My current piece at MSN Money won’t show up in the RSS feed. That’s because it’s a slide show rather than a column.
“$9 airfare and 9 other travel hacks” offers the skinny on things like “news flash” alerts (e.g., a $9 flight from Boston to New York), ways to get a free flop anywhere from Anchorage to Amsterdam, and how to spend just $1 to journey from Washington, D.C. to Philadelphia.
Earlier this week I went hiking with my niece and her two boys. On the way to the trail another hiker told us to be alert: Bears had recently been seen in the area.
We can now attest that the bears are still in the area.
Melissa Allison was the one whom the random number generator loved best this week. She gets the $20 Amazon gift card. Everyone else gets to try again on Friday.
My first week here has been fun: Little sleep, but plenty of family, friends and food. The weekend was given to attending (and recovering from) a reunion of current and former women of the Anchorage Daily News in picturesque Hope, Alaska. This was a great group of kickass wimmen, and of course the food was major.
Oh, and yesterday my niece and her boys and I ran into a couple of bears while hiking.
I never cared much for yogurt. It generally seemed too sour to me, unless it was turned into tzatziki sauce on a gyro sandwich.
Apparently I just never had the right kind of yogurt.
I’d heard that the homemade version was better than the commercial kind. I’d also read about people making yogurt in a slow cooker. After looking online for instructions I settled on a slight variation of the process described at A Year of Slow Cooking.
And then I improved on it.
I can remember my grandfather grousing about the price of cigarettes. He swore he would quit when it went up past 35 cents a pack.
It did, and he did.
Now I know how he felt, although my particular vice is brown and fizzy and gives me reward points. At an Anchorage supermarket I was shocked to find Diet Coke selling for $8.19 per 12-pack. Thank goodness there’s no sales tax here.
That works out to 68 cents a can. It won’t break the bank. But really? More than eight dollars for a 12-pack? For something that I can’t even get drunk off of?
I love animals, but I don’t want any pets. It’s probably because I don’t want to be responsible for another living being.
Or to be responsible for torturing another living being.
If so, ask South County Girl — she has an extra ticket, now that she’s been declared the winner of the AMC movie giveaway.
It’s a little nervous-making to get a letter from the Internal Revenue Service. My first reaction is always, OMG I’m being audited.
Nope. “We changed your 2010 Form 1040 to match our record of your estimated tax payments, credits applied from another year, and/or payments received with an extension to file,” the letter read. “As a result, you are due a refund of $1.”
Some people might think, “A buck? Not worth the gas to take it to the bank.”
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 50 million people in this country are “food insecure,” i.e., they do not have regular access to adequate nutrition. More than 17 million of them are children.
You can help, at least a little.
I wish I had unlimited prizes so that everyone could be a winner. I don’t. Is it too corny to say I think you’re all winners?
(It is? Well, too late. I just said it.)
Here’s how the first-anniversary giveaway turned out: