June 2007

When I was a kid in high school (of course I didn’t think I was a kid then) all of my friends took a French class as their required language class. Not I. I wasn’t interested in France at all, I was interested in Spain. Instead of taking French I took a Spanish class instead. I enjoyed it so much that I took a second year of the language even though it wasn’t required.

I wonder how much of the language I’d remember if I ever had the opportunity to travel to Barcelona. I was looking at some Barcelona hotels over at the Easy to Book website and I was impressed at just how easy it is to book hotels in Barcelona. I’m such a home grown country gal I’d probably travel all the way to Barcelona and then book my stay at the Best Western Premier Hotel Dante Barcelona there. Not that that would be a bad thing. The Best Western in Barcelona is a four star hotel and looks like just the kind of hotel I’d want to stay in.

My husband is taking one of his seven weeks of vacation from work next week but we don’t have any plans to go anywhere. It would be nice if we could take advantage of a service like Leisuretime Promotions but we won’t be able to do it this year.

Leisuretime Promotions offer worldwide flights from over 30 UK departure airports and has been offering luxury accommodations as well as fast and efficient reservation service to its members since 1993. Wow, that’s a long time and a lot of airports! If I lived in the UK I’d definitely be checking them out.

*sigh*

I say again…

*sigh*

I should have known better. I really should have. My mother-in-law is a dog person and never had an indoor cat before. When she started talking about getting either a cat or dog I persuaded her to get a cat because I knew I’d end up with the pet sooner or later and a dog will not fit into our family of cats. I just didn’t know it would be this soon.

Lilly White kitty bit holes in the Old Lady’s oxygen hose so many times we all felt it was better to let her (the cat, not the Old Lady!) come live with us. We all thought we were doing the best thing by getting her a cat but truth be told it was just too much for her.

Lilly has been with us for about a week now and is settling in pretty well. She is tolerated by 2 of our 3 cats and hopefully she and the other female will learn to get along with each other too.

Although I really didn’t want another cat I’m happy to welcome Lilly into the family. I guess 4 is not much more trouble than 3. I just have to clean the litter box more often. heh

I’m always on the lookout for shopping deals and online coupons to help me save money. The newest site I’ve found is called Keep Cash.

Keep Cash is the easiest to navigate coupon site that I have found online so far, and I’ve looked at a lot of them. In addition to their website they offer an RSS feed as well as a newsletter which will deliver coupons directly to your inbox.

I received a $75.00 Amazon.com gift certificate for Mother’s Day that I haven’t used yet. I don’t know what I’ve been waiting for but I’m glad I did now that I found out about the coupons from Keep Cash. I’m going to use my gift certificate along with the free shipping coupon I found at Keep Cash and really get my money’s worth on my next Amazon purchase. *evil grin* I’m always thinkin’!

You can browse the Keep Cash website by store, by category, by recently added and also by which deals are expiring soon. I think I found my new favorite coupon codes website.

Yep, I’m a “do-follow” blogger. That means I have removed the “no-follow” tags from your URL when you post comments. I welcome comments and as long as your comment is relevant I really don’t mind that most people comment just to get a back-link. I’m happy to help!

However, this does not mean that I have turned my blog into a Free For All Links page. This is personal blog, it is not an advertising site. If you use your web site title or business name instead of your name (or handle) then that’s pure ol’ spam. dang. I’m going to start deleting spam comments. For goodness sakes be kind enough to use your name or handle/alias when commenting.

Use a name or handle/alias to comment please. Comments with a business or website name are spam and will be deleted.

I already have the domain name picked out in my mind but I won’t say what it is because I don’t want to jinx it. The kind of blog I want to have won’t be for fancy recipes or the kind of cooking you learn at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago (http://www.chic.edu/career.asp). Nope, the recipes I want to write about are some of my favorite short-cut recipes - the kinds of meals you can throw together in thirty minutes to an hour and make it look like you have been slaving away in the kitchen all day.

I was thinking about naming my cooking blog The Lazy Gourmet but I’ve decided to name it something different than that now. I really like the name Quickie Chef but that one has been done to death already. I’ll get to it one day - I have too many other irons in the fire right now and can’t take on another project. Some day I will have a cooking blog though. yeppers.

BlogFollow is a cool Wordpress plugin I just found. In addition to being a “do follow” blogger I will now show a snippet from your blog at the bottom of your comment. All you have to do is input your normal URL and your feed will be determined automatically.

Feel free to try it out by commenting to this (or any other) post. If you like the plugin head on over to SiteAMonth and download it for your Wordpress blog.

