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My New Addiction

by gswarfield
Grant thought that it was time for me to confide in other people about my new addiction. I don’t think that he wants me to give it up since it has not shown to be harmful quite yet, but we will see. Tanya showed me this blog, listed below where this amazing lady writes out all of the deals in most major grocery and drug stores in the USA. She tells you the deals, the coupons to use, and how to completely understand each of the stores and how they function. It is soo much fun getting good deals, but it can also be very addicting. When you get something for $0.20 cents, it makes you want to buy it even though you don’t need a certain hand cream, etc. I have been trying very hard to not buy things that we don’t NEED unless we are getting them 100% free because otherwise we are still spending more money than we would have without the coupons.
Here you can see a whole group of items that I was able to get for free, some samples, some deals, some coupons, and some I could only have gotten with the help of this blog.
http://hip2save.blogspot.com/

One of the best things about the blog that I use is there are sooooo many free samples to keep up with that for the picture above, I couldn’t even keep up with all of the things that I have gotten for free! Here you can see free luggage tags that I got from KLM Airlines. I got one for me and one for Grant which was a fun thing to get in the mail.

Here you can see all of these items I got and only spent $1.32 which definitely shows how much you can buy for a dollar. Clipping and using coupons takes a lot of time,but since Grant and I are on a limited budget, it really helps us out. It lets us afford things that we don’t always need, and it lets us have some luxuries like some name brand items and some snack food that we would normally not be able to afford. We have even stopped doing the Angel Food Ministries because we are saving more money with the coupons. We still think that it is a great ministry, and is very good for people who cannot make the time to save money otherwise, but it just hasn’t been the right thing for us since I have come to enjoy couponing.

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Trip to Searcy Arkansas

by gswarfield
A while ago now, Grant and I drove from Austin, TX to Searcy, AR for a weekend, or better yet two days. We left on a Friday morning when I had taken off of work. We made it into Searcy later that night, and then hung out with my Cousin Simon. We were also very blessed to be able to stay with the Robertson Family (My older Sister’s In-Laws) who seem to have almost adopted us since we are treated like we are their children or married into their family! The next morning, Saturday, we went to our storage unit and got winter clothes and random other things that we had been missing. After that, we headed back to Austin, TX and had most of Sunday to chill.

This was driving into Dallas, I thought it just looked like a nice city scape!

This was also in the Dallas Area, a nice body of water.

This is one of the funniest things that I was not expecting! Here you can see a TRANSFORMER! If you click on the picture and look at it more closely, you can see multiple Transformer Logos, and even Autobots instead of expedition or whatever make SUV this car is.

Here you can kind of see flooding on a construction site where they were trying to pour concrete… not the best conditions… this was leaving Little Rock.

In the next few pictures you can see more of the flooding where even equipment was under water.

As stated above.

This might not be the most interesting picture,but Arkansas is not the natural state for no reason! It is always so beautiful.

Speaking of natural, here is the infamous Trash Mountain, that is literally all trash… this is as we were leaving Little Rock to return home.

I love seeing funny animals, and this giraffe with its tongue stuck out really made me laugh! I cannot remember for the life of me where this was taken,but it was still funny to see.

And now after we have gotten home. I am sad to say that all of my clothes that we brought back are not yet put away. Since our return from this trip, I don’t think that we have been as busy since we have gotten married, but thus is life.

In this picture, you can see the items that I brought from the storage unit on the left. On the right, are the items that Grant decided to bring back. Also, Grant wanted me to mention that there are still more shoes in the storage unit that are mine, and I accidentally had 3 more pairs of shoes in one of the bins. We actually had more room in our car to bring more home, but we would need somewhere to put everything we bring back, so we refrained. I for one am ecstatic that I have more of my clothes, but am very happy and grateful for all the different things that Grant and I have been blessed with through out our lives and marriage that matter so much more than clothes and shoes.

