I love life factory water bottles. They are glass, which is nice for people trying to avoid plastic or metal. It has a silicone sleeve to avoid breakage. And it is made in France (the bottle) and the U.S. (silicone cap and sleeve).
The trick to learning to cook cheap meals from cooking shows is to take the techniques you learn and the general recipe ideas and pare them down ruthlessly. Rachel Ray isn't a great one for recipes, in my experience, maybe because she got her start at a supermarket trying to get people to buy more stuff. But learning cooking techniques is essential for making cheap ingredients sing.
Also, the internet is a great place to figure out how to cut recipe corners. Just use recipes as a general idea of where you want to end up, research to replace any ingredients you don't have, and people will think you have magic kitchen elves.
One of the best trips I've ever been on was almost entirely unplanned. I was on study abroad for a year in Japan and had to (somehow) get from a small town in Southwest Japan (about an hour east of Hiroshima) back to Tokyo.
I knew I wanted to take the ferry from Hiroshima to Kobe (because why not? Ferry's are cool!), I knew I wanted to spend the night in Kobe, I knew that I wanted to see Himeji castle (in Kobe), and I knew I was going to have to take the local trains back up the coast from Kobe to Tokyo, because the bullet train was too expensive.
I convinced two of my friends who also needed to make this trip to come with me. When we left, I knew where we were staying each of the two nights we would be traveling (one night on the ferry, one night in a small hostel-like establishment), roughly how we would get from one place to the next, and roughly how much everything was going to cost. Otherwise I didn't have a clue what we were going to do.
My friends told me later that if had known how "unplanned" the trip truly was before we left, they never would have come along. As it was, it was one of the best trips of our lives. We found an amazing ramen restaurant, got to walk though a beautiful Japanese garden that wasn't on any map or in any guidebook I've looked at since, and we really bonded over the whole experience. It was a *blast*.
Guest, welcome to the board. Yeah, house-buying is a complicated, confusing task, and it sounds like there are a few things which would have made your experience better. There are a couple of things I would have done differently:
1) You don't say if you were pre-approved (not just "pre-qualified") before you started shopping. If you weren't, you should have been. Getting pre-approved means you've already shopped around for the terms that best suited you. And knowing you already were approved elsewhere would make it easier to judge the RE company's lender's terms. The middle of a purchase is not the time to figure out where you're getting the best deal.
2) Unless your agent was hired specifically as a "buyer's agent", he or she represented the seller, not you. At the same time, especially in THIS RE market, buyers get to call a lot of the shots because there aren't that many good ones out there. Until you sign, nobody gets paid. Use the power you have in that situation to ask as many questions as you need to and take the time you need (understanding, of course, that there are deadlines and that an accepted purchase offer helps lock things in).
3) It is hardly ever a good idea to require sellers to do maintenance of any kind. They have no incentive to spend a dime on it, never mind do as good a job as you like. For all you know, the carpet "cleaning" they did was a can of supermarket rug cleaner. Next time, negotiate maintenance into the price you settle on.
3) House measurements are notoriously "off". Measuring the outside of the house to determine square footage sounds misleading to me, but if that is the custom in your area, at least all property is measured that way. You'll notice lots of RE ads and paperwork states that information is “deemed reliable but not guaranteed” -- the agent may have taken dimensions from the ad the last time the house sold, or someone may have screwed up typing in the numbers ... If you want to be sure, measure it yourself.
4) As in every business, there are RE agents with great work ethics and a lot of integrity and there are RE agents who are distracted or burned out or shady. There are people like that in any business. Not to defend RE agents too much, but the commission they receive isn't always all theirs. Out of that comes marketing expenses for the property, typically office rent or some sort of fee by the company they're with, taxes, and so on. I used to think being a RE agent was easy money until I learned more about how the business works; there aren't THAT many truly rich RE agents.
As in most major purchases, educating yourself about all the alternatives will pay dividends. I sincerely hope you enjoy your house. But if/when you're ready to move on, spend a little time boning up on your choices and I'll guess the transaction goes a whole lot smoother.
