This week my wife made a trip to the Redbox and brought home a few videos for us to watch together. I generally do not look forward to this because all she ever picks out is romantic comedies. One of the movies she rented was “The Proposal” with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. I went into watching the movie with a fairly negative attitude but have to say I ended up enjoying the movie. Not only did it make me laugh many times it also made me want to pick up and go look for Anchorage real estate. The character Ryan Reynolds plays ends up being from a tiny town in Alaska. The scenery was absolutely beautiful and exactly the type of place I would love to be able to raise my family. The storyline is fairly predictable but the actors somehow made it all pretty funny and pulled together. Betty White is especially funny in this movie. So, if you wife or girlfriend brings this movie home do not despair it is actually pretty good and won’t leave you feeling completely emasculated.

Do you prefer a gas or electric stove? Our oven is having issues. It is not cooking anything in a time frame that’s anywhere close to what the recipe predicts. At first I thought it was because the oven just wasn’t fully heated when I put the items in, but even now that I’ve confirmed that the oven reaches the correct temperature, it still doesn’t cook things properly. For instance, I put a chicken in the oven. According to the recipe, the top was supposed to be browned after 20 minutes; it’s been 60, and it’s still white as snow.

So now my question is this: would a gas oven at 400 degrees cook worse or differently than an electric oven at 400 degrees?

Thoughts?

In my line of work I frequently deal with populations of people who rely heavily on various entitlement programs to make ends meet. I think many of these programs are important for people who really need them. It is however hard to listen to someone tell me how unfair it is that they are expected to participate in employment training in order to remain eligible for these programs. I listened on one particular day to a 24 year old woman who detailed how wrong it was that she be told she had to attend a job training seminar. She insisted that she did not have time for this type of thing despite not being able to keep a job of any sort in the last year. Since she is not currently working, going to school, or raising children I have to wonder what is making her schedule so busy? I know I would jump at a chance for training if this were something offered to me in a similar situation.

Has anyone besides me noticed that product packages, for food items, are getting smaller and smaller. We are paying more for less food. My yogurt now contains 4 containers instead of 6. My pasta of choice is in the same box but the box weighs significantly less. I find this irritating!

I have been a big fan of Dreamfield’s pasta and have recommended it often, however, I am quite irritated at the manufacturer at the moment. At some point they have changed box sizes from 16 to 13.25 ounces and kept the price the same. This product is already higher priced than most other brands of pasta; I justified the price because of the reduced carbs and comparable taste to regular pasta products, but the sudden reduction from 16 to 13.25 ounces without a drop in price has got me questioning whether I still want to purchase this product.

I just went to Dreamfields’ website to see if they had an announcement on their homepage concerning the change in size and they didn’t; in my opinion a change of this magnitude deserves some mention on their homepage. The company sent no announcement of the size change via email (I am on their mailing list). I think the consumer at least deserves an explanation. Not doing so is bad customer service and there is something about it that seems sneaky to me.

This afternoon should prove to be exciting. I had planned to sit down and spend the day watching television but my house has other plans. For some reason two of the 4 faucets in the house have decided to start dripping again. I had replaced the washers once in each of them and they stopped dripping for about 6 months. Now this week both of them have started again. I decided that the time has come to replace them both. I would like to find something like those Danze faucets for both of them. We only have a couple hardware stores in town so I may have to make do with something else. I figure anything that doesn’t leak will be an improvement. One of the faucets is pretty much a running stream of water even when turned completely off. This makes waiting any longer to fix it impossible. I am hoping to at least quell the stream until I can get some sort of long term replacement. Not an ideal way to spend the afternoon but it has to be done.

Andre Bauer said no assistance should be give and children should be taken off free or reduced-price lunch programs in his State if their parents don’t pass drug test or attend parent-teacher conferences.

Seriously. I can’t believe a person running for a public office would say such things.

He went on. Quote:
“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

My son surprised me yesterday by asking me why I thought Americans elect so many dis-reputable people to represent us. Okay, really, he called them “fruitcakes”. It’s sad, but true! Not feeding children because their parents are struggling–only a complete moron would think that is a good idea.

I have to say that I have officially had it with all of this cold weather and snow. The paper says that it isn’t going to end any time soon. I am sitting here looking at the new Garmin GPS I received for Christmas and just wishing the weather would warm up slightly. We love to go geocaching as a family and all of this cold weather makes it impossible. My older son would go out in any weather but my wife and younger son want no part of the bitter cold weather that we have been having. As happy as I was to get this GPS system for Christmas I haven’t been able to get out and use it because the weather has been so awful. For now the only thing I can do is sit and look up places I want to go when the weather improves. At least we should be pretty well organized when the time finally does arrive to head out into the great unknown in search of “treasure”.

The lint filter in your dryer is made of a mesh material and if you try to run hot water through it the hot water will just sit on top of the mesh. The reason for this is that the dryer sheets that make your clothes soft and static free and feel waxy when you take them out of the box also build up wax on your clothes and on your lint screen. This is also what causes dryer units to burn out the heating unit and potentially burn your house down with it. The best way to keep your dryer working for a very longtime (and to keep your electric bill lower) is to take that filter out and wash it with hot soapy water and an old toothbrush (or other brush) at least every six months. This will make the life of the dryer last at least twice as long! We all know what an expense replacing a dryer can be and it usually happens at the most financially inconvenient time.