This started in my home about a month ago. We have smoke alarms outside each bedroom door and in hall way ant the smoke alarm outside mine started chirping intermittently.
It made me insane and at 3 am I put in a new battery. Beeping started again about an hour later.
Since we have 5 smoke alamrs in our upstairs - maybe a bit of over kill , I felt okay about just removing the battery for the night.
Well, now the one in basement doing the same thing. Its like some kid of Chinese water torture.
Thinking it might not be the battery and a clogged sensor- so took the vacuum to tit and that seems to have stopped it.
A smoke alarm detects a change in the density of air so something that hinders its sensor wil trigger a problem.
I read also using a can of compressed air ( the type to clean computer) also works the same way.
So - if your smoke alarm beeping or chirping after changin the batteries- most likely it is clogged sensor - try getting rid of built up dust before you replace.
All who know me know that i am a serious bargain hunter and a shrewd shopper. In every circle there ia someone who knows where to get the best and the cheapest. I am that person. I can tell you what day and where to get a great deal on potato chips, what the best cell phone rate is or where to go for a new BBQ.
I am well loved by the neighborhood kids who thanks to me all have brand new Nintendo DS systems for next to nothing.
My hands down favourite haunt for any kind fo a shopping deal in Canada is Red Flag Deals an online deal sharing forum.
I have a killer home theater thanks to the reader and posters at Red Flag. I don’t go grocery shopping without checking where the best deals are that weeks. I pay next to nothing for blank DVD’s and I have even bought items from other readers ( at prices less than ebay). I have been a member for almost 5 years and probably saved hundred if not thousands of dollars.
I am a stay at home mom and take pride in being able to buy stuff for my family at a great price. I am not sexist but on some level I feel like by taking time to find a good deal it is a to show my husband how much I appreciate his slogging it out every day earning a living.
I have had countless deals but a couple stand out at the ones that gave me most satisfaction.
I bought a fantastic Ridgid brand shop-vac at Home Depot for 19.95 that was regularly priced at 69/00 It was a double whammy because it was a great sale and I was able to price match with a 10.00 coupon.
Not many women would be so thrilled at a shop-vac purchase but I was grinning from ear to ear all weekend over that one.
The deal that I most known for within are family is the week all our kids and the neighbourhood kids got dirt cheap brand new Nintendo DS’s from EB Games. They had a promo on where you traded in 5 games with a trade in value of 8.00 and got a brand new Nintendo DS.
t was also the same week RFD ( Redflag Dea;_ posters were posting that Blockbuster had Playstation2 games on for 7.99. I went in and not only did they have quite a few used PS2 games for sale at 7.99 ( and had at least an 8.00 trade in value at EB Games) but they had a slew of Nintendo DS games for 8.99. Games that normally had a very high ticket price- Drawn to Life, Sponge Bob, etc. I bought a few to supplement our collection and was able to trade-in and get new DS’ for all our kids- which we really needed. The only one we had had a cracked screen. So for about 50.00 and couple of used games we made out pretty well.
Further more- I explained the deal to some neighbourhood kids and went through their games with them and took them to Blockbuster to buy games they could trade in… They went in with their parents and go new DS”s as well. i was a HUGE hero on our street for quite while.
This was by far the most satisfying deal for many reasons. One of the kids down the street was having a really rough time at home and they didn’t have a lot of money . He was 13 and all his friend had a Nintendo DS and he was using an OLD OLD gameboy . I know not exactly a tragedy- but to him it was a big deal.
When I brought home my kids kids new DS’s he asked if he could have our old one with the broken screen- it just broke my heart . I went back to Blockbuster and bought 5 games for 7.99. The cost was under 40.00. I then went and got him a brand new Cobalt Blue DS that no one else had. It was by far the best 40.00 I have ever spent.
Seeing the look of that kids face will be with me for a long long time.
As a footnote, the boy ended up giving me his old game boy- which my girlfriend took to Cuba with her and was gave to her foster child she sponsors.
The whole experience was memorable very satisfying and was a case where money did buy a little bit of happiness.
I have been using the same webhosting company for about 5 years now and have been pretty satisfied and nothing major has happened = that is until last week. Some of the sites on one of my servers were down for 4 days.
This was a bit of an economic disaster, it will not come as as surprise to many of you that I earn money by blogging ( I have written about it at length . My sites being down for 4 days was a huge blow. I was on track for biggest money making month since i started blogging as an income source about 2 years ago. All that cam e crumbling when sites when offline.