I line dry when the weather is decent and when the clothes are suited to being outdoors. Somethings are fragile or might fade in the sun. These I twirl a few minutes in the dryer and then put on hangers and dry inside.
I love compiling lists of things to do (from Guidebooks) before I go. I decide which one or two I most want to do, and try hardest to fit those in. I prioritize the other things, too, and organize them by location. That way, if something didn't work out in one location, I can see other options to try nearby instead of just giving up and doing something random or going back to the hotel. I think all this research and planning is a big part of the fun and helps me learn a lot before I go (especially if it's a place very different from where I'm from) so that I can be more comfortable on the trip and do more. Plus I definitely like having a plan on places to stay, with reservations already made. Helps me feel better.
But then I also keep my eyes and ears open while I'm there and stay very flexible. I never do half of what's on my list, but then I'm also never just sitting around having run out of ideas. I've never changed my overnight plans, but I'm certainly open to that.
I admit that I do bring a laptop, if for no other reason than to store my pictures. I also use it to keep a journal of what I do so that when I get back I can make a nice album to help me enjoy the trip over and over later. But you can store a lot of pictures on an iPod (which I don't own) and write in a paper journal (which I normally do). (I also bring a tiny notebook for taking notes while I'm out, especially on tours when the tour guide is telling us lots of interesting things.)
Weird. My experience is that cooking shows do not help me make meals cheaper, faster OR better. They are all about magically having rare or expensive items already measured and chopped sitting in little bowls in your kitchen.
Frankly, my best way of learning cheap, fast, and healthy recipes is to have roommates. Second best: getting all my mom's recipes. Also good: sharing recipes with friends and asking for recipes I like at potlucks in case they turn out to be not that crazy. And then I also just google for recipes for my favorite foods and keep experimenting until I find one that's healthy and simple but also yummy.
No, I did not unfortunately. I thought I did a great job since I found a few mistakes on the site. I had figured I wouldn't find anything wrong originally since it is such a popular site/store. I personally think its a scam since the site is not always the same like stated by others. the get free critiques (the people that are applying for job) and get paid for their work by the companies that want to be critiqued. But, hey, maybe there are alot better critiques out there then me =/
Continental is ending the OnePass Program 12/31/2011 and replacing it with the Mileage Plus Program. They are also ending participation with American Express. I'm curious to see what other changes will be made.
I don't know if this counts, but I'm a HUGE comparison shopper when it comes to booking flights, hotels, rental cars, etc. I start with the travel websites, then move on to individual airline/hotel/car websites, then hit sites with customer comments and recommendations. There are times when I feel like I've spent way too long on one aspect of my plans (ie, flights), but with patience and perseverence, I usually come away very satisfied~
why water down coffee to make iced coffee when you can make cold brew coffee? in the summer my press pot lives in the fridge. add coffee and water, refrigerate overnight and press down in the morning. if you don't have all night, i find 4-6 hours is fine
Only helpful if you live in the handful of cities that have screenings. I don't live "in the middle of Montana", but in hampton roads, VA, a 4 city area with over a million residents. Yet I could not find a screening within a hundred miles.
This is a great blog topic. It is a symptom of our narcissistic, responsibility-free society that so many people, those who cannot make their first marriage work (or in your case have a child as well- 14 yrs earlier) expect us all to sing and dance when they try to do it all over again. Keep your problems to yourself, they have little bearing on the opinion that the vast majority of the people here agree upon. The second marriage should be low key and humble as the track record of failure is nothing to be proud of. Death of a spouse is another story altogether as mentioned.
I make Kool-aid or Flavor-Aid using about half the sugar the recipe calls for. Sometimes I'll use honey, agave nectar, maple syrup or brown sugar but that ups the cost considerably.
Man I was reading this and getting excited, but started to think, "I bet they don't do this in Montana..."
and then you dropped the bomb, "If you live in the middle of Montana, it's unlikely that there are a lot of screenings in your area."
FML
I'll just have to stick to befriending the people that work at the theater so I can get free tickets lol.
Nice post though.