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New Purse!

by gswarfield
Even though I was a total tomboy growing up, I have definitely found and embraced my girly side. I love purses, shoes, and clothes.  Grant and I are actually on our way to Arkansas right now to get more clothes out of our storage unit for winter. I decided that this was a good excuse to get in some blogging since lately I have been making a lot of excuses to not blog.
So, even though I love those items, I don’t not buy things blindly, it takes me a long time to make decisions about more expensive items like coats, shoes, and purses. I have waited 2 years to get a coat until it was on sale and I knew I wanted it enough. So, I have been looking for a new purse for some time, but since I am so picky about things I just couldn’t find one I wanted.
Grant and I are now living in the Rivas’s house in Lakeway, and we went driving around to see which stores were in the Galleria by our house and came upon a Marshalls. This is a great store, and I decided we should go have a look. Of course, when I shouldn’t be spending money I find a purse that I really like, but I knew I shouldn’t get it so we went home with nothing and tried to forget about the lovely purse.
One week later, my sister Kira was in town and we were shopping mainly to hang out and went to Marshalls, and I wouldn’t let myself go see if that purse was still there because then I would want it more, and I should be forgetting about it. After our shopping trip, I came home to find the purse that I wanted on the island of our kitchen with a note from Grant. I don’t know why he bought it, but OF COURSE I LOVED IT.  We don’t have a good excuse like a birthday or anniversary, but it was such an awesome surprise.
So here are pictures of my new purse in all of its glory ;p! It is a guess purse that normally retails at $115.00,but believe me it was much cheaper than that now, but it still makes me happy to know it was a great deal.

I also got a new wallet, my sister Kira had an awesome one, and mine was literally busting at the seams, but I didn’t want to get the same one that I had before because it would probably break in the same places again, so, I liked how sturdy Kira’s was, so I went to the Stein Mart and found one by the same company but a different look. I am VERY happy with it, and hope that both of my new purchases last a long time!

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Young Married’s Fall Festival

by gswarfield
The Young Marrieds in our church do a variety of different activities, and this month, the social team decided that it would be a fun idea to have a fall festival which consisted of going to a pumpkin farm and taking pictures, picking out pumpkins, going to our house/Rivas’s house, having a pot luck, and carving the pumpkins. Grant and I were planning on doing all of those activities, but as the time got closer with everyone coming to our house, I realized that we were still too far behind on cleaning so we didn’t go to the farm.
Grant was so excited that we weren’t going since it was farther away from our house than we had anticipated in the first place, but once everything was clean and my portion of the food cooked (Chili and Spiced Cider) everything was a lot better. Everyone came over and we had a better turn out than I was expecting consider we only had 2 couples say they were actually coming. I think that we had about 11 couples show up which was awesome. All of the food was great, and I even got a few compliments on my Mother-in-Law’s cider recipe which made me happy because that means I didn’t mess it up.

Here you can see some of the ladies in the dining room carving some pumpkins.

Some more people carving pumpkins, I am glad that the Rivas house was as large as it was, otherwise it would have been very crowded.

Here is a cool picture that Grant took so you can see a few more people.

Some more pictures of the great pumpkins.

I am not completely sure whose pumpkins this was, but I think it was Andy Luksys’, and it was the biggest pumpkin I think out of all of them.

Here you can see the two lit up, they definitely look awesome!

Here is my pumpkin … I decided to go with something different than the usual face, I got my inspiration from a magazine, and I would say once Grant gave me a power drill to make the circles everything was smooth sailing from there.

Here you can see it lit up which is pretty cool. I was kind of sad that we missed out on the farm thing because I would have loved to have some of those cheesy photos because Grant and I hardly EVER take pictures since it is just the two of us. But I will just have to force him to take more pictures of us because I feel like we haven’t been documenting our time very much.

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Talk about a headache!

by gswarfield

So today I spent most of the time trying to figure out the problem with windows 7 not wanting to frikin install.  I still haven’t gotten a different drive yet but it is killing me that I can’t figure out what is going on. I went back to trusty google and researched more and just saw that other people were having the same problem. It is driving me up the wall. I was thinking that maybe mu iso is bad or maybe It is the brand of DVD I was using. Or maybe it what my drive sucks at burning at high speeds.  Sooooo I redownloaded the iso and then I even got a different brand of DVD-r and then I burned it with jessica’s laptop. Surely that should solve my issue. Well guess what!  It didn’t!  So I took my DVD burner out and tore it apart and tried my best to get to the lens of the laser to clean it.

