Well, autumn is officially here, and it’s time I started getting the lawn and garden ready for fall. I noticed that my harvest of cucumbers simply didn’t happen, which was discouraging because I really love cucumbers! I’ve been cleaning up the flowers that have gone by, and mulching the garden. Planting daffodils and day-lilies for next year’s floral display.
Mowed the lawn, using the bagger attachment. Boy do I LOVE the bagger attachment! I wonder how late into the season the grass will keep growing this year. I don’t like mowing into winter, but it sure beats shoveling snow!
There is a great new search engine in town called local.com that helps connect consumers with local businesses. This new search engine acts like a local yellowpages and combines the citysearch, yelp, yellowpages, and superpages websites to give you a comprehensive local search engine that “does it all.”
What I think is so remarkable about this search engine is that it offers free advertising to businesses. This is a great boon to businesses, as advertising is one of the biggest budget busters in most business ventures. To be able to get listed in a search engine such as this for free is a great value!
The website offers driving directions and business contact information, as well as business hours and reviews from a variety of websites. Users of the website can also contribute to the website by writing their own reviews.
I was shocked to read in the Time.com website that a bomb attack was carried out on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. From what I understand, no terrorist organization has claimed “credit” for the bombing, but it is clear that the Marriott was the target of the attack. Fifty three people died, and two hundred sixty six were injured as a result of the attack.
The bombing was carried out by way of a suicide truck forcing its way through the gates and exploding. I have to assume that it was a suicide attack; and assume that the driver of the truck is dead. Assumptions are being made that the Taliban is involved/responsible for this attack.
I think terrorist attacks are the most contemptible feats possible. These are acts of cowardice, not courage. These people believe they are going to some kind of great martyr-dom heaven, but I believe that they will be going to the “other place” that is not quite so pleasant!
When my wife and I have gone on vacations together, we have tried a variety of lodging accommodations. We have tried the standard hotel/motel room, we have tried renting hotel suites, and we have rented vacation condos. To be honest they have all worked out fairly well, but for the most part we have preferred renting out condos. The hotels and motels were nice enough, but we frequently found our sleep disturbed by noisy people walking down the hallways in the wee hours of the morning. And in a hotel room, or even a hotel suite we found it difficult for one person to watch television without disturbing the other’s sleep.
We much prefer renting out vacation houses or condos. It’s easy to find a place we like through the homeaway.com website!
We like the spacious feeling of being able to stretch out, and not be cramped all up in just one room. We really like the convenience of having our own kitchen so we could put restaurant leftovers in the refrigerator and heat them up later in the microwave if we wanted. And the best convenience was being able to go to the local grocery store and buy breakfast foods so we could eat breakfast right there in our place and not have to try to find a restaurant for breakfast. We really don’t mind eating one or two meals out during the day on vacation, but we don’t want to eat ALL our meals out! We like the extra amenities that often come with renting a vacation condo – access to a swimming pool, a nice private patio/balcony, and private jacuzzi tubs right in our own bedroom suites! And the price of renting a vacation condo is usually less money than renting just one cramped room in a hotel!
So for us, when we are planning a vacation that is more than just a one or two night stay, we usually try to rent a vacation condo, and a hotel is usually our last resort option.
When we lived in Maine, every time my wife had a birthday (or other gift giving occasion) I would give her a “Cat’s Meow” Village piece of a local landmark. When we moved from New England to where we are living now I thought I would continue the tradition, but I have not been able to find a local store that sells the pieces! I went to the Cat’s Meow website and their store locater tells me where to buy them, but when I go to that store listed on their website, the store claims that they don’t sell them anymore and they have no idea where I can go buy them. Very frustrating!
My wife likes to spend a lot of time thinking about ways she could be decorating and furnishing our home to make it look more like “us” and less like “flea market.” I have to admit we have a lot of hand-me-downs from family members that we have been using for a very long time, and we certainly have a strange eclectic mix of furnishings in our home. The biggest problem we have had in decorating is that she likes the country/traditional style but I like the modern style, and those two styles are hard to reconcile when buying new furniture! So for the most part we have been settling for “functional” because of the price tag involved – money is tight, so price has always been a big issue from the beginning. It would be great if the item looked good, but function and price are the number one considerations!
My wife has been looking for a great looking storage bench to put in the mud room, where people could sit down and put their shoes/boots on or off as they are coming or going. She is always reminding people to please remove their shoes before coming into the house, to reduce the amount of dirt that gets tracked in.
She also has been looking for coat racks to buy, as she seems to think we don’t have quite enough closet space. I have to agree that once we get all of our coats put into the closets there doesn’t seem to be any room for shirts, pants, sweaters, dresses, etc. So she is probably right about trying to find solutions to that situation too!
When she puts her mind to finding something specific that she wants to buy, she likes to use the shopwiki.com website. Unlike most shopping search engines, the shopwiki website searches throughout the entire Internet and brings up all of the results – not just the results of their paid advertisers. So she gets a lot more results to look at, and has a better chance of finding exactly what it is she really wants.
My wife and I went to eat lunch at one of our favorite local restaurants this afternoon. We had received a coupon in the meal good for $9.00 off one meal, and we decided to take advantage of it today. We also had to stop at the pharmacy to pick up a prescription and at the grocery store to pick up some hamburger rolls and bananas, so we were combining errands into the trip (made us feel less guilty about driving into town just for a meal!)
As we were driving home we were noticing how many trees were already starting to drop their leaves. The colors don’t seem to have changed yet (much) but the leaves are dropping. It surprised me to see so many leaves on the road and the ground without having seen much color, but there it was. I wonder why the color doesn’t seem to be changing? I wonder if that is a sign of too much rain, or not enough rain. One way or another, however, it is a sure sign that autumn is approaching, and winter won’t be far behind!
