My parents are getting to that age where they are considering retirement.  Since they live in a busy city, they have been looking for a quiet place to retire.

My father’s best friend Robin, just bought some Asheville real estate a short time ago.  He just retired, and he loves his new place.  He suggested to my father to look at Asheville Condos and the prices were down at the moment.

I showed my parents that they could use a search engine and type in "real estate for sale Asheville" to find properties that are on the market.  I suggested that they could find the ones they liked and then contact a realtor down there over the phone to discuss the details.

It will be interesting to see what they come up with.  I know my father misses his best friend terrible, so I won’t be surprised if they settle down in Asheville.

I did not know that such a thing as organic baby clothes existed until my daughter-in-law decided to use them for my grandson. I was quite appalled at the notion, as I think the whole “organic” era is just a ploy to gouge innocent, naive people into spending tons of money where it is not necessary.

My children certainly didn’t wear organic baby clothing and they all turned out just fine. They also drank water from the garden hose and rode their bicycles without helmets. I really don’t think we are doing kids a favor these days by trying to overprotect them.

When I found out that Spencer also slept with organic baby bedding, I almost lost it. The prices of these things is crazy and people are being scammed. Basically organic clothing contains no bleaches or chemicals. You would think they should be cheaper, as they have less added to them. I don’t know anymore, but I have to bite my tongue way too often.

I own a small pharmacy in a small town and I have recently started purchasing my stock online. We specialize in antidepressants, as the clinic in our town specializes in mental health and we get a lot of out of town patients. I like to keep stock on hand, giving them the opportunity to purchase from me, at a lower price rather than take their prescriptions back into the city.

I started by only purchasing Zoloft online, as it seems to be the drug of choice prescribed by the local doctor. This seemed to be going well, so I thought I would look into expanding and purchasing other drugs this way, as well.

I started ordering generic Paxil, as this would be much less costly to the patient and was easy to order and have in stock. I was happy with the service I was receiving with this particular company, so I thought I would try some more.

The last thing I did was buy Prozac from them. I was again happy with the service and my customers were really happy with the prices I was offering them. I decided from now on that I would order everything through them.

I am the proud mother of a talented preschooler and I recently got the great opportunity of redoing to whole décor of his classroom. I think the make-over was such a wonderful thing and the classroom has never looked better.

We started by replacing all of the carpets with new Italian tile flooring. As we can’t have the children sitting on the hard floor, I ordered a great selection of small round rugs to match the new classroom motifs. They are perfect for the kids and we have had great responses on them.

We constructed a new closet for the kid’s backpacks, and while still being very accessible, are less visible. It opens up the classroom more, as there is a lot less clutter. It makes the classroom much brighter and it looks more organized.

I must say, my team did a wonderful job. I rewarded each of the moms who helped with a selection of trendy handbags and fleece jackets for the dads that I had procured for a very good deal during the whole renovation process. I am going to be very sad to see the end of this room next year, when my son changes classrooms.

I went over to my grandmother’s house the other day to visit.  She is getting old (about 85 now) but her mind is all there.  In fact, she has taken it upon herself to learn how to use a computer and has been learning on her own.

I am very proud of her because most of her friends wouldn’t even touch a computer.  She has actually tried to get some of her neighbors in her condo complex to try out her computer, but most of them show no interest.

Her learning curve has been steep but she has been up to the challenge.  She has shown me the many things that she has done and tried out on her computer.  While at her house to have coffee she shared her latest computer learning adventure.

You see, she told me that she was getting a weird popup each time she started her machine telling her that she had a registry error.  Not knowing what it was, she searched online for the best registry repair tools.  She found a couple of products and printed out reviews about those products.

In between knitting mittens she read the Regcure review and the Registry Easy review (she showed me the printouts).  She told me that she made her decision based on the reviews and purchased the Registry Easy software for her machine.

She even managed to show me how she did it on her computer and I was impressed.  If the software is so easy that my grandmother can fix her own computer, it must be good.  I think I might have to buy it for myself.

