All in all this was a great Christmas. I was able to see alot of friends and family. This was also my daughter’s very first Christmas and she made out like a bandit. I’ve never seen a 2 month with so many toys. The only thing that I regret is not sending out any Christmas cards this year. We must have received about 50 cards this year. Most were those cards that are made out of a cute family photo with the kids, the family dog and so on.

For some reason my wife and I never got around to having a family photo made up or sent out. Looking back, I really wish we would have done this. Looking forward, I have already been brain storming on what I want to do for Christmas 2009. My Mom told me about this site called paper-papers.com. This is where she bought her envelopes for her Christmas card and let me say they were beautiful. She told me that the paper was made out of cotton. They were very cool.
This year I will make sure that out Christmas card and photo will be the one that everyone talks about. If you to knock people socks off with you next letter or mailing, I recommend you check out paper-papers.com

I can’t get enough of this guy

I know have mentioned this before but I am a HUGE paintball fanatic.  I’m not sure about everyone else’s area but Michigan has a huge paintball population.  

We have tons of indoor venues, outdoor venues and hybrids.  My personal favorite game is capture the flag.  I like to take a defensive position and wait for the enemy to come to me… or maybe I am just lazy.  

Winter is a very cool time for paintball.  I love breaking out my white camouflage on those wintery Michigan days.  No one can see me at all.  I just sit back and snipe noobs all day.  They never even know what hit them.

Now onto my new paintball gun…I have always been a big fan of a “back bottle” paintball gun.  For those of you who don’t know, a back bottle gun is a gun configuration where the source tank is attached to the rear of the gun body and acts as a stock for shouldering the gun.  I personally think the back bottle give you a great and comfortable feel epically for the long tournaments.

There are alot of local paintball gun shops in the area but my favorite online paintball spot online is ultimatepaintball.com.  I highly recommended them of any and every paintball need.  They carry all the major brands like Spyder, Tippmann, Dye, and Empire.

For about the last 3 years I have been using deezer.com to listen to MP3s online for free.  It was an awesome site, all you had to do was register, and create playlists.  It was like napster but you didn’t own the music, you could only listen to the music….which was perfectly fine with me.  Now it appears that popular and even some non so popular music is no longer available.   What a bummer.

I have been looking for a replacement and I think I settled with  http://www.thehydrogenjukebox.com.  It is a very similar format to deezer, and it looks like any and every thing you can think of is available,.

This time of year it always good to consider donating your old car, truck, van, SUV, boat, motorcycle, time share, or airplane.  Not just because it is your last chance to get a good tax deduction for 2008, but beacuse its good you help out your fellow citizens.

I was doing some read on the web and Washing DC in patricular is really going through some economic troubles.  So I started doing some digging and found a great site dedicated to Washington DC Car Donation. The site is called Charity Dispatch.  They specilize in bring donators to the proper charties.  In a way they help facilitate the donation process to make it as smooth as possible.  I personaly love the concept.  Anyone who can streamline the donation process in alright in my book, espically in these economic conditions.

In conculsion, if you are looking to make a last minute car donation before the end of the year, I suggest you take a look Charity Dispatch

As I mentions in last weeks post, I am seriously looking to some Texas real estate. Now that a have my location picked, all I need to do is find a list of Houston Realtors. Thank you interweb!  Like I would have any clue on how to find a Houston realtor while I am in Michigan.  

I have a feeling 2009 won’t be as bad as many people make it out to be and this is the year you make a good real estate transaction.  Usually when people say its the end of the world, then is the time to buy.  When everyone is talking about how good a specific market is doing, then that is when you should be selling.

It seems like every business owners is going through some sort of cash crunch these days. One of the biggest complaints I hear from my fellow business owners is that it is next to impossible to collect money from their customers. I couldn’t agree more. It was just the other day that I was talking to a friend of mine who is a roofer he mentioned that the last three jobs he has been working on have failed to pay him within the last 90 days. I then asked him if he accepts credit cards.. I already knew the answer but I wanted him to hear himself say no…And he did. He then said “maybe I should look into that” Then I sent him a link to onlinecheck.com. Onlinecheck is a great way for businesses accept credit cards. They have an excellent service and even offer a free one month free trial. He had nothing to lose. They even offer on the spot check processing so you can say good by to bounced checks for good.

In this tough economy you need to do everything you can to stay ahead of your competition, and having multiple payment options available to your clients is a great way for you business to stick out.
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Me and my wife have been looking at updating our condo for about a year now. Being that the economy is so bad right now, we figured that we will be in our condo much longer than we thought so I guess we better start improving on our home instead of sitting around wishing we could sell it.

We recently finished the living room and it looks awesome! Our kitchen still needs some work and so does our bedroom. I think the absolute first thing that needed to be done is buying a new bed. Ours is very old and outdated. I have always liked those low to the ground looking beds that I see alot of. So I started looking around and found a site called .time4sleep.co.uk. They have all kinds of cool, funky, modern looking beds. To me how a bed looks is very important. Being that there are so many styles, you can really express yourself.

While looking through their online catalogue, I found my favorite, which is the Rhea, which is only 399!  Not a bad deal for one very cool looking bed.

I would recommend checking out time4sleep if you are looking to update your bedroom.