It's about health

Technically, my father's cousin would be my first cousin once removed. But she is like a sister to my aunt, and therefore more of an aunt to me than a cousin at all. I care about her a lot, and it was hard for me growing up because she was a smoker and very over-weight. I was concerned about the choices she was making with her life because I loved her very much and wanted her to stick around for a long time to come, you know?

When she told me a few years ago that she had quit smoking, I was thrilled! This was a huge step for her and I couldn't have been happier. Unfortionately, she already struggled with her weight and quitting smoking was not helping things. After another year or two, she decided to have obesity surgery, which kind of took me off guard. I had always thought that was for people who were horribly vain (like movie stars) or people who were so obese that they couldn't even walk.

My cousin was neither of these, but her doctor agreed it would be in her best interests to do something about her weight. Extra weight creates a ton of health problems and risks, like heart trouble and such.

It was another year before I saw her again (we were living in Idaho when all this happened) and I couldn't believe how amazing she looked! Not model skinny, but huggable and rounded, instead of well, fat. I hate that word, but that's where she was headed before she decided to take charge of her health. It's now been several years more and I'm so impressed at how healthy she looks and how she's managed to keep the weight off.

Trust me, I learned from my cousin, the doctors can give you the starting point you need, but YOU are the one who has to do the hard work. Watching what you eat becomes vital when overeating causes you to throw up and get really sick. This is not something you want to be trying to do on your own. So if you're obese and are looking into getting surgery, check out this Web site, which offers support boards, insurance information, recipes and more.

A head start

After writing about holiday shopping yesterday, I got to thinking. The holidays hit us so hard financially because we have to pay for like 25+ presents all in one month. And every January, I tell myself, "that's it. I'm starting my shopping super early this year. Surely we can afford two presents per month. We'll just work them into our budget and then we won't go broke."

And then of course, its November before I realize that yes, the holidays are the same time this year that they are every year, and we haven't done any shopping yet and we'd better get started. So then we have the time crunch problem too. The later in the season it gets, the more likely we are to just grab something stupid or lame or OUT OF OUR PRICE RANGE, because there's just not enough time left to keep looking.

Add all of this in with the fact that a liquidation store at our mall is going out of business (we're sad, cause we love it there) I decided that we should do some holiday shopping today. Yes, in September. So now, we've spent about $50 and we have about 1/3 to 1/2 of our shopping done. I am so totally not kidding. Wouldn't it be awesome if I could spend my Black Friday wrapping instead of shopping? Horray for not procrastinating!

Pingo phone home

I've had my cell phone for about four years now, and have been land-line free for about two of them. It definitely works well with our lifestyle. There's just no reason to pay $30 a month for a landline when we can make all of the calls we need to on our cells, and they don't even charge for long distance. The only problem we've run into is that you can't make international call on a cell phone. At least not without paying like $5 a minute or something horrible like that.

So, when we've had to make international calls (usually to Canada, but once or twice to France and Australia as well) we've gone out and purchased international calling cards. Previously, I bought them at grocery stores, as I didn't really know where else to get them. But I just found out about Pingo, which has some great deals on all sorts of calling cards.

One of the things I thought was really generous of them is that they are offering a special discount for my readers! They are already selling their $25 calling card for just $17, but if you guys are interested in buying a Pingo card, just follow the links and put in the code ppp3 for and extra $3 off. That means you can get a $25 card for just $14. Plus, Pingo is going to give you five hours for free just for signing up. That's a lot of talk time. They don't have any hidden fees, and their rates are quite competitive. They do charge $1 per month to maintain your account, but if you talk on the phone like I do, you'll still be saving money.

Even if you don't know anyone in another country, you can get a long distance phone card for your home phone. Or, keep one in your wallet for an emergency. If you ever end up stuck somewhere without your cell (or the battery is dead) you will have a way to call home or maybe a tow truck. :-)

Seems like a great present for a teenager. Then you don't have to worry about "I would have called, I swear, but couldn't get any reception on my cell!"

Time to relax

I can't believe it's Friday night and I'm done with work and our house is clean (OK, mostly clean) and we're not going out of town or expecting overnight guests from out of town or anything!

