Prepare To Survive

Over a year ago my husband, Matt, started learning wilderness survival.  He was laid off at the time so he had a lot of time for learning!  His interest in wilderness survival gradually turned into a desire to make sure that our family was prepared for any disaster that might occur in our area.  The more we researched and prepared our family, the more we realized that we need to share this information our family, friends, and anyone else who will listen; so a couple of months ago we started teaching an Emergency Preparedness workshop and just last week created a blog Prepare To Survive so that we can share more information with more people. 

So what about YOU?  Are you prepared to survive a tornado, earthquake, severe thunderstorm with major electrical outages?  Being prepared for emergencies is crucial at home, school, work, and in your community.  Disaster can strike quickly and without warning.  It can force you to evacuate your neighborhood, workplace, or school or can confine you to your home.  What would you do if basic services - water, gas, electricity or telephones - were cut off?  Local officials and relief workers will be on the scene after a disaster, but they cannot reach everyone right away.  The best way to make you and your family safer is to be prepared before the disaster strikes!

Fun Filled Friday - Uses for Old Curtains

A while back a friend gave us some old curtains.  Ally helped me sort through them; and since RaeRae was sick and sleeping at the time and Ally needed something to do, we played dress up with some of the curtains.

Isn't she a cute little bride!

Design your own blog layout!

It's so much fun to have a blog that is uniquely your own.  Not just in content, but design.  Design that reflects your personality, content, and purpose.  Good design also helps boost your ratings (so I'm told).  But how do you get a personalized blog design with out paying for it?  ...Design your own!  I won't promise that it's easy... but it can be... it just depends on you!  It can be time consuming... unless you go simple and don't vary from the directions.  But it IS fun... if you like creating things without making mess all over the house! 

First, head over to SJH Blog Design and follow their step-by-step instructions for turning a simple blogger template into your own unique design.  As well as the basic instructions for blog design, check out the other design instructions on right hand side bar, including instructions for designing a Clickable Button.  This is where I got the instructions for creating my three-column layout.  If you're feeling brave, you can customize things further by experimenting with border and margin width and all that fun stuff.  There must be someplace with more instructions for adjusting border and margin width, but I just did it with a lot of trial and error till I got the look I wanted. 

One thing I found to be helpful during the design of my blog was to create a second, private blog to use as my testing ground.  Instead of messing up my main blog, I would apply my design experiments to my test blog until I got everything right.  Then I copied the HTML and pasted everything over to my main blog.

Another site with lots of tips is Blogger Scrapbook.  I haven't had time to apply any of the tips that Sarah has given yet.  Looking over her site though she has some great tips on how to do things like How to add post divider graphics to your blog, and Adding buttons to your header, and so much more!

So there you have it!  Now you know what I know (or rather don't know, but can follow the same directions!).  I hope this was helpful!  Anyone else know of great sites for blog design instructions?