Added note: This plugin has been disabled. I gave it a good try but it made my comments page too cluttered and messy looking. I still think it is a good idea and if there ever is a way to modify the plugin with different options I might take another look at it.

One good thing about Saturday is that I don’t have to make the daily Old Lady call *evil grin* since my husband calls her instead. My husband is in the living room watching This Old House and procrastinating about calling her so even if I don’t make the call I have to yell “CALL YOUR MOTHER!”, hehe. He needs to get up off his butt and stop fantasizing about architectural classics and come back into the real world.

I keep hoping he will see something on This Old House that he might actually want to build. I don’t think we’ll be using many architectural classics here in the trailer but it is fun to dream.

I started writing this as a reply to a comment Yowie made but it got long so I just made it into a post.

Oh, the old coot’s son, eh?

Keep in mind that the story you’re reading is the story from one person’s narrow-minded point of view. I’ll tell you a little bit from my husband’s point of view.

I know you can’t tell from reading here but my husband is bearing the brunt of the, oh God, I don’t want to say burden. But burden is the only word that really describes it. For one thing he goes to his mother’s house straight from work every other day and sometimes he has to detour to run errands for her. This makes for a very long day for him, usually 12 hours or more and he hardly has time to eat and watch a little TV before he goes to bed.

And he goes to her house at least one day on the weekend and often times both Saturday and Sunday.

There is a lot more I could do for the Old Lady to take some of the burden off of my husband but due to problems of my own I’m sort of a burden to him too, in a way.

The least I can do is take her to the doctor once or twice a month. That’s one less thing he has to worry about, and believe me, he has plenty. I should be doing a lot more for her than the few things I do but if somebody wants to bitch about me they can get their own blog! :p

When I do things for her I don’t think about it as doing something for her. I think about it like I’m doing something to help my husband. He is a good man so any little thing I do for her is one less thing he has to worry about.

But I’m not going to stop bitching about her.

I’ve been given an impossible task. I am supposed to tell you who my favorite character is from Reno 911! Miami The Movie. I really don’t think I’ll be able to complete this task because I love them all. And that’s no baloney.

Here is a video of one of my favorite scenes from the movie and I just watched it several times trying to figure out who my favorite character is.

Okay, I narrowed it down to a choice between Jones and Dangle - they are my two favorite characters and it isn’t fair to make me choose between them. Of the two I’d say Dangle is the funniest but Jones is the sexiest so there you have it. My favorite is, um, are, Jones and Dangle. But then there is Trudy. I laugh my butt off at some of the things Trudy says and does. I wonder if her character is as dumb as she acts sometimes or if she is crazy like a fox. I had better watch the clip again since I’ve narrowed it down to 3 instead of 2.

I’ll have plenty of opportunity to decide who my favorite character is because the Reno 911 Miami unrated dvd release date is June 19, 2007 - just in time for Father’s Day. I’m always thinkin’! I could watch Reno 911! Miami The Movie over and over again and never get tired of it. I’ll be buying the DVD for sure.

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After the stressful day I had yesterday I think I deserve to treat myself. Yep, I think I deserve to buy myself a little gift and I know exactly which website to check out for bargains. As long as I’m treating myself I might as well get the most for my money so I’m headed over to Coupon Chief to check out the coupon offers.

I was looking at some of the coupon savings at Target and noticed Target recently added (yesterday as a matter of fact) a $5-$50 coupon redeemable at checkout. I’ve mentioned this before but I think it is worth mentioning again. Coupon Chief has short instructional videos that fully explain the way their coupons work. I was a bit confuzzled (yeah, I made that word up) about the coupons at first but after watching the video it finally clicked for me.

Target has some nice bargains and I might order something from SpaLook also. I believe I’ll just pamper myself. I deserve it.

I spent the day out on the town with the Old Lady yesterday. (Her doctors office and Bob Evans for lunch is the town for the two of us, hehe.) It was a stressful day for me but I can’t pinpoint the exact cause of the stress. I think it was an accumulation of things.

I had a hard time with the stubborn old coot (can females be coots?) when we got home. We have been using the same routine to get her out of the car and back into her house for over a year now and yesterday the routine got upset. Well, I got upset would be a better way to put it.

Normally I help her out of the car, run ahead, unlock her house door and run back behind her and help her to the steps. There are 3 or 4 steps but when you’re 84 years old it is like a mountain. So anyway, after I unlock the house door I usually run down and stand behind her while she leaves her walker at the bottom of the steps and uses the hand railing to help herself walk up. Then I bring the walker into the house.

