All these things will give you experience (if you walk uprightly before the Lord.)" Maybe that should be the title.

Did I tell you about the time our furnace blew up on Christmas eve day? Yeah, you try and get it replaced and fixed on that holiday. It was a week before it was replaced and running, which meant we had to turn off the gas to the house for the entire week. Fortunately we had a wood burning fireplace, so not only did we live in the living room to keep warm, we had to boil water for bathing (2 adults, 5 little kids), and took the opportunity to also cook in it with dutch ovens. I managed to be smart enough to get a hot plate so I could cook, but I wasn't smart enough to buy room heaters (ok, it was a money thing too.) It was a not-too-painful experience which educated me on the things I will do differently the next time (and there was a next time) I am "living off grid" without heat or heating elements in the house.

We have lived for up to a week at a time without electric on a fairly recurring basis, most notably when we lived in one section of town where major construction was happening, and often when I forget to pay the bill (or most recently forget to pay a DEPOSIT.) I still don't have major solar panels and batteries which will allow me to be completely self-reliant, but we've managed to acquire enough to keep us going without electricity for a while. Examples: Goal Zero panels for small electronics; we live in a south/east/north facing house (on purpose) which means virtually from sun up to sun down, we don't need interior lighting; home-made rocket stoves to cook; a generator (not yet adapted to use natural gas though, it's on the list). We've made sure our food storage reflects a cooking style which is more stove top friendly than baking or BBQ grill dependent. That takes more intention than you think it would. Hint: rice based, pasta based, tortilla (versus bread) based, raw/pressed juice oriented.

I will confess: with all the experiences we've had the only one we had not yet had was living without running water.

Should have knocked on wood. That changed this week. The main bath shower, which heretofore was a minor inconvenient drip/leak, decided it was going to give way and become a steady, constant trickle. Up to now, I just put a 5 gallon bucket underneath the faucet and every 8 hours I'd go water the plants, vegetables or fill up the Berkey water filter or washing machine. This week it got bad enough that I finally caved and called a friend of mine who is a plumber and won't over charge us.

Good news? He's willing to come help me out and give me the friends and family discount. Bad news: you get the friends and family TIME SCHEDULE too. That means "when he gets there" which translates to next Wednesday (at least), a full week away.

Ok, I could opt to spend a small fortune and get it repaired sooner, but I'm...exceptionally frugal (some call it cheap!) Come on, a nom de plume of "Get Free Groceries" on my @grocerysecrets Twitter handle might be a clue! So this week we are (for the most part) living without running water.

Now, before all the overbearing, micro-managing, snarky people run and call Child Protective Services on me, I want to state for the record that we DO have running water here. We just choose not to USE IT for most of the day and night. 

What we've chosen to do is shut it off at the main. Once or twice a day we turn it back on. Everyone showers, does laundry; we fill up in buckets and store what our daily water usage for the day is (mostly, this is for flushing toilets.) So we're only semi-living without running water, but it's been a real eye-opening experience we haven't had before (unless primitive camping.)

I've always "known" despite having ten 55 gallon water barrels that we don't have enough water stored. Now I KNOW it. I'm conscious of how much water we need in a day, versus how much water would be nice to have in a day. A composting toilet is going really high up on my prepping list. (Will I ever choose something that doesn't cost me a small fortune?) 

Living without running water changes your behavior patterns. My DD17 queried "how was she going to brush her teeth without running water? (and she meant it.)" I looked at her sideways and said, "the same way you do when you are camping: fill a cup with water from the bucket and go from there." She was like, oh. Yeah. But you just don't think about it with intention when your situation changes.

And that's the key. It's not that we (or you) can't adapt and make do, it's that you have to do so with intention. That's the experience part. I've been so often without power or heat that we now go on auto-pilot and continue living without hardly missing a beat. 

Water is a new one. It (along with the drought) is making me rethink 'how and when' to do things. My youngest son learned it's water pressure which flushes a toilet, and that water poured at a decent rate (flow) will directly flush down a toilet (versus flipping a handle.) We've all learned that it takes 3 gallons minimum to flush a toilet. Multiply that by 5 people (15 gallons), 2 or 3 times a day per person, and you start thinking: in a true emergency, is that the best use of 45 gallons of water a day, or do I want to look seriously at investing in a composting toilet? My husband started freaking out that we hadn't stored drinking water (day 1.) My youngest kinda looked at him strangely and walked over to the Berkey filter set up and poured him a glass of water. DH went: oh. Yeah. Not to mention we have bottled water on hand, but it illustrates that when your life takes a prepping turn out of the ordinary, people don't think logically.