The local stores have a very limited supply of lighting fixtures, and my wife and I want to buy some new outdoor lighting fixtures for our house. We’d like to replace the lights on either side of the front door, and on either side of the garage door, and a nice lamppost at the end of the driveway.
Living far out in the country however, there really is not a large variety of stores to choose from, and we really don’t want to spend a lot of time going from store to store, looking for what we like. So we are doing our preliminary “window shopping” for our new lighting fixtures on the Internet.
We’ve found quite a few nice lighting fixtures that we like and I’ve bookmarked the webpages for us to be able to go back and look at them again for future comparison against other fixtures we might find. The pages I’ve bookmarked are from the farreys.com website are:
Forecast lighting, Maxim lighting, and Fine Art lamps,
Had to run down to the bank to make a quick deposit and was in a hurry but careful to not speed. About 2 blocks from the bank is a Sonic drive-in restaurant and there were some construction or utility guys with two bucket trucks and a handful of hardhats working on the corner. All of a sudden, a guy with an orange hand flag jumped into the intersection waving the flag so that a car on the cross street could drive across the intersection.
Now, the intersection has a traffic light and I had the green light headed north. Why on earth would that flagman jump out and wave the car heading east through a red light into oncoming traffic – I couldn’t tell you. Thank goodness I have quick reflexes and could swerve to avoid getting hit by that car. It would have been the flagman’s fault, I’m sure. But I don’t need to be dealing with another car wreck.
My neighbor knows I’m pretty handy with tools and can work on cars, so he stopped by this morning to ask my advice about a little problem he’s having with his Toyota pickup truck. It’s just a little work truck, but it gets really good gas mileage and having a pickup bed sure comes in handy for a lot of chores.
He’s been having trouble getting the air conditioning in his truck to work. Although it has not been all that hot this summer, there are times when you really appreciate having air conditioning as opposed to rolling down the windows, such as when it is pouring down rain or when you are stuck in traffic.
So I took a look at it and, like I suspected, it needs a new ac compressor. As luck would have it, I know of a good place online to buy auto ac parts, and we found what he needed by searching the site for Toyota AC Compressor. The right part came right up and we were able to order it online and have it shipped to his home.
When the part gets here I told him I’ll be glad to show him how to put it in. I don’t mind doing the work but it’s better if he learns from this, so I’ll show him how to do it.
Just finished reading an article on Yahoo’s front page that talks about the top 10 best retirement cities. I was curious what made a city good for retirement, as I guess I have my own ideas about what kind of quality of life I want in my own golden years.
The article says that cost of living, jobs, and access to health services are the most important factors. Now, in my mind, jobs shouldn’t even be a part of a retirement equation. The very definition of retirement should disqualify “jobs” from that. I think that the availability of services for the elderly and recreational opportunities for the elderly would be more important to someone who is retired.
So the top of this list is Columbus, Ohio. Number two is Dallas, Texas, and number three is Minneapolis, Minnesota. I wouldn’t want to live in any of these places whether I was working or retired. So much for this list having any value to me!
My daughter wants to have one last getaway for the summer and I suggested she go to the beach now that it is “offseason” for a lot of the beaches and you can get better deals on the hotel rooms. She had gone with us on our last family vacation to Morey’s Piers in New Jersey and seemed to have a good time on that trip.
Morey’s Piers offers weekly specials and is a great family vacation destination in New Jersey because they offer something fun for everyone in every age group, and everyone in New England loves to go to the Jersey shore for the beach, the boardwalk, the arcades, the amusement rides – the whole vacation experience is right there.
The Morey’s Piers website is a good place to find hotels and motels in Wildwood, NJ. I’m sure she is looking for the cheapest room rate in a decent motel, and we were very happy with the Blue Palms motel, because it was just 1 block to the boardwalk and the room rate was under $50 per night. That’s hard to beat on any family beach vacation and its even better because it’s right at Morey’s Piers! Now I wish I could getaway and have a beach vacation, too!
I went to have an MRI done yesterday, and the doctor called me this morning to tell me that I have a torn rotator cuff! No wonder my shoulder has been hurting so bad! I’m not sure when I’m going to have that surgery done, I need to learn more information about it. I understand that it won’t heal by itself, so I have to have surgery. I’m quite annoyed by this; I don’t know what is involved, or how long the recovery time will be!
I have been spending more time lately learning a lot about the Internet. I really did not realize just how complicated it really is! I was thinking about creating a web page, and will need to learn more about webhosting in order to do that. There is a great website that I found called webhostinggeeks.com that reviews the top ten webhosting services, but what I like even more is there wide assortment of educational articles for web masters. I’m learning a lot from those articles! If you are a beginning webmaster, you would be well advised to check out their website!
This past weekend I spent most of the weekend insulating the garage, then putting up plywood and painting it white. A nephew of my wife came over a couple of the days and was helping me for a little bit of the time. I am very excited about getting the garage done – it will make it much more comfortable for me to be working on vehicles if I can better control the temperature in there! And insulation is the key factor to that!
There have been a lot of telephone calls to our house lately where the caller ID shows the phone number of the caller, but not the name. I really don’t like not knowing who has been calling the house, so I was glad to learn of the Phone Lookup Scan website that lets me do a reverse phone lookup and find the details of the company (or person) who called our place.
We had a great Labor Day weekend! The weather was great, and I managed to grill almost all of our meals outdoors! I love to grill burgers, dogs, and steaks on the grill, and my wife really enjoys how much it helps her – she has much less to do when I am grilling!
Although I grill a mean steak, my burgers are the best. I can even convince our son to leave his video games for a few minutes for one of my grilled burgers! Now you have to understand that really says a lot!
