must be KARMAH

Faxed Again

This morning when my cell phone rang, I ran through the house like a madwoman trying to reach it before the caller hung up. Why the haste? No one. I mean no one ever calls my cell phone when I am at home unless it is something important. Here I am thinking that something happened to a family member, etc. Nope. Just someone trying to fax me... again.

No sooner had I take a pic of my phone with the number displayed that they called again! "Hello?" "Beep, beep, uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh." Yeah, that is so not the sound that I want to hear at any time of the day, let alone at frequent intervals.

I did a search on the phone number and the only thing that came up was the location of the interchange. This time it is someone in the area of St. Louis, Missouri who is trying to send me some much needed document. My luck it is probably some auto fax spammer out there and the calls will continue.

Has anyone else been getting calls from 314-842-3855? I just saw another number on the received call list: 314-842-8348. This added to the previous number that kept calling me: 314-837-7321. I am up to three numbers trying to fax me. Wow. Lucky me I get to pay for the calls.

Now that I have listed the numbers, the next time that someone else is faxed by mistake, they might get this to come up in their search. It may not solve the problem, but at least they will know they are not alone.

Question: Anyone out there with T-Mobile know how to block a number?

Sign of the Times

Does this mean that Coke Zero is so good... It's bad?
Picture of my MyCokeRewards points, taken after my last cap was inputed.
Maybe this entry should be titled "Sign of the Zero".

Show Me the Vinegar

Online there have been a lot of post lately about being frugal and more "green". One of these posts mentioned making your own cleaning solutions. (Unfortunately, even after much backtracking through my computer's history I can not find the original post.)

The thought of a cheaper alternative that would work for cleaning, help kill mold and bacteria, etc. intrigued me. Vinegar can do all that? I had to try it out and see for myself.

Now mind you I am just in the testing phase. For my first go-round I decided to mix half white vinegar with half tap water to make the all-purpose cleaner. Then I went outside and tackled cleaning the car. Believe you me, it needed it bad. I used it on the windows and it seemed to work well. The true window test will be tomorrow while driving as it is then that I will see any streaks, etc. Kind of hard to tell if you have streaky windows in the near dark.

It did work wonders on the rubber floor mats. You know, the kind with all the crevices that take forever to try and clean out by hand, and they still have gummy stuff stuck in them? I just sprayed them down, let them sit for a little bit and rinsed them off with the hose. Gunk be gone!

The vinegar even removed a mark on the passenger door that we have been trying to get rid of for a while. A conventional cleaner would not remove it, but this solution did. (See the before and after photos below.)

The girls helped me clean out the car and they both complained of the strong smell. At first the smell was overwhelming to me as well, but as I cleaned I got used to it. The smell is supposed to dissipate with time, but most of the people who said so used it in a more open space (a house) and said that within 20 minutes it was gone. I will see in the morning if the car smells like vinegar inside or not.

Now I do not think that I would use the vinegar & water solution to regularly clean my car as there was a note about it dulling plastics, etc. I can imagine that a vinyl interior would not fare well with a constant acidic cleaner being used on it. It would be a good cleaner for occasionally use on tough dirt on the interior.

I am going to try it out on the bathrooms next and see what it can do there. I'll report in with my findings then. If it works out well, I will be quite happy to have a more cost effective cleaner for much, much less than the conventional counterpart.

In the mean time, does anyone have any homemade cleaning solutions that work for you? I am really interested in a detergent that will work with a dishwasher and another for laundry that would work in an HE machine.

Research Maniac

When I want to find out information on a subject I invariably turn to the internet. Need a recipe? Look it up at All Recipes. Need to know how to spell a word or look up a word's meaning? Surf on over to Dictionary.com. No heavy tome lifting required. What time is the movie tonight? Pull up Fandango. How much wood can a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Google it.

I research everything online from a product that I want to buy to what time the store downtown opens up. Time flies by as I get lost hopping from site to site. Slogging through articles, digging through link after link. Searching for the golden egg of information.

If I can't find the information online I ask some questions on a related forum or message board. Someone there may be able to help me to direct me to an answer, or provide it thelmselves. Even a post on my blog can turn up an answer I am seeking.

When those means do not pan out, I use the resources available to connect me with other means. I log onto the local library system and request a book or two on the subject. Search a website for contact information to write an email or letter for more information about a product, destination, company, etc.

