My wife has been talking for many years about wanting to get a grandfather clock to put in the living room beside the fireplace. She has found a website that sells grandfather clocks and has been spending a lot of time looking at the different types, figuring out which one would look the best in our living room.
She was reading the blog about using clocks in an unconventional way and has been rearranging our house’s clocks, confusing the dickens out of me! I’m used to looking for the time in one space, and she’s gone and moved the clock on me! This is going to take some getting used to!
Anyway, her birthday is coming up next month, and she has been dropping quite a few ”hints” about getting a grandfather clock for her birthday. I recently bought a lottery ticket that won a little bit of money and was thinking about spending it on her gift, so I just might humor her and look at which one it is that she wants. She says she wants one of the clocks that does double duty as a curio cabinet, to keep our pewter and crystal wizard and dragon collection inside.
I’ve been working out in the garage the last few days. I’ve been insulating it, putting up walls and painting them white. After the walls are up and painted I am going to be hanging shelves on them. This is going to be a great improvement to the garage – it will clear up a lot of storage space! It is starting to really look great, and having it insulated will be a great benefit. I don’t understand why people around here don’t insulate their garages – they get so incredibly hot in the summer! I think maybe the folks that don’t insulate them just don’t spend much time in them – just park their cars and leave. I actually USE my garage as a workshop, and having it insulated will make it so much more comfortable years round – it will be well worth the investment in time and money.
My mother recently had to have surgery to repair an aneurysm. The hospital gave her some TED Stockings to wear in the hospital and to take home and wear for several weeks afterwards. They told her that they would help to prevent DVT. My mother asked me to order her another couple of pairs of them over the Internet, so I am ordering them from the dhphomedelivery.com website. They sell them in several different styles – knee length and thigh length. One of the thigh length styles is belted to help keep them from falling down – that is what I’m going to order for my mother.
My wife has been taking classes this summer, and has just recently started working full time, too. Her classes end this week. I’m really glad that her classes are ending because it has been very stressful for her to take classes and work full time. I’ve been trying to help her out around the house more than usual, to give her time to study (and sleep!) I’ve been quite surprised to realize how much work it really is to do household chores! I’ve always thought that tending the house was easy. I guess it’s just that she makes it LOOK easy!
My wife and I have been talking about how our youngest son needs to get a couple of credit cards in his own name to start building his own credit history. He’s in college, and will be turning twenty one soon. We started researching VISA, MasterCard, American Express, Discover Credit Cards on the cardhub.com website to see what card would be the best card for him to apply for. We found it interesting that on the left side of the website you could click in what kind of credit you have and then it would perform a wizard that showed you credit card offers that matched your credit. We liked the informative articles about credit cards, too. We’ll be telling our son to use that website himself to look at the offers and then we can discuss the choices with him before he makes a final decision.
After months of letting the dogs out repeatedly, over and over again, which is becoming extremely annoying, I’ve come to the decision to buy a doggie door to let the dogs let themselves in and out by themselves. I really wanted to put one in the entry door, coming into the house, but my doors will not allow it due to storm doors, etc. Fortunately, on the back of the house, where we have a big pen there is enough room in the wall beside the door to allow me to place the doggie door. I’ve gone to several places, including Lowe’s and Home Depot to buy a door, but they don’t have what I’m looking for, so I’ve resorted to looking on the Internet for what I want to buy. I found just what I wanted; and it was insulated and looked like the dogs could easily maneuver their way in and out of the house without any problems. I hope to never have to let the dogs in and out again!
My daughter is visiting us this weekend from New England. This is the first time she has come down here since we’ve moved, so I’ve been very excited to show her our house, and the area. I’ve been taking her to a few local restaurants and she has been taking lots of pictures. She’s been helping me to do a few things around the yard that needed doing, like mowing the lawn (I have two riding mowers so she rode one while I rode one.) I especially enjoyed taking her to the shooting range yesterday; she was impressed with how well I shoot! It was also nice that the instructor at the range gave her some tips to improve her aim!
Then we went to one of my favorite all-you-can eat buffet restaurants, which we all really enjoyed. So it was a good day.
