Another Free Favorite: Volumouse!

Volumouse is one of the those little programs that I can't live without and can't remember what life was like before I found it!

How would you like to be able to control your pc's sound from the wheel on the mouse?

Well download this little beauty and you can!

I've got mine set to work whenever I mouseover the desktop or a title bar.  You can configure yours anyway you'd like.

It's a free program, and it's been stable on both my Vista and XP machines.

Scroll down the Volumouse main page and click the automatic download link.

Pump up the volum...ouse.....

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Children and Marital Happiness

This op-ed piece points to research that challenges both the conventional wisdom that marital satisfaction increases after children arrive and the research that suggests that all marriages experience a decline in happiness after children arrive.   I've highlighted some of the key points.

What are your thoughts?  Please add them to the comments.

By STEPHANIE COONTZ, NY Times
Olympia, Wash.

HALF a century ago, the conventional wisdom was that having a child was the surest way to build a happy marriage. Women’s magazines of that era promised that almost any marital problem could be resolved by embarking on parenthood. Once a child arrives, “we don’t worry about this couple any more,” an editor at Better Homes and Gardens enthused in 1944. “There are three in that family now. ... Perhaps there is not much more needed in a recipe for happiness.”

Over the past two decades, however, many researchers have concluded that three’s a crowd when it comes to marital satisfaction. More than 25 separate studies have established that marital quality drops, often quite steeply, after the transition to parenthood. And forget the “empty nest” syndrome: when the children leave home, couples report an increase in marital happiness.

But does the arrival of children doom couples to a less satisfying marriage? Not necessarily. Two researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, Philip and Carolyn Cowan, report in a forthcoming briefing paper for the Council on Contemporary Families that most studies finding a large drop in marital quality after childbirth do not consider the very different routes that couples travel toward parenthood.

Grid O' Life Updated!

New info added to The Grid 'O Life, everyone's favorite guide to supplements...

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Make DIY Mummy Dogs The Next Time You Pull Dinner Duty

Ariel the Mermaid and her brother
at her preschool Halloween parade

I made these MILF's (Mummies I'd Like to Feast upon) for J and D's Halloween dinner.  Everyone was pretty pleased and so I've definitely added them to the small but popular sillyDaddy dinner repertoire!

Here's what you'll need to make your very own mummy dogs:

• Pillsbury Crescent Dough
• Pack of hotdogs
• Mustard
• Cheese
• Rolling pin and flour (for the rolling pin and your rolling surface)