Much to my surprise, a couple of weeks later one of the intended recipients told me that she was thinking about buying one of those Himalayan salt lamps online. She showed me the picture of what she wanted, and it was exactly the same one that I had already bought for her! I told her that I had bought one for her for her Christmas present, and not to buy one herself. She asked me to give it to her now because she wanted to start “enjoying the benefits” immediately. Well, I agreed and I gave it to her. She was happy and took it home with her.

Less than a week later she told me that her daughter told her that she hated it, that it made her feel depressed instead of happy, and she gave the lamp back to me and asked me to give her something different for Christmas. I agreed to do that, and now I am using it in one of my bathrooms. I like how it deodorizes and helps to dehumidify the room. As for the original recipient, well, I ended up giving her a gift card to Wal-Mart. I know she buys things there, and I think that maybe I’ll just keep giving her gift cards in the future.

Black wedding rings

Mary was telling me that she was trying to find black titanium rings to buy for her wedding ring. She said that titanium was one of the metals that won’t irritate her sensitive skin and that it is guaranteed never to tarnish. She first found out about titanium jewelry when her fiance gave her a couple of titanium bracelets a couple of years ago. She said that she was concerned at first about wearing them because of her sensitive skin, but quickly discovered that she was able to wear the bracelets without any discoloration or discomfort at all.

Mary found a website that sells titanium jewelry, and thought that she had found the black rings she was hoping for, but when she was showing the website to me I pointed out to her that the black rings that we were looking at were made out of ceramic, or tungsten. They were pretty, but they were not titanium. I would expect that she would be able to wear a ceramic ring, but I don’t know how durable a ceramic ring would be. I’ve never had any ceramic jewelry before, have you?

I immediately started reading an article about how to save money on tools, and enjoyed reading his little story about when he was a little boy his grandfather gave him his first set of tools, and how he and his grandfather worked together on a variety of projects that needed tools. The story brought back memories of my own relationship with my own grandfather and it brought a smile to my face. You see, even though I am female, I was a tomboy, and my grandfather treated me like the son he never had of his own. It was great fun visiting him on his farm and helping him plant seeds in the garden and follow him around in the barn and watch him slop the hogs and feed the cows.

Realizing that I enjoyed his writing style, I decided to click around on his website, and found that the author of the website is offering college scholarships! I found that very interesting that he would do that, and decided to read more about that. Apparently he is going to award two $5,000 college scholarships a year! His requirements for winning the scholarship do not seem to be unreasonable, based on academic history, extra curricular activities, and ingenuity of essays.

That particular article brought back the memory of how my youngest son was able to go to college on a full grant/scholarship to Princeton due to the generosity of one of Princeton’s alumni. A friend came over to visit a few days ago and she was talking about how her son had thrown away his chances to go to college on a full scholarship and how upset she was that he was not taking advantage of the opportunity. Her concerns made me so grateful that my son was fortunate enough to get the financial grants he needed to go to Princeton, and how that college degree will be opening doors for his career for the rest of his life.

I’ve bookmarked this frugaldad.com website; I think I’ll be going back to read it again and again.

When I think of all of the great ways the Internet has made life easier, I am simply amazed. For example, back when I was a young adult, looking for Flats to rent in Glasgow I had to depend on a newspaper advertisement. And if I was coming int own from a place far away from there I had to first rent a hotel room for several days before I could get my bearing.

Now it seems as easy as pie because with the Internet you can go to to a variety of websites designed to help people who are looking for Flats to rent in Edinburgh or Flats to rent in Aberdeen or any other place in the UK.

The website I was just looking at is called lettingweb.com, and what I like about the website is that in addition to looking for flats to rent, you can also use the searching wizard to find a room mate. I think that is an especially handy feature for single people, to be able to find not only a place to live, but someone to share the rental fees with. Yes, the Internet has definitely made life a lot easier for a lot of people.

I was looking at a website I found recently – houzz.com – and saw that it had a lot of resources for interior decorating. Some of the featured bathroom designs really made me want to have my master bathroom renovated; there were some fabulous baths there. The website has a search function to search for a local professional interior designer. Out of curiosity I typed in the name of my town, and was very surprised that there were no results. The biggest reason for my surprise is that just last week I met two different ladies that told me that they are professional interior decorators! The next time I see them I think I’ll mention this website to them as a resource and suggest that they check it out. My guess is that they will have to pay for a listing, but I think it is worth checking out anyway. After all, when trying to promote a business, all avenues should be explored, right?

Have you ever been the victim of collection harassment for money that you didn’t even owe? Let me tell you, having collection calls from companies when you really owe them the money is bad enough, but when you don’t even have an account with the company that is harassing you it can make you crazy mad! It all started out innocently enough, there was a phone call from a collection agency asking to speak with a person that I had never heard of before. It was one of those recordings, that says “if you are this person, please hold on for an important message, if you are not this person, please hang up now.” So I hung up. And hung up again. And again.

Got to the point where I was hanging up on the collection calls more often than I was talking to people who I actually knew! I had no idea how to stop collection harassment for good with this robo company. Finally I decided that I’d just go ahead and take the call as if I WAS the person that they were looking for, thinking that I could explain to the operator that there was nobody here by that name, and would they please take my telephone number off of their robo collection call procedures. Well, the representative did not want to believe that I was not the person that they were looking for, and gave me a really hard time about it. I asked to speak to the supervisor, and was told that the supervisor was “in a meeting” and could not be disturbed. So I left a message for the supervisor to call me. (Supervisor never DID call me!) But about forty-five minutes later the robo call comes in again.

Margie suggested that I do two things at this point – to Google “stop collection harassment California” and see what resources I can use to make this stop, and to use my telephone features to block the telephone number that the collection calls are coming from. D-UH – why didn’t I think of call-block before? Ah, sweet, sweet peace and quiet; I love you!

Looking at their list of participating retailers, I have to admit that if I were to be opening a new account to save money for someone’s college expenses that I would not hesitate to join this site. They offer some coupons and discounts at a lot of the stores that I normally frequent. If you are a young parent, I think that checking out this website would be a smart thing to do if you are concerned about saving money for your children’s college expenses. It’s sooner than you think.

Remembering favorite pizza joints and the tunnel that we had to walk through to get to school, the old school rivalries, and the children’s clothing store that had a special display of real monkeys in the shoe department have been bringing back a lot of memories, and even managed to rekindle some old friendships. Isn’t Facebook wonderful!