I have a $200.00 phone system and Magic Jack works very well. The main phone is plugged into the Magic Jack and all the others are plugged into the wall sockets. I can dial out and answer calls. Never had a problem. Maybe I am lucky I don't know. What I do know is that as long as they offer this service I will have it. Especially on vacations.
"Not edible" is not the same as "tastes nasty." Older knotweed tips are tasty, but they are quite high in oxalic acid. Be aware. You want to eat them in the spring, when there's much more stem than leaf, or no leaf, and less oxalic acid. Take shoots that are large, new, and pale green. (There's another compound in the very short pink ones that causes nausea in some people.)
I had two "fabulously frugal" bachelorette parties. The first was when my then-fiance and his buddies went to Vegas, the weekend before our wedding. We had just moved into our new apartment which was conveniently across the street from a brewery, so all of us girlfriends/fiancees/wives left behind from the bachelor party had a delicious dinner then came back to my new apartment for a safe and boozy slumber party. We had DVDs but never got around to watching them because we were talking so much.
Then, the night before my wedding, about 10 (different) girlfriends and I gathered into two hotel rooms. Everyone brought delicious snacks and drinks and silly gifts, and we had another safe and boozy slumber party.
I loved both my bachelorette parties. Really, I hate going out. It's expensive and loud and you have to deal with stupid people and transportation and reservations...and someone ALWAYS either gets too drunk, gets her feelings hurt, or loses her wallet. Slumber parties are soooo chill, and you get lots of quality time with your favorite people (some of whom are probably from out-of-town and you won't see them until the next wedding).
I definitely comparison shop ... even more now since I got my smartphone. It's so convenient to scan an item via my phone camera while at the store and get prices and review instantly. It has definitely changed the way I shop for general items.
A lot of the folks I worked with at a movie theater when I was in college are theater managers now. So I pretty much watch free movies whenever I want. I highly recommend this method.
I almost never comparison shop on groceries and daily items. However, I do it for larger-ticket items. A few days ago I comparison shopped for contact lenses and saved 35% over what I usually pay for them.
I love life factory water bottles. They are glass, which is nice for people trying to avoid plastic or metal. It has a silicone sleeve to avoid breakage. And it is made in France (the bottle) and the U.S. (silicone cap and sleeve).
The trick to learning to cook cheap meals from cooking shows is to take the techniques you learn and the general recipe ideas and pare them down ruthlessly. Rachel Ray isn't a great one for recipes, in my experience, maybe because she got her start at a supermarket trying to get people to buy more stuff. But learning cooking techniques is essential for making cheap ingredients sing.
Also, the internet is a great place to figure out how to cut recipe corners. Just use recipes as a general idea of where you want to end up, research to replace any ingredients you don't have, and people will think you have magic kitchen elves.
One of the best trips I've ever been on was almost entirely unplanned. I was on study abroad for a year in Japan and had to (somehow) get from a small town in Southwest Japan (about an hour east of Hiroshima) back to Tokyo.
I knew I wanted to take the ferry from Hiroshima to Kobe (because why not? Ferry's are cool!), I knew I wanted to spend the night in Kobe, I knew that I wanted to see Himeji castle (in Kobe), and I knew I was going to have to take the local trains back up the coast from Kobe to Tokyo, because the bullet train was too expensive.
I convinced two of my friends who also needed to make this trip to come with me. When we left, I knew where we were staying each of the two nights we would be traveling (one night on the ferry, one night in a small hostel-like establishment), roughly how we would get from one place to the next, and roughly how much everything was going to cost. Otherwise I didn't have a clue what we were going to do.
My friends told me later that if had known how "unplanned" the trip truly was before we left, they never would have come along. As it was, it was one of the best trips of our lives. We found an amazing ramen restaurant, got to walk though a beautiful Japanese garden that wasn't on any map or in any guidebook I've looked at since, and we really bonded over the whole experience. It was a *blast*.
Guest, welcome to the board. Yeah, house-buying is a complicated, confusing task, and it sounds like there are a few things which would have made your experience better. There are a couple of things I would have done differently:
1) You don't say if you were pre-approved (not just "pre-qualified") before you started shopping. If you weren't, you should have been. Getting pre-approved means you've already shopped around for the terms that best suited you. And knowing you already were approved elsewhere would make it easier to judge the RE company's lender's terms. The middle of a purchase is not the time to figure out where you're getting the best deal.
