Jeremy Herndon

Around this time of year I like to go to the local craft store and buy new calendars for the new Year coming up.  A few years ago I just happened to be in one of the craft stores around this same time of year and found that they sold a huge variety of high quality calendars for under $5.00 each.  A lot of them were only $1 or $2 each!  When I found them I bought quite a few of them to give out to my friends and family as Christmas gifts.  I think that is a great bargain because when I go to many department stores, or stationary stores, or gift stores, they sell the exact same type of calendars for $15 to $20 each!

So I will make a point of going to the craft store before now and Christmas and pick up a few calendars!

There is absolutely nothing more annoying to me than to come home and find that all of the lights in the house are on, but no one is in most of the rooms!  I can’t seem to educate certain folks that we need to save money by turning off lights when we leave the room.  Well, I just found out that Black & Decker is releasing for sale motion detector light switches that will turn the lights off automatically after a few minutes of detecting no motion.  The price sounds reasonable, about $30 per switch.  They are supposedly going on sale in April.  I’ve signed up to receive an email notice from them when they come out!  I am DEFINITELY going to buy several!

Guest post written by Sharlene Brooks

For once, I’m not going to have to worry about which pie I’m fixing for our huge  family gathering for Thanksgiving Day. I always wonder about that because my family is all about the pies and I like to make sure that we have no repeats. But instead of doing the normal thing for Thanksgiving this year, I’m going to take my family to see the Thanksgiving Day parade!

It’s something that I’ve thought about doing for a few years now, but I finally decided to just go ahead and do it before the kids get a little older and have other things that they need to do during the Thanksgiving break. I was online a few months ago booking our hotel and everything for it when I ran across some information on getting a hearing aid. That’s also something that I’d been thinking about for a while, so I decided to go ahead and get fitted before the big trip.

I think that we’re going to have so much fun with the parade and I just want to make sure that we’re all ready for the trip and pack everything. It’s going to be a whirlwind of a trip, but I think that it’s going to be amazing!

Several years ago my mother-in-law gave us a couple of dining room tables with matching chairs. She was in the process of moving to a smaller house and was giving away a lot of furniture. The chairs were in very sad shape, however, and the seats in about half of them needed to be replaced. We didn’t know how we were going to fix them, and so they have been gathering dust for a couple of years in the garage. My wife has been reluctant to throw them away, so I was humoring her.

Yesterday a box arrived on the doorstep – a box full of new seats for the chairs! Seems as if my resourceful wife found a website where she could buy replacement seats and she ordered them, just in time for the family gathering planned for later this week! Now all we have to do is break out a couple of screw drivers and fix them up!

I really thought that my sister was pulling our collective leg when she sent out her last email with her Christmas Wish List attached with the link of http://www.blueskyscrubs.com promptly provided for anyone interested in purchasing her a set or two of her favorite cotton scrubs to wear next summer. My sister has become very sensitive to the heat the older and heavier she gets each year and she has discovered (so I’ve since been clued into) that these type of cotton scrubs, much like the ones that you see all of the medical people wearing to work at their office or the hospital.

They have come out with some very nice medical uniforms in the past decade or so, so she doesn’t feel intimidated by wearing these cool cotton scrubs out and about herself, which I think is pretty cool of her (please don’t mind the “cool” pun there folks) and if they keep her happy and cool as a clam than the more power to her. She is definitely no fun to be around when she is grump and we all know how being hot and uncomfortable can make a big gal grumpy.