 Cause really that is the only thing left unless it was a different hardware issue, which I couldn’t believe that could be it. So I put it together and still no go. Frikin starting to get on my Nerves. The worst part of it all is that around 6 we were having some people over so I needed to figure it out soon. Cause I know I would of been in a weird mood (unsocial, trying to think about ways to fix my problem). So what I ended up trying was boot with a live ubuntu cd again… and then copying all the files from the windows 7 iso to the partition, where I wanted to install 7 to.  Then once that was copied I used the 7 cd and booted into the setup but went into the recovery setup and then got to the cmd prompt.  I changed the directory to the partition and did a good ol’ run “e:\7\sources\setup.exe”. Then BAM! it started the setup.. but would it make it past the “windows expanding files” part?  Yes it did.  Every other time I tried this, it would hang at 0% or 1% and then throw me an error.  This time it just start breezing by that part.  I was so ecstactic.. You can even ask my wife.  Well it finally finished around 5:45 so I’m happy that I got it done before 6.  But! I now only can boot into xp or 7.  So I reinstalled grub over my MBR.  I have my linux now!!! sweet, but windows 7 isn’t showing up.  So I go into /boot/grub/menu.lst and add a windows 7 section and save exit restart.  Well when you add a section, you have to classify what partition it should read for the boot.  So I chose the correct partition and restarted the computer.  Upon restart I scroll down to 7 and then I get an error that is not allowing it to boot (it can’t find the partition or something).  At this time Anthony and Shea show up for the shin-dig and I have still not officially fixed my booting.  As of right now I believe I can only get into linux (which I already did) and windows xp (which I didn’t try yet)  Well Anthony wanted to see windows 7 and I’m like yeahhh…. kinda working on that myself.  Well him being a geek as well said let us see if we can figure it out.. long story short, we couldn’t get it and then just tried booting into windows xp. OH Gosh well once past the grub bootloader I was then met with a windows bootloader that i could choose 7 or xp.  Gross I know..  I will figure it out later but I theoretically can get into linux/xp/7 so I am happy.

Ta-daa!

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Windows 7 and the headaches I knew were coming!

by gswarfield

DISCLAIMER: if you are not a geek, you will probably not fully understand any of this. And also you need to be a little ADD to stay with my thought process. /end disclaimer

