If you are getting ready to plan a vacation my best advice to you is to plan it online using hughes net satellite internet. It is the greatest way to plan your vacation. I never have to talk to anyone. I use my sateiligh internet to get online and off I go to start booking my transportation. I decide if I will need a rental car, want to travel by train or bus. There are so many websites out there to plan air travel if you are going by airplane. Sometimes you will find great deals and promotions online on websites. If you would like to travel by train, make sure that you plan well in advance. Usually the tickets are cheaper a couple of months before you go. I also found out that if you wait until last minute, that you almost never get a ticket. If you travel by train it is kind of expensive, but it is really relaxing and yo can even get you own sleeper. You also may just decide to rent a car. Planning a driving vacation is awesome. You can go right online and get all your driving directions and resturants along the way. If you need a hotel, I recommend going directly to the website of the hotel that you want to stay at. Some hotels give AAA discounts, so keep that in mind if you are a AAA member.

I check my email at least 25 times a day. A little email giddy I know, but if I don’t, it piles up and I miss out on stuff. And I don’t like missing out on stuff!

Well, back to the dreaded virus. While I was going through the motions of having someone remove it and upgrade my windows, I lost the setup for my printer/scanner. The printer works but now I can’t scan and upload anything. I want a wireless scanner and printer anyway so I would not have to leave wherever I am at home to hook up to my printer. It’s a modern day pain but I am grateful for having such a nice printer that was a gift!

Recently, I was at the Wal-mart, better known as Wally World, and was looking around in their electronics department in search of a new printer with a scanner. I came across a very nice looking printer that was compact, matched my decor, and had all the bells and whistles but no price. I looked above , below, to the left and to the right but no price for this model. So, I loaded it up and rolled it over to the check out stand for a price check.

As I waited on the two customers ahead of me to complete their purchases, another sales associate came up to me and commented on the printer I had in the cart. I mentioned that I could not find a price and he instantly whipped out this hand gun thing-a-ma-jig and squeezed the trigger. Voila, the price was more than I cared to pay for it but it was amazing that I could get the info I needed that easily.

Being a gadget guru, I looked up the model of the scanner used at the store but couldn’t find it. I did find one quite similar to it: the ls4278

Now the mommies and primary shoppers of the world could use one of these that works on a universal bar coding system to identify the price of any and everything that is not listed as it should be!

Now to find the printer I want at the price I’m willing to pay. Believe me, I’m not holding my breath about finding it!

It will be one year in August since I lost my job to the failing economy. My last job search was in January 1999 and it took me two weeks to land a job but  today, employers have so many stages or hoops to jump through! For instance, one job I have applied for will take two months just to find out if I get to train for the job or not! Then an additional eight weeks to train before I know if I have the job or not.  That’s four months and no, this is not to work for the FBI or CIA either. No one told me it was gonna be like this..argh!

With all the gum shoeing I have been doing in search of a job, I am staying a bit fit and don’t see a need any time soon for the fat burner pill I was contemplating to buy to help shed a few pounds! Between the heat and exhaustion, I don’t have much of an appetite and the movement of climbing in and out of the car, walking in and out of offices, walking across parking lots, and up and down stairs is doing me a lot of good.

Until I receive a permanent offer, I will continue to beat the pavement in search of a new position!

I just moved from Atlanta to Charlotte. While it was just a few hours away, moving seemed like the biggest task I had ever taken on in my entire life. With a family of a husband and 4 children, it seemed the packing would never end. My husband and I tirelessly packed and packed, and packed some more.

I used the postal service’s Web site to change our address. That saved a trip to the post office, which left me with more time to pack! I also used the world wide web to get all the important information I would need about Charlotte, like the electric and water company! I was able to get these services established the day I arrived in Charlotte. While I was at the water company I saw an ad for ADT alarm systems Charlotte, and immediately called and had it installed.

I even used the Internet to let all of my friends know I was going to miss them with the help of my Myspace page. Everyone loved it! I am thankful for the Internet. It is so useful for someone who is moving!

When I moved from my small hometown in Tennessee to attend college at New York University, I knew I wouldn’t be in constant touch with my high school friends. But I never knew that I’d practically fall off the face of the earth in my hometown when I moved to Nevada after college and turn into more of a legend than a person people stayed in contact with.

The Internet wasn’t used nearly as much when I was 18 as it is today, so it wasn’t until a few years ago that I really used it to go about touching base with my old friends. I found many of them on Facebook and started catching up and talking to them on Facebook chat with my wild blue internet.

I also use my wildblue in NV to send my old best friend pictures of my kids that are especially cute that I don’t always put up in our Facebook photo albums. (I don’t want to be one of those moms that take over other people’s Facebook news feeds.)

Keeping in touch with these old childhood friends have also helped me stay connected to family that still live in Tennessee. I’m even planning on getting together with an old friend over the holidays next year while in town!

