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Category Archives: Life

My son broke up with his girlfriend

by Mary Anne

My son called me from college last night.  He was sad because the girl he had been seeing has decided it would be wise to break off their romance.  He had seen it coming, because they were going to different colleges with a large distance between them.  When they first started dating they had talked about how this might happen, and they agreed that they would still be friends afterwards.  But that is harder to actually DO than SAY!

So, we talked about some different strategies on surviving the break up.  We talked about how he needed to take some time to heal emotionally, and avoid any kind of rebound romance.


Address plaques add a little personality and a lot of visibility

by Mary Anne

One of the things I enjoy doing when I go to a home improvement store is to go over to the area where the store displays mailboxes. I like to take a good hard look at all of the different custom address plaques and mailboxes that they have to choose from. I squint my eye and imagine how the bronze address plaques would look on our house and at the end of the driveway. Having personalized address plaques both street side and on the house are very important steps to ensure visibility to rescue services, delivery drivers, school bus drivers, and they add some personality to a property that helps to make a statement about who it is that lives inside.

For the past couple of years I’ve been wanting to design a pattern for an address plaque that would complement the painted mailbox that we have. My hubby brought a plain plaque home last fall and told me that he wanted to use it but I’m not quite sure exactly where he was planning on putting it. At first he said he was going to put in on the mailbox but I really don’t see the need for that since the mailbox is already hand painted and numbered quite well. It will be interesting to see what exactly it is that he does with it!


Running a cleaning business

by Mary Anne

My sister used to clean houses in the past to make a little bit of extra money, and she was really good at that.  She had quite a few customers.  She hasn’t done that for several years now, but she is still getting phone calls from people asking her to come clean their house!
Where we live, more and more families are two-income families, which leaves them little time to clean house.  The demand for cleaning services is on the increase, and I think that this would be a good opportunity for her to make some money running a business that she already is familiar with!


An avoidable tragedy

by Mary Anne

Guest post by Linda Bradshaw

When my hubby and I moved into our first house, we were so excited to share our joy with our friends. So we had a big Independence Day party; complete with a pot-luck barbecue and pool party. The guests were completely enamored of our litter of five week old keeshond puppies, which were confined inside their six foot tall chain link kennel run.

One of our guests (which I did not want invited but hubby insisted) decided that he would light a string of black cat firecrackers and throw them into the kennel run. The quick bang-bang-bang and yelp-yelp-yelp brought my hubby and me running quickly to see what in the world was going on. When we saw the inebriated guest laughing at the upset puppies, we asked him to leave the party. Needless to say, feelings were hurt.

The next morning when we went out to feed the puppies, we discovered that someone had removed them from their kennel and put them inside the fenced in pool area. The puppies had all drowned in the pool. My heart was completely broken. Later that day we went to the pool supply store and bought a pool cover for our swimming pool in the hopes that this kind of tragedy never happens again. And I never spoke to that guy that had thrown firecrackers into the puppy pen, as we suspect that he was the one responsible for relocating the puppies. It would have been impossible for the puppies to escape their pen and enter the fenced in pool area on their own.


Relocating for a new job

by Mary Anne

One of the things that I’ve been reading on Facebook a lot is a debate between folks who are supposedly friends regarding the unemployment situation. Some of the people maintain that there are plenty of jobs “out there” for people that really WANT to work. The rebuttal that I’ve been reading is often that the jobs that are available require relocation, and many families don’t want to relocate.

The entire discussion reminded me of a few years ago when my sister accepted a job out in Los Angeles, and had to find some Los Angeles movers to help her with her relocation process. She told me that she had hired a Los Angeles moving company to do everything that needed to be done – even the packing! I thought that was amazing, I had never heard of a company that will do the packing for you in addition to the transportation! I wonder if the LA movers are the only ones that do that, or if it is a service available around the US and I just live under a rock.


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