Gimme A Break

My girl friend in the US called the other night. Gosh, it was so good to hear her voice. Of course, we talked for hours because we haven’t seen each other in years though we do try to speak on the phone at least once a year.

The latest news is her eldest son will be moving to either Chicago or Omaha depending on which job offer comes through first. She hopes it’ll be Omaha though because she’s worried about Chicago being unsafe.

I honestly don’t know which is the safer city to live in. She seems to think the likelihood of needing Omaha Personal Injury Lawyers is far lower than if he were to live in Chicago. I guess there’s crime everywhere. We just have to be alert and take precautions, that’s all.

• double jeopardy
• blowing up for no reason
• a life I can only dream about
• hello, John?
• need to manage my time better

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Yesterday was a record-breakingly crazy day for me. Yes, there’s busy and then there’s busy. I started my day at the gym. After a hour-long workout, I came home, checked my emails and then it was time to get lunch ready before the kids came home from school.

Then I was off to pick my girls. We had lunch at home and then we were off to visit a relative at the nursing home. From there, I went straight to pick up my son from college.

We came home, rested for an hour and I was out the door again to drive my daughter to her friend’s and back. I had a hurried dinner at home and was out with my son to an event he had to attend at the mall.

We got home at close to 11pm and didn’t get to bed till midnight. Gosh… talk about crazy!

• where’s the real lunch?
• a day in the life of a mom
• one big blur of a week
• cold, sneezy, hungry, sleepy
• wild woman

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These weekends, I’m being a good girl and staying home more, cooking more and eating in more. The kids aren’t complaining so I take that as a good sign.

With the prices of things going up, it seems every time I go out I end up spending more than I want to. Suddenly I’d remember that I need to buy this or that, not big things but the little things do add up.

Let’s face it, for many of us, money doesn’t grow on trees so we got to watch it. It’s also a good lesson for the kids to learn to be more thrifty. I can foresee that with gas prices going up, everything else is just going to follow suit.

• work hard but won’t spend
• sea breeze, palm trees and no money?
• a day in the life of a mom
• just the honeymoon please
• the stumbling cook

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I wonder how many of us look at doctors as geeky people so I was actually faintly amused to hear that many of them actually carry mobile devices in their lab coats?

With Epocrates offering a free drug guide with free pocket PC and Palm as well as Windows Mobile software, I guess that’s reason enough to carry a new-fangled mobile device.

Instead of flipping through pages of medical books and manuals to find information about drug dosing, side effects or other related information, all they have to do is click away at their PDA or smartphone. That’s so cool.

This announcement was paid for by Epocrates.

• Dumbledores no more
• she ain’t that geeky at all
• don’t read, listen to these books
• magazines or dessert?
• a-choo…

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My son and I were walking past a promotional booth at the mall today. The MC was pulling up people randomly from the crowd to answer a question about their product and win prizes.

All of a sudden, the MC stopped us in our tracks, pointed the microphone at my son and asked him a question. Of course we had no idea what was going on but my son gave the correct answer and won a keychain, a fridge magnet and a pen!

Small prizes, yes but we were practically jumping for joy. We’ve never done anything like this before and we certainly didn’t expect to win!! Yay!!

• not getting to watch the Olympics sucks
• how to vary your menu
• ungrateful B’s
• you can bid 4 prizes
• can you keep up?

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I’m so proud of my daughter for rescuing a little bird that was trapped on our window ledge. She heard the chirping and went to investigate.

True enough, there was a little bird struggling to get unstuck from the window. It was a good thing she found him and he wasn’t too badly injured. She was rather sad to see him fly away though.

• gotta have that cake
• fishing for shirts
• strength from a cactus
• with a pinch of salt
• that elusive turkey

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I was hanging out at the driving range waiting for DH when I overheard a couple of men talking about their investments. From what they said, it seems they’re trying to find newer and more interesting ways to invest their money.

Hmmph and to think I take two weeks to decide on a pair hundred dollar Reeboks, and these guys are talking about getting more information from Monex Deposit Company about investing in gold bullion.

Suddenly I felt like I was in a James Bond movie (not as a glamorous Bond girl but maybe one of the extras) eavesdropping on the villains’ plans on how to transport the bullion out of the country in a submarine or something . Okay, so that was the highlight of my evening!

• investing in gold
• good time to invest in silver bullion
• buy gold, not wear it
• talk of gloom and doom
• ten years and we never met

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When it’s hazy like this, just going outside the house is like walking into a wall of smoke and leaving the windows open ushers in lots of little particles of dust.

It seems like I’m dusting and sweeping all day long and still there’s a layer of dust enveloping everything. Yuck.

I honestly don’t know what it will take to get the house clean. I’ve tried everything short of hiring a bunch of steam cleaners to do the dirty work. If the haze continues, I might consider moving out of town .

• hot weather garb
• sparkling clean car, yeah right
• borrow but never return
• due for a car wash
• how to keep your home cool

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Well, it looks like the haze may be making its way back here. It’s either that the open burning of forests has started again, or that the weather’s been super-hot in the day and cool at night because of the rains.

Frankly I don’t mind the sun and the rain as much as I mind the haze. I can’t open my windows for fear of letting in this horrible smoky smell. Yet I have to, simply because of how stuffy it gets inside the house after a while.

We used to have one of those air purifiers around for days like these. But I lent it to a friend and that was the last I saw of it. Don’t you just hate it when people borrow stuff and never return them?

• thankful for a cooler spell
• haze fighter cleans the air
• hot weather garb
• dusty everything
• wasted afternoon

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If it’s one thing I’ve learnt from doing my groceries on a Sunday night, it’s that I couldn’t have picked a worst time. I don’t know what it is that makes people more desperate on a Sunday night.

Maybe it has to do with the next day being a working day, a school day. The supermarket shelves were near empty and it seemed everyone was in a hurry and quite rude, to be honest.

For weeks now, I’ve been saying I won’t do my groceries on weekends any more. And I haven’t for a long time. It’s just that I’ve been so busy these past few weeks that I’ve gone back to doing it on weekends. Big mistake.

• why you should shop on weekdays if you can
• ten hours sleep
• how to reduce back-to-school stress (1)
• back to the grindstone
• gotta keep talkin’

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