2) Unless your agent was hired specifically as a "buyer's agent", he or she represented the seller, not you. At the same time, especially in THIS RE market, buyers get to call a lot of the shots because there aren't that many good ones out there. Until you sign, nobody gets paid. Use the power you have in that situation to ask as many questions as you need to and take the time you need (understanding, of course, that there are deadlines and that an accepted purchase offer helps lock things in).
3) It is hardly ever a good idea to require sellers to do maintenance of any kind. They have no incentive to spend a dime on it, never mind do as good a job as you like. For all you know, the carpet "cleaning" they did was a can of supermarket rug cleaner. Next time, negotiate maintenance into the price you settle on.
3) House measurements are notoriously "off". Measuring the outside of the house to determine square footage sounds misleading to me, but if that is the custom in your area, at least all property is measured that way. You'll notice lots of RE ads and paperwork states that information is “deemed reliable but not guaranteed” -- the agent may have taken dimensions from the ad the last time the house sold, or someone may have screwed up typing in the numbers ... If you want to be sure, measure it yourself.
4) As in every business, there are RE agents with great work ethics and a lot of integrity and there are RE agents who are distracted or burned out or shady. There are people like that in any business. Not to defend RE agents too much, but the commission they receive isn't always all theirs. Out of that comes marketing expenses for the property, typically office rent or some sort of fee by the company they're with, taxes, and so on. I used to think being a RE agent was easy money until I learned more about how the business works; there aren't THAT many truly rich RE agents.
As in most major purchases, educating yourself about all the alternatives will pay dividends. I sincerely hope you enjoy your house. But if/when you're ready to move on, spend a little time boning up on your choices and I'll guess the transaction goes a whole lot smoother.
I line dry when the weather is decent and when the clothes are suited to being outdoors. Somethings are fragile or might fade in the sun. These I twirl a few minutes in the dryer and then put on hangers and dry inside.
I love compiling lists of things to do (from Guidebooks) before I go. I decide which one or two I most want to do, and try hardest to fit those in. I prioritize the other things, too, and organize them by location. That way, if something didn't work out in one location, I can see other options to try nearby instead of just giving up and doing something random or going back to the hotel. I think all this research and planning is a big part of the fun and helps me learn a lot before I go (especially if it's a place very different from where I'm from) so that I can be more comfortable on the trip and do more. Plus I definitely like having a plan on places to stay, with reservations already made. Helps me feel better.
But then I also keep my eyes and ears open while I'm there and stay very flexible. I never do half of what's on my list, but then I'm also never just sitting around having run out of ideas. I've never changed my overnight plans, but I'm certainly open to that.
I admit that I do bring a laptop, if for no other reason than to store my pictures. I also use it to keep a journal of what I do so that when I get back I can make a nice album to help me enjoy the trip over and over later. But you can store a lot of pictures on an iPod (which I don't own) and write in a paper journal (which I normally do). (I also bring a tiny notebook for taking notes while I'm out, especially on tours when the tour guide is telling us lots of interesting things.)
Weird. My experience is that cooking shows do not help me make meals cheaper, faster OR better. They are all about magically having rare or expensive items already measured and chopped sitting in little bowls in your kitchen.
Frankly, my best way of learning cheap, fast, and healthy recipes is to have roommates. Second best: getting all my mom's recipes. Also good: sharing recipes with friends and asking for recipes I like at potlucks in case they turn out to be not that crazy. And then I also just google for recipes for my favorite foods and keep experimenting until I find one that's healthy and simple but also yummy.
No, I did not unfortunately. I thought I did a great job since I found a few mistakes on the site. I had figured I wouldn't find anything wrong originally since it is such a popular site/store. I personally think its a scam since the site is not always the same like stated by others. the get free critiques (the people that are applying for job) and get paid for their work by the companies that want to be critiqued. But, hey, maybe there are alot better critiques out there then me =/
Continental is ending the OnePass Program 12/31/2011 and replacing it with the Mileage Plus Program. They are also ending participation with American Express. I'm curious to see what other changes will be made.