We are actually going to RENT A MOVIE tonight, which is something we used to enjoy doing a lot but had significantly cut back on to save on the $$$. But this is a celebration of my great day. I even finally talked to my boss about a raise!!!! He said it was already in the works, as was my very tardy review, but did not give me an acutal number. Oh well. At least he didn't laugh :-)

Black Friday without the lines!

I don't know about you guys, but I am absolutely allergic to going shopping on the day after Thanksgiving. It's true that you can get some great deals, but I seriously just can't handle that kind of crowd! Two years ago my husband made us get up at the horrible hour of 5 a.m. so we could hit all the sales. I was nearly 34 weeks pregnant then and swore at him the whole time we were shopping. But he pointed out to me that we couldn't really afford the holidays if we didn't shop the sales.

Unfortunately, that's still true. But I recently learned that you can still get good deals by looking at thanksgiving ads online! I'm all for saving the kind of money that you do by shopping on Black Friday, yet not having to go out into the chaos at the mall. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what kind of Target deals I can get, because Target is one of my favorite stores ever! And if I shop online, I don't even have to worry about the fact that the nearest Target is about an hour away.

Another cool thing about this Web site, is that if you can get email alerts to let you know when new Black Friday ads have been posted. They feature a lot more stores too, like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Old Navy and Kohls.

Poor and perfect

When we were at Baskin Robbins a few weeks ago, I didn't pay much attention to who else was there. I did remember the family with the beautiful children who reminded me of my friend, but no one else really stuck out. A couple days after that trip, I was working late and the janitor asked me if Ben had liked his ice cream cone. Well, I had to think fast, because at first I thought maybe I had written about it in a Mama Talk. But no, I hadn't. And then, to my horror, I wondered if this woman had been reading my blog? No, that's too crazy for words. Couldn't be that. So she must have been there. And, bless her heart, she was kind to me when I admitted I hadn't remembered seeing her. She told me where she was sitting and that Ben had walked right up to her kid and said "Ice cream peeese" and thankfully, I remembered that.

Well, I was in here working late again last night and she came by with her daughter in tow. Little girl of maybe 4 or 5, very shy. She smiled at me when I talked to her but hid behind her mom. She was yawning and rubbing her eyes a lot, but she still helped her mom collect garbages. By the looks of how good she was, she's been doing this for awhile. It was all I could do not to start crying then and there. Can you imagine supporting your family on janitor's wages? Being so poor that you can't afford anyone to watch your kid, so you have to bring her along to work with you? It was very late and this girl was very little, but what else was she going to do? And though it may be against child labor laws to have her help, I understand that too. The sooner they're done, the sooner they can get home so said little girl can go to bed. It reminded me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, except that Katie quit the school janitor job and changed to one in her apartment building so that she wouldn't have to have a baby-sitter.

Poverty is so poignant when you put a face to it. Much more so than reading in the paper a percentage of people in our county who live below the poverty line. I don't care about them. They are just numbers to me. But I care about this sweet little girl with long black curly hair and a missing tooth.

For some reason, the fact that her mom took her to Baskin Robbins even though she clearly can't afford it is what is resonating the most with me right now. I'm so glad. She's been working hard, she deserves it.

Share and share alike

A few weeks ago, someone I didn't know contacted me after reading my post about the Joss Stone concert, because he wanted a copy. Well, I made him jump through a lot of hoops first because I didn't want to get in trouble or anything. But once I chatted with him for awhile and established that he was a real person and not looking to sell the concert for personal gain, I decided, hey, why not? I can do a nice thing for someone I've just met. How else are you going to make new friends, right?

Well, luckily he knew what he was doing, because it was, of course, too big of a file for me to email to him. So he told me about file sharing, which is where you put your file up on the internet and then tell the other person where to go to download it. It's kind of like hosting your photos on photobucket or flickr, but for large files such as a Joss Stone concert. I really appreciated that he taught me about this, because now I can share files with all my friends. Driveway.com is a really easy site to use, and its free! You can get up to 2GB of storage and even install a widget on your blog. I really liked using this service. Trust me if I can figure out how to work it, anyone can figure out how to work it.