Today, choosymom and I spent about half of the day trying to locate a pipe fitting for the water supply of our icemaker. After visiting a hardware store, plumbing store, and the local Wal-Mart, we finally managed to "engineer" a solution.  read more »

The Chick-Fil-A restaurant chain came up with an ingenious product marketing campaign for their tasty chicken sandwiches - an image of a cow holding up a hand-painted sign that reads, "Eat Mor Chikin". Instead of having chickens (whose flesh you are consuming) advertise themselves as food, you get a cow promoting the chicken as food, so as not to become burger fodder himself. Finally, we have a restaurant chain that understands the internal conflict behind selecting a cartoon animal mascot to represent the same animal product being eaten.  read more »

For dinner, I took the kids to a buffet near the hotel. Since we only have one vehicle and Choosymom needed it for work, I had to find a place within walking distance from the hotel. Honestly, I haven't eaten at a buffet like that in a very long time. And it wasn't very good. The building was old, with missing panels in the drop ceiling and this annoying vibrating air unit. The food was typical geriatric buffet fare - very bland, lots of old stand-byes like mashed potatoes, roast beef, fried chicken, carrots and corn. They had good-looking ribs, but they were almost as chewy as beef jerky.  read more »

Yesterday, we spent most of the day indoors. Sundays are generally reserved as "family days" in our household, as they are the only day that we are all guaranteed to have off - from school and work. We usually try to take short roadtrips or do some sort of outdoor activity with the kids. We were feeling a little sleepy, though, so choosymom and I had a nap in the afternoon and then spent some time going through old boxes and storage items. The kids watched old movies.  read more »

Although I tried to prepare myself for the sticker-shock, I am always amazed at how expensive everything is when we visit Disney World. A sweatshirt for the kids will run $45. A t-shirt is $20. Mickey ears were about $13. Nearly every sit-down restaurant in the park will cost you $25 per entree - even for Mexican food! Bottled water was probably our biggest recurring expense, as we were feeling dehydrated and dried out from all of the air conditioning.  read more »

Our road trip hadn't kicked off until late in the afternoon, well after lunchtime, so by the time we had arrived in the city and made our first return, it was nearing time for dinner. As we had made our way into town, there were all kinds of interesting mom-and-pop type restaurants on the outskirts and I had made several mental notes as to where we might eat once we had finished some of our shopping. Unfortunately, all of the big retail stores that we had to stop at were quite a distance from the edge of town, and I didn't feel like driving back through the traffic to get to them.  read more »