Window Shopper

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The year I graduated, lots of things happened. The Prom. Dates to the park and the movies. Yeah, I know. Not all that exciting. Those were not the most exciting times…unless, of course, you are a girl who is finally dating the guy she wanted to date for years. That makes it pretty exciting, wouldn’t you say? We did get to the prom. I had an awesome dress! Beautiful night. We danced for what seemed like hours, then went out to eat with another couple to a great place. I say that with all the straight face I can.

The place where we went to eat requires a reservation so you might figure it’s classy, right? Thought so too since my parents and I had been there several times prior to my date there. It was always nice….until. After the waiter took our orders, we talked about the prom, well, we girls did. Frankly, I have no idea what the guys talked about. But we were interrupted several times by the guy vacuuming the floor next to our table. Are you serious? We could not believe how rude the guy was. But I guess he wanted to go home and we were stopping him. Not just us, of course. There were other diners. We laugh about that night now. Well, my husband and I laugh about it. Not the guy I went with. I have no idea where he is now.

Ya know, if I had known then what I know now, I would have taken that brand new luggage I got for a graduation present, gotten into a car and taken off to see the world or at least the portion of it that I could get to then. Surely there were some places out there that served good food AND had their vacuuming already done. Don’t you think so? The memories get a bit hazy over the years but I really do not think I will ever forget about that date and the night of the great vacuum caper. LOL!

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I had to check this out for myself but it looks to be a good plan. So many families are going under because they are paying things that will not matter and do not pay things that really do matter. People need a place to live. They need food. They need to have lights and water. They need to have heat in the winter and, frankly, these days with the weather outside looking the way it does, they need the air conditioning as well. It is no longer an option. Now it’s a necessity.

But you can do some things to help your family. These are just suggestions. They are not a rule of thumb or any type of real advice since everyone’s situation is different. These things may not have anything to do with your situation at all. But if this is good for you, then it helps.

1) Deal with credit card debt. Pay the bills on that because the interest rate is going to kill you financially if you don’t. When the things are paid off, CUT THEM UP!!! Get rid of them. They are a huge part of the problem.

2) Pay what you need to have….utility bills are top of the list there. Also, your rent or mortgage is very important. If you don’t pay that, you won’t have to worry about utility bills. As homeless people you won’t have any. If your bills or mortgage are out of control, contact those whom you owe. They will work with you. DON’T IGNORE THIS! The bills do not go away magically. Things get shut off or you become homeless. That should not be an option.

3) For those who use heating oil or propane, contact your company and see if they have an incentive plan to pay for the oil or propane in the summer time when the prices are lower. Most places have such plans. Then, in the winter when the prices are way higher, you will get the fill up for the summer rates. The risk is that the price will go down but since that is highly unlikely, it’s worth the risk.

4) You can do things around the house to lower your heating and cooling bills by simply..in winter, lowering your thermostat a couple of degrees. Believe me, you get used to it. We did. In the summer, raise the thermostat a couple of degrees. This will save you some money. That bill is going to be high enough.

5) Insulate if at all possible. That will cut down on your loss to the outside.

6) Prioritize what is needed and what is not. Be brutal if you have to. No one needs that many snacks or cokes. Do you really need that extra cell phone? Does your cable or satellite have to have all those extra channels? Stepping down one level on either of those will save you quite a bit of money. Must the family eat out all those times? Go back to home cooking. There’s a benefit. You have family meals again.

It’s getting so that people are desperate now. I understand that. But it’s time to get in there and find ways to survive all this. With families helping each other, this can work. People don’t always have to lose out.

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I think I mentioned a while back that we had a new puppy. She was new at 5 weeks old. Now she’s over three months old and no longer new in the house. In fact, I’m pretty sure she decided to take the place over. We do have a problem or two since she seems to want to be in charge. Yes, I know. We are the humans and the adults here so we are naturally the ones in charge of the house. Got it. Well, we do have it until the puppy decides to whine. Believe me here. This pup whines with the best of them. And she does not simply whine for one thing. Oh no. She whines to go out, to get food in her bowl, to get noticed by any of us who are willing to play with her and whines to simply get attention.

