From what I’ve been hearing, the average American is now suffering from bad credit and is being bombarded with offers from credit repair services. These offers give the impression that all that is needed for credit repair is to sign up for their program, and with a wave of a magic wand the bad credit will disappear.
I think it is very sad because credit repair information is something that should clearly state that if someone has bad credit because they have missed payments on a loan, that these services will not magically repair their credit! What these services basically provide is information about how you can get a copy of your credit report and dispute anything on the report that might be in error. If all of the information on your credit report is correct, and your credit is still bad, then these services cannot help you! What we need to do is to figure out how to pay off those debts so that our credit will improve over time. Just as with fixing the nation’s economy will not happen quickly, neither will getting out of personal debt. The sooner we realize that and deal with it, the better off we will all be.
Have you noticed that when you call a large company that you almost never get a real live person quickly? I recently was calling my health insurance company to try to get information about some of the claims that they should have received and processed. I found that instead of the traditional “press 1, press 2″ prompts that I’ve become accustomed to, I was getting an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system.
My ivr customer experience was frustrating in this case because the machine could not recognize what I was saying. I think that I speak English perfectly well, but my wife says that I have a pretty thick New England accent. Very aggravating if you are supposed to speak answers into the phone and the machine on the other end keeps replying “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand your answer. Please repeat…..” I got frustrated and handed the phone to my wife, who does NOT have a New England accent. She even found herself having to repeat her answers several times for the doggone thing to go through! I think there are some improvements to be made in this kind of system!
A more exciting advance in self service technologies is the voice recognition biometric technology. This type of technology is used in security situations – it is like taking fingerprints of your voice. I think this will be a great tool in the area of banking and law enforcement! This can help law enforcement track down suspects who have gone so far as to go through plastic surgery to change their appearance!
Recently my wife went into the basement to scrounge around. I don’t really know why she went down there in the first place, but she brought up an old box full of doo-dads. I think these were items that she got as hand-me-down trinkets from her father many years ago. Included in this box were a lot of 1896 Sweet Corporal cigarette buttons with flags from different countries on them. We think that they are probably worth a few dollars, and I’ve been trying to figure out some kind of worth by “googling” them, but I am not having much luck at all. Very discouraging!
When we lived in New England, I made my living doing landscaping work and grounds maintenance in the summer. I took great pride in how nice my clients yards looked. Although I did basic work such as lawn mowing and shrub trimming, my favorite work was with the flowers. In New England, the growing season is very short, so flowers are dearly appreciated when they bloom!
I especially enjoy working with planters. One of the advantages of working with planters is that if you are planting something that can’t survive the winter up there it is easier to bring the plant indoors for the winter! I think my favorite window box planter was one where I filled it with cascading petunias and they cascaded all the way to the ground. That was simply breathtaking! Lining the edges of a deck with a variety of decorative planters filled with dinner plate dahlias added a great dash of color to an otherwise stark deck. And I like being able to move the planters around to mix it up a little bit, get a little variety.
The other day my wife asked her friends where she could go to get her diamond ring cleaned for free. Where we used to live in New England, she would get it cleaned for free at the local jewelry store. They all laughed at her! They said that NO jeweler in town would clean her ring for FREE! After the laughter died down, they started talking about the different jewelers in the area, and how much they charged to clean jewelry. Then one of them said “Well, you know, the Warrenton Jewelers store might clean it for free, why don’t you try them?”
So today my wife was running errands in town and she swung past the Warrenton Jewelers store. She went inside and asked the very nice woman (who she later learned is named Jackie) who greeted her “How much does it cost to have my engagement ring cleaned?” Jackie joked “A million dollars!”
Well, my wife KNEW (or at least feverently hoped) she was joking so she slid it off of her finger and handed it to her. Jackie looked at it and said “give me a moment, I’ll clean it for you.”
My wife looked around the store (and fell in love with their beautiful rainbow sapphire jewelry) and before she knew it, Jackie was handing her ring back to her. They chatted for a few minutes about personal stuff (kids, jobs, power outages, being new to the area. My wife learned that Warrenton Jewelers only opened in town last October.) When my wife asked how much she owed for the ring being cleaned, Jackie said “no charge.” Well, my wife was thrilled about that!
So, Warrenton Jewelers, thank you for cleaning her ring for free, and welcome to the area! I hope you do well. We’ll be back.
My elderly mother lives alone. She is an independent woman, but I worry about her. More than once I’ve heard about how she’s fallen out of bed, or tripped and fell on her way from the living room to the kitchen. She really should have someone living with her! But she won’t hear of it; unless it is a family member, such as myself. Well, there are times I think my wife would be more than happy to let me move back home with my mother, but I really don’t have any plans to do that!
