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Temperatures rising

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It’s the strangest thing. Early Thursday morning it was -20 Celsius outside. That’s pretty darn cold. No more snow but what’s out there certainly wasn’t going to melt any time soon, or so I thought.

Now, it’s 1:30 in the morning and I’ve been watching the temperature rise throughout the day. It’s -9 Celsius. It looks like it’s going to be warmer over the next three or four days.

It probably won’t be warm enough to melt all that snow but it should be warm enough to get outside and clean up the driveway a bit better. The snow plows made a mess of the entrance to our driveway since one of our neighbors cars was parked in front of the neighbors house the night of the snow storm. When the street plows went by they had to miss the car and this left a wide path of snow in front of our driveway.

So, unless the plows come by again to move the snow over a bit more- hopefully when the neighbors car isn’t parked there, we still need to clean out the opening to our driveway a bit better. Oh, we did shovel. We can get in and out, but it’s still a mess that stretches about ten feet out into the roadway – thanks to the neighbors car.

How did everyone else do after the snow storms?






Bad Credit? Learn how to repair your credit rating

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For those of you who are consistently short on funds, perhaps living from paycheck to paycheck, have you noticed that this time of year always seems to be the hardest to get through?

I think that because of all the spending many of us feel obligated to do over the holidays we run up our bills and when they come due in January and February we find that we are short.

We’ve been lucky in that we’ve managed to stay on top of our bills for the last few years, even with me home sick for more than a year. I’m really not sure how we are doing it, particularly when I think back ten years or so, when both of us were working good jobs yet struggled to make ends met. I guess we were living higher than our means back then.

I’ve written before on this site and on one of my other blogs that I’ve had credit problems in the past. When I began my Jewelry business in the late 80’s the expenses ate all of my savings and I not only ran my own company but worked three other jobs on the side to try to pay all of the bills. I even got a room mate in my tiny junior one bedroom apartment.

Still, no matter how hard I worked, the bills were piling up and I was using my credit cards to pay for groceries and toiletry items. When I look back I still feel that I was in a sad state with all my bills.

Naturally, even though I was paying for things with my credit cards that didn’t mean that I could actually pay off the credit card bill each month and it didn’t take long before my credit rating took a nose dive as well.

I never did end up using a Bad Credit Repair service to fix my credit problems. I should have though, because my credit rating would have been better so much earlier than it was. I suppose that if in the early 90’s the internet was what it is today I might have gone looking for information that would have helped me get out of the situation I was in.

Certainly I would have learned something from reading articles such as “Credit Card Bill Consolidation” over at Creditloan.com.

There is a lot of great information on that site about mortgages, credit and loans. If you want to learn more about how to manage your finances better you really should pop over there and start reading some of the great articles.

New Map makes it easy to find the best schools in Florida

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I think it’s almost universal that when people are moving into an area they want to live in safe neighborhoods. Not only that, people also search for areas with good hospitals and great schools for their children to attend.

Luckily for those who choose to live in the State of Florida schools are graded there, with the best schools being given an A and the worst and F. Did you know that there area neighborhoods with great schools in Ponte Vedra beach, Jacksonville and St. Johns County?

RE/MAX real estate agent, Krista Fracke, is often asked by her clients which neighborhoods have the best schools. That’s why she has put a page on her site that as of today, will allow home buyers across the state of Florida to display a Google map that shows all of the public schools in the county in which they wish to purchase real estate. The new map will show the FCAT scores for these schools for the past 5 years.

The Schools grades are color coded so that home buyers can easily identify neighborhoods with the best schools. Just click on a Florida county that you wish to see and the map will center on that area. Once you are looking at the county that you are interested in purchasing a home you’ll noticed that the schools are color marked to indicate the grade that they received in the last year. By clicking on a schools color marker you’ll be able to see the grades that the school has achieved in the last five years as well as the schools full name.

I think that this is a great idea and I only wish that a page like this was available for all areas across North America.

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