My mom lives so far out in the country that she doesn’t have access to too many things. The closest grocery store is about 50 miles away from her house. I don’t know how she does it, but she loves it out there. I could never be that far away from convenience! The utility company doesn’t even offer internet connections out there, so she had to get wild blue satellite internet to keep in touch. I will never understand why after so many years of living in Chicago mom felt like she needed to move to the country. She raised my sisters and I to be city girls through and through, and then all of a sudden she was sick of the lifestyle. I’m supportive of her decisions as long as they make her happy. She comes to see us pretty often anyways, so the way I see it, she gets the best of both worlds. She has her peaceful country life, and then she can come and see her children and grandchildren in Chicago whenever she wants to get back to the faster pace.

One of the things that I found interesting about this article was the proposition that the most successful way to control overpopulation is to put women in control of their own procreation.  In countries where women have access to birth control, the birth rate drops.  I imagine that’s very true, common sense would dictate that most women would not want to have a lot of children – children are a lot of work, and are expensive to care for! 

I’m no mechanical expert, but I don’t think shooting a lawn mower will “fix” whatever was wrong with it!  The story does not give a reason for the shooting, so I don’t know if he was mad that the mower wouldn’t run properly, or if he was simply mad that he had to mow the lawn and decided that if he killed the mower then he wouldn’t have to mow the lawn.

Oh, the world is full of nut cases!

In addition to being able to search through a lot of different vendors for an item like white teen desks or custom suggestion cards the site also offers comparison reviews and an entire section of tips about products and “how to” do things, like how to take care of your fingernails and how to pick out the best vacuum cleaner for your needs.

While I was browsing around, looking at the listings of books I realized that this might be a good website to use to buy the baby shower present that I’m going to need next month for Sarah. I found a lot of cute crib bedding, and I’m having a hard time choosing between the green and black crib bedding and the girl farm crib bedding. I think I’m going to need to find an excuse to go to Sarah’s house to get a sneak peek at the nursery before I decide for sure what to buy.

It’s hard being the youngest in a room and at my job, that’s always the case. I work for a restaurant marketer and there’s always some kind of fire to put out but I feel like being in such a professional, fast paced environment makes sure I learn something new each and every day. If only I hadn’t waited so long to graduate and had been doing this for two extra years! My bosses seem to really see something in me and they’re always giving me some kind of cool assignment like looking up card services or talking to a vendor about price and it’s only a matter of time before I think I get promoted. I already make more than a lot of my friends who have jobs right out of school so I’m doing pretty well for myself and don’t think I’ve got too far to go! I love this place and I feel like I’m lucky to have fallen into a job I really see myself staying at for the long term.

I’m really concerned that the cost of gas is going so high that she’s not going to be able to drive it out of her driveway!  But, she is pretty insistent, and she is telling me that right now the prices of vans are getting lower because of the gas crisis.  I’ve told her that if she is so insistent on buying a van I will help her try to find the best insurance by doing some Internet research on the coverage and prices that are available from the many different insurance providers.

Living in such a rural area, however, can get kind of lonely, and we’ve found ourselves thinking about how to meet new people beyond our neighbors and work on finding friends on our local area. We’ve heard that there is a community center supper next weekend, trying to raise money for the Community Center. I think we should go to it!

So I contacted the merchant, who told me that he did NOT want me to return them, but that he would replace them.  So I waited a couple of weeks, and asked for a progress report and was told “so sorry, we’ll be shipping them tonight.”  A couple more weeks, and still nothing.  My inquiries to the merchant have now remained ignored, so I am assuming that the merchant has “stiffed” me at this point and has no itention of doing the honorable thing.