In the “totally unnecessary but nice” department, I keep a cooler in the trunk. Always handy for stashing my lunch if I’m going on a day trip somewhere, or holding stuff I get from produce stands when I’m out for a ramble somewhere. Or even for grocery shopping. 

I’ve always defined it as...

A good idea is also to shop around and try different banks. Small local banks are often willing to bend over backwards to help out folks who were rejected by bigger banks, and offer more personalized service. Also, see if you qualify for a local credit union. Credit unions rock, and many are broadening their…

I once threw in some pork chop bones, and some juices from a pork roast that I had frozen, into some chicken/turkey stock I was making, and it had surprising depth of flavor. I really liked it.

I work for a major manufacturer of power tools, and we did a pumpkin-carving session, including cleaning out the insides by putting an eggbeater blade in a power drill, which gets the worst of the pumpkin guts taken care of in a few seconds. I was amazed. We cut the tops with jigsaws and used a regular drill to make…

In my younger days, I got 25 cents a week. Even back then, it was nothing. My parents were just damn cheap. Eventually I argued them up to $5, especially after several shopping expeditions proved that at what they were giving me, it would take me months to save up enough for a simple paperback book. (I honestly think…

I had to explain to someone once that using fancy words doesn’t make you sound high-class or smart, it makes you sound pompous. There is a big misconception out there that the upper crust uses fancy words all the time. Read some Nancy Mitford, folks...the upper-crust use very simple language, and (at least in her…

Enterprise accepts debit cards too, at least in my area. Personal experience.

I went for the first aid app for my phone, but that’s largely because I’m an official emergency responder at my work and I’ve taken a class and am CPR certified, but it’s nice to have it handy just in case. 

The idea is that she’s a different character given the OO7 designation. She’s not “Jane Bond.” And it may only be temporary; there’s no indication that the series will center on her from now on, which so many people seem to be assuming.

There HAS been talk of them wanting a sort of expanded OO7 universe....they may want to spin her off into a new series running parallel to the James Bond flicks. We’ll see what happens. But as I always say when it comes to rumors like this....I’ll believe it when I see it.

I had to do this when I was hired by my current company; I had an 8-month gap between getting canned by my old job and starting the temp gig that led to my permanent job. HR was adamant that I provide something to fill in the gap, so I ended up telling them that I’d been caring for my elderly mother during that…

OK, serendipitous that this is posted the day I paid off my credit card debt. My problem was that I’d had to rely on my cards for a couple of years when I was unemployed/working temp jobs that barely kept body and soul together, so I owed quite a bit. Now that I’m established at a new job, I found it was becoming a…

I researched some of this when my dad passed away a few years ago. He donated his body to science, and a few months later we got a box of ashes. At first Mom was going to inter them in an urn, but the cemetery they had a plot in requires urns to be buried in a concrete vault and the cost was absurd. So, Mom just…

For many people, still, horses are of more value alive than dead. And I’ve been told horse meat is not very good.

I’ve experienced this. I go to a local bar every so often to hang out with friends or just to have a drink, and I have a certain amount of social anxiety so I’m usually pretty darn quiet and just sit with my beer and chat with my pals. But then one evening I walked in and the bartenders greet me by name, the owner…

There’s two versions of ranked voting...one where you can only assign one rank at a time (Bob Smith is #1, John Doe is #2, Jane Roe is #3, etc.), and there’s a variant where you can assign the same rank to multiple candidates (Jane Roe and Ira Cohen can both be ranked #1, with John Doe as #2). There’s also “Approval…

Fine. Go start a restaurant serving horse, and see how well that goes over. We’ll all be waiting for your report.

Yay! Here in Baltimore, the National Aquarium and the Maryland Zoo are both accredited! I need to visit that zoo soon!

A sanctuary near me takes in horses from farms that are viewed as being too old to be of any use.