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I wish I’d planned our patio better

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When we created our lovely garden and patio we were planning more for the garden than anything else. While I love our garden I often wish that I’d made our patio area at least 15 square feet larger than it is. Why? Well, we have plenty of room for our really nice patio set, and we have garden beds around two sides of the patio creating a nice intimate feel … but we have no room for our barbecue!

Our barbecue is in the driveway chained to the wall. That’s where we cook. Then we either bring our food to our patio table or back inside if it’s too hot or if it’s raining.

We need to create an outdoor kitchen. With that extra space that I really should have planned for when we landscaped our yard we could have had a built in barbecue or even a stone stove. We could have even had cabinets to keep our various utensils and BBQ supplies in.

Perhaps I’ll redo our patio area one day. All I’d really have to do would be to move one raised garden bed back a few feet. Not as easy as it sounds but quite possible.

Do you have a landscaped yard? If you do, did you plan an outdoor kitchen into it?





Blogging – getting organized and Schmoozing

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As many of you likely know I have a number of blogs.

The majority of my blogs are well over a year old – so don’t be thinking I created my blogs to make money. No, I created them to divide up the various topics that I was interested in talking about regularly into blogs of their own.

When I first did that, and every time that I mention that I did that people think I might have cut my readership down by spreading out my blogs. I haven’t. I’ve increased readership all round because those that are only interested in particular topics can focus on the blogs that I created about those niche topics rather than digging from one or two main blogs that talk about ALL the things I enjoy or that I’m passionate about.

As my blogs have gained in readership I’ve been spending more time developing the sites and interacting with those who leave comments. This has actually taken time away from blogging and has made it harder for me to post in some of the blogs on a regular basis.

When I wasn’t quite as busy I’d take the time to write up a few extra draft posts on each site that I could use whenever I needed or set in advance to auto-publish so that the blogs always had at least one post a day.

I was to get organized and start doing that again. It really helps!

If this sounds like a good idea to you, I think what those of us with multiple blogs need to do is set aside at least one or two hours each day to write up a couple of extra posts on a few of our blogs. In no time at all you’ll have a stalk of draft posts just waiting to be published.

When most of your blogs have some drafts backed up you can then take a bit more time to get out and visit other bloggers sites or spend some time promoting your sites on directories.

schmooze.jpg One of my blogging friends, RennyBA recently gave me a Schmoozing Award the other day. I don’t think he gave it to me because I buzz around promoting my sites. I think it was more because I try to build communities with my blogrolls and make posts like this every once in a while with the aim of helping others with their blogging. Now if he’d given me this award last year it would have been for commenting because I think I regularly visited about 200 sites a day leaving comments on most!

Anyway, back to the point of this post. Help your self with posting and organizing your time by writing up some extra posts that you can save as drafts when you either have the time or when you are in a writing mode. Believe me, it will give you more time to schmooze and promote your site … or simply to relax!

In the old days before our PVR

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I was just thinking about something I used to do when people would call while I was watching a television show that I didn’t want to miss. I used to switch the TV over to closed captioning. Sure it distracted me a little bit from my telephone conversation, but I could still keep up to some degree with what was going on in the show.

Now of course we have a PVR. That’s like a TIVO for those of you who don’t know what a PVR is. We almost always record our favorite shows on the PVR because we don’t always watch the shows when they are on TV. We watch them hours later. One bonus to this is we can skim through all the commercials.

The PVR also lets us pause or even rewind a live program. I love this! If the phone rings while I’m watching something interesting or if I need to use the washroom or go cook dinner I can either just pause the program or let it run and rewind it back to where I’d left off when I’m ready to watch the show again.

I love it!

Who else has a PVR?

My Niece’ first successful sleep over

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This past weekend my brother in law, sister in law and their young daughter dropped in for a visit and ended up staying overnight.

I wasn’t super thrilled to have unexpected house guests but I did end up having a nice time. I was actually able to spend quite a bit of quality time with my young niece.

I didn’t know this, but she’s been getting scared lately when she’s gone to friends houses for sleep overs. The week before she’d even ended up calling her mom at 3 in the morning to come pick her up.

Not being aware of her fear of sleeping in strange places I’d made up one of our spare bedrooms with kids bedding and made it all nice for her. When I told her mom what I’d prepared she didn’t think that my niece would end up sleeping alone but to everyones surprise she did.

It could be that she was in a relatives house or the fact that I’d taken the time to make sure the room was made up nice for her … either way it was her first time sleeping on her own in our house and she felt so proud of herself when she got up in the morning.

It made me feel proud too to have helped her through a phase. Well I hope she did, maybe she’ll have more success on her next sleep over at a friends.

Use and EPAY debit card to transfer money to friends and relatives

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Have you heard of EPAY yet? I’m really not certain how long EPAY has been in existence so to me it’s new even though it might not be as new a system of making online payments as it seems.

It seems that more and more online merchants are starting to accept payment via EPAY debit cards so this is a payment option to consider particularly if you don’t feel comfortable using your credit card online or for that matter perhaps don’t even own a credit card.

There are many ways that an EPAY debit card can be used. You can easily use your debit card to transfer money to friends or relatives, or to pay for online purchases where a credit card is required. Transfers can be made from any country to another, instantly and without limits.

I suppose EPAY is best known as an international online money transfer system but they offer quite a bit more than money transfers.

EPAY can be used in hundreds of countries worldwide and as I said earlier it’s being used by more and more merchants so it’s worthwhile registering for an account.

There are a few more advantages to having an EPAY debit card that makes signing up for a free account all the more appealing. The debit cards can be given to children or teenagers. The cards can be preloaded with only a certain amount of money so that your child can only spend a certain amount. Personally, if I were to allow a child to have a debit card or credit card I’d feel better about using something like this with a child rather than an open credit card with a high limit. Kids don’t learn how to spend money properly when there are no limits!

Another feature I like about the EPAY debit cards is that when traveling you’ll always have access to cash when you need it. So rather than carry around a wallet loaded with money you could just use your debit card to pay for items.

Visit EPAY today to learn all the different ways that EPAY can simplify payments and transfers for you.

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