Yesterday the routine was thrown off a bit because I ran ahead and unlocked the door, but I had to make sure Lilly the cat was still behind the gate we had put in the hall to keep her in the back part of the house. Lilly can jump over it but she doesn’t know it yet. I never know if she is going to be where she is supposed to be or if she will be standing near the door ready to make a run for it.

I don’t know why I agreed to this but when the mother-in-law tells me to do something I always assume the child role and feel like I have mind my elders. I was at the top of the stairs when she got there and she said “grab my walker and pull it up and I’ll hold on to it and go up behind it”. I argued but it didn’t do any good. I said we never do it this way. She said she didn’t want me to lift it by myself. LOL, I’ve been lifting it for a few years now - it isn’t that heavy. So when I said we never do it this way she said “I want to do it this way now!” so I felt like I didn’t have a choice.

I could just kick myself in the ass for Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t think there were any programs available like the PAYjr Teen Prepaid Card when my son was a teen but it sure would have been nice. It would have been especially nice during my son’s senior year since he was living with his father during that time and I had to make special arrangements to pay for some of his expenses. In addition to child support I also assumed responsibility for all the extras like yearbook, cap and gown, karate lessons, senior trips, proms, etc. etc. It would have been easier to have a convenient way to send him the money when I got the phone call “hey Mom, I need money for blah blah blah”. Instead I had to meet him somewhere to hand him a check.

These days parents are lucky to have access to a program like PAYjr Teen Prepaid Card for their teenagers. The card is a convenient way to give teens money electronically and great for getting money to a teen quickly in an emergency.

This might sound strange but I think this would also be a good thing for my adult step-son and daughter-in-law. We have wired them money several times and let me tell you, wiring money is not cheap. If we had one of these PAYjr prepaid credit cards we could send them money electronically and save a lot of hassle and a lot of money by not paying the wiring fees.

The PAYjr Prepaid MasterCard card is a re-loadable prepaid card designed for teens but in our situation I think it would work well for our adult son. He is a Marine stationed in Iraq and his wife is still on base in North Carolina with their two small children. Emergencies do come up and in the event we need to get money to them quickly I think the PAYjr Prepaid credit card would suit our needs very well. I’ll be running it by my husband to see that he thinks.

I have good news about my pump, yay.

The only thing that was wrong with it is there were ants gumming it up. Seems a nest of ants was looking for a dry place and they were attracted by the electricity of the motor. After a few squirts of my wasp spray (couldn’t find the ant spray) and $75.00 the repairman had my pump working again.

Seventy five dollars seems like a lot for 5 minutes of work but I guess it is better than buying a new pump or drilling a well. I’m glad the guy was honest - he could have said anything and charged for a lot more than a service call. Whew.

I’m tired of waiting for the well/pump repairman to arrive so I think I’ll have a little fun instead of fretting about something I have no control over. I think I’ll head over to whogets.com and play their online game show. LOL, I haven’t checked but I wonder if they have any submersible pumps for prizes. Now that would rock!

The games at whogets.com are FREE, there is nothing to buy and you don’t get any annoying emails. I just wanted to get that out of the way up front because those are the first questions I always ask when I go to a site with a “contest”.

The value of the contest prizes range from $10 to $600 and all you have to do is sign up and enter. At the close of the semi-final round, seven entrants are selected randomly for the final round. Each of these seven contestants will be able to make a statement of up to 100 words explaining why they should win the prize. During the next 7 to 14 days Whogets.com members will vote for their favorite contestant. The contest with the highest number of votes wins the prize.

I entered the contest for the RCA RTD209 5-Disc DVD/CD System. I hope I make it into the finals. If I do, please vote for me! (AnnaBella)

The well guy told my husband he will be here today but he hasn’t made it yet. I sure hope he shows up or I’ll definitely have to take a bath at my mother-in-law’s house.

I’m glad we decided a few weeks ago to freeze a couple of gallons of water to use in case the pump or electricity went out. I took one gallon of “ice” out of the freezer this morning and it is about half way thawed out. Brrrr… I just washed my hands using freezing water. I’m glad I was able to though!

Again I ask, air ambulance? I never really knew such a thing existed. I’m glad to find out about air ambulance, because this is a service our family might need to use sometime in the future.

My mother-in-law is 84 years and has been living in Florida for the past 30 years or so. She has one bother that resides in Florida but the remainder of her family (that are still living) are all in Iowa. I know she hasn’t been back to Iowa for a visit in almost 10 years and I know she would really like to go. I believe she has resigned herself to the fact that she will never go there again. I’m glad I have found out about air ambulance because now I know there are options out there for my mother-in-law if she decides she really wants to go back to Iowa for a visit. I realize I talk bad about the Old Lady all the time but I really do want the best for her and I feel bad to know that she is sad in thinking she will never be able to go “home” again.