You think: do I want to use water to wash dishes or do I want to invest in paper plates, bowls (silverware doesn't use much water)? I already invested in one of those green ceramic skillets which wipes off clean with a damp cloth. I should probably buy another one. I had already planned to build a parabolic cooker to not only cook, but distill sea water. Except my satellite dish is oblong, not round, and I haven't gotten far enough to research whether or not I can still use it, let alone make one. 

Thankfully being a mom of 5, I already know 60 gallons of water in a bathtub will wash five
people. THEN--the kids didn't notice the in and out, and I was doing the washing of the kid so it went pretty fast. NOW--they'll notice and have to get over themselves. DH might be going last. Plus you'll need water for rinsing out hair. I'd already started thinking about grey water re-use for laundry. 

DD17 pointed out we need to stockpile hand sanitizer if we won't have access to running water. Again I say: fill a cup with water, scrub your hands, rinse off with water from cup. But she has a good point, and it's not something I've heretofore stockpiled. Plus hand sanitizer when paired with a cotton ball does double duty as a really good fire starter.

All in all, like other prepping adventures (voluntary or forced) it's a good experience. We're hoping to move to Texas in the not-to-distant future, and the area I'm looking at we might very well be truly off grid for a long while, so I was already thinking how I was going to solve water issues. The Cairns wrote a book entitled "Off On Our Own: Living Off Grid in Comfortable Independence" Might be an interesting read. But their experience is "in the wild" versus living off grid in a city environment. The mechanics would be compounded if you are living in an apartment or townhome.

Still. The point of this blogpost is that it is a lot easier to gain experience when it's not a real, true emergency. We can take the minor inconveniences of life (power outage, water outage, food shortage (people on strike), etc.) and use them as jumping off points to prepare. Or we can continue blithely through life, avoiding the inconvenience and then be royally hosed (water pun there) when disaster strikes. 

This experience has shown me that I need to have way more water than I thought. It has shown me that I want to be able to drill a well when we move to Texas. And I'm going to want to have a ram pump or something similar to bring water to the house: buckets get old really fast, and that's when I can turn the faucet on and refill for the day. I shudder to think about bucketing it in from a distance. I liked those 125 gallon water barrels before; now I'm thinking they're more of a necessity. Aqua dams look interesting and hold 125 gallons. You'd need to store it in something secure though, and I wonder about long term. And I've long desired some large capacity water cubes.

Someone a lot wiser than me said: if you are prepared, you shall not fear. (Or at least: not as much.)

Sit DOWN Shut UP

(Think military cadence:)

Sit down, shut up.

Sit down, shut up.

Indoctrinate not educate.

Sit down, shut up.

Sit down, shut up.

There's a school in my city which has the most bizarre 'rules':

--No playing on playground equipment unless it's "break time" this includes before school starts (Sit down shut up)

--School starts at 8:03. If you arrive before that, you SIT down on your number on the blacktop and SHUT UP.

--Parents are to walk their children in and stand on the blacktop with them until school starts

(parents: reinforce Sit down shut up)

--No shouting or talking loudly while walking through school property (I actually saw and heard a teacher "shush" a student who called out an hello to his friend this morning...sit down shut up)

--Outside the classroom, empty your backpack completely out, hang it on a peg, put your snacks in the gender appropriate box (the teacher will distribute later), lunch boxes in a separate bin. (sit down, shut up)

--At lunch time: lunch is for eating, not playing. (after all, worker bees only need to take the state imposed lunch break from work.)

Historically, true education has been done privately by tutors, or in the home, or a small community hired a teacher(s) to tutor a group in fundamentals. "Public" education had a different goal: provide a framework and a structure to prepare workers for the factories. Robotic, mindless work, done by rote. 

Sit down shut up. 

What a tremendous meta message is being sent to these students. Sit down shut up. We'll tell you what you need to know. We'll tell you what you need to do. We know what's best. Don't use your mind. Don't question authority. You're not entitled to independent thought or action, personal accountability or responsibility.

Sit down shut up.

Huntington Beach city school district implemented Common Core last year, way ahead of anyone else. 

Surrounded by multi-million dollar homes, parents are thrilled their children attend this wonderful school. After a week of drop off/pick up, I can barely step foot on this campus without throwing up. I already warned the parent whose child I transport I may not be able to contain myself from challenging the status quo. She thought I was kidding.