Nothing is worse for a site owner. i am debating looking for a new hosting service. There way of apologizing was a free month service. HAHAHAHA. A drop in the bucket.
I have found reviews on WebhostingGeeks.com to be pretty accurate and was looking at their picks for best VPS hosting ; however some of the sites I have not heard of so will have to investigate further. I am looking for a virtual private server under 50.00 a month.
it does not happen very often but every once in a while i will find a product that I LOVE. It does exactly what is says it will do and sometimes MORE.
This week i stumbled along something that I am in love with. You may recall my nightmare with the raccoon family . They are gone , thankfully. In our finished basement we have home theater set-up and there was a cold air return on one of the walls that led to under house extension and this is where the raccoons set up house. Even writing about it now gives me willies. I could hear there every movement when downstairs.
We had tried using moth balls and ammonia soaked rags to get rid of them They did not work but house sure smelled- and still did up until a few days ago.
Best Scent For Glade Oil Plugin
I have been using Glade Plugin Oils. I know not that earth shaking- but the scent we are using Lavender Vanilla is to die for. My basement smells fresh and clean from lavender but sort of cosy with the vanilla undertone. I will never get sick of this scent! I feel like I have my home back again. I know I may but nutty but it is true.
Making money from a simple web sit or blog is all the rage these days. I can;t exactly say I have gotten rich from my blog0 I may make enough to treat family to ice cream one a month But tons of people swear buy it.
One key to making money on a site is to get traffic. This is one of the hardest parts of marketing your web site: building traffic to your site.
One of the most popular and successful ways to increase traffic is to use pay per click like AdWords. I have had limited use working with pay per click and can tell you it can be very overwhelming to some one who is not web savvy or knows what a keyword is or why keywords are important.
Many companies will offer you services to help you or completely manage your campaign; making landing pages and designing ads that will work for your site.
Companies like Network Solutions offer starter package from 125.00 to help you manage your campaign. This would have cost a fortune even a coupe of years ago!
If you are serious about building your web based business than you really need to have some sort of online presence and using a PPC management service is a must have.
We are in some kind of deck paint hell. We bought our house last year. In the time of making the offer and getting the house the people who owned our house at the time decide to paint the deck It is very large, about 12×20 feet overlooking inground pool.
The previous owner were in a hurry to make the deck look nice and didn’t care how it got there- they use indoor wall paint.
We spent DAYS last summer- not to mention tons of money trying to get the paint off. We rented floor sanders, used every chemical imaginable. Spent a fortune on scrapers and special sand paper. We could not get that paint off. We also tried water pressure hose and that wrecked wood.
Over the winter some of the paint came quite loose and we able to get most of it off with the pressure hose. TONS of paint chips all over the lawn and even worse into the pool. I ended up changing sand in filter.
Thre are still way to many paint remnant to even think of putting a clear stain on the pressure treated wood.
I dont; know what to do. it looks AWFUL right now.
We may try an opaque stain but I am not hopeful- will still sinf ‘ring: marks around paint.
This year will be the first year any of our kids go away for “sleep away” camp. I am not sure I will be able to make it I have rarely been away from my kids for more than a day or to and the though of a whole week makes my stomach churn.
I have been preparing all the stuff and packing supplies and gear for camp.
One thing I didn’t think of but my girlfriend mentioned was getting some kind of bracelet or medical alert jewelry for my daughter who has a severe allergy to cats and penicillin. he daughter is allergic to peanuts and travels with an epi-pen. It never occurred to me to get one but makes perfect sense. Most Medical ID services have a special sections of ID made just for kids. I was just looking at them and took me about 5 minutes to “build” two of them for my kids with allergies and medical conditions.
May seem a t bit on the paranoid side but having dealt with many incompetent people I know that in an emergency weird things can happen. I won’t worry about being overly cautious when it comes to my kids health and safety.
I just wanted to pot that I was very pleased with the Zip.ca service I signed up for about 2 months ago. It a mailing dvd rental type service. I make a list up ( called a ziplist) of movies I would like to see and then send as they come available. I usually end up with about 5 or 5 movies each month. I have only used for Blu-Ray. My local video stores have had pathetic selection of Blu-ray movies to rent and this was a good solution. I have the 9.95 package which is almost the cost of one Blu-Ray rental at Blockbuster.
Getting “good” movies has not been the greatest- but I do eventually get them,
I would recommend using this type of service if you have a Blu-Ray player and are having trouble finding titles. Most, including zip.ca offer a free trial for 2 weeks.
