Cheryl Beckham

There’s a grocery store in Europe that makes our little ’self-checkout’ lines look obsolete already.  In Germany, there’s a grocery store that you take your cell phone, scan the items with it that you put in your shopping cart and then when you get to the check out, your cell phone will display a bar code for everything you scanned total, the check out person scans that and you pay and out you go.

So it looks like we’re not only looking at advances in grocery shopping but also in cell phones.  At the check out, once you scan the payment bar code, you can pay by cash, credit card, debit card or fingerprint (after you have signed up for fingerprint shopping).  And the politicians wonder why we are falling behind the rest of the world where technology is concerned.

We certainly have become a very materialistic society and apparently many of us are considered hoarders. There is a big push for us to down size and organize all of the “stuff” that we are constantly bringing home. I have been in a few homes through out the years that I would consider to belong to hoarders, not a pleasant place to be. I can’t imagine living the way so many of these people do.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of stuff and I certainly could use a good down sizing. I’ve been wanting to gather up a good amount of stuff and have a yard sale for a few years, but yard sales are so much work that just the thought of holding one gets my stomach all in knots. I think what I really should do is to call a Houston Junk removal company and have them come and just take it all away in one full swoop. That way I don’t have to sort, fix, clean up, display, price and deal with nasty and rude customers for two days straight. And then when all is said and done there is always stuff left over that you have to deal with. What a pain.

Have you ever had a tarot reading? Last time we were in New Orleans we came across an older lady on the sidewalk in front of Jackson Square, with a lap table and deck of tarot cards. She only asked $10 for a reading, so I gave it a whirl.The positions of the 9-card life cycle tarot card spread take advantage of the properties of the magic number ‘9.’ That’s what I chose for her reading.

A reading of the 9-card spread provides a view of your past, present, and future at three depths

the body (unconscious)
mind (personality, ego) and
soul (higher power)
It was fun to watch the whole presentation and added some extra magical qualities to our evening in the French Quarter.

Christmas was made so totally easy for me this time around with the help and use of my handy dandy laptop. I did not have to go outside of the house for a single thing in order to find and purchase all of things that were necessary to make the house look good and all the people on my Christmas list happy campers.

I have never enjoyed going out shopping, I just don’t like crowds and the holidays always warrant crowds in every store in town. One of my favorite sites is now nomorerack.com so I wanted to make sure that my friends, family and all my other readers here on my blog know about it. They really have a great selection of products at wonderful prices to offer. The one thing that you need to know is that these are daily deals, you can go back the next day and find all new deals to check out, which I really enjoy, variety is the spice of life as they say. You never know what you will find unless you check in with them frequently. I’ve made it a habit to check this nomorerack site each afternoon before I even check my emails which works well for me.

This afternoon I found a great pair of Snow Bunny Winter Boots that I have been looking for to give my daughter for her birthday, which falls on Valentines day, only a month away, sigh…. These boots normally sell for over $35 every where else that I have found. At nomorerack.com I got them for only $15, that is way more to my liking, a 63% savings in nothing to ignore, you know what I’m saying here folks?

I found this unique and very user friendly site on Facebook. My sister actually uses it as well, but did she turn me onto it? Nope, had to find it myself while on Facebook LOL. I won’t hold it against here though, the holidays are always a crazy time for all of us, but we seem to always find the time to check Facebook at least once a day right?

I do the majority of my grocery shopping at our local Food Lion, they seem to have the cheapest prices for the items that I buy regularly. There is a few things that I can’t seem to get Food Lion to carry for me, so once in a while I will need to make a side trip to either Martins (owned by Giant and very expensive) or go to Wal-Mart, ugh, I’m not a big Wal-Mart fan and dread having to go there.

I have seen for the past month or so that Food Lion has a huge bin over flowing with brand new books at a discounted price and as much as I love to read, it takes a huge discount for me to purchase any book. I get most of my reading material from places that give them away or go to the used book store to find my bargains. The price of a brand new book is totally outrageous, I can’t even remember the last time I bought a book at full retail price.

But back to Food Lion’s book offering, today I had to make a mid week grocery run and I noticed that the book bin was almost empty, and they had a sign stating that the remaining books were being sold for 75% off of the already discounted price. With that being said, I stopped and took a look to see what was left over and was glad to find two new hard covered books that needed to come home with me and only paid $1.50 for each one, and I’m pleased with my purchase and will go back again on Friday and take another look see.