The last time I was in Spain, I was traveling with my buddy and we were fresh out of high school. We did the whole cliché backpacking trip and it was great, but not valuable for planning future holiday rentals in Spain. I am planning my second trip there now and this time my “buddy” happens to be the love of my life. She does not know that we are going and I am hoping that on this trip, she will agree to spend the rest of her life with me.

We are starting the trip by meeting and staying with one of the families that took us in when I went five years ago. From there we are going to go into town to the business that does Motorhome rentals and we are going to drive, leisurely,  for three days until we reach Barcelona.

I have a couple of different villa rentals lined up for us there and I plan on popping the question on the balcony of one of them under the stars. This trip is going to be so amazing for her as she has never traveled out of the country before. She deserves it and I want to give her these kinds of surprises forever.

Yesterday I wrote about how I love free traffic.  I mean, traffic from search engines can be so targeted and be the result of your hard website promotion.  Many different methods exist on how you can promote your site, but for myself, I have had very good success using web directories.

If you went back a couple of years, my marketing efforts were primarily free directory submissions.  Back then, I had the time to sit at the computer (sometimes till early in the morning) and just submit my sites.  Now this hard work paid off over and over again, but now my lifestyle is much different: it is busier.

A busier life means less time to devote to promoting my sites.  So instead of doing it myself, I have taken advantage of a directory submission service that does all the grunt work for me.  I still have to come up with the titles and descriptions for my listings, but they take care of submitting my site to the free directories.

If I could do it all over again, I don’t think that I would have done the manual submissions.  With all the time that paying someone to do it for you frees up, I could have spent my time making many more websites and have had more money flowing into my pocket.

I find it funny that so many people say that you can get nothing for free.  I beg to differ.  I have received many free things such as free samples, free air (yes that air you breathe), and lately free traffic.  How did I get free traffic to my websites?  Let me tell you how.

I have always set a bit of my time each day aside to promote my websites.  I would add them to a links directory or two, and wait patiently till the links were approved.  Quite often, I would have to wait six months or more to see results, but eventually they would come.  While looking for a review website that would tell me which general directory was better than the other, I came across the mother-load of free website promotion.

The site I came across has everything a new and experienced directory marketer needs: 8000 web directory listings.  Conveniently sorted in paid and free directories, you have a guide that lays out where you should be spending your marketing time.

Do I use it?

You bet.  Sure I use directory submission services a bit more than I used to, but if I am low on cash, I tend to use their list.  Where else are you going to find a place that gives you 8000 links (spam free)?

I was out for lunch yesterday with my best friend, who is an investment advisor.  We have been friends for over fifteen years (yes I don’t remember how long - I am a boy after all) and I trust what he tells me.  He has been an invaluable sound board for my investing ideas and keeps me grounded in reality.

Well, the reason we went out for lunch was to discuss one of the latest investment programs I was considering.  I had found out about it while looking for ways to make money online - and I needed to know if it was a good idea or not.

You may be familiar with what I found, but it was a high yield investment program (HYIP).  They promised that I could make at least half a percent return on my money per day - that works out to 15% per month.  Some alarms went off in my head since my mutual funds only made 10% for the whole year last year.

So I had brought my laptop and showed David the site.  He looked through it, and gave me his honest advice.  He told me that the one I came across was not as good of a deal as I thought, but he showed me another HYIP that he was invested in that has been paying out for a couple of years. 

Taking his advice, I have put just $100 into the program.  When I see how it does, I may put more in there, but I will do what he says: I won’t put all my money in an HYIP, because that would be crazy (did you notice it rhymes?).

Alright, I’ll admit it: I love my iPod Video.  How can I not?  It holds so many songs, and movies to watch at lunch, and even some pictures of my dog.  It is my constant companion since giving up my CD player just one short year ago.

I also love the expandability of iPod.  In my case there are hundreds of different iPod Video accessories available for purchase: everything from custom cases, to crazy home theaters with iPod docks.  Personally, I just have and FM transmitter for iPod and a travel charger - that’s it.

The only problem I have ever had with it is when I first bought it, I had problems initiating an iPod to computer transfer.  I was able to get it sorted out after talking to their online phone support.  It was just a bad install of iTunes that I was able to fix.

I wonder how I survived before iPod - it seems like that was so long ago.