Mishmash Musings

I think I’ve mentioned a couple times before about how poorly my home is furnished. Neither my husband nor I really care too much about having nice furniture, so we usually just buy what we can afford — which means the cheap stuff.

But I think that trend might finally be starting to change. We bought a new couch last month to replace our old fake leather one that had duct tape holding it together. The new couch is actually pretty nice and easily qualifies as the most expensive piece of furniture we have. The next step for us now is to get a dining room set so we don’t have to eat our meals huddled around the coffee table in the living room.

I was browsing through some online stores today and saw some very nice dining room sets in the Century furniture Casa collection. I would love to get one of those, so hopefully I can talk my husband into shelling out some more money to improve our home!

I went out to lunch with my husband last week, and before we left, I took a quick walk through his office to say hi to some of his co-workers that I’m friends with. My husband has been working at the same company for 11 years, and I don’t think they’ve purchased a new piece of furniture for the offices in that entire time! Things are looking pretty shabby in there, which certainly isn’t the impression they should be giving to prospective clients. I think an upgrade is definitely in order over there.

For example, the desks that they’re using are ancient! The surfaces are scratched and scarred from years of wear and tear, and the desks in the room don’t even match each other. It looks like such a ragtag operation in there! They really need to look into getting some nice modern desks that will spruce the place up a bit.

I don’t know… I just can’t stand it when businesses don’t seem to care what kind of impression they make on customers. That should be one of their main concerns, especially when a good part of their bottom line revolves around sales!

A friend of ours runs a successful business that involves packaging and selling produce to area restaurants. He recently opened a brand new packaging plant after operating out of rented warehouse space for many years, which means that now his main offices and the plant are separated by a couple of miles. The distance is negligible in terms of travel time, but it’s very inconvenient in terms of communication.

So right now our friend is looking into intranet software to solve the bulk of his communication problems. An intranet setup is not just for large organizations anymore, so I think our friend is on the right track. After all, a company intranet would give his employees email, scheduling, and messaging capabilities while improving overall productivity.

I did some quick searching online and learned that Epazz.com is offering a 30-day free trial on their intranet software. This would be a great way for our friend to see how much of a difference a company intranet would make, and he’ll be able to make a more informed purchasing decision. He’ll know exactly what to expect from the software, which means there won’t be any surprises later.

If you find yourself in the same situation and think that intranet software could be the solution to your organization’s communication problems, contact Epazz to get started with a free trial.

I live in a 3-bedroom condo with my husband and son, and am finding it increasingly difficult to store all of our things neatly. We have a decided lack of closet/storage space, plus we buy new stuff all the time — with the result being that the whole place feels cluttered and messy.

Finding a storage solution is becoming more of a pressing issue now that my son is getting older and will need to use his room for his own stuff (right now I’ve got a bunch of my clothes in his closet because of lack of space).

We’ve tried buying shelves and containers and so forth, but that seems to be a temporary fix rather than a long-term solution because as soon as the shelves or containers get full, we’re right back where we started.

Anyway, my mom is pretty good at organizing things, so we’re going to go through everything together to see what we can do with the space issue. If that doesn’t work, we might need to call in a professional to come in and sort things out. I’m serious — this clutter is driving me nuts and I’ll pay someone to take care of it if I have to!!

These days, most people don’t even think twice about going into debt in order to buy something they want. Tired of your old car? No problem; just apply for financing and get a new one. Need a bigger house? Start shopping around for another mortgage, even though you’re less than 5 years into your current one. Want the latest laptop? Break out the credit cards and charge it. You get the idea.

Those are some of the more common reasons to go into debt, but you’d be surprised at other reasons people find to borrow money. These people are called debt-a-holics, and commonly take out personal loans to fund their crazy whims. The problem with that, of course, is that they then have to spend months — maybe even years — trying to pay off that debt. Some will borrow more money to do it, some will try to set up an IVA with creditors, and some will simply walk away from their obligations at the expense of their credit rating. In extreme cases, filing for bankruptcy might be the only viable option.

Obviously, none of those alternatives is particularly attractive, so I think you have to be very selective about what kinds of things you’re willing to go into debt for. To me, a house and maybe a college education are worth it; cars, vacations, and toys are not.

I’ve been on both sides of the fence here, so I know what it’s like to be in debt, as well as what it’s like not to owe anyone anything. Believe me, you definitely want to become part of the latter group!

That’s in reference to the baseball season — as in, I can’t wait for it to end! I can’t believe how bad both the Cubs and the Sox are doing this year. The Cubs are 25-32 and 6.5 games behing the NL Central-leading Milwaukee Brewers. The Sox are 26-29 and 8 games behind Cleveland in the AL Central. We expect the Cubs to be under .500, but the Sox??? They started the year with so much promise!

I know that 6.5 games and 8 games aren’t insurmountable leads, especially when we’re still in June, but I don’t expect either club to make a significant move in the standings any time soon. They’re both flawed in so many areas that they’re pretty far away from gaining ground.

Looks like Chicago baseball fans are in for yet another loooong summer.

Sigh. I spent another couple hours reading about the new WordPress 2.2 upgrade process and tried several more times to get the new software onto my site. But I’m still not having any luck. I read a bunch of troubleshooting articles and followed the step-by-step installation instructions pretty closely, so I really have no idea what the deal is. Good thing I’ve been making backups of the site all along because I completely nuked everything several times!!

Anyway, I’m giving up for now. I’ve got a couple of blogging friends who might be able to help me with this one, but as for now it’s quite clear that I can’t get through the upgrade on my own. What a waste of a Saturday night .

I spent about an hour trying to upgrade this blog from WordPress 2.0.5 (or something like that) to the latest stable release, which is 2.2. I followed the instructions and everything, but couldn’t get it to work. I finally just gave up and restored this blog from the backup files I made right before the attempt.

I have WordPress 2.2 over on my brand-new shopping blog, and like it a lot — particularly because it has an auto-save feature that I really need. I can’t tell you how many posts I’ve lost because I neglected to save them first!

I guess I’ll try to figure this out again tomorrow or something. I need a break for now….