Archive for » January, 2006 «

Amazon Central

23 Jan 2006 by

Amazon Central sidebarAs some may have noticed, our “Amazon Central” sidebar got a little boost. The previous version was hosted as a separate blog in Moveable Type. Each book was it’s own entry with various blog fields mapped to different attributes about the book: i.e. entry body => ISBN, keyword => are we still reading this?, etc. Not very intuitive, yet a common practice used by bloggers wishing to enhance existing tools.

If you want something done right, do it yourself… and have fun doing it.

Amazon Central is a Flash-based internet application integrated with WordPress and Amazon’s E-Commerce Web service that I created. Our collection of books is store in a mySQL database by ASIN, who’s reading it, and is it being read right now (its reading status). The accordion menu separates the collection into views by reading status. Each view displays up to 10 books. Ten is the maximum number of items you can request from Amazon in a single call. If there are more than 10 items in a view, the next and previous buttons will be enabled. Since we’ll only be reading a few books at a time, I decided to include images for the “Reading” view.

Now for the real magic.

What you don’t see is the admin form unless you are logged in to WordPress as an author. The image here shows that authors can add books to either view by simply entering it’s ASIN in the appropriate accordion menu. If the author wishes to change a book’s reading status from “Reading” to “Read”, or visa-versa, she would simply need to (un)check its checkbox. It’s that simple.

As before, clicking a book will take you to its entry on Amazon.com tied with our Associates tag. So remember – visit our site first before shopping at Amazon!

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Fulton’s Baptism

16 Jan 2006 by

Yesterday, on January 15, 2006, our son, Fulton Timothy Gretencord was received into the Church, became a brother in Christ and an adopted son of God through the Sacrament of Baptism. What a joyous day and a blessed baptism!

Fulton, as you know, is named after the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. He is also named after a dear friend of the family Fr. Timothy Alkire, who also celebrated Mass and baptized little Fulton. Fulton did great! He didn’t even cry as his sin was washed away. Fr. Tim also consecrated Fulton to the Blessed Mother.

Our blessed Lord crowned the day with a special gift (as if the beautiful Mass and baptism weren’t enough). Fulton’s Godparents, Andrew and Elizabeth Shearer, had written the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Foundation a couple of weeks ago to request some holy cards. Fulton Sheen’s cause for canonization is open and the Vice-Postulator for the cause is Fr. Andrew Apostoli. We are told that when the Foundation received the Shearer’s request for their God son, Fr. Apostoli called the fundraising office in Irving and asked them to get in touch with the Shearers. They had a special gift for the young lad named after the Archbishop. The office only knows of two other children named after Fulton Sheen. Elizabeth, being the good almost-God mother that she is, drove to Irving with both kids to pick up this gift to present to us from the Foundation. So what is this gift?

Here are the pictures from the day. The Foundation gave us a beautiful icon of Archbishop Fulton Sheen. It is one of 350 in existance. Their generousity toward our little family brought me to tears. Thank you!

What a blessed day indeed!
Fulton Sheen, pray for us!

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3 Year ago Today…

11 Jan 2006 by

…We said “I do” to a lot of things…to be open to children…to be faithful through EVERYTHING that God would bless our lives with…and to give ourselves to each other freely…

Who knew (besides God and His Church) that saying “I do” to those three “little” things would mean giving so much…and being blessed with so much.

Last year was a very “interesting” year. As I look back, it was ONLY by the grace of God in our marriage that we got through the trials. And it was only by His grace and mercy that we were blessed with so many joys.

Thank you to all of our family and friends who continue to be witnesses of God’s love to us and our growing family. May His face shine upon you!

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Bottoms Up! (and more)

08 Jan 2006 by

I must say that I’m proud that french fries are not the number 1 vegetable in our household. The added bonus is french fry times give us funny stories to share.

We’re at the Hebert home on Friday as they invited us to share in a fried catfish meal. Included in the meal were french fries. And with french fries, you have to have ketchup. Well, Therese is still learning what to do with “dips.” The Heberts have nifty serving cups for ketchup. Therese liked her “cup” so much she decided she would try to drink the ketchup! Bottoms up! The kids (remember they have 7) and we got a good laugh out of our sweet Therese turning a dip into drink.

In other news…I was inspired by my friend Misty taking a cake decorating class. Even before she told me she was going to take it, I thought something like that would prove useful. You know having kids means more birthdays, baptisms, and other celebrations. So I asked Adam to get me a cake decorating kit for Christmas and my sweetheart came through. Well today was my first stab at using my new tools. I’m just about as sick of icing as I can get. But it was a good first practice round on the decorating end. It took too long for my brain so I’m going to have to figure some tricks around that. But now I’m set to work on Fulton’s Baptism cake and Therese’s birthday cake. Say a little prayer that all turns out well–and in a timely manner.

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“At least it’s not as bad as when…”

02 Jan 2006 by

Happy New Year dear faithful readers!

Yesterday was the feast of Mary, Mother of God. The family was invited to a Mary, Mother of God party at our friends, the Hebert’s home, just down the neighborhood. They’re a great Catholic family. Allen and Danea have been married 15 years and have been blessed with 7 delightful children (so far). And with kids comes scrapes and bruises…but I didn’t expect it to be our kid yesterday!

So I was on Therese watch. And she was playing on the playscape…and up the ladder she goes…but not down the slide unfortunately. She fell about 6 feet from the top of the platform…landing on her head. Thanks be to God, our holy mother Mary, and her Guardian Angel, she only has a nice shiner below her eye to show for it. And thankfully the Heberts cushioned their play area with 8 inches of mulch so it was a realatively soft landing for her.

Now, being a “newer” mom, I almost had a heart attack and I still feel quite upset about the whole thing. In my 24 hour hindsight, I think it’s funny how the more experienced moms jumped in less than 10 minutes after the incident to console me by telling me everything worse that has happened to THEIR kids… “At least it’s not as bad as when…” “my daughter fell off a playscape at a friend’s house and broke her arm…” or “my son knocked his head on the end table and had to get STAPLES…” or “two of my kids had to go to the ER 3 times in the same day…”

Was this all REALLY supposed to make me feel better? Is the lesson supposed to be that I can’t child proof the world? Or prepare myself for the worst and when it doesn’t happen be that much more thankful?

Well, I’m very thankful that Therese was not hurt and my little monkey was climbing up our own playscape this morning with giggles and smile.

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