Woot.com has a good deal on Blu-Ray computer today, its a Gateway GM5664 Desktop and features:
9600 Quad Core
1TB HDD
3GB RAM
Blu-ray
Radeon HD 2400XT graphics card with 2 DVI ports.
downside- Vista Home Premium and no HDMI- although it is shipped with a DVI to HDMI dongle
My dad got a NASTY gash on his foot last summer when working in the yard. They were putting in an ornamental pond in back yard and when digging out dirt there were some buried rail way tied- a HUGE nail- ripped open his foot. He was wearing crocs.
No on plans to have an accident. Who would have thought there would be a buried railway tie and giant rusty nail? My dad had serious medical problems because of the incident. He was on antibiotics for almost 3 months and wore a portable IV for 10 days.
This never would have happened if he had been wearing some kind of protective footwear or work boots Please be careful when you are working in the yard.
Now, if I can only get my husband to stop mowing lawn in flip flops!
Here are some tips for changing the sand in your pool filer that you can only discover after you’ve done it a couple of times. Mist of the pool web sites will have instructions on how to change the sand in your pool filter but leave out some valuable information.
Set aside some time to do this. It is time consuming. You can do over 2 days if you must.
Scooping out sand by hand will takes hours - if you can get your hand in there. Use a shop vac or other wet/dry vacuum. If you use a shop vac take out the paper filter inside or it will get really nasty and maybe moldy.
Using a shop vac to take out sand will also take along time- but not as long as by hand.
Drain the filter of water before you start taking out the sand by removing drain plug at bottom of the filter.
When you have most of the sand out you can also use a hose to give filter a bit of a rinse. Be careful of any electrical outlets.
Use some silicone lubricant on your gasket head while you have everything opened up.
Check lateral pipes for damage or breakage. If you have had sand in your pool this may be why.
Cover standing pipe so sand wont get in it. I use a sock some people use duct tape or a liquor store bag to make sure they don’t get sand in the pipe. Just means you will get some sand in your pool.
After you have filled with sand ( about 2/3 full or at line where filter starts to curve) Use or hose or bucker to put in water to help get circulation going. Don;t have to fill- put about 2 inches above sand level or so.
Good Luck. You wont have to do for another 5-7 years!
IZEA’s SocialSpark came out of beta in May. The service s meant to compliment or maybe reason replace PayPerPost.
What is it? It is a social media site that hooks up advertisers who want a product, event or service promoted in the blogosphere. with bloggers. The bloggers are compensated the their time spent writing a post with sponsors link.
This falls within Google guidelines as any links have the “nofollow” attribute and will not be followed by search engines or what Google calls paying for page rank.
The idea is to create Buzz around the advertisers product and generate traffic.
To become a member of SocialSpark you just need to sign-up-membership is totally free. An advertiser can set up a “campaign” asking bloggers to write about a specific topic and post how much they will pay for blogger to write about it in their blog. Bloggers can browse the marketplace and choose from opportunities and then write about it. Most opportunities seem to be for about 5-10.00. They are ones for more money but they never seem to be available.
I did fins the site difficult to use and not sure I will go back. Was hard to figure out what opportunities were available to me and took a long time for my blog to be approved- almost 2 weeks.
This is a sponsored post.
For those of you who own the video game Rock Band, available for PlayStation 2, PlayStation 2, XBOX 360 and coming out June 22 for Wii- here is how one mother figure out how to fix her broken set of Rock Band drums, Rock Band Drum Head Snapped Off .
Apparently it is an ongoing issue and happened to many people.
Aside from drum heads breaking of many have had wiring issues. Harmonix, the makers of Rock band for an gaming platforms does have a pretty good replacement policy- but it is only for 60 days.
I recently went to a “business” conference and the night before I realized I had no business cards, I works a consultant in It very part time. I have never had a need for business cards- everyone emails me and I turn away most new business because I just don’t; have the time. I gave business cards ZERO thought. I realized I would need them because I would be meeting so many new people and it was be easier to trade cards than to try and get their email and follow up next day and sen them my info… I was going to network and possible get some lucrative speaking engagements. I did something really dumb- I made up some card very quickly and printed them on my home printer. And it looked like it.
I was mortified when I handed these out. They were on PINK paper to top it all off.
I wish I had spent some time on decent looking cards. One of my favourite places to print business stuff is Vista Printing. On their site you can create your own business cards using their free online logo designer. Their catalogue of logo is much nicer that i expected and I found something right away- it was clean and slick looking.
