After my grandfather passed away, I realized very quickly that he had been a severe pack rat. When we were going through his closet, we found a whole garbage bag full of mens ties. The thing that was most humorous about that is that Granddad did not like wearing ties and wore them only to very special occasions.

The same thing happened as we went through his dresser. He had a whole drawer full of jewelry and he certainly was not the type that would ever wear anything except his pocket watch and his simple wedding band. Why he had a drawer full of cufflinks was completely beyond me.

He had several money clips in the drawer and I know he never used a single one of them. I think that they must have all been gifts at one point and rather than offend the giver by exchanging the item, he packed it away in the drawer for us to find decades later.

When my boyfriend and I had been dating for several months, he finally took me home to meet his family. As I was browsing at all of the photos on the wall, I was really surprised to see that he was wearing glasses in most of the pictures. When I asked him about it, he informed me that he had undergone laser eye surgery.

I was impressed that he had been so brave, as I thought it was something I would have never considered, but he told me that it was pretty harmless. He explained all of the most common laser surgery side effects and told me that he had not experienced any.

By the end of the weekend, I was completely convinced that it was something that I should do and I decided to go ahead with the LASIK Wavefront procedure. I was equally impressed with the results and I am so glad that I did it. It was all thanks to some old pictures on the wall at my future in-laws house.

I have always wondered if phone cards were better than getting your long distance through the phone company.  I see the really low rates that are promised on the displays in stores and on websites, but it was my understanding that they always charged a connection fee.

But when I was reading a blog about the cheapest calling cards, I realized that I might have been wrong.  You see, the cards that they mentioned in their article didn’t have connection fees and in some instances were as much as ten times cheaper than what my phone company charged by the minute.

So, I have ordered a couple of them and I will be trying them out.  Sure, I don’t make a lot of long distance calls, but the cost does add up each month.  I figure that if the amount that I spend on calling cards is less than what the phone company charges me each month, I will finally know the answer.

I thought that I had a good grasp on Spanish until I took a trip to Mexico.  What I guess I hadn’t counted on was the fact that I sounded so much like a tourist that most people just ended up laughing at me.  I guess I sounded funny, and sometimes I mixed up my sentences, but hey, it was not my native language.

It was especially frustrating when I wanted something a little more detailed.  When I asked for where the clinicas dentales de tijuana mexico was, I was pretty sure that I was looking for a dentist.  Most people that I asked understood what I was saying when I asked, and pointed me in the right direction.

But when it came to asking the dentist to perform a specific procedure, I was in trouble.  He was trying to say stuff to me, but I just didn’t understand.  In fact, I got so frustrated that I just left the office.

I guess next time I go to Mexico, I should take the time to learn the language - obviously, I didn’t know enough to get by.

One of my best friends, Bruce, has had many successes in his life.  He got his degree, has a great career, and makes lots of money.  You would think that this would make him happy, but he is missing one thing in his life: someone to share it with.

Sure, he was married once, but that only lasted just six months.  He married a real "winner", and she took him to the cleaners to get his money.  Having been burnt, he kept looking for women in the wrong places, and he was getting nowhere in his life.

I suggested to him that he should try to find local singles online.  He has not tried this route yet, so he is going to give it a shot - worst case, nothing comes of it.  We have also set him up with some profiles on free online dating sites to see if there are any bites on there.

Hopefully something good will come of this and he will spend someone who will genuinely want to spend the rest of their life with him - he is too good of a person to spend his life on his own.

I started scrapbooking more than ten years ago. For awhile, it was all I ever did in my spare time and it was the one thing that I enjoyed more than anything else. I figured, at the time, that I would never be behind in my albums. That all changed on the day I first became a mother.

I thought that I would have so much time to scrapbook when the baby arrived because I would not have to go to work anymore. I was so naive. That little baby took up so much of my time that I do not think I even had time to think about scrapbooking for the first few months.

When my dad had a heart attack, I made him a get well card and it was then that I realized that, even if I did not have time to scrapbook anymore that I could spend an hour or two every so often making homemade cards. I am sad to say that with three kids, I am so far behind in my scrapbooking that I doubt I will ever catch up. I do, however, have several cards on hand should I ever need one.

My husband and I had been renting a nice little townhouse since we got married. We recently found out that the area in which we lived has been rezoned and will be turned into industrial office space. We decided that this was the time to look into buying a house, though it made me sad to leave the first home we had together.

We found a house fairly quickly. It was a bit of a fixer-upper, but my husband and I have always been up to a good challenge.

We started with the flooring, removing all of the carpet and laying down hardwoods throughout the house. We had all of the old windows replaced with sash windows and then we gave everything a fresh coat of paint.

It came together very nicely and we are looking forward to making new memories in our new home. We still miss the old one, but this is where our future is at.

One of the biggest things that has been bothering me about potentially becoming an owner of investment property, is the whole concept of becoming a landlord.  I have never been very handy and I don’t really have the time or desire to learn how to do maintenance.  But, most of the property investors that I know do it all themselves - something that I never want to do.

It wasn’t until I spoke to Bill at a conference that I found my solution.  You see, he is in the same boat as me, and he didn’t want to become a landlord when he bought his first house.  Instead, he looked for solutions at the time and found a property management company that would take care of all the "messy" stuff when it comes to owning an investment property, and he would just collect the checks.

I am going to take his advice, and I have arranged a meeting with a residential property management firm for next week to see what the price is and what is involved.  I may own my first rental property yet!

I am not a big fan of keeping secrets and I would rather share my success with others so that they can benefit from my knowledge.  You see, I believe that everyone should have the right to succeed, but if they get a little help along the way, that should be allowed.

For me, I owe my MLM success to the MLM lead generation skills that I have developed.  Sure, they didn’t just come to me overnight, but it took many years for me to get to the level that I needed to succeed in my business.  It has involved a lot of trial and error, but I have honed my skills to an art.

Another thing that I did early on was engage in blogging for profit and not just for fun.  With the goal of making money in mind, I was catering to a different audience, one that had money to spend.  So, I found a lot of referrals and sales by following this practice, and it has helped my bottom line out immensely.

I would have to say that the biggest contributor to my success has been the support of my family - without them, I would have never taken the journey.

I am so sick of this new “technological” world that we live in. The one thing that makes me angry, more than anything else, is the fact that you can never talk to a human anymore when you call a toll free number. It is always a machine that gives you options.

There is, of course, not an option for the information that you are looking for and you end up on the phone for twenty minutes and get absolutely no where. By the time you ever get to talk to someone, you are so angry over the digitized message that you forget what you called about in the first place.

My suggestion is that if you are going to have a toll free service for your products, you should at least make it easy for consumers to navigate. Otherwise, you end up with customers like me, and trust me, you don’t want that.