Want to know what her last adventure was? Yeah, I didn’t either but that’s life. Now we have three computers in our house. All of the plugged into a wall socket. All of them have wires running everywhere. And she is a puppy. Starting to get the picture? Uh huh. When we caught her, she had been chewing on the latest edition of the CAT5e cable coming off the back of the computer. I’m not even sure how she got back there in the first place. She is getting really BIG! At three months old, I believe that she probably weighs in around 25-30 lbs. How can a puppy that weight get into the place she was in to do all that? I guess that’s another mystery of life.

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The fact is, I start out a whole lot of my posts here with “when I was a kid”, so much so that I do not want to do that here, this time. So, when my niece was younger….HA!…she wanted to win. It did not matter what, she just wanted to win. The problem was that her sisters were all older than she and they DIDN’T want her to win…anything. Quite often, there’d be crying because she didn’t get to win a game. It got to the point that her sisters didn’t want to play games with her anymore.

That was a tough time for her. Well, she was desperate to win something. After all, all of her sisters could do it with various competitions and games. Striving to get the best score on all sorts of things, she could win and some things. Over the years, of course, she got a lot better at these things and she does win now, sometimes. It’s as it should be. But back when she was about 8, I think, she got a Rubis, excuse me, Rubics Cube for Christmas. We told her how to work the cube and what it took to get the colors all in the right places. One day, she brought out her Cube and gave it to me. She told me proudly that she got it all right. I took one look and knew just what she had done. She had peeled off all the colors and replaced them so that she got all the colors matching where they should be. Trouble was that those stickers no longer were sticking. *grin*

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Ever heard that phrase before? I have…all my life. Sometimes it was me that had someone saying that. The truth is that I am a klutz. That would be why when I go shopping, I do not pick up many items, especially the really breakable items. Yes, on occasion, I am having to pay for something that I would need to fix if I wanted to keep it myself. Not so much of that anymore but before, when I was a teenager….ACK!

Most teenage girls are so graceful you would think they were taught by the models of the world to stand, sit and walk into a room. Me? When I was a teen, I galloped into the room. If I could have neighed, most people wouldn’t have been able to tell. You know, that it wasn’t a horse. You had to make me say it, right?

These days, the klutz part is a bit dampened down, I think. I only drop the keys when we’re headed out the door, in the car and when I want to put them away. Not nearly as bad as it used to be. Still, the klutz part of me wants to be just like everyone else. Now wait a minute. I have to think about that one. I can tell you for a fact that I happen to be a super klutz. Oh yeah? Don’t believe me? Have you ever seen a Cobra golf? Uh huh. That bad. In one day, I probably wiped out several items treasured by people. I simply will not go into an antique store anymore…that is, if I don’t get banned.

Am I really that bad? I would like to think that this post is really just a spoof but I can’t tell you that. Oops, there goes my keys again. They sure are slippery today. Sigh.

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My husband has a blog that deals with cooking, recipes and lots of things to do with the kitchen. And he has a list of the other cooking blogs that he likes. Through all of it, one of the things I like so much are the chocolate recipes. And that is a problem in itself. I love chocolate! Love the recipes for brownies and other recipes that use chocolate. I also love raspberry recipes. They’re so great.

I do think there is a problem though. With our family seeing these recipes and trying them out, we could have real sugar issues some time. But also, we do see that there are other things that we cannot ignore. I mean, you know what it was like to be a teenager, right? I remember. Most of us had to battle the big zit problem one way or another. And with all those chocolate recipes, our niece will be looking for acne solutions sooner rather than later if this keeps up. So, we have decided that he can write the recipes but we can’t always try the recipes like we would love to do. And that can be the best solution for us right now. But I do miss my chocolate. Sigh.

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Ordinarily at this point, I would be wanting to tell you about places to go, things to see for vacations. This year, I cannot think how to do that because of the astronomically high gas prices which, shockingly, have reached a national average of $4 a gallon according to AAA. And of course, it is conveniently at just the time that most Americans are wanting to travel on their family summer vacations.

I think it is an absolute shame that the oil companies, who are increasingly greedy and self interested, are causing the American public to change their whole lifestyles to serve the CEOs and companies so that their pockets can be lined with bucks from those of us who can ill afford to even pull up to the pumps these days. I don’t know about you but in our house, we cannot afford more than a couple of tanks of gas a month even in our rural area. The price at the pump here is somewhat lower at the current rate of $3.89 which is horrifying to us but much lower than other areas of the country.