Sit down shut up.

I get that "teachers" shouldn't have to do playground duty...after all, their teachers union contract says indoctrinate (err, educate) not develop a child. SO GET ALL THOSE PARENTS YOU MAKE STAND ON THE BLACKTOP ANYWAY, SUPERVISE IT. 

There's actually very little playground/gym equipment on the blacktop. Certainly not enough to support a school population of this size. There IS a huge grass area (likely rented out to all the commercial-for-profit sports clubs as a revenue stream by the District.) I asked one of the students if they ever played soccer or baseball or anything out there. He said NO, NEVER.

Indoctrinate not educate. Sit down shut up.

It's ironic that this school is one of the first to implement Common Core. You know, the SAVIOR of Education--the system which is going to CHALLENGE young minds to think critically. Yet day after day, hour after hour, what they demand is: SIT DOWN SHUT UP.

Sit down shut up

Sit down shut up

Indoctrinate not educate

Sit down shut up

Sit down shut up

1  2  3  4,  1  2....THREE FOUR.

Kinda catchy, isn't it??

New Prepping Videos

Been prepping up (for) a storm. (Little play on words there, eh?)

One of my yahoo groups was talking about dehydrating ground beef into hamburger rocks. Always seemed like a lot of work for ground beef bits (they turn out really small) so I asked if one could de-hydrate meatballs? No one had an answer. 

So I did an experiment. Check out my YouTube video for the results:















I had a bunch of cucumbers so I decided to experiment and dehydrate those too. Not exactly sure what I'm going to do with them, but I'm on a dehydrating roll here, so you get to see that one also:

And last but not least, something I REALLY hope takes the cake, I've grown my own sweet potato slips. Sweet potato slips are what we would normally call seedling/starters for other vegetables. Eventually, I hope they will become pounds and pounds of sweet potatoes. So far, I've gotten 15 potato slips off one sweet potato for which I paid about 50 cents, and there are still more stems sprouting. Didn't think to take a video about how to peel off the stem from the potato...so I'll try and do that soon and edit the (already uploaded) video. Plus hopefully I'll actually have a harvest (I'm starting REALLY late in the year) and I'll video that one too. We only have about 6 weeks of bad growing weather here in southern California...I'm hoping I can extend the growing season and make it through to get a harvest.

Prepping for the Downsize & Move

We have managed to persuade my youngest, who will be the only child remaining at home by then, of the wisdom in moving to Texas.

He has been most excited by the idea of building his own Tiny House. He's already started designing it in Minecraft. We talked about plumbing and how it has to run parallel or vertical to be most efficient, which sent him back to the drawing board for re-design. We discussed downloading Google Sketchup and building it in that (hey--look, education can be fun!)

We are thinking, buy land in a recreation area, then moving a travel trailer, mobile home or build a tiny house while we decide where we want to live permanently and if we want to build or buy. We've lived in a well laid out 850 square foot condo with 2 parents and 4 kids ages 14, 9, 8, and 5 plus a dog, and thrived, so I know three of us can live in less space.

Pluses of a travel trailer: self-contained, low cost (here in California, not Texas!!), can be used year round.

Negatives: really small space. On average, 128 square feet and not an efficient 128 square feet. Even a tiny house built on a trailer bed could use space more efficiently, as a normal travel trailer is meant for weekend use, whereas a Tiny House built on a travel trailer frame is meant for 365 day use. 

Pluses of a Mobile Home: one and done :)

Negative: Cost (surprisingly expensive in Texas....)

Tiny House pluses: Usable, livable space. 14 feet square translates to 196 square feet, plus a sleeping loft would add more space, about 112 square feet. Ironically, DS and I measured our living room and found it is only slightly larger than that, so we could actually do mock-ups here at home if we decided to go that route.

14 feet square can be built economically for about $3-5,000 roughly the price of a travel trailer. Obviously you can spend a boatload of money (the average tiny home owner spends like $25-30,000 building and outfitting one. That's crazy IMO.) 

Negative: Off grid (negative for DH, positive for me.) Building it yourself to make that price footprint do-able (the irony of this is not lost on me.)

In any event, the following would have to happen to make the move a reality:

1. Get out of debt. We have been following the guidelines in The Total Money Makeover for a while now. If we are gazelle intense like we were when we were paying off the Honda, we could be original debt free by December.

