New Blog

I decided to start another blog besides the two that I have. I already have a watercolor blog where I post all my new artwork. This blog, "Sweet Happenings", is just about daily living and all the things that go along with that. My new blog is called, "My Gut Reactions" and is about my son and his mysterious illness that started back in June of 2007. It has been a challenge ever since to get my son healthy and able to function at school and at home. So far he is doing better but still not completely well. I really owe the internet for helping me come up with ways to deal with this problem. Unfortunately, the doctors were not of much help. This illness made me look into alternative methods which I have found to be really effective.

Contractor Called

Out of the blue, our contractor called and so he is coming on Monday! Yay! My husband had told him, several months back that he thought we would be remodeling in the spring and apparently the contractor remembered and gave us a ring. In the meantime, I have spent practically every minute prepping furniture for painting and then adding 2 coats of primer and 2 coats of paint to each piece. The rest of the time, I have been cleaning out the two bedrooms and the bathroom. I can't believe how much junk has accumulated over 20 years! Definitely all this stuff will not fit after the remodeling is finished. I am going to have to get rid of a lot of it. Luckily, we have a fairly large house and so I was able to stash the stuff in other rooms and still have room to maneuver.

Digxa- A Free Comparison Shopping Site

Usually, when I am interested in buying something, for example, a laptop, I do a lot of comparison shopping. I look at different brands and then visit each of their websites. Digxa is a new free comparison shopping site and they have a very comprehensive list of items. I was just looking at the clothing category. There are 1,742,501 items listed and can be searched by price starting below $10.00 and going up from there. The womens clothing had 337,933 items and in the outerwear category had price comparisons between well known brands like Nike, Northface and Columbia.




I was amazed at how many categories Digxa offers. They compare prices on cars, computers, computer accessories, health and beauty, event tickets, flowers and gifts,baby items and toys, electronics, jewelry, sports memorabilia,video games and just about anything else you can think of.

They even have a musical instrument category. I just bought a guitar for my son for Christmas and it would have been nice to have used this site to find a guitar in my price range.

Big Remodeling Jobs

It has been about 14 years since we last added on and 9 years since we remodeled our kitchen. This year, I would like to remodel the master bedroom, bath and guest bathroom. Our master bedroom never had a walk-in closet so I would like build into the spare room next door and just combine the space. It's going to require some walls to be knocked out and rebuilt. Also would like to change the tub to a tiled-in shower, and the sink to a double sink vanity. Not sure how much this is going to cost. All I know is that I about fell over when I was looking at prices on non custom made vanities. The ones I was looking at were in the $1500.00 range. The problem is that I would like a custom built one so I have a feeling that it is going to be even more expensive and that doesn't include the wood flooring that we will have to buy, the french doors, the regular doors ,a new window, the tile and the window treatments and shades needed. We are planning to do most of the labor ourselves, although we want to hire a contractor to put in the walls and outside doors and windows. Right now I am painting the bedroom furniture to give it a new look so we don't have to replace that too.

My house is a wreck at the moment and probably will be for the next 3 months or so. In the meantime, my husband and I are going to have to move into my eldest son's bedroom (he's away at school but will be home in May). I am not sure we can get this all done before my son is back but we are going to try.

Word Press Themes Resources

When I was looking to start a blog, I reviewed several sites and ended up with blogger.com. I used one of their templates and then made my own header in corelDRAW. Nothing too fancy. I really was interested in Wordpress but thought it looked a little too complicated for me.

Kaushalsheth.com is a site that offers a guide to webhosting and beautiful wordpress templates. Kaushal is an engineering student from India and he has developed several skills in web design, web development, SEO, internet advertising and more. I have this blog and an art one and I just love the colors, layout and graphics that he uses in his sample art web pages. They are gorgeous. He offers several themes with various bells and whistles including, books, animals and pets, business, charity and so forth. Not only does he offer these but custom themes as well. His prices are in the $40+ range and up. I also saw that he offers a few free Blogger templates to boot.

Kaushalsheth.com is loaded with many things including tutorials for enhancing wordpress themes, reviews of best web hosting sites and also a touch of personal posts on his life as a student. All very interesting. He is a very talented fellow and I definitely will be telling people to check out his site.

Five Years of College

I got a call from my son yesterday and I could tell he was upset. He just found out that he will need at least 4.5 to 5 years of college to graduate. This was ironic, as I was just breathing a sigh of relief the other day because I thought my son would be able to graduate in 4 years.

Last August, he started out in engineering, a major we had chosen for him because he did not know which way to go. He had even received a scholarship for it. Well, it became clear 1/2 through the semester that engineering was not in his blood so he went to some career fairs and found construction management. He switched majors in the middle of his first semester. Took his first construction management class this January. He still needs another semester before he can apply to the construction management program which means he can't get in until next spring. There apparently is no way to make up classes during the summer and so he will most likely have to stay on an extra semester or maybe even a year depending on the scheduling of the classes.

As far as budgeting goes, we had planned to pay for 3 years and he was supposed to pay for 1. Now it looks like he will have to pay for more. We may also have to reevaluate and help him out. With another son coming up in the ranks and being ready to go to school in 5 years, I was hoping to focus on saving money for him.

I was reading about how it is now the norm to take 5 to 6 years or longer to finish college. That wouldn't be a problem except it costs so darn much that I can't see how anyone can have the luxury of taking this much time to finish school. We are paying at least $14,000 per year for a public school and we are not taking out any loans. Kids in private schools are paying $40,000 and up although most get scholarships that will pay 1/2 of this amount.

I was hoping my son would not be part of the norm but it looks like this is something that can't be avoided.