At our house, we could not afford the gas prices over the $3 mark let alone $4. We, like so many Americans, live on a fixed or semi-fixed income. We unashamedly find ways to have an income but are constantly stopped by other just as greedy companies that think they can run our lives. The oil companies make us pay extremely high prices at the pump while the internet company, Google, chooses to slap us down when we do the horrendous thing of blogging for money online if we do not do it Google’s way.

Through it all, these money grabbing companies are going to not only bring the American public to it’s knees, it is going to bring down the whole country as they are currently doing. What is it going to take to change all this? I have no idea. Wish I had a magic bullet to fix it all but I do not. My only advice, as crappy as it may sound, is to stay home this vacation…not going to the pumps at all. Let the greed of the oil companies have their day by not having the sales they expect to have. The problem is that all people do not go on vacation at once. So it will hardly be seen at the pump unless we all agree to boycott the pumps for a few days. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

As for Google, that greedy company online that does not want others to share in the wealth of the net, we are choosing to blog for pay anyway. Some of the blog for pay companies are getting the idea of not basing their criteria on the page rank that Google shows those of us who do blog for pay. That is a step forward and I certainly hope that Google falls on it’s nasty little internet tail bone. It AND the oil companies as well as the oil people in the middle east deserve everything they get when they do fall on their posteriors. I just hope we can enjoy that instead of standing in a food line somewhere. Sigh.

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If you haven’t read my blog in a while, you might not have seen the adorable new puppy we recently acquired. She’s a great pup, very enthusiastic about everything. Very smart. She is mostly trained to go outside now at 9 and a half weeks old. I am very happy with her…most of the time.

Let me tell you a bit about puppies that get into things they should not. We have retrieved a couple of flip flops, endless amounts of plastic wrap (in pieces, of course. We have no idea where she is getting that stuff), bits of fuzz, an old toy that our previous doggie played with about 5 years ago, assorted chewies (also from the other pet who died a few months back), a comforter and many other things. Yes, I did say a comforter. If we cannot get her to change her ways, and we intend to make that perfectly clear I can assure you!!!, then I will have to go shopping for down comforters again. I just bought a couple of them last fall.

This is getting serious. Not only has she decided to terrorize the cat because at 9 and a half weeks old she is much bigger than our kitty but she also gets into everything!!! Actually, this reminds me of the movie “Turner And Hooch” more than anything. And now I have to laugh! If you have not seen the movie, I recommend it. It is hilarious and so is our new puppy! A laugh is a good thing even when picking up the pieces. LOL!

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You know, we bought some items that we were going to use in cooking…about 2 years ago. My Mom always likes to make a mincemeat pie or two for Thanksgiving or Christmas. She uses an alcoholic beverage in it. A couple of years ago, she had run out and wanted us to get her some more. She had a list. All of those items were to be used in cooking. Now, before you do the “yeah right” thing, that’s the truth. In cooking.

At the same time, we decided to venture into the area of cooking with alcoholic beverages as well. So, we purchased a bottle of wine and a pack of beer. In my younger days, I did enjoy a beer every now and then…well, maybe a tad more than that. But it has been many,many years since I had a drink of beer or any other beverage like it. My husband does not imbibe.

We purchased those items for the sole purpose of cooking with them. As you are probably aware, the alcohol burns off in the cooking but leaves the taste of the product intact. Well, like I said, we bought a bottle of wine..don’t get out the wine rack just yet. I think we will need a few more bottles of that before that happens. Maybe a beer rack or two. Nah. I doubt that we will need any of that. Why? Because over two years later we still have the pack of beer, one missing having given it to a family member. We still have the wine bottle intact, nothing missing at all.

I just don’t think we are ready to be big drinkers. But the cooking will be getting better IF we use any of it. Maybe some day.

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We have a new puppy. She is a little nut but cute, very cute. At the moment, we do not have really good pictures of her and our cat because we have a crappy camera. It’s bad. Sometimes we do get not bad pictures so I will show you a couple that were taken with that camera. I think you will see that it leaves a lot to be desired. You know, I never really got what that phrase meant until just now. Here are two pics of our animals, Gizmo our cat and Misty, our new puppy:

The thing here is..if the camera was any good I would love to have custom picture framing done on our pictures because they would be worth it. Someday soon, we are going to have that good camera (we are currently saving for it as we speak) and get fantastic pics. If not, then I have to beg my bro-in-law, who is by the way an excellent photographer, to take pics of our adorable four footed kids so that we could have the best pictures in those frames. I think we should do that one way or another, don’t you?

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