My obsession with finding out the best deals, how to accomplish something, etc. is becoming well known with friends and family. It's gotten to the point that if they need information on something they ask me first. I try to tell them how easy it is to find information online, but they would rather go through the middle man a.k.a. me. Good thing I am addicted, right?

Free Slurpee from 7-Eleven

I found out via Erin at the Thrifty Soaper that 7-11 will be giving out 7.11 ounce Slurpees for free today July 11th. The only catch? Your local 7-11 might not be participating in their 7-Eleven Day celebration.

Hubby and the kiddos are planning on going and getting their own. They will either walk the mile to the store, or ride their bikes to get there. It will give them some quality time together and keep the kids from griping about their summer boredom for a little while at least.

Sew Good Reads

After a long hiatus, my mother has taken up sewing again. It began a little bit before Christmas of last year. She got into making some pillows for gifts. Now she has moved on to quilts. I thought that I would help to broaden her horizons and give her some ideas of what people are sewing these days. (The last time she did a lot of sewing was the 1990's and before that the 1970's.)

I picked up the above books through the library loan system and dropped them off at her house. She was like a kid in the candy store with them. She teased me that I hadn't purchased the books for her, but rather they were the libraries, so she wasn't allowed to keep them. (Perhaps a hint for her yuletide gift this year?)

She returned them to me the other day because they are due soon. No comment as to what she might have decided to make. That leaves me in anticipation of what sewing project she is going to proudly present to me on my next visit to her home.

The books pictured above are:
In Stiches by Amy Butler
Last Minute Fabric Gifts by Cynthia Treen and Karen Philippi
Bend the Rules Sewing by Amy Karol

Two to Four Pepsi Points

Am I hallucinating? Has there been a misprint? Someone please tell me... Have the 12 packs of Pepsi gone from being two points to four?

I remember when the Pepsi Stuff program started up again and a lot of people were upset that the point value for 12 packs and 24 packs were not much more than a 20 ounce or two liter. They compared it against the My Coke Rewards where you received more points for the same package size. But then they tried to reason it out that rewards for Coke cost more points than those for Pepsi, etc. (Although this point can be argued by how much of each product needs to be purchased to gain items of similar value, but we are not going down that long road.)

Now, we only purchase the 12 packs, not the 24. So I was quite shocked to see that the points inside were more than I expected. Was their a stamping error at the plant that day, or did they raise the point value system to please customers? Hmmm...

Anyone else encounter this?

Catching Nashville Star

In years past I had seen advertisements for the show Nashville Star, although I never watched it. Perhaps I had in my mind that it was just American Idol goes country. “Another music star-wannabe show? Ugh.”



Then this summer rolls around, I see more advertisements and decide that I will set my DVR to record it and then give it a go. That way if I found out that I did not like it, I would just delete it and get on with my day. And if I did like it I could fast forward through the commercials to get on with the listening.

What did I find out? That I actually like watching the show and ended up watching the first three episodes back to back.

Comeback of the Ghost Eating King

That's right Pac Man is back and he's ready to... err... drink some Coke? I wonder if Ms. Pac Man is into Diet Pepsi. Oh, the household must be fraught with the debate over Coke vs. Pepsi. Poor RC Cola never had a chance.

Taking Steps Towards Financial Freedom

We have begun to take baby steps. Figuring what we owe and to whom. Trying to come up with a game plan and being grateful for the assistance of a local banker who has helped us to come up with a plan to be totally debt free and have a sizable savings within the next 10 years. If you knew the mountain of debt we are facing down, you would be flabbergasted that it is even halfway feasible to reduce our debt by half, let alone all of it in that short of a time period.

To say that just hearing the news that it is a possibility has lifted a great weight off of us. Hubby has remarked that he no longer feels that he is going to have a heart attack from the stress. That now that he knows there is a way out of all this, a light at the end of the tunnel, that he can rest easier.

Now comes the tougher part. Going through with the planning and then sticking to it.

I am off to do research on ways to save money, cut costs and anything else that might possibly be helpful in our quest to be debt free. This is all quite new to me, but I hope to find some useful information out there and incorporate it into our lives. Off to do some searches, peruse sites and hopefully find some blogs where other people have been or are going through the same thing as we are.

Any advice, tips or links to sites about this?