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Category Archives: Around the House

Bridal shower invitations

by Mary Anne

You can imagine my surprise when my neighbor Danielle called me on the phone yesterday to ask me for my help with her daughter’s bridal shower. To be perfectly honest, I think that it is probably a breech of etiquette for her to be calling me and asking me to help her with that, (I mean, if she is the mother of the bride, should she be doing that – I thought that was the responsibility of the matron/maid of honor?) but I’m not the type of person to come right out and say something like “that’s not the “proper thing to do.” I try to get along with people, and telling them that they are doing something egregious like that just isn’t my style.

Anyway, Danielle asked me to come over to her place tomorrow afternoon and help her to fill out, address, and stamp the bridal shower invitations for her daughter’s bridal shower. She is getting married in July and they want to have the shower two weeks before the wedding.

The phone call got me to thinking about how long it has been since I’ve been involved in any way in the planning and/or preparation for a wedding. Or for that matter, even attended a wedding! To be perfectly honest, I think that the last time I was at a wedding was my very own wedding back eleven years ago! And prior to that it was probably back in 1992. Wow – that is a very long time between wedding ceremonies! For a moment I was starting to wonder why it was that it has been so long since I had gone to any weddings – should I start to do some serious soul searching about my worthiness as a friend, or what exactly is going on here.

Looking around at my friends and family, though, I realize that most of the people of my generation either have been married a long time, or have no intention of ever getting married. And our kids, well, they are just too busy having fun being single and pursuing their education and careers to even be considering getting married. Which I think is interesting, and wondering if this is a new trend nationwide, since most of these kids are already in their late twenties and up to their mid thirties. I think weddings just aren’t as important to people as they used to be. What do YOU think?


New used car

by Mary Anne

When we decided that it was time to go ahead and buy another family car, we agreed that we would take a look at the used cars available for sale to see if we could get a decent used car for a reasonable price. We really did not want to have to take out a loan to buy a new car if we could avoid it. So we were really pleased when we found this used Lumina for sale at a local used car dealer at a reasonable price. The car looked like it was in really great shape and had really low mileage. When we asked how a car over ten years old could have such low mileage on it the sales man said that the first owner of the car was a little old lady (yeah, how many times have we heard that before?) who gave her car to her grandson because he needed a car. The ungrateful brat used a car title loans Michigan service to borrow money against the car and then never made any payments on the car at all. So the car got repossessed and we ended up with a decent low-mileage car at a decent price to boot! Their loss, our gain!


Crafting jewelry from empty soda bottles

by Mary Anne

My kids know that I love trash to treasure crafts, so when they found a really interesting book about using empty soda bottles to make jewelry, they bought it for me for a great Mother’s Day gift. The name of the book is Magical Butterflies by Donna Manchester. She gives directions (and lots of pictures) on how to use empty plastic soda bottles, paint, wire and beads to make really gorgeous pins. I think that I already have most of the supplies to make some of them myself.  I’m looking forward to giving it a try!


Outer Banks homes for sale

by Mary Anne

I have been interested to hear that the real estate market is starting to make a come-back for the seller. For my neighbors George and Marcia, who just listed their house for sale and got it under contract within the week, that is a good thing (although I will miss them like crazy!) For a lot of communities, that will be a good thing, an indication that the economy is starting to improve. But since the market has just started to improve, George and Marcia will have a their pick of the best possible obx homes for sale while the prices are still low!


Tired of junk mail

by Mary Anne

I don’t know about you, but I get so tired of all of the junk mail that I get almost every day. What irritates me even more is all of the resources that are wasted producing and delivering the junk mail! When I get junk mail, sometimes I shred it, sometimes I just toss it in the trash.  Sometimes, if it has a postage-paid return envelope in it I will tear up everything except the postage-paid return envelope, put it all inside the postage-paid return envelope and mail it back to the company that sent it to me.

I think that the US Post Office continues to raise the rates of stamps because they are not getting enough work (competing with Email, UPS, FedEx, etc) so this is a relatively painless way to give them more work at the expense of some other company! So, it is creating a little bit of job security for the Post Office workers, and some job security for the people who end up opening the envelope at the company it is going to! And, hopefully, their company recycles (most big companies do) so maybe the papers will get recycled there instead of filling up the junk yards in the local municipalities!


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