Monthly Archives: April 2008

Where’s that stimulus check?

I know, I know.  Everyone is wondering where theirs is.  I can’t wait for ours to arrive – it is already allocated as follows: $600 – brings savings back up to $5000.  Yippee! $350 – gas for traveling to OH in 2 weeks, and then western NY over Memorial Day.  This is all to visit family. $25 – donation to friend who is doing pancreatic cancer walk.  She lost her stepfather last year, and is such a sweet gal. $35 – basketball shoes for the husband.  He just started playing again, and his old shoes were, well, really old. ...

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How would you handle this situation?

The ignorance of people never ceases to amaze me. I do need to divulge a little personal information to put this story in its proper context.  I have dark hair and eyes, but am not sure of my ethnic heritage because I do not know my father.  My mom is Caucasian, but I don’t really look like her.  If I had to guess, I would suspect that I may be Native American as well, but your guess is as good as mine. So here’s my story: There is a mother in our parent-child program who is somewhat annoying.  Up...

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Quote for thought #1

Since I am busy on the weekends, I thought this would be a nice idea.  Each weekend, I will try to post one or two quotes for thought.  Here is the first: I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: ”What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.” Author Joseph Addison

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Thoughts on Dave Ramsey

I recently finished Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover, and it is a quick and easy read.  I would recommend getting it from your local library – I would not buy it just because there are enough blogs and information on his methods on the web (and you can use the cost of the book as your first snowflake!).  I think that Get Rich Slowly has a nice synopsis of the book here if you want to get the basic idea before investing your time reading the whole book. Is Total Money Makeover going to change our lives?  I’m not...

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Get $10 off a $25 purchase when using a Visa card at Lowe’s

I thought that I would share this – we’re not spending a lot on home improvements right now, but this will definitely help to fill the kids sandbox and get us some mulch for the yard! The coupon is good through July 30,2008, and will be e-mailed within 24 hours, according to the website. Here’s the link: http://www.loweswinners.com/LifeTakesVisa/ Enjoy!

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Decreasing 401k contributions to offset health plan increase

After finishing the taxes, we decided to decrease my husband’s 401k contributions from 20% to 10% with the intention of putting this money into our Roth IRAs.  The next day, we get a letter in the mail with regards to our health care plan. They have changed the salary tiers and the contribution limits.  My husband now falls into a higher tier (if he made $1 less, he would still be in his lower tier).  The contribution limits have also increased.  When all is said and done, he is now making less than he did before his raise after...

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Using a rubber mallet to fix your MacBook?

It seems to have worked for me! I was having some trouble tonight after my hard drive started whirring on my (less than one-year old) MacBook. I’ve had the hard drive replaced once (this is why my published thesis is about 20 pages shorter), and was pretty ticked to hear it causing a commotion once again (no pun intended). The thought of traveling over 1.5 hours to the Apple Store tomorrow after my son’s class was not appealing, so I decided to take matters into my own hands – after backing everything up, of course. Turns out that a...

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The new Entrecard – the good and the bad

I am not sure what to think of the new Entrecard changes.  I really like being able to see how many times a blog has dropped on you in the past 30 days – I am using this information to comprise a drop list for myself.  I used to be a member of the Recipro-drops list, but was surprised to see that some members were hardly dropping any cards at all.  I think that doing a little extra work and getting a consistent list of droppers for my blog will be worth the effort. I am not sure what...

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How do you blog when the weather is nice?

Ok – I admit that this is off topic.  But I can’t seem to find enough time to get anything done when the weather is nice – it’s just too much fun being outside! Today, for example, I took my son to a dairy farm.  We’re reading about cows this week (more about that later), so I thought it might be nice if he could see them in person instead of just as pictures in books.  Plus, he should know that the couple of gallons of milk he consumes each week doesn’t magically appear in the carton! So off...

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Need to recycle those packing peanuts?

We were cleaning out the basement this weekend, and had a lot of packing peanuts that we wanted to get rid of.  Throwing these out makes me feel guilty, as I know they take a long time to decompose in a landfill. A quick google search helped us come up with a solution, and I just wanted to share the link.  The Plastic Loose Fill Council has over 1500 collection sites in the US – you just need to fill out an online form to find the collection site nearest to you.  Hope this helps someone out!

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