The air ambulance team members are specialists in medical flight. They transport patients along with a team of flight nurses and flight paramedics on-board a special air ambulance that is equipped with start of the art medical equipment. Air Ambulance provides basic to critical care which includes stroke, cancer, heart and transplant patients among many others. Air Ambulance can even arrange to have a physician or even her own doctor aboard. (Fat chance getting one of our doctors to fly to Iowa though, but complaining about our doctors is a topic for a different post, hehe.)

My mother-in-law has has numerous strokes and a few heart surgeries as well as a broken back. She is only operating with one lung and while her situation is not critical, she is fragile and is not able to fly with a standard airline at this time in her life. Air Ambulance coordinates from bedside to bedside to make the patient has the smoothest trip possible. With over 20 years experience Air Ambulance has gained the trust of hospitals worldwide and their support staff is on-call 24 hours a day. I’m really glad I found out about this company.

I really, really didn’t want to take the Old Lady to the doctor and dentist today. Of course, I really, really don’t want to go anywhere any other day either but that’s a different topic.

My husband woke me up this morning at 7:45am and said “I hate to tell you this but the well is out again.”

So I reckon I have the option of going to his mother’s house to shower but you know what? I don’t freaking want to do that and I’m not going to do it. I called her at 8:30 to tell her I won’t be able to take her. She was pretty good about it because she really wasn’t up to it herself. She will be rescheduling her dental appointment and I can take her to the doctor tomorrow.

So I got my wish - I don’t have to go out today. I’m wondering if the well will fix itself if I wish it. *wish wish*. Nope, still no water. dang. The pump/well guy should be out sometime this afternoon. I hope it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Have you ever shopped for furniture online? I never have but I have wanted a new dining table for about a year now and I’m finally at a point that I think I can afford one. Soon. Very soon.

As I was browsing Best Priced Furniture.com of course the first link I clicked was Clearance Furniture. I’m always on the lookout for a bargain and Best Priced Furniture.com has 3 pages of clearance items. The thing that is really cool here is that a good portion of these items offer free shipping. Are there any words that are a bigger turn on than “free shipping”? Keeping it clean here I will say “free shipping” are the two words that can really get me excited. Not only does Best Priced Furniture.com offer free shipping on clearance items but they offer free shipping on some of their other furniture as well. Gotta love that.

Best Priced Furniture.com offers quality furniture at reasonable prices and selects their suppliers with three major criteria in mind: quality, service and value. All that sounds good but what about customer service? One of the reasons that I hesitate to order from any online store is lack of customer service but you won’t find a lack of customer service at Best Priced Furniture.com. There are several ways to contact Best Priced Furniture.com. They have three phone numbers listed - local, fax and toll free. They have their physical address printed on their site. They have a contact form and of course they have an email address. Best Priced Furniture.com’s customer service representatives are available Monday through Friday during normal business hours (9-5) Pacific Standard time to assist customers by answering any questions they might have before placing their order as well as helping customers find the furniture they need at the lowest prices.

Okay, back to the item I was interested in purchasing in the first place, a new dining table set. We don’t plan to stay in this trailer forever and I’m not looking for anything fancy or expensive. This 5 piece counter height table set is similar to what I have in mind. (And did you notice it has “free shipping? hehe) The finish is a little lighter than the idea I had, so I guess it is time to try out that customer service number.

The last time I took the Old Lady to the doctor for her blood test her results were borderline so she was scheduled to come back in 2 weeks instead of one month. A few days ago she told us that she has a dental appointment this Thursday and that Louise (her neighbor across the street) would be taking her and that she owed Louise a lunch out anyway.

I guess she forgot she was supposed to get her blood test this Thursday and I was thrilled because I thought Louise could just take her for the blood test and the dentist as long as they were already out. I pitched that idea to her and really talked it up. *sigh* The Old Lady decided that she didn’t want Louise taking her both places because Louise doesn’t know how to work the little oxygen tank (portable) and she can’t be out that long with Louise. So now I get the honors of taking her to the doctor and dentist on the same day. Fun fun fun.

Most of the time I don’t believe in the supernatural, but there is always a little voice in the back of my head that says “what if”?