I don't know if this counts, but I'm a HUGE comparison shopper when it comes to booking flights, hotels, rental cars, etc. I start with the travel websites, then move on to individual airline/hotel/car websites, then hit sites with customer comments and recommendations. There are times when I feel like I've spent way too long on one aspect of my plans (ie, flights), but with patience and perseverence, I usually come away very satisfied~
why water down coffee to make iced coffee when you can make cold brew coffee? in the summer my press pot lives in the fridge. add coffee and water, refrigerate overnight and press down in the morning. if you don't have all night, i find 4-6 hours is fine
Only helpful if you live in the handful of cities that have screenings. I don't live "in the middle of Montana", but in hampton roads, VA, a 4 city area with over a million residents. Yet I could not find a screening within a hundred miles.
This is a great blog topic. It is a symptom of our narcissistic, responsibility-free society that so many people, those who cannot make their first marriage work (or in your case have a child as well- 14 yrs earlier) expect us all to sing and dance when they try to do it all over again. Keep your problems to yourself, they have little bearing on the opinion that the vast majority of the people here agree upon. The second marriage should be low key and humble as the track record of failure is nothing to be proud of. Death of a spouse is another story altogether as mentioned.
I make Kool-aid or Flavor-Aid using about half the sugar the recipe calls for. Sometimes I'll use honey, agave nectar, maple syrup or brown sugar but that ups the cost considerably.
Man I was reading this and getting excited, but started to think, "I bet they don't do this in Montana..."
and then you dropped the bomb, "If you live in the middle of Montana, it's unlikely that there are a lot of screenings in your area."
FML
I'll just have to stick to befriending the people that work at the theater so I can get free tickets lol.
Nice post though.
I have a $200.00 phone system and Magic Jack works very well. The main phone is plugged into the Magic Jack and all the others are plugged into the wall sockets. I can dial out and answer calls. Never had a problem. Maybe I am lucky I don't know. What I do know is that as long as they offer this service I will have it. Especially on vacations.
I always have the ingredients for bread for my bread machine. Who doesn't enjoy fresh bread?
"Not edible" is not the same as "tastes nasty." Older knotweed tips are tasty, but they are quite high in oxalic acid. Be aware. You want to eat them in the spring, when there's much more stem than leaf, or no leaf, and less oxalic acid. Take shoots that are large, new, and pale green. (There's another compound in the very short pink ones that causes nausea in some people.)
I had two "fabulously frugal" bachelorette parties. The first was when my then-fiance and his buddies went to Vegas, the weekend before our wedding. We had just moved into our new apartment which was conveniently across the street from a brewery, so all of us girlfriends/fiancees/wives left behind from the bachelor party had a delicious dinner then came back to my new apartment for a safe and boozy slumber party. We had DVDs but never got around to watching them because we were talking so much.
Then, the night before my wedding, about 10 (different) girlfriends and I gathered into two hotel rooms. Everyone brought delicious snacks and drinks and silly gifts, and we had another safe and boozy slumber party.
I loved both my bachelorette parties. Really, I hate going out. It's expensive and loud and you have to deal with stupid people and transportation and reservations...and someone ALWAYS either gets too drunk, gets her feelings hurt, or loses her wallet. Slumber parties are soooo chill, and you get lots of quality time with your favorite people (some of whom are probably from out-of-town and you won't see them until the next wedding).
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I definitely comparison shop ... even more now since I got my smartphone. It's so convenient to scan an item via my phone camera while at the store and get prices and review instantly. It has definitely changed the way I shop for general items.
A lot of the folks I worked with at a movie theater when I was in college are theater managers now. So I pretty much watch free movies whenever I want. I highly recommend this method.
I almost never comparison shop on groceries and daily items. However, I do it for larger-ticket items. A few days ago I comparison shopped for contact lenses and saved 35% over what I usually pay for them.
I don't comparison shop usually simply because I don't have time to!
There is rarely a time that I don't comparison shop. The internet has definitely helped me with it, especially with books.