So not sure if ya’ll know? But if you are a student (or still have a student e-mail like I still have one) you can get windows 7 home/pro, 32/64bit for $30. Well……. That is a great price for windows 7 but boy does it come with complication for me. So I went ahead and bought it because I have no clue when my school email will go byebye. Well it is a promotion thing through digital river. It is an online download of a 3 separate files that total 2.9 gigs. Which shoot that aint nothin. Only took about 40 minutes to download I think. But I couldn’t get it downloaded as an iso. Meaning I couldn’t just burn it to a dvd and then clean install windows. What I bought is a upgrade, which you need to have windows vista to upgrade or windows xp. Well I have windows xp because I didn’t want to go into the vista nasty world. But I figured I might as well get into the windows 7 I figure that is where windows is going, and I don’t wanna get left behind on knowledge of an OS. Where was I… oh yeah well I have windows xp but I still want to keep it while I get accustomed to windows 7. ( for now on I’m just going to call windows 7 …”7” cause i’m lazy. Also here is the link for the offer http://windows7.digitalriver.com/store/mswpus/en_US/DisplayHomePage?resid=dQJxNwoBAiMAAFa2YYUAAAAK&rests=1256329835913 Well I went to the land of google to try and see if I could find an iso of this version of windows, since theoretically I just payed for the serial key. If I can find the iso no pirating is happening. Well I (when I say I, I really mean my friend matt!!) found a site that showed how to make the three files into an iso after you kinda extracted them. Now you have to use a terminal.. or in windows it is called a command window I think. Omg !!! oh no not the terminal you mean I have to like type out directories!?!?!11 well it is practically copy and paste (ctrl-c…ctrl-v). oh here is the website for the how to make it into an iso. http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/how_burn_your_student_copy_windows_7_dvd so I extract one of the 3 files but it crashes with an error.. I’m like well crap.. now I have to redownload 3 gig of info. Well I went back to trusty ol google… which makes me think of this picture.. here
So back to the extraction. I searched on google about the error. ( by the way if you don’t know how to do something or you get an error.. just copy and paste to google.) Well it seems a lot of people are having trouble with that error. I found out it doesn’t matter to me, because that is all about doing the install within windows[which is not what I want]. So when it did extract I got all I needed from it and followed the how to. Awesome I’m that much closer to my goal of breaking my computer with 7. well when I say break I mean software not physically.
Let me tell you a little more about my story and worries. The reason I’m so nervous is the fact that I’m dual booting Ubuntu 64bit(linux) and windows xp. Well I have GRUB as my bootloader. It is the default bootloader that comes with ubuntu. Well a little more to this. I have 4 partitions on my main OS hard drive. The first being a partition for ubuntu 32 bit version. ( that was back when I was skeptical about 64 bits and compatibility issues.), the second partition goes to windows xp. The third partition went to a stuff drive as I call it. Well I was feeling frisky and I partitioned that stuff drive later on to get a partition for ubuntu 64.. well let me tell ya… I have no problems with 64 bit ubuntu.. frikin uses all of my ram.. another issue with 32bit *sigh*. So anyways once you go 64 bit you can’t go back.. who says size doesn’t matter?!?!11 ok well I have a 32 bit ubuntu partition that I haven’t touched in months. Well that was /dev/sda5 and my 64 bit partition was /dev/sda7. I formated my 32 bit partition and then deleted the logical drive so windows 7 would just see it as unallocated space. Well as soon as I rebooted.. grub is already complaining.. and by complaining I mean it isn’t showing anything to boot at all. No windows xp or ubuntu.. head ache has begun. So I’m like screw it I know that there is is formated partition so I put in my 7.iso dvd into the drive and start the death of the life, aka 7 install. Well it is taking for ever and nervous at the same time that I don’t accidentally miss the unallocated space wording and format my other partition or something. Well I finally feel confident about it and then boom error it can’t read a file. OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!111111. This is where the e-mail I sent to anthony came from which is this: (his reply to my email was “You should blog about this. Just cut and paste this in, it’s teh awesome.” and now look what you gone and made me do)
*hahha well get this.. my dvd burner is old.. i was even having problems installing ubuntu.. says it couldn’t read a file.. but there is a retry button.. so it finally would read the file.  (i think my burner is just dirty, which would surprise me.. i’ve had thru out college)  well windows 7 is like .. if i can’t read one file  your screwed!@!!11111 so i thought.. dude i can just boot off usb.. i have a newer board.. like i don’t even think the board is over a year old yet.. sooo i get the install on a usb harddrive.. and then boot into bios.. looking.. only options are harddrive, cd rom,, or frikin FLOPPY!!! who uses a floppy these days… so i’m go to my friend google.. and find out my mother board can use a usb stick to flash bios.. frikin bios!!! so i askmyself why in the world can ASUS not have usb bootable.. tell me that anthony WHYYY!  so I yeah.. that is my story of the day. *
So I can’t get 7 installed because my dvd burner doesn’t work. Well I’m living at the rivas and I was thinking surly andrew has to have a computer or dvd rom around here somewhere? Well he did.. but my computer wouldn’t even recognize the dvd rom in bios. So that is a no bueno. So my motherboard can’t boot a simple usb, which I know motherboards like 4 years old that could… I can’t read the dvd itself. Well I guess I’ll just go back to my linux until I find someone with a dvd drive. Anthony is hopefully gonna pull through for me. It is a external usb dvd rom though.. little nervous.. Ok so back to me going back and relaxing in my linux.. ohhhh nooo grub is all like.. what! You want to boot into a OS.. heck no! I’ll give you an error 17! well guess who I went to for help.. no not my foot in the screen.. it was my pal google (remember him?) yeah here is a link for what I just copied pasted. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351 OMGZ0RS!!!11 more terminal and now your throwing in a live cd.. whaaaaa!?!?! .. well I had to use the ubuntu live cd to get to a terminal in root and reinstall to the mbr (master boot record). And noww I just wait more .. for what I know is to come.. more headaches!!..
But have no fear! Raid 5 is here!! You might be thinking through all of this, this guy needs to be backing up all his stuff if he is messing around with formating and master boot records and what not.. well let me just say I have a raid 5 setup with all my personal stuff on there. But it still sucks losing your OS to something stupid like a format or rm /*.. haha don’t ever do that one.. Well I’ve spent a lot of time configuring my ubuntu to get it that way I want.. But oh yeah! I just remembered.. 9.10 is coming in 6 days!!!! can’t wait for it http://www.ubuntu.com/

what is raid ? or even radi 5?  http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2007/06/11/understanding_raid/1

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