Greetings from the Southern traveling, newly cooking, product reviewing, student nursing, blog hosting, Tennessee native known as Earl’s Daughter! It’s been a rough seven to ten days up and down with virus monkeys tap dancing all in my hard drive. However, we persevered and now only have a couple of things to tweak.

My post today is in conjunction with my participation of this week’s Blog Bash hosted by Not Your Average Teen beginning tomorrow July 12th – MY BIRTHDAY- through July 15th. Sharing a little bit about CJ, yes that’s me, and the Earl’s Daughter blog.

I am the eldest of three siblings in which there are actually two Earl’s Daughters, my younger sister is the brat and Chef of the family. She graduated May 2009 from Johnson & Wales with an AD in Culinary Arts and a BS in Hospitality Management – But she cooks very little for us- Wah! My younger brother is the middle child however, he and I are considerably older than my sister so no middle child syndrome necessarily- I think.

I was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee and moved away briefly for school – I have a bit of Bear Cat blood pulsing through my veins! I am currently enrolled as a nursing student and find that this is not easy but challenging and enjoy the work so far.

In 2008, I began my blog as a private little journal, posting about random thoughts and family activities. Well, in November of 2009, I got curious enough to actually toggle the Blogger next blog button in the navigation bar at the top of my blog’s homepage and discovered that there was so much more to this medium of communication than just what I had to say at the time!

I have made so many friends blogging and have met many wonderful people online and in person. Additionally, as a writer and consumer I have grown through my experiences of product reviews and various editorial posts. When telling a story or giving a description of an item or activity, I want the reader to be able to envision the experience and be engaged while visiting Earl’s Daughter.

Recently, my life focus has come to include the desire to cook like many of my friends who are mothers and wives. Well, with such influence by the South’s greatest cooks, I was bound to be bitten by the cooking bug and have really enjoyed the small accomplishments I have made. So, I have incorporated this new love of cooking into my blog and truly find it rewarding. In addition to meals and market excursions, coupons, traveling, and product reviews are also a regular part of Earl’s Daughter as well.

Did you know that Earl is my father’s middle name? It’s also my younger brother’s as he is a junior, and his son’s middle name although he is not a junior. Earl is also the name my dad went by so I thought it a good title for my blog in his honor.

More so than my own blogging adventures, I enjoy visiting blogs I admire, new blogs I discover or are suggested, and learning about the lives of others who may or may not live near me. Coming across funny stories or supporting others via this format to raise awareness or funds to support a cause is always exciting and satisfying too. Blogging gives me the travel experience without the cost in the convenience of my home. I truly enjoy it.

Kitchen Chronicles

I look forward to Wednesdays for the weekly farmer’s market stand near my house. I have specific vendors for squash,herbs, breads, wheat flour, cabbages, and so on. Today, I was able to purchase some andouille sausage for my shrimp and grits dish I plan on making soon. However, I think I may make an andouille and potatoes dish I put together every now and then too.

This week, my herb lady did not get out and pick any so I returned home herb-less but quite happy with my other finds:

I wish there were more vendors available with eggs and more cheeses than what was there.

Now to find my pancake recipe…

Guest blog post from Taylor Ranko

Every home owner worries about what can happen to his home when away at work and he worries more when vacation time rolls around and the whole family may be traveling far away from home. Anything can happen. A fire could start, a pipe could burst or a burglar could ransack the place. Fortunately peace-of-mind can be had on a budget. I really like having an alarm system. The one thing I never fail to do is to set the New Jersey alarm equipment before I leave the house.

With us at work and the kids in school, the only ones home are our dogs. They are like members of the family so I really like it that there are smoke and carbon monoxide detectors as well as door and window sensors that are part of our home’s alarm system. Everything is connected to a 24-hour monitoring center that will call my cell phone as well as appropriate emergency personnel in the event something should happen.

The few bucks it costs us for the monthly monitoring service is well worth it. They are monitoring the detectors and sensors even when we are all asleep. It is like having someone actually there to protect us while we sleep. Then when vacation time rolls around I have a whole lot less stress since I know that someone is keeping an eye on our home while we are gone.

Introducing a child to the internet is not always something a parent looks forward to. I know for a fact that it can really nearly scare a parent to death. At least that is the way we felt when we introduced our youngest child to the proper use of the internet with our satellite internet Rogers Arkansas connection. We recently found good wildblue internet pricing, so we though now would be a good time to sign up for the internet so that our child could learn. She had been using the computers at schools to record the books she read since Kindergarten but, when she was ready to begin using the internet to research projects and papers for school it took some convincing for her parents to acquiesce.

Okay, so the direct tv satellite internet offers a vast supply of answers to everything relevant to school but we were cautious since this was our baby and why should she need the internet when the other children didn’t need it. Yes, she was a bit younger than the others and times had changed so we gave in and installed satellite internet in order to offer her the kind of education she would need in the world of today.

We also installed parental controls so that we would feel a little better when she was browsing the net for those school projects but we were also careful to watch over the process as well. We even told her that she would lose her computer privileges if we found that she had abused them. She knew we meant it.