Posted by Leigh on October 17, 2008
Every Mom Wants to Work From Home
I work from home and live in a very small town, so everyone knows that I work from home. What they don’t understand though, is what exactly I do.
I get calls all the time from people who know me, usually young mothers, timidly asking me what type of home based business I run, and wondering if they could do it too. They’re usually very disappointed when I tell them that I mostly design small business websites, and that it does require programming experience. I always feel bad when I hear the disappointment in their voices.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
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Posted by Leigh on August 27, 2008
I have been asked by a few of my web design clients about the new ad service by ScribeFire, called ScribeFire Quick Ads As I’ve never used it before, I can’t really give them an answer, and I hate that. I hate not being able to answer client questions no matter the subject, so I try and make it my business to find an answer for them!
So I’ve installed it on a few of my own blogs to try it out.
I love the ScribeFire Firefox Addon, as it allows you to post to your blogs without the hassle of logging in and navigating your way through the admin pages. I always recommend it to my clients, especially un-tech savy clients, because it makes their lives easier. You can manage an unlimited number of blogs just from your Firefox browser, and it supports many of the popular blogging platforms, whether you have a self hosted blog, as all of mine are, or if you use many of the free blogging services out there. I myself prefer self hosted Wordpress blogs, but do have a few clients that are always asking for help on free services such as Wordpress.com, or Live Journal. I do not recommend Blogspot, or Blogger to anyone.
So, please deal with me as I try out this new service from the creators of Scribefire! And let me know if you feel the advertising is too “in your face” or if it’s not too bad. Also, if you happen to see any non-family friendly ads showing on my sites, please notify me immediately, as my children are often visiting our family site and such and I really don’t want to catch my thirteen year old son staring at pictures of scantily clad women on my own site!
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Posted by Leigh on July 9, 2008
Mortgage Brokers… I understand the need for a mortgage broker, as I know of a few people who just went to the local bank for their mortgages, and ended up with loans a few percentage above what we ended up getting.
But I do have a few problems with them also!
The first mortgage broker we worked with was horrible! She let each individual bank pull our credit reports instead of pulling it herself and sending copies of it with the applications. This left us with about 30 inquiries on our credit reports instead of one, dropping each of our FICO scores by a few points. She also never bothered to update us as to what was going on. We were completely in the dark the whole time.
The second mortgage broker we’ve dealt with has been great! Only two inquires on our credit from her, she’s kept us updated as to the status of things pretty well. And she even let us send in most of the paperwork by email. (How awesome is that, at least for someone who spends 90% of her time in front of a computer, and who is totally fax dumb. I have a fax machine sitting two feet from me, but I have yet to get it to do anything but work as an overgrown telephone. But I think that is do to the user - not the machine.) She also got us a rate a whole percentage less than the first mortgage broker managed. Which considering our credit, is wonderful. My bankruptcy is not quite three years old, and up until this spring my husband has never even had a credit score, due to never using credit. But she still managed to get a great rate. My mother-in-law, just bought a house, using the local bank and she got a rate 2% higher than ours, even though she has never had bad/poor credit.
Now, the only other problem I have with mortgage brokers is that fact that I have never ever spoken to anyone at the bank who is financing our construction. They are giving us a good deal of money, but I couldn’t off the top of my head tell you the name of the bank. I could dig it out of my “mortgage papers” folder - most likely. But as we’ve gotten offers from so many banks, it would take me a while to find the one we accepted.
What’s your experience with mortgage brokers?
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Posted by Leigh on June 9, 2008
Funerals, I just don’t get them. People that you haven’t talked to in years, who never bothered to visit you while you were alive, suddenly seem to come out of the woodwork to pay their respects as soon as you die. If you couldn’t make time to visit the person while they were alive, why would you make time after they die?
Not that I’m complaining or anything, I just don’t understand it. Only a handful of us grandchildren (and there are 16 of us, still living) had seen grandpa in the last year, but nearly everyone showed up for the funeral. Some driving hundreds of miles. Not that it wasn’t nice to see the relatives that we haven’t seen in years, and in some cases decades, but it would have been nice if it had been for a happier occasion, like maybe last week for his 88th birthday, before he died.
And the people who never knew him, they were just friends with other relatives? Why go to a funeral of someone you never knew?
Wouldn’t it have made more sense to drive the distance back when everyone knew the end was coming? To have been able to talk to him, tell him you love him, and see him alive? Why wait until after death to show up?
Funeral - a ceremony marking a person’s death. Funerary customs comprise the complex of beliefs and practices used by a culture to remember the dead, from the funeral itself, to various monuments, prayers, and rituals undertaken in their honor. These customs vary widely between cultures, and between religious affiliations within cultures. In some cultures the dead are venerated; this is commonly called ancestor worship. The word funeral comes from the Latin funus, which had a variety of meanings, including the corpse and the funerary rites themselves.
Funeral rites are as old as the human race itself, as well as other hominids. For example, in the Shanidar cave in Iraq, Neanderthal skeletons have been discovered with a characteristic layer of pollen, which suggests that Neanderthals buried the dead with gifts of flowers. This has been interpreted as suggesting that Neanderthals believed in an afterlife, and in any case were aware of their own mortality and were capable of mourning.
Taken from Wikipedia.
“Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead.” - Francois De La Rochefoucauld
“Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.” - Mark Twain
I was kind of hoping to find the reasoning behind funerals, how they started and why, but at most got a description of different regions funeral rites. Not that I looked very hard, just an hour or so.
So what’s your take on funerals? Can you explain the reasoning behind them?
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