Katelyn Cole » shopping

I’d love some professional help with my kitchen

Katelyn — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:38:11 +0000

Even though I really like my house, one of the things that has always bothered me about this place is where is the best place to put some
kitchen spice racks. Almost every woman that I know keeps her spice rack really close to their kitchen range. My mother had a custom spice racks built into the cabinet above her range, and she loved it!

Yet, I’ve read that spices should not be kept near a source of heat, so that tells me that they should be stored away from the range. I like the idea of the racks that fold up under the cabinets, but they don’t seem to hold very much.Organizing a kitchen would be so much easier if all spice cans and bottles were the exact same size and shape; it is difficult to properly store so many different odd mix and match containers!

I’ll eat them but I don’t especially like them

Katelyn — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:33:00 +0000

Having decided to try to lose a few pounds, I bought some of those Special K cracker chips yesterday. They were on sale, and I thought to myself that I would like them. Well, I don’t like them very much at all. They are too spicy-hot for my liking. Because of that I want to cover them with sour cream to cool them down! And I don’t believe that adding sour cream to them would help to accomplish my “lose a few pounds” strategy.

Not wanting to waste food, or money, I’ll eat them up. But I won’t buy them again.

Remembering the old days

Katelyn — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 03:42:33 +0000

One of the fun things about Facebook is when someone from your past creates a page about the times and the area where you grew up. Recently a former classmate did exactly that for the area in which I grew up, and there have been a lot of fond memories being shared.

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!

Peddling your wares

Katelyn — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:10:21 +0000

One of the best ways to spread the word about your business is by giving away promotional items that has your business logo and name on it. One of the most common freebies that I get from a business is a pen, and those are all well and good (and I use them) but I also tend to get a lot of promotional bags given to me.

My favorite freebie bags are the canvas ones that are sturdy enough to be used to carry groceries home from the grocery store. I’ve been trying to cut down on the amount of plastic bags that I bring home from stores, and sometimes a store will give me a five cent credit for bringing my own bag to use. Using the bags as often as I do keeps the advertiser’s company name in my line of vision several times a week, and I think that is a good advertising procedure!

Another one of my favorite freebies is a water bottle. I especially like the kind that are insulated, so it helps to keep your water cold. I like to buy the individual packets of Crystal Light or some other brand of ice tea like the Arizona brand of green tea with ginger and use them to flavor plain water. The packets are easy to slip into my purse and the water bottles get a lot of use. I used to just buy bottled water and put the flavor in those bottles, but I have heard so much publicity about how bad plastic water bottles are for the environment that I really prefer to get something that is re-usable. My sister re-uses the plastic ones and fills them with water, freezes them and then takes them out of the freezer and lets them thaw so she can drink ice water, but I’ve read that doing that is actually unhealthy for you to do.

Coupons help me save a lot of money

Katelyn — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:29:18 +0000

Do you use coupons? Most of my friends are avid coupon clippers. From time to time they will post a picture of their latest great bargains that they purchased and brag about how much money they have saved. They talk from time to time about the television show called Extreme couponers (or something like that) and about how much merchandise these people buy and how little that it costs them. I have never seen the television show for myself, in fact I don’t even know what channel it is on or what day (or night) of the week that the television show is on, but I just cannot imagine anyone having enough time in the day to collect all of those coupons and redeem them and still have any time left over for a job or a social life!
To tell you the truth, I subscribe to the Sunday newspaper simply because of the coupon inserts that come with the paper, and I’ve been thinking about the fact that now that those coupons are available over the Internet, free for the printing and clipping, that maybe I should just cancel that newspaper completely because the remainder of the paper just goes into the recycling pile.

Recently I joined a couple of new shopping websites that offer really fantastic shopping deals. Some of them you order the merchandise directly from them, others will give you a coupon code to use to buy the product at a different website. Still others just will send you an email list full of offers and coupon and discount codes. Some of the websites donate money to charity, others deposit money into a savings account for someone’s college 529K savings plan. Over the past couple of years I have saved hundreds of dollars through using these shopping websites. Still other companies will give you a loyalty card to shop at their store, and if you register that loyalty card with the company’s website, you will be on their email list and you’ll get special offers through your email account.

Just this morning I knew that I had to go into town to run some errands and I knew that I needed to buy my tax preparation software, so before I left the house I went online to locate a coupon code to see if I could get a bargain on that. And you know what? I found a coupon for 25% off a purchase at Staples! I printed it off, and I’ll be taking that with me when I go.