My cousin is a big Chicago Cubs fan. He sent me an email yesterday that I was just reading a few minutes ago about how excited he is that his office is going to arrange for a Wrigley roof top party for the entire office and their families. The party is going to be held at the Ivy League Baseball Club Rooftop location which is across the street from Wrigley Park.
I’ve never been to Wrigley Park, and so I find it hard to imagine that watching a game from a rooftop across the street from Wrigley Park would be better than watching the game from inside the stadium! But he says that the rooftop has a great view of the park, and is only 478 feet away from home plate!
The Ivy League Baseball Club is endorsed by the Chicago Cubs, and can accommodate from ten to two hundred people. They serve food and beverages right there on the rooftop! I was looking on the Internet at their website and saw that it looked like a great place for a party! Their website lists their menu, which is standard ballgame fare, and has an interesting fact sheet that tells about how their club is the first rooftop club that was established in 1914. He’s invited me to come join them; I’ll have to check my schedule!
My friend Mike just called me. He had just gone to Maine for the weekend. He had to rent one of those “do it yourself” moving trucks to bring some furniture home from his mother’s house. He rented a Budget brand truck. He took his Tom-Tom GPS unit with him to guide him home. He’s never had very good luck with maps, and has complete faith in his GPS unit. It will run for only about four hours on its own battery, so it came with a cigarrette lighter adapter to plug it into the cigarrette lighter to keep it running longer. It’s about a fourteen hour drive from Maine to his house.
He was some upset when he got in the truck, all loaded and ready to come home, plugged in the GPS unit and discovered that the cigarrette lighter didn’t work! He didn’t know how to come home! So he used the GPS sporadically, turning it on for a few minutes to see how long he had to drive on this stretch of road until the next turn, then turned it off until that turn. Doing that he made it last until he got home. He is planning on having a few words with the Budget Truck company when he turns in that truck!
With my wife constantly “encouraging” me to watch our pennies, reminding me frequently that our budget is stretched very thin, I’ve started to become more interested in credit and debt managment. She tells me that we are going too deeply into debt and are going to need some Credit Repair Services if I’m not more careful about spending our money.
I told my wife that I ordered a book that talks about Credit Repair and reducing/eliminating debt. My wife says “that’s easy to do, just stop spending money on junk we don’t need and we won’t need to have any kind of Bad Credit Repair services at all!” Of course (and as usual) I ignore her completely, what does SHE know, after all? If I decide that I need to Repair Credit, I’ll go to the repairyourbadcredit.com website and see what they have to say on the subject.
I heard that Morgan Freeman, one of my favorite actors, was badly injured in a car accident. They had to use the jaws of life to cut him out of the car he was in. I was reading about it on the Time.com website, but was a little disappointed in the limited amount of information that they had to date. The article says that the car he was in was airborne and landed in a ditch, but did not say if any other cars were involved, or even if he was alone in the car. They did say he is in critical condition. I hope he pulls through!
My wife has been talking about buying some playground equipment to put in our backyard for when our nieces and nephews come over to visit. Our own kids are full grown, so our own slides and swings are old and dilapidated and no longer safe. But we have a lot of family, with a lot of young children that come over frequently and we think that we should have some great outdoors activities for them to do. This would help to save wear and tear on the interior of our house, not to mention wear and tear on my wife’s frazzled nerves!
We were looking at some great daycare equipment at the swingset.com website. They have a great looking residential jungle gym that we think is the perfect answer to the situation. They have a ten year warranty on their product, and the jungle gym is customizable so we can pick and choose what components we want to have.
As the economy worsens, I believe that fewer people will be buying new vehicles. And the few that DO buy new vehicles are probably very wealthy and don’t care about the economy, or are people who are looking for options for getting great gas mileage. This is bad news for American auto makers, as they are not poised to take advantage of the one that is most likely to happen – the one where people are looking for better gas mileage. I was reading on the Time.com website that new automobile sales slid in July to a sixteen year low. Although automakers are trying to adjust to the new market, the adjustment will take time, and money. There are troubled times ahead.
