Termination dust.

by

Termination dust.Today dawned a typical September day: gray and foreboding. The sky was the color of a galvanized trashcan and the air tinged with a chill that whispered of summer’s end.

When the clouds lifted a bit I saw termination dust sprinkled on the Chugach Mountains. That’s the local parlance for the season’s first snow. The tail-end of the tourist trade clucks and points, taking numerous pictures of the shining whiteness while buttoning coats up to their chins.

Residents pretend they don’t care, but it can drive a little shiver into your day. Sure, the snow is still way up there. But we know it’ll make its way down to the flats fairly soon.

Even DF, who’s pretty cheerful about everything and a skier to boot, gets a little glum at the prospect. In fact, he sings about it (to the tune of Chopin’s Funeral March): 

Woke up this morning, looked out the door and cussed:

There on the mountains — behold! the whitish crust.

Termination dust. Summer is a bust.

Hate facing winter again, and yet I must.

That made me laugh. I needed to laugh: Termination dust showed up on the very day that I got terminated.

Read more

College: A great place to have your identity stolen.

by

College: A great place to have your identity stolen. I got my university degree in 2009. During my years of higher education students in the library regularly asked me to watch their belongings while they went to the bathroom.

If I’d been at all light-fingered I could have scored some awfully nice phones, laptops and whatever was in their backpacks.

Given how much info is stored on smartphones, I might also have been able to do a little banking or shopping.

So believe me when I say that your college-age kid is at serious risk for identity theft. Believe the experts, too, because they say that Junior or Sister make perfect targets.

He’s excited to be back in school/in school for the first time. She tends to be a little too trusting of her new best friends (and all the other strangers who wander in and out of the dorms).

She may leave a loan application lying on the desk, or  neglect to lock the door when she heads down the hall for a shower. He may apply for a credit card at one of those tables in the quad, without thinking about who might be looking over his shoulder to memorize his Social Security number.

Worst of all, college students have little or no credit history. Not only are they the perfect blank slates for identity thieves, they’re a lot less likely to monitor their credit – after all, they don’t have cards.

That they know of, anyway – someone else might have gotten cards in their names and used them with abandon.

Read more

Need a reason to save? Here’s a $10,000 reason.

by

Donna-FreedmanSeptember is National Coupon Month, and Valpak and Savings.com are sponsoring a campaign called “10,000 Reasons to Save.”

The idea is to highlight the “tangible, long-term impact” that coupons can have on our lives.

Coupons have made a major difference in my life, especially when I was a broke single mother and a broke middle-aged college student. Maybe they’ve made a big impact in your life, too – and if so, you can share your story for a chance to win up to $10,000.

That would be a pretty big impact, too. 

The Reasons to Save website invites readers to contribute short essays (250 to 500 words) about their specific reason to save – buy a house? have a baby? put an existing baby through college one day? – and how smart coupon use could support that long-term goal.

Read more

9 frugal mood enhancers.

by

9 frugal mood enhancers.Autumn is coming, sooner than I’d like to acknowledge. Although the days are still mild (50 to 60 degrees) the angle of the sun has changed, making its rays seem tentative and transitory. That is, when the sun can be seen – it’s been raining a lot, too.

Where you live might still feel summery right now, but you know the change in seasons is coming. Those of you who live in places where the seasons don’t alter that much can go ahead and feel supremely lucky, or downright smug if you like. The rest of us will come up with such coping mechanisms as are necessary to get us through the transition.

Or through the season itself: Winter can be challenging both physically and emotionally. I’ll be pulling out the seasonal affective disorder light box eventually. Right now we’re leaning on a handful of things that make us feel better and don’t cost very much. In fact, some of them cost nothing at all.

Read more

The Coffeehouse Cliche giveaway.

by

51HixOXuQXL._AA200_As summer slips away we prepare to move more of our lives indoors. That is, unless we’re clever enough to live somewhere that’s temperate year-round.

Warm interiors. Hot drinks. Burning inspiration.

If you were ever going to write poetry, plays, short stories or the Great American Novel, you’re a lot less likely to do it when the weather is fine. No, fall and winter is when we head indoors and think deep thoughts.

(Or watch televised sports or “The Walking Dead,” or indulge in whatever nerdy pastimes make us happy.)

This week’s giveaway will give you two tools of the trade, or rather the accoutrements of the affected: a notebook and some coffeehouse scrip.

Read more

Let your geek flag fly.

by

thMy friend Linda B. is a major genre fangirl. There was a time when she could be spotted at MediaWest conferences, dressed as a middle-aged Corellian spice trader* and participating in blaster battles all over the conference hotels.

She and other fellow geeks would see plays and skits, admire others’ costumes, buy fan fiction (including some rather startling “slash” fiction) and, yeah, shoot at one another.

She and several other middle-aged women would share hotel rooms and at some point conduct readings of abysmally written fan fiction. A particular “Star Wars” story always brought the house down with the line, “Han spurted into the room.”

Good times, despite the expense of traveling from Alaska to Lansing and the “con crud” that she always seemed to catch.

These days she’s staying closer to home – working, writing plays, making jewelry and doing free-form bead weaving – but she’s still a geek. Or maybe she’s a nerd. Probably both.

Either way she’s a fangirl, which is how she came to send me the link to this Wil Wheaton video, “Why it’s awesome to be a nerd.” This is the kind of thing that slips over her transom on a regular basis, along with things like song parodies based on characters from “The X-Files” or news about the latest Doctor to play “Dr. Who.”

Read more

Jean Chatzky wants to school you on finances.

by

XSmallWant to take charge of your debt, your spending, your retirement or some other aspect of your finances? Maybe it’s time to go back to school.

Jean Chatzky’s “Money School” opens Sept. 10 – and since friends don’t let friends pay retail, I can offer you a discount code.

The financial editor for NBC’s “Today” show and the author of eight books, Chatzky will teach half a dozen virtual personal finance classes in real time (more on that in a minute).

You can choose one or two or take all six for an additional discount. Bonus: You won’t have to worry about mean kids who slam you into lockers or steal your lunch money.

What’s on the syllabus? So glad you asked.

Read more

Sucre shock: Sweet treats from New Orleans.

by

choc_nola15_9Remember those gorgeous French macarons I gave away a few months ago? The sponsor of that offer, the Sucré Sweet Boutiques and Confection Studio of New Orleans, is at it again.

No, it’s not a king cake (even though that’s a specialty confection often associated with New Orleans). This time around the giveaway is in the universal language: chocolate.

Not just any chocolate, either: Sucré is giving away a 15-piece New Orleans Chocolate Collection.  

Read more

Silliness to be savored.

by

thEvery so often I get an e-mail about the “Mensa Invitational,” a word game hosted by The Washington Post. It asks readers to make up new words by adding or subtracting a letter from an existing word.

A few examples:

Foreploy: Misrepresenting yourself for the purposes of obtaining sex.

Intaxication: The euphoria that accompanies an income tax rebate (which lasts only until you realize that this was your money to begin with).

Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic humor and the person who doesn’t get it.

Glibido: All talk, no action.

Pretty clever, huh? The only problem with the Mensa Invitational is that it doesn’t exist. (Yet another reason to stop blindly forwarding every e-mail you get.)

Read more