Amy Currioman

My dear sister is in a big mess.  She is trying to refinance her house because the interest rates are so low, and she really needs to lower her monthly payments.  Her husband was badly injured in a car accident eighteen months ago and has been unable to work since then.  He has not been able to collect any kind of disability or sick pay since the accident, so the entire family is dependent on my sister to support them.  At the time of the accident my sister had been looking for a new job to help make ends meet because even though her husband was working full time, his paycheck just wasn’t quite enough. 

She had been looking for a job for about six months prior to the accident and she was not having any luck at all.  She has a bachelor’s degree in business administration, and all of the local businesses have been telling her that she is “over qualified” for the jobs that they have in the area.  So she finally got hired part time as a substitute school bus driver simply because the school board was so desperate for drivers that they don’t care about college education – just a high school diploma, a CDL and good driving record.  Ironically, the day she took and passed her CDL test was the same day that her hubby had his accident!

So she has been working as many hours as she can doing that, but has also been looking for another job as well.  In order to survive, they have been leaning heavily on their credit cards.  Even though they have been keeping up with all of their credit card payments and mortgage payments, with the financial crunch going on during this recession has caused many of the credit card companies to cancel a lot of their cards.  This has badly affected their credit score, and it is now making it difficult for my sister to get any kind of credit loan.  Going to refinance her house, the mortgage company says that in order to take into account her part time jobs she has to have been working there for at least two years.  The poor girl just can’t catch a break!

Well my sister’s on the road again. She’s been in the home office and stayed home for the past three weeks, but now she has to travel again. She says it’s really weird that she’s been traveling so much that being at home now is like being in a foreign country! She’s traveled so much this past year that even though she misses being at home, when she is home it doesn’t FEEL like home! That must really be weird!

Anyhow, she’s not going far this time, and not for very long. She has a three day conference in Dallas and it’s not going to be too much travel around the city, she will be staying in the same hotel as the conference. She says she will probably not even leave the hotel the whole time she is there. She is working on writing a new book, which keeps her on the laptop all night, not much anything else needed as long as there is room service.

I wish she would start taking more pictures and perhaps come out with a random picture travel blog. It’s amazing how you can spend years in a city and never even know what it really looks like out there in the rest of the world. Of course spending years out on the road, you can fall into the trap of not really knowing what it is really like in the city. Isn’t it amazing what we all get used to dealing with and accept as our surroundings? If we all only had the time to explore more, we might find that the places we deal with regularly could be so much more.

I wish I could claim this photo as mine, but it was found at another blog, from a guy that is truly seeing the road… on a motorcycle and taking some great pictures of places that seem unreal to many who don’t get out of suburbia purgatory.

My cousin has been talking about going to Cyprus for a couple of week vacation. She had read a blog about traveling around Europe and decided that she would love to arrange for a car rental and travel around Europe.  This is something she’s been wanting to do ever since she was in college, and she thinks that now is a good time to do it.  She has invited me to join her on her vacation.  She’s going to fly there and then arrange for a car hire cyprus company to fix her up with a car.  Cyprus is a beautiful place, and I’d really like to join her on her trip.  I’m just not sure that we can afford it right now!  I’ll have to do some more research on Cyprus and see what activities there are that I would like to do.  I’d love to get a taste of their culture, and watch some folk dances!

Read an article that was posted at the worpal Random thoughts blog, describing how easy it is to set up a podcast or internet webcast today. Technology has been taken pretty far, and is enabling almost anyone from anywhere to broadcast and share thoughts via blogs. I think that the audio and video netcasting is awesome. Now if there was a better way to search through all of the audio and video podcasts to find relative talks of interest, it would be great! Perhaps the big search engines will have a way to transcribe and create text based directories of all of the talk shows and audio sharing that has occurred and certainly will be occurring over the coming years.In the meantime I hope we’ll see broadcasters using descriptive keywords in posts and tags to help those of like minds (and not so like minds) to find each other!

My sister called me and asked me for some ideas on what to get her mother-in-law for a mother’s day gift.  I told her that I think it would be really nice if she sent her a gift card to her favorite restaurant and a nice vase of flowers.  I think that she was a little bit disappointed with my response because she tends to expect me to come up with very creative and crafty ideas for things.  But I really don’t know her mother-in-law well enough to be able to suggest a particular clever and crafty thing to give her!  And there is one thing I know for sure, most women LOVE flowers.

I suggested that she buy the “Pearls of Wisdom” gardenia potted plant from the 1800flowers.com website.  I like the idea that it symbolizes the fact that she gives good advice!  And gardenias smell so pretty that I’m sure she would love it!  And, being a potted plant, it will continue to grow instead of wither and die.  I think you can’t go wrong with that!

Or something exotic looking like the Martha Stewart coral azalea topiary plant!  Whenever I see something like that it makes me think of the Alice in Wonderland story; it is simply fantastic looking!