I do think it would be a good idea for me to have a talk with my sister and mother about subscribing to the Life Alert service. Unlike the standard alarm system where the client wears a panic button that they push if they fall down or need help, the Life Alert system also has a fall detection sensor. If the client falls down, the alarm is triggered. This system would bring great peace of mind to many people; I know one of my greatest worries is that my mother might fall down and lie in pain for hours, or even days before anyone finds her!
A couple of weeks ago Jim Baker sent me a Ghost vs Sanne CD to listen to. He thought I might like to give it a listen. When it came in the mail, my wife took it and kept it for a few days. She was listening to it in her car while commuting to and from work. She gave it back to me yesterday so I finally had the chance to listen to it myself. The vocals are nice, and the music is easy to listen to. When I first listened to it, I was enjoying the music, and the voice. The second time I started paying closer attention to the lyrics and was not particularly enjoying them. I’m not so sure I enjoy the lyrics – they seem very dark.
Earlier today my wife gave me quite a scare! I saw she was looking at a website that sells maternity clothes! I said “Dear Lord, please don’t tell me we are going to be hearing the pitter patter of little feet around this house anytime soon!” She laughed and said, “No, I’m looking for some cute clothes for our niece. She’s starting to show and I’d like to buy her a cute top she can wear this summer.” She found a nice website that sells trendy and very affordable maternity clothes. She also said that they have a promotion code to save 20% by using the word “blogfriends” at the checkout. Sounds good to me!
When we first moved in here, I saw that there was a whole-house attic fan up in the attic, but I never got around to seeing if it worked or not. Well, last week my wife starting asking me about how to turn it on because she was concerned about using it to help lower the cost of cooling the house this summer. So I went up into the attic to check it out and found that it needed a new motor. We happened to have brought a new attic fan with us when we moved, and I considered whether to remove the old fan and install the new one, but decided it would be easier to just swap out the motors. It didn’t take very long to do, and now it is working just fine. It is set up on a thermostat so it will come on automatically when needed. I sure hope it will help keep the cooling costs down!
My wife has been telling me that some of her friends are interested in learning how to create their own websites, and some are interested in learning about blogging. She has been asking me a lot of questions about how to explain to her friends how to go about doing that. She tells me that they are having a hard time understanding that buying the domain name and the webhosting services are not always one and the same.
I’ve told her that she should suggest to her friends that they check out the webhostinggeeks.com website. They rate, rank, and review the best webhosting services “out there.” Some of the services that they review include a free domain name, which would be good for some of her friends to check out. The website also has a nice blog that has a lot of good information about webhosting services.
What I think that her friends will like best about this particular website is that it also has a very specific category that they call Green Web Hosting. This section is dedicated to ranking the eco-friendly companies that provide webhosting. I know that many of our friends and relatives are trying to do business with eco-friendly companies, so this is a good resource for them to find eco-friendly companies in the webhosting business.
I know it isn’t officially summer yet, but since I am new to the area, and the weather is so much warmer here than I am used to, it sure feels like summer to me! But I am surprised about how rainy it has been this late spring! Last spring and summer we were in drought conditions, and I was afraid that we were going to lose a lot of our garden due to lack of rain. Well, that certainly has not been a concern so far this spring! It seems to have rained almost every day so far this month! Everyone around here has been commenting on that! It has been very warm, and very wet. The humidity is oppressive – I could certainly do without that!
I was out on the road and it was lunch time; I was hungry so I pulled into a McDonald’s restaurant. I saw that they have a new country-fried chicken sandwich at a reasonable price, so I decided to order it. I ordered it as a value meal, with fries and a drink. I was surprised when I got it that the were no condiments on the sandwich at all, just a hunk of fried chicken and a slice of pickle on a bun.
There were no packets of mayonnaise “out” for the customers to grab a packet, and there were no salt packets out, either. No salt or pepper shakers on the tables, either. That was a little bit annoying because I had to get back in line to ask for mayo and salt! The sandwich was “ok” but nothing special. I could see that they were trying to compete with the chik-filet chicken sandwich, and I have to admit that it seemed to be just about the same in taste, although I think the piece of chicken was smaller.
My brother is a huge Star Wars fan. He collects everything he can find that relates to Star Wars! Well, his birthday is coming up soon and I just found the coolest Star Wars gadget to buy for his birthday that he is going to LOVE! It is a Darth Vader USB Hub! How cool is that? His head moves from side to side and he makes that raspy breath sound. It’s under $80 and I found it at the geeks4u.com website! I also found the cutest little R2D2 USB hub that they sell that I’d like to buy for myself, but that will have to wait a while. I have to budget my money carefully in this rotten economy! But I’ve definitely bookmarked the site to go back later when I have the money saved up for that little guy!
