Did you know that over 5000 people pick up and move to Las Vegas every single month? I never realized that that many people moved there each month. That’s amazing. Well, I guess everyone is moving there since there are so many opportunities for people in Vegas and because it’s probably a fun place to live.

The Las Vegas real estate must just be booming with everyone renting or purchasing homes. I know a few people who have moved to Las Vegas but they never really said much about having any difficulty finding a home or whether it was really expensive or not. That’s probably a good sign that there are a lot of places available in a range of prices I guess.

Changing a light bulb in Birmingham is getting expensive - the cost is now over 90,000 pounds. News that a council street and traffic lights engineer received 91,000 pounds for 2005/2006 including overtime bonuses, even though he was off sick, caused an uproar. Apparently the average pay in Britain is about 23,000 pounds a year.

Birmingham City Council’s Alan Rudge said he intended to stamp out the practice of workers getting bloated pay packets. Earlier this month, Birmingham council came under fire when news leaked that some road workers, whose job was to paint white lines on the city’s streets, earned 1,000 pounds a week.

Wow, maybe I should move to Birmingham England and get a job working for the city?

I’ve had quite the day! Earlier today we had a cable company technician here for three, yes three hours! We had to call the company the other night because we noticed that some of the shows were were taping or just plain watching were getting digital interference. Sometimes it was so bad that the picture totally pixilated and you couldn’t tell what the actors were saying. It was terrible.

Ever since we moved here we’ve had problems with the signal. Apparently the cabling or equipment in our area is very old and that results in the houses in the area getting poor cable and even internet signals. They’ve known about the problem for several years now. This is not the first time we’ve had a tech here for two, three or even four hours trying to fix the problem or at least manipulate the equipment enough to get a slightly better signal. This is starting to make my stomach Churn, I’m so frustrated.

I swear earlier today we were thinking about switching to satellite TV instead. I figure that’s got it’s own particular set of problems though so I’ll wait a while and see how the work that was done today works out.

Are you a Do It your Self type of person? We are. We’ve been busy renovating our home since the very first day we moved in, I guess you’d call it a remodeling job. We got a lot done in the first year, but we’ve slowed down over the last two or three years. The last project that we finished together was the installation of a sunroof on our enclosed front porch. We did that so that a little bit more light might come into our living room since the front of our house where the living room is faces North.

It’s really saved us a lot of money by doing things ourselves. Of course we haven’t always known exactly what to do. I think our friends who are contractors and construction workers are sick of hearing from us because we’re always asking them- how do we do this, how do we do that? Or else we are researching techniques on the internet.

If you are like us - a DIY type person you might be interested in visiting this great site that I just found. It has a ton of information on home repairs. I only wish that we’d discovered this site a few years ago. It would have really helped us out.

I know it’s going to help us with the projects that we started a while back and haven’t finished yet, and also for the projects that we hope to start in the next few years such as redoing our kitchen and our basement too. Those will be big jobs.

This site is full of helpful tips for the DIY type of person whether you be a renter as we once were, or a home owner. There’s even tips for automobile owners there too. There are several categories to choose from such as carpentry, cleaning, decks, painting and flooring just to name a few.

Oh yes I also wanted to tell you that while I was visiting the Handy Household Hints site I discovered that they are having a $50,000 Extreme Home Makeover Contest. Naturally I entered. I’m a DIY renovator but I’m not stupid. If your home could use a makeover you might be interested in entering too.