The trailer for the 1408 movie has made me wonder if anything “supernatural” has ever happened to me. I do remember one time when I was a teenager and my best friend and my brother and I were playing with our Ouija board. It was really weird to see the pointer move around the board and even spell words. We all accused the other person of moving the pointer but we all swore we weren’t doing it. I know for sure I wasn’t moving it. I started saying things like “Ouija board, you are stupid, you don’t know what you’re talking about!” and after I said that a few times the lights went out and we were sitting in pitch dark. We threw that board in the air and ran screaming into my mother’s room where she was trying to get a good night’s sleep. We were so scared we could barely get the words out to tell her what happened. She got up with us and lit some candles. My mother was pretty level headed. She convinced us that is was purely a coincidence. She told us to look at outside at the streetlamps. The electricity was out all over the neighborhood and that convinced us that a ghost wasn’t trying to get us. The lights finally came back on and we eventually calmed down. I’ll never forget the fright I felt for those few minutes.

I haven’t seen a scary movie in the theater in long, long time. I think those types of movies are much better in the theaters than at home on DVD though. My wedding anniversary is coming up in July and my husband and I usually go out to our favorite restaurant for dinner. I think I’ll surprise him this year with a movie date and I already have the movie picked out. Yep, after watching the trailer for 1408 Movie I think that’s the one we need to see.

In the movie, John Enslin (played by John Cusack) is a writer who scoffs at the afterlife and who has written a string of best selling books discrediting paranormal events in the most infamous haunted houses and graveyards around the world. Enslin’s phantom free reign of long and lonely nights is about to change forever when he checks into suite 1408 of the notorious Dolphin Hotel for his latest project “Ten Nights in Haunted Rooms”. Defying the warnings of the hotel manager Enslin is the first person in years to stay in the haunted room. In the last 95 years 56 people have stayed in the room and 56 people have died. They all died within the first hour. I was thinking if I were the author I’d make sure to take my cell phone or something but I’m sure supernatural beings have a way of disabling electronics just like the ghost in my Ouija board turned my lights off.

The movie looks like a good one and I’m wondering now if I should tell my husband ahead of time or keep it as a surprise. I’ll probably tell him because I’m not good at keeping secrets and he hates surprises.

I’m kind of embarrassed to say where I found them, hehe, but I don’t wear makeup everyday and I guess there is no shame in that. I found my glasses in my makeup bag. Why I put them in there is a mystery to me. I guess I was picking everything up and putting it away (see, I do clean the clutter once in a while) and grabbed them in my haste. I can see much better now!

I don’t think I’m going to learn until it is too late but who knows, maybe there is hope for me after all. With the two scares I’ve had recently maybe I’ll actually back up a few files from my computer.

I should use a company like IBackup. One of the things that attracted me to IBackup is the mapping of my online account as a local drive. All I would have to do then is drag and drop and edit my files in my online account. I’m not the most technical person in the world and the ease of use of IBackup for backup and online storage appeals to me.

PC Magazine listed IBackup as the top online file sharing and backup service provider in an article on a dozen ways to boost a small business (November 2006 issue). That’s a pretty high recommendation.

I almost picked up another Trojan, and that’s 2 just in the last few days.

The first one was “errorsafe” and the second one was “amaena”. I don’t think I actually got the second one because as soon as I saw the error screen I reached over and turned off my computer. It is a good thing I wasn’t in the middle of something because I don’t think I lost anything that time. It gave me a good scare though!

Heaven forbid we would have to take the Old Lady with us on vacation, but just in case we do I was looking for accommodations that would be suitable for our entire family. This four bedroom vacation villa in central Florida is something similar to the type of rental I will be looking for if we all decide to go on vacation together. I prefer something near a beach and not in the central part of the state though.

When I was looking around at the VLBO Vacation Rentals website for different Florida rentals I ran across some information about Harvey Cedars vacation rentals. I hate to show my geographical ignorance, but I really didn’t know there were beaches this nice in New Jersey. Well, I guess I never really thought about it. I’m a home grown Florida gal and have only been out of the state of Florida a few times since my childhood. When I think about beaches I usually think about Florida and the beaches that are very near my home.

I had a stressful day today and I sure wish I was relaxing on this balcony and enjoying the view even if it is in New Jersey, hehe. Maybe I can go on vacation soon.

I can’t believe I’ve lost my glasses for for this length of time and they are right here in my house somewhere. When I first lost them my husband said “well, I guess you’ll just have to start cleaning up the house until you find them”. I wonder what he meant by that! lol (as if I didn’t know the clutter is getting pretty thick around here).

I haven’t seen them since May 25th. I remember the date because that is the day I took the Old Lady to the doctor. I was wearing the glasses when I wrote the post that day but lost them before I got in the shower. I only need them for reading but I do need them. *sigh* I’m wearing the $2.00 drug store specials now. I’ll probably cause myself some serious injury if I don’t find them or get myself to the doctor and get new ones. I need new glasses anyway because I’ve been having trouble reading with my current ones. dang.