Our old printer went kaput about two weeks ago.  On top of that, all we have used the scanner half of a printer whose printer half does not work (if that makes any sense).  I bought an HP printer with a nice auto-feed scanner/copier.  We rarely use the printer anymore for anything other than maps and college reports.  We need it, but we really want to minimize the printer usage, not because we are so environmentally sensitive, but because of the cost.  The purpose of all that is to get ready to start publishing the Betty Blonde comic strip again.  Kelly has been drawing strips whenever she gets the chance and is starting to get a good chunk of them to give us a running start.  Both the kids HATE the drop-shadow that the BleAx program puts on them (it is so 90’s-ish), so I have to modify the program to add just a line border.  Then, we need to redo the blog site so that it has a better look than its current miserable state.  That is a big job because we have to change the file names of about a year and a half of comic strips and modify the comic press blog we plan to use.

Kelly and I had some good talks over spring break.  She will write about this more in her blog, KellyJeanChapman.com when we get that spiffed up after we have Betty up and running again.  We both knew she had spread herself too thin when she started the community college.  She wanted to keep up with everything she did in homeschool, but there was just not enough time.  Consequently, she felt like she did a lot of things poorly instead of a few things well.  Since those things were just for enjoyment, it became easy not to do them when the results were not so satisfying.  That lead to more Facebook and web browsing.  So, she decided she should focus on five specific things, consider them as essentials that she enjoyed rather than recreational pursuits.  Those five things are Betty Blonde, her blog, volunteer research at NCSU, French, and one other that I cannot remember right now.  The rule she made for herself was to not do any of the non-essential enjoyment activities until she finishes her commitment to herself for a specified amount of work on the essentials.  The essentials are not everyday items, so there is plenty of time for other stuff, too.  She wants to do one (minimum) or two (maximum) Betty Blonde strips per week, a blog post each day, two hours per week on the volunteer project until she learns R, etc.

Still, there is a lot more start-up work than day to day performance work on all these projects.  We were getting swamped in the start-up because we were trying to do them all at once.  Now we have decided to take order them and start them up one by one.  We will start with Betty Blonde.  When that is up and going, we will work on the blog.  After that, we will get the French going.  The volunteer research takes care of itself.  It is still nagging me what that other one is.