If you read my friend Weaselmomma’s blog, World of Weasels, you know that this week she completely lost her mind and added a mastiff puppy to her brood of five children, a couple of cats, a non-human rodent or two (I lose track: we recently lost Gimpy and Tenderfoot…), a couple of frogs, and lord knows how many other animals that are there in that house that I haven’t even seen yet in the many times I’ve been over there. But I get it. I’m a total dog person and I adore puppies (can’t wait to meet that little peeing-in-the-kitchen-half-the-time-but-getting-much-better darlin’), so going gaga over one is not a foreign…
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Creative Parenting 101: Take A Picture. It’ll Last Longer!
I often say that photographs are my favorite souvenirs. In addition to the wonderful memory* that you can preserve with just one picture, a picture–or thirty–takes up much less space than, say, that jumbo Disney World snowglobe that costs you the same amount as a brand-new Geo Metro and will be in next year’s garage sale. My pictures-take-up-less-space philosophy came in handy when the older boy was younger. We discovered early-on that he had packrat-like tendencies. He came by it honestly; his mother’s** side of the family has the packrat gene in a big way. With intensive therapy***, I finally learned how to get rid of stuff. Halleluyah! When our…
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How To Buy A Car (Or, Yet Something ELSE That Took Me Forever To Learn, But Now I Rock At It), Part Three
Shew! You made it to the final installment! Congratulations! What? You didn’t read the first two? Oh my, you’ve got some catching up to do. How to buy a car, lessons 1-3 can be found here, and lessons 4-5 can be found here. Start at the beginning, and then come back. Don’t worry; we’ll wait. Let’s jump right into it: Lesson #6: Let Melisa handle the deal, and be ready to walk out. And walk out again. And walk out a third time, if necessary. After the tumultuous beginning we had in our car-buying career, we were finally hitting our stride. In 2003, it was time to find a car…
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How To Buy A Car (Or, Yet Something ELSE That Took Me Forever To Learn, But Now I Rock At It), Part Two
It’s about time you got here! I’ve got so much more to teach you about buying a car! Did you miss the first three lessons? Click here. Now, where was I? Oh yes. It was 1990 and we had just gotten screwed, buying our little blue truck. In 1991 we moved to Wisconsin. We still had the Dodge Shadow (the one without the cassette player) and decided that we really wanted to get something else. We weren’t sure what that something else would be, so we just started “doing research” by going around to different dealers and checking out what they had to offer. That brings me to lesson four.Lesson…
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How To Buy A Car (Or, Yet Something ELSE That Took Me Forever To Learn, But Now I Rock At It), Part One
Next to a home purchase, a new vehicle ranks right up there among the biggest purchases of someone’s life. You would think that people would do the proper research–and I’m not talking about research on the car itself; I’m talking about learning how to buy one–but many don’t. Jim and I didn’t, when we first started buying cars. We have been screwed by car dealers* several times, and each time was maddening. However, we have learned many things through those terrible experiences over the last 23 years, and since the car-buying process is now an exciting one for me**, and because so many people walk into that situation with their…