Alright, I admit it: I'm going to pat myself on the back for the second time this week. What are you going to do about it? It's my blog, neener neener.

So Madalyn's class is putting on a play about the Oklahoma Centennial today. All the classes at her school have participated but they have broken it down into multiple performances so only a couple classes do the play at once. For the play the kids are supposed to wear either an Oklahoma Centennial t-shirt (there's an official Centennial logo that is available on various types of clothing) OR an outfit that people may have worn a hundred years ago when Oklahoma became a state.

I have know about this for a couple of months but, as usual, I managed to dink around and find myself with only five days to go till the play and no costume in hand. I didn't want to take the cop-out route and just do the t-shirt if i didn't have to (plus I'm not sure where to get one around here). I had looked on eBay at pioneer costumes and found them unreasonably expensive (we're talking $60 range for something she'd wear once) not to mention I'd have also had to pay to get someone to express ship and I was dead broke this week. My ultimate backup plan was for her to be a cowboy, which would be pretty easy to manage -- just need a Western shirt and a cowboy hat and we already have jeans. to go with the jeans we already have.

First, however, I decided to go scour the local Salvation Army. Much to my surprise and delight it yielded everything I needed to turn Madalyn into a pioneer lady. I found an old-fashioned style blouse, a long skirt and a pair of boots. The skirt was too small in the waist but it has one of those overlapping-closure waistbands, so I simply moved the outer button to expand the waist and the fabric from the overlap covered where the gap would've been had it been a single-button waistband.

I still wasn't sure how the complete package would look until Madalyn got dressed this morning. Once she had the outfit on I thought, "You know, that looks pretty good!" -- especially considering it was purchased at the last minute for a grand total of (drumroll, please): $8.

Incidentally, when JZ first saw Madalyn in her costume he said, "You look like Georgia O'Keeffe" which, first off, OMG, did my four-year-old just say that? And, secondly, that's about the time period we were aiming for, so I guess I did okay, after all!

Now some pictures of my pioneer lady. The outfit:

And the following two because she is totally incapable of being serious for more than 0.7 seconds.

I had been using Internet Explorer for years without ever wondering if there was anything better out there. A couple months ago I was unable to save some animated gifs and was told the problem was IE. The person who told me that recommended Firefox so I downloaded it. Can I just say....it doth rock?

I haven't had any of the problems I had with IE since I started using Firefox. I got my animated gifs with no problem. When I installed it, it imported all my bookmarks and history from IE so I didn't have to start from scratch. This was a big bonus because I have TONS of bookmarks. If Firefox hadn't imported them for me I'd probably still be using IE most of the time, because I am THAT lazy.

Another cool feature is you can put a certain number of bookmarks right on your toolbar, so for the ultra lazy, like myself, there's no pesky pulling down of menus and scrolling to the desired address. Just a click on the tool bar and off you go.

Oh, and have I mentioned the search engine right in the tool bar? There's a little window to which you can add numerous different search engines. Type in what you are looking for, pull down the menu, select the search engine, and bang -- off you go. I have Google, Amazon, Ebay, Dictionary.com, Wikipedia, IMDb and Ask Jeeves on mine. It is so stinkin' handy I can't even stand it.

And then there's the fact that you can change Firefox's skin. For someone like me, who spends most of her waking hours staring at the computer screen, this is a big plus. I currently have a theme called "Pimpzilla" going. The buttons? Look like bling. Big, shiny, gold-and-diamond bling that sparkle when you run your cursor over them. It is tres cool.

The only downside I can think of is that some things do not support Firefox. But that can be easily remedied by keeping IE for those times when you find something that Firefox can't view. These things are few and far between, from what I've been able to ascertain.

So, are you sold yet? If you want to get Firefox, or just want to learn more, I invite you to please do so by clicking the handy little Firefox button over on the right of the page, under "Links" or go here: Get Firefox.