They also carry a nice array of cheap address labels that suit most businesses and any budget- 140 labels for under 10 bucks - not bad!
I don’t know what it is with me and MP3 players. I won a Yepp 256MB 4 years ago and it still works. I loved that thing.
I bought I new one last August - a Creative Zen V plus- also LOVED it and had it 6 weeks. I dropped it and ran the car over it. I then got an ipod nano- I wanted one for a while a got it as a gift. Aw week later I realized I hated it and returned it for the Creative Zen 4gig player. Last week the screen was cracked. REALLY cracked. Huge black blob of an ink stain. I can barely see screen but it does still work. I am in customer service hell with Creative Labs trying to get an RMA. I just want a price on how much it will cost to fix before I run out and buy another, but I have been jumping through hoops for days. I will keep posted.
I saw that Best Buy had 8 gig in sale for 139.00 so may pick up.
You can actually get paid to blog. I signed up to try a few weeks ago on a whim. You sign up, submit your blog for review ( usually takes a few days) and after you are accepted you get to grab “opportunities” . You write a post or review about a product, site or service usually. The sponsor of the add will often have requirements- like mention this product or link to this page or insert this image. Usually the post need to be about 100 word long- sometimes less sometimes more.
I make about 150.00 a month but others make quite a bit. The least you will be paid is 5.00 a post. The most I was ever paid was 90.00. The post you are reading now, I am being paid 20.00 for.
The topics you can write about are wide and varied. There are opps for almost any kind of blog. Web hosting, hobby sites, parenting blog, personal blog, pets, shopping, etc. I wouldn’t worry if you have a really obscure topic on your blog- you would be shocked at some of the odd things you can write about.
You can’t just stuff you blog with paid post however- you need to have original content and a reasonable well written blog.
I have been REALLY disappointed in the selection of Blu-ray discs available for rent at our local Blockbuster and other video stores. They have had MAYBE 30 of them in - most I wouldn’t rent in a million years. The I go to Wal-Mart and I see they have tons available. Annoying. I signed up for a trial membership at Zip.ca about a week ago. hey do have fast shipping ( usually 2 days) and they have cool feature where you can tell them you have mailed back a DVD and they take your word for it and send out another. i have found that my top choices never seem to be available.
There ar many dvd by mail services available I just happened to try zip.ca because I liked the price 9.95 a month. I You can have unlimited DVDs but only one out at a time. You can upgrade to having 3 dvd out and cost is 24.95.
The cost of 1 Blu-Ray rental at Blockbuster is 7.99 ( I think) so this is good deal .
There is a good list of online dvd rental services in Canada, here
This is a fun post to make-revealing an embarrassing moment as part of a “coming out of your shell” campaign by Gulf oysters and Oyster aware campaign. The site itself is serious- they are promoting the nutritional benefits of oysters as well as how to enjoy eating ousters safely. Here is video my niece and I made today that reveals an embarrassing moment
Getting your site listed on a a link from another site help your site get found by search engines and will also help you get page rank. Having a better page rank will help yo get better rankings in search engine results pages. Hoe do you get other sites to put a link on your site? Does it matter what kind of site you get listed on? When looking for sites or blogs to get links from try looking for blog that follow or belong to the dofollow movement. When you comment you link will be allowed to be followed by search engines, Most blogs do not allow search engines to follow link in the comments section.
Another great way to find links for your site is to look for inexpensive or free directories. Look for directories that do not require you to link back- often this well worth pay a few dollars for. When you submit your site- use good anchor text in your sites “name” or title. Choose keywords you want to be for in the search engines. Repeat those keywords again in your site description to get the most bang for your buck on your directory listing.
One solid web directory is Dirmania . They have decent Google Page Rank and make it easy to submit your site for approval. The web directory has number of listings including some other free directories for you to check out for site or blog.
I have been having to pick up a bunch of these when going over the border- I am not kidding the ONLY way i will ever sanitize my hot tub with,. You really do just pop it into “hole” in center of your filter cartridge,,, and that;t it. Add a tiny but of chlorine- I do mean tiny. Shock as you normally would. I am not KIDDING! I was so thrilled to find this product after years of breaking out in rash from chlorine and bromine.
I know this company sells them- let me know of others.
www.jacuzzicalgary.com
But tons of people swear buy it.
One key to making money on a site is to get traffic. This is one of the hardest parts of marketing your web site: building traffic to your site.
One of the most popular and successful ways to increase traffic is to use