Hit or miss

Katelyn — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:13:24 +0000

Ever since my girlfriend told me about all of the great nomorerack insanity deals I have missed, I’ve been trying to remember to go online to their website to grab some for myself. All of the nomorerack reviews I’ve read indicate that it is a fun and cheap way to get merchandise online. So far I’d have to agree that the bargains are outstanding, and what adds to the excitement of it is the fact that you never know whether you are going to score a great bargain that day or not. Kind of like a hit or miss type of deal. Don’t get me wrong, everything is a bargain there, what you don’t know is whether you are going to be able to scarf up one of the insanity deals, or even better one of the free deals!

This afternoon I went online around one hour after they put their deals up online and saw that their free deal was already sold out! Darn it, missed it this time! I’ll have to try to remember to go online at noon to check out the new deals and hope that they have something great then!

No instructions included

Katelyn — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:55:24 +0000

When I was shopping online a couple of months ago I was looking for specialty bras that I could wear to dance class. My favorite bras are sports bras because they have no hooks. The hooks dig into my body and hurt me like crazy. My favorite sports bras were only sold at Wal-Mart, and for some reason they don’t seem to carry them anymore. So I went online in search for that particular sports bra. I never did find it, apparently it has been discontinued. But what I did come across that I found interesting was a backless bra. I decided to order it because if it is backless, then there are no hooks to hurt my back.

Well, when the bra arrived, there were no illustrations or instructions about how to put it on and keep it from falling off! Apparently I am supposed to buy my own double-sided tape and tape it to my body to keep it on! I sure wish that had been explained in the description of the bra; I would not have wasted my money on it!

Skin care

Katelyn — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:49:23 +0000

This morning I went to a business networking meeting in town at the local IHOP. There are a lot of different businesses that send a representative to the meetings, and it is always interesting to go and see who shows up and what they have to say. One of the ladies that always shows up is an employee of a dermatologist in town. She always talks about dry skin, wrinkles, and Acne. She always brings a book or two with her and says that her bosses are the authors of the book. The way that she talks about the products that they sell, it sounds to me as if they are selling something very similar to the Resurgence skin care product that my sister recently purchased with the Murad Coupon Codes that she found on the Internet.

They all sound like fine products, and I’m very curious to see how much my sister likes the Resurgence once it arrives. We’re both of the age where we are interested in minimizing the wrinkles that are starting to appear on our faces. A lot of people tell me that I look younger than I really am, but I think that they are just being kind. Skin care is near the top of my priority list this year, time is marching on too fast!

What is with these sizes?

Katelyn — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:35:58 +0000

I don’t understand why I have gained so much weight over the past year, but it would appear that I need to buy some new clothes while I try to figure out how to shed a few pounds. My sister suggested that I try shopping at Chico’s, and I decided that I would check out their website. What is with these weird sizes? I like some of the things that I see, but I guess I’m going to have to make a point of actually going to a Chico’s store and try some clothes on to make sure that they fit. I hate it when I order clothes online and when they arrive they don’t fit right and returning them is such a pain in the neck to do!

I wish that the fashion industry would label the clothes with actual body measurements instead of their current size 8,10,12,14,16 etc. So many different brands have different measurements for their sizes – it is very frustrating.

Commercial use quality

Katelyn — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:33:47 +0000

My sister used to work for a company that sold Resort Supplies & Catering Supplies when she first graduated from high school. I can remember how excited she was to work there because she was given an employee discount on everything that they sold there, and she was in the process of getting ready to move out of our parents home and into her own apartment. She was convinced that the commercial use quality of Hotel Supplies & Restaurant Supply products would last her a lot longer than the products that she could buy at a department store at the same prices. I can remember going to a Japanese steakhouse with her while she was working for that company and she told me that restaurant was one of their customers, and her pointing out the dinnerware, flatware and glassware, even the napkins were from her company.

She hasn’t worked for that company for a very long time now; I wonder whatever happened to it. I know a few years after she left there that they moved their offices to a different location. I think that someone told me that they went out of business because they couldn’t compete with the PeachSuite Hospitality Supply company. Anyway, the whole reason that I was even thinking about any of this is because I’ve noticed that we are running low on drinking glasses and I was thinking about how the local stores here don’t seem to sell anything even remotely durable. I’d like to get some that can take a little bit of rattling around without shattering, and restaurant quality would be a good thing to get.