Mary Anne has her own blog now
Category Archives: Tips & Words of Wisdom

A touch of class

by Mary Anne

One of my favorite things to do is watch Home and Garden Television shows about making your house better looking. One of my favorite shows is called “Curb Appeal.” The show is designed to take a hum-drum boring looking house and make it look outstanding. I enjoy learning about different ways to make a house look nicer. One of the ways a homeowner can improve their curb appeal is by putting one of the many good looking Gaines Mailboxes curbside. There are a large variety of Classic Mailboxes and Keystone Mailboxes available for sale on the Internet. All are USPS approved, and some websites offer free shipping.

The website I was looking at today that sells these mailboxes and offers free shipping is gainesmailboxesdirect.com. I was looking for a rural mailbox that might offer some theft protection features and saw that this website sells locking inserts for the mailboxes that they sell. I have never seen anything like that before; I think that is a good idea! There have been a few times when I have worried that just putting our mail in the mailbox was not protecting us from unscrupulous characters that might get into some of the mail and attempt some identify theft schemes. Having our incoming mail go into a locking insert would make it just a little bit harder for some unauthorized person to snatch and grab the mail quickly.


Take the time to learn the details

by Mary Anne

With all of the gadgets that are on the market, it is worth your while to really check out the details before you go out and spend a lot of money on one of the new digital camcorders. A couple of years ago I had a camcorder that used a tape to record performances, and the tape length was ninety minutes. Well I started to have trouble with the batteries not keeping a charge, and I bought new batteries. Even the new ones would not keep a charge, so I decided it was time to invest in a digital one. I had no idea what exactly all of the terms meant, and I ended up buying one that would only record about ten minutes before needing to insert a new disk. That was very upsetting to me because I wanted to be able to record my kids recitals and school plays, which lasted a lot longer than ten minutes! So, do your research, lesson learned!


A moving story

by Mary Anne

Whenever I daydream about selling my house and moving to a far away exotic country, I always snap back to reality with the thought of all of the work involved in packaging up my household and sorting through the listings of Removal Companies to find the best Removalists to entrust with my belongings. My dear friend Alecia moved recently from one end of town to the other and the company that did her Removals broke one of her antique tables right in half. She was showing me the damaged table last weekend when I went to her place for lunch with the other ladies of the garden club.

We all agreed that it was a darn shame that her table was ruined, and to make it even worse the company refused to pay her anywhere near the value of the table because they said it was so old that it wasn’t worth anything! And then they said that a little bit of carpenter’s glue would fix it as good as new. Obviously that was very distressing to Alecia, and she was asking us what course of action we thought she could take. Since she had not had the table appraised before the move, we agreed that there probably was not a whole lot that she could do other than to take the table to a restoration company and ask them to fix it as best as they can.


Don’t cut your hair so short!

by Mary Anne

Seems to me that whenever I tell one of my sons that their hair is starting to look really good, they run off to the barber shop to get a haircut. Having been in high school in the early 1970′s, I’ve grown to enjoy a man’s hair cut to be a little bit on the longish side. Don’t get me wrong, I am not endorsing hair that is long enough to cover the ears, I just have never been a big fan of a crew-cut or a “skin head” look. When the Ken and Allen dolls came out, I liked the longer cut of Allen’s hair instead of the crew cut of Ken’s hair.

As far as I’m concerned, a guy has a better chance to attract women if a guy has a little bit of hair on his head. Now I’m not saying anything negative about guys who are balding; if they have a good hair cut that is not a turn-off at all. But I like a guy who has a little bit of curl in his hair, and my boys have curly hair. So when they cut their hair so short that you don’t see any of the curl at all, it makes me sad because I think that they are trying to repel women, not attract them!


Littermaid self cleaning litter box

by Mary Anne

When I heard about my brother’s problem about his house smelling bad because of the troubles he is having with his cat adapting to moving to his new house, I bought him one of those Littermaid self cleaning litter boxes, hoping that would help with the cat urine problem he said he is having.

I have one of those Littermaid self cleaning litter boxes, and I love it!  You have to use premium clumping kitty litter in it, which I use anyway.  There is a motion detector in the box that detects when the cat is in the box, and after ten minutes, the rake activates and sweeps the clumps into the covered container.  The only issue that I have with the litter box is the expense of the disposable trays.  The original intent of the manufacturer is to have you throw the tray away every time it is full.  That gets really expensive, really fast!  I have to empty the tray twice a week!  I have found that the plastic shopping bags that I get from Wal-Mart are the perfect size to line the trays.  So, I line the trays with a plastic shopping bag and when the tray is full, I tie the shopping bag closed and throw it away, line the tray again with a fresh bag, and put the tray back into the litter box.  That way one of the trays lasts for several months before it falls apart.

I found a cool website that sells furniture custom made to hide litter boxes.  I found one that I liked and bought it to hide our litter box in.  I love it!  When people come to visit us, they don’t even realize that we have a cat!  They don’t see or smell the litter box, and our cat is so shy that when strangers come to the house, he runs and hides under our bed.


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