2. Save up $10,000 by September of next year. 

3. Pretty much rid ourselves of everything we own. Have to do this anyway.

I need to apply the same gazelle intensity towards finding work that I have to getting out of debt. Any extra income would just balloon that nest egg so much higher (and/or, get us out of debt that much sooner.)

We're excited !!

Justice and Mercy

I had a long conversation with my dearest friend Wendi the other day about Justice and Mercy. It was quite illuminating. She has spent the entire summer studying this topic in depth. 

As we conversed, she gave several examples of instances where we demand justice, not content to let God oversee justice. There is a difference between the justice we demand and, IMO, God's justice, which largely holds someone accountable for his or her actions. Accountability in my viewpoint, is the natural consequence of a decision we make or don't make. For example, if I fail to pay my electric bill and the electricity gets shut off: is that justice? Or is that SCE holding me accountable for my lack of action? One could argue either side of the coin. One could also argue SCE could extend mercy, and not shut off my electricity.

What we usually demand however, is our justice, which is really more akin to vengeance. Someone does us a real or imagined injury, and we demand they pay for it with the uttermost farthing, to the nth degree. 

I'll give an extreme example. When my Ex beat up my daughter, I had an opportunity to see justice prevail by having him arrested, convicted and (perhaps) serve jail time. Instead, like many women in these situations, I allowed (a false sense of) mercy to rob true justice and hold him accountable for his actions. I then spent the next 7 years demanding emotional justice (vengeance): the family court system needed to validate he was an evil guy, the church needed to take action because he was an evil guy etc etc. That he was (is) an evil guy, is true. But here's the important lesson: I had my chance at justice, and chose (false) mercy, then regretted choosing mercy (because I errantly thought mercy=letting him off the hook) and demanded that my brand of justice/vengeance be substituted instead. What's ironic is that if I had not allowed mercy to rob justice, I would not have had to spend the next 7 years demanding personal vengeance: the court system would have (justly) kept him at bay for me.

More frequently are the minor offenses (not crimes) we allow to mushroom into our own personal nuclear wars because we demand "justice." My mother literally just went to her grave having not spoken to, or interacting with, anyone in my immediate family for over a decade, including her grandchildren, because of some real or imagined slight she had been dealt  by me or mine. She demanded that justice be served by substituting coldness and distance rather than sociableness or congeniality. She allowed her demand for personal justice (vengeance) to rob her of attending or participating in all of my childrens' baptisms, ordinations, graduations, other key celebratory events, or conversing about things that she and I previously enjoyed.

My sister has taken up her torch by refusing to inform me of my mother's passing, refusing to inform me of burial services etc.  In her desire to demand personal justice (i.e., " I'll make my sister pay the utter most farthing by keeping the death as secret as can possibly be done") what she has really done is rob those from the community at large who would have offered condolence and support to my mother's other children and family; taken away the opportunity from others to serve in time of grief, lend a kind hand, word or deed. All because her view of justice (really vengeance) must be meted out.

I realized something profound during my conversation with Wendi. It's this: when we demand that our own personal level of justice/vengeance be substituted for God's justice, what we are really saying is we don't believe that God will actually mete out justice. Worse, what we really mean is: I have to mete out justice instead of you God, because I know you won't act in my best interest.

Ponder that for a few minutes. It's pretty profound.

God has told us repeatedly that He's got justice handled. I think we err thinking God's mercy "lets us off the hook," rather, included in God's justice is that he allows us to experience the natural consequences (good and bad) of our behavior and decisions. I think the mercy part (and it's just my opinion) is that with God (versus our brand of justice), at some point the bad consequence ends.

 Additionally, Christ warns us in Matthew 5 (The Sermon on the Mount) that unless we are willing to set aside our own personal desires for vengeance, extend personal mercy and rely on God to handle the justice, our vengeance will boomerang on us, and we won't escape it until WE have paid the utter most farthing.

Sadly, in my mother's case, paying the utter most farthing was all too real. Having spent the better part of her adult life meting out personal justice, she missed out on a lot of joy. When I was busy making sure that personal justice was dealt to my Ex, I extended his control over my life. 

When I learn to extend mercy, what I get back is peace. I get back freedom. I get back energy. I get back love. I don't end up wasting my life bogged down carrying the heavily weighted bundles of negativity, anger, and hate.

God speaks this clearly in Exodus 14:14: "The Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace."

I'll close with the memorable words of a 12 Step program:

Let Go and Let God.

And rest in peace, Leona.