I am so lucky to still have my job.  They laid off one of us at the Verizon store and that only leaves five of us so we are having to take turns working alone during the slow hours which is the mornings through the week.  We usually have at least three of us on Friday evenings and Saturday all day.  Those are the busiest times for us.  We have seen people coming in and cutting their packages to lower minutes to try and save money.

To save money myself, I have done away with my home phone and my Internet.  I only have my cell phone and switched to mobile broadband which saves me about $50 a month.  I’m even switching from my local cable company and going with Direct TV.  They have some great specials an I can get more channels for less than I am paying for less channels with my cable.  Every little bit helps.

I just finished reading a story about a young couple in New Zealand. It seems they have had a tough time the last few years. Well as the story goes:

A “nagging” wife who pushed her husband to buy a lottery ticket helped scoop the $4.2 million ($7.7 million New Zealand dollar) first prize — with only minutes to spare. The man from New Zealand’s biggest city, Auckland, bought his ticket just two minutes before ticket sales closed Saturday night.

“My wife had been nagging me all week to get a ticket, so I when saw the Lotto sign … I sprinted in to get the ticket before they closed,” said the man, who asked not to be identified — normal practice among lottery winners in New Zealand.

Now wouldn’t it be nice to have a wife nag you to buy a ticket instead of griping at you for buying a ticket. Still, I wonder if the money will help or only make matters worse. That’s usually what happens. The money makes them crazier than they were when they had no money. I have also seen many times when there is sudden wealth, within a few years, they owe so much on taxes and payments that they lose everything and end up worse off than before they won the money. I hope this young couple does better, not worse.

A couple of my friends are really into shooting paintball. They have invited me to come along several times but I never seemed to have the time until this weekend. I knew absolutely nothing about what kind of paintball gun was a good one much less which one was the best. Boy did I learn a lot from them.

Mark has a Tippmann A-5 and Chelsea has a Tippmann 98 Custom. Both are pretty neat weapons but I saw someone with another weapon I liked better. He told me it was a Spyder Pilot. He said he had a used Smart Parts Ion he would sell me if I wanted to get into paintball with my buddies and that way I could decide if I wanted to put more into a different weapon.

I checked out this web site and found all kinds of gear for paintball. I now have a rather long wish list of things I’m asking for next year for Christmas and they can find all of it at ultimatepaintball.com.

I really enjoy blogging. It gives me a creative outlet I wouldn’t otherwise have. But to have a blog, you need a good web host. Web Hosting comes in a lot of different forms just like most everything. If you’re not sure about which ones are good and which ones aren’t, you need to do some homework. This site breaks it all down for you.

This site, webhostingreport.com has a really good article for people that are just starting out and need to learn more about web hosts. I had to do my homework too and would have loved to have known about this site. It sure would have saved me a lot of time. They have the hosts listed from best to cheapest to whatever you’re in need of.  That’s where I learned what I needed to do to get this site up and running.

When I was in college, I had a part time job at a hot dog fast food restaurant.  Between full time college and part time work, come the weekend, I was exhausted.  Well one Sunday morning I decided to sleep in.  My grandmother and tried to wake me up several times but I didn’t hear her at all.  I was dreaming.  What I was dreaming was that I was making a ‘Weiner King Special’.  On that particular hot dog you put mustard, onions, cheese sauce, chili and Cole slaw.  Now you have to just slap the fixing’s on the hot dogs because usually there’s a pretty long line waiting on their food.   Now remember I’m dreaming and my grandmother is trying to get me out of bed.

Back to the dream……..I have put the hot dog in the bun, slapped a little mustard on the dog, onions, cheese sauce and chili.  Now I’m ready to slap the Cole slaw on the hot dog and at that point, my grandmother pulls the pillow out from under my head.  In my dream, I missed the hot dog and threw Cole slaw everywhere.  I looked up at my grandmother and said ‘Oh man, I made a mess.’  At that point, my grandmother is looking at me like I have lost my mind but when I told her what I had been dreaming; she had to sit down on my bed to keep from falling on the floor she was laughing at me so hard.   After that, I was so afraid I was going to miss the hot dog the next time I made a ‘Weiner King Special’ it wasn’t funny.