An Alternative for Those With Bad Credit

With the stock market going up and down, my husband and I have made it a point to minimize our debt. We have not always been good about paying off our credit cards, month to month. But since we have been trying to save money for our son's college, it has been imperative that we keep a zero balance on those credit cards. Also we are carrying one loan and that will be paid off next year. Our house mortgage was paid off 2 years ago and we were able to do it in 18 years.



Rising gas prices and just the cost of living have made it difficult to make ends meet. There has been a huge rise in the number of people who are seriously in debt. A site, badcreditoffers.com provides a resource to help out those with a not so perfect credit rating. They offer the bad credit consumer ,information on credit offers that best fit their needs. Badcreditoffers.com have links to credit cards, home, auto and personal bad credit loans. They give the rundown of what each has to offer and the consumer can be approved in 3 easy steps. They give the consumer an opportunity to regain a hold on their finances.

I think it pays to review your credit rating and get some serious credit counseling either from an outside source or through the links offered on this site before signing up for more credit. We have all been there where we have been strapped for cash but there is plenty of help available and no one needs to be drowning in debt.

Is Our Retirement Money in Jeopardy?

My husband and I decided to move his 401K out of stocks and into bonds. We also went out and cashed out another mutual fund and the rest we left where it was. With the market being so volatile these days and also my husband being 10 years from retirement, we decided that we have to salvage what we can. We can't afford to standby while the stock market drops. It could take more than 10 years to recoup our savings so we had to take drastic measures. Our financial planner had warned us that he thought this was coming ( a severe stock market crash), a couple of years ago and I think it is all coming to fruition. Only time will tell if we did the right thing.

New Domain Name and New Look

I decided to take the plunge and got a custom domain name for my blog. Blogger offers them for $10.00 a year. I liked the fact that my blog stays where it is and my blogspot URL now redirects to my new custom one: http://www.sweethappening.com. It turns out sweethappenings.com was already taken as was sweethappenings.net. My backlinks still work but my page rank plummeted to zero at least temporarily.

Smorty, a get paid to blog site, rejected my blog under its new URL because the pages have not been indexed. Well, they are indexed but under my old blogspot name. Now I have to wait to reapply. In the meantime, I revamped the look of my blog and am looking for other like blogs to exchange links. If you are interested, please contact me.


Paid $55.50- Cashcrate

My Dog is One Hairy Thing

I adopted a sweet terrier mix , 2 years ago from the Humane Society. She has been a great dog. She gets along with our cat. She likes to play and chase the cat around but in the end, they usually take naps together and really enjoy just hanging out. I never had a dog where the hair keeps on growing. We had her groomed once and she came back looking like a skinned rat. They were supposed to leave a 4 inch coat of hair on her but instead she came back shaved to the skin except for a bushy head and tail. I was not too pleased to say the least.

I decided to cut her hair myself. Bought the Remington NoMess pet grooming clippers from Walmart. It has a built-in vacuum that sucks up the hair as it is being clipped. There are different length combs you can attach. It supposed to be used on shorter hair dogs, unfortunately my dog's hair was about 8 inches long. It did do an OK job of cutting but it took me about 1.5 hours. Her hair is about 4 inches long now and it doesn't look like a hack job so I am happy with it.



$55.50 earned- Cashcrate

Christmas Light Decorations in March

I was introduced to this site, Birddog Distributing,Inc. and all I have to say is where was this site back in October of 2007? I didn't know about it and I didn't even think to do a search on the internet. Our church was doing a Decorated Christmas Tree Auction fundraiser and I was looking for fiber optic trees in the stores before Halloween and there were none to be had. The trees finally showed up in November and that gave me only 3 weeks to design a tree for the auction.

As I was checking more into Birddog Distributing, Inc, I found that they carry rope lights. What are they? I had the exact same question. I never have heard of them before. They are small tiny lights, spaced an inch apart in heavy plastic tubing. Rope lighting can be used to decorate railings,decks, clubs, theaters and etc. A more common use of the rope light is for holiday decoration. Bird Dog Distributing also offers icicle lights, yard and patio lights, fiber optic trees as well as 7 different color rope lights,an incandescent one too and much more.

My Christmas Tree Auction went off well. We raised a lot of money, but it might have started off a little more smoothly if I had known about Birddog Distributing,Inc.

The Strange Sound of Donkeys

As I lie sleeping, dead to the world like I do every morning, I am suddenly brought to my feet by the loud obnoxious incessant braying of my 2 pet donkeys. They will never let me have a day to sleep in! As if that were not enough, they inch closer and closer to the house until they are outside my bedroom window. Granted they are in a fenced pasture but they know exactly what room I sleep in and they get as close as they physically can before they let out their next absolutely loud cacophony of sounds. My neighbors were saying that they didn't have to set their alarm clocks anymore because the donkeys were waking them up. I hope they were joking when they said that but somehow I think not.




I have had horses, dogs and cats but they never sounded quite like my donkeys. With each breath they wheeze in and out, crescendoing each time with the resulting end similar to a full blast of a tugboat's foghorn on a misty morning. There is no other animal on earth that sounds quite like that.

I was just reading about how donkeys make very good guard animals. I guess that makes a lot of sense. My guys are very suspicious of everyone and everything. If I change the color of my coat, they suddenly treat me like some crazy stranger and head for the hills. They are otherwise pretty smart, territorial and they definitely fit the stereotype of being extremely stubborn. They would chase out stray dogs and I imagine coyotes too so I agree, they would be good at guarding livestock.

Although, I kid about my donkeys' strange sounds, they are huggable and loveable and I wouldn't trade them for the world.

$53.50 earned- Cashcrate

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