I think I mentioned that last weekend I finally braved my storage unit. I was looking of my design samples so I can talk to a guy about a magazine he wants to publish. If all works out the way I would love it to, I would be able to pick up some work designing it and writing for it.

Anyway, I took out a few bins of clothing. One was absolutely stuffed with old sexy lingerie. I have no idea why I am saving it. Most of it has a memory or two attached and there is no good reason to hang onto it. A good bit of it never ever got worn. That is because buying it is half the fun – or, having someone else buy it for you.

With that philosophy firmly in mind, I called a friend who is about the size I was when I bought most of it and I am dropping it by her house next week. She has only been married about a year and I am assuming she swill get a lot of good wear of it of the pieces. God knows I have no use for it at this time in my life.

I’ve decided to write on my Murphy-isms from time to time. I am THAT person, the one who lives a life that would have made Edward Aloysius Murphy, Jr. quite proud. “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong”. People laugh at me initially when I tell them that my life is so full of perfect illustrations for Murphy’s Law that I have finally learned to just shrug them off. Once a person has known me for a while, they just nod sagely each time they see it happen – which is often. If it’s going to happen, it’ll happen either TO me or near me.

I have hundreds of pens and pencils. I have them in old mugs, in desk drawers, and in shoeboxes. I even have some in storage. I have lot of advertising pens from throughout the years. I have pencils that have been given to me by students. I have writing instruments I bought because they were on sale or because I liked the way they wrote.

So, how is it that sometimes when I need something to write with, every single pencil I come across is broken or has never been sharpened? How is it that each of the pens I pick up is out of ink? This does not happen all of the time. It only happens if I am on the phone and need to write down important information or, when I have an all-too-rare flash in writing inspiration. And, it is happening right now. I have, at this point in time, thrown a total of 30 pens in the trash can next to my desk. I have thrown all 30 in the trash without having yet encountered one that will write.

How odd. It reminds me of the time that all five of the wrist watches I owned at one point had stopped, seemingly out of batteries. When I took them all to have new batteries put in, the jeweler noticed they had all stopped at exactly 11:17. All of them. The same time. This happened even though I had been wearing one at the time and the others were either in my jewelry box or on my dresser.

Murphy and his blasted law. *sigh*

There are two things happening right now that make people more aware of how important it is to save money: rising gas prices and the pressure to buy Christmas presents. I don’t drive as much as most people and I try to keep my gift costs down, but even so I am spending a lot more cash this time of year than usual and it makes me aware of other areas where I can cut costs.

I learned the hard way how bad it is to put off car repairs. Just ask me about my car repair bill last month. I had a transmission issue and I am luckier than a four leaf clover that I got to it before the whole thing gave out. Add that to all the other little things that I needed to have fixed and it made a bill so large my eyes watered.

AAMCO is a national chain of facilities that specializes transmission work and other automotive repairs. You’ve all seen the commercials – Double-A-M-C-O. You can sign up to be sent coupons and discounts on transmissions, brakes, tune-ups and other automotive services (you can opt out of the mailings at any time). AAMCO has free towing with major repairs, and I can attest that comes in handy. I had to have them tow me once when I was in town visiting my dad and the car I borrowed from him stopped running.

Save money where you can. If there are coupons available that make routine auto maintenance more affordable, by all means use them!

Sadly, I am still unpacking boxes from my August move. While I had all of my daughter’s things unpacked nearly immediately, I have clothes and toiletries that are still in the garage or tucked away in storage, because they got taken away by the movers by mistake. I’ve spent days sorting through plastic bins looking for my nutritional supplements and prescription migraine meds.

When I was scrambling around in my storage unit this past weekend, scooting boxes, moving chairs, and trying to squeezer past mattresses, I realized how much I don’t like having so much of my life put off to the side. On the other had, I still cannot rally afford to strike out on my own and a $200 storage bill sure beats a mortgage.

We might live in Florida, but we get out share of cold front here. In fact, I have all of the windows open right now, taking advantage of the mild breeze and clean air. I have to get the house aired out now, because a cold front is actually on its way as I write this. While it might be breezy and in the mid-70s this very minute (yes, it is indeed paradise in Florida), the season’s first cold snap is well on its ways. A county or two inland could very well see temperature drop below freezing this weekend.

Tonight, temps will be in the low to mid 40s in my own backyard. So, that brings me to one of my favorite things about cold weather – socks. Heh. I’ll bet you expected me to say anything except for socks.

The thing is, I adore socks and tights. I wore them all of the time up north and had an impressive collection. Here in Florida, I usually wear sandals and though I have been known to throw a pair of sock on WITH the sandals on that rare occasion where I forgot to take the trash out the night before, I more often don’t.

My daughter wears socks every day with her little tennis shoes, for school. But now that the cool weather is here for a little while, she is excited about tights. I know. You are probably laughing at me, but you have to think of the old adage “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.” Socks and tights are fun, cozy, fashionable. Due to my propensity for shopping online (and avoiding the annoying crowds), I love it that Hue.com offers $5 flat shipping on any size order. And now, onto my quest for sweater tights.

When I graduated from college, finding a job was a true chore. A resume was easy enough. I just had copies made at the local copy shop. Cover letters were another issue. While my room mate was under the impression she could write one cover letter to submit to all her job prospects, I knew the best way to go about applying for a job was to tailor the cover letter to each position. So, I would sit for hours with my electronic typewriter and type each letter, doing my best to not make mistakes (since correction tape was SO obvious).

I wish I could post a picture of me sitting there with a giant pile of wadded up mistakes on the floor next to me. It was usually an all-day affair to get resumes out. I’d sit there in the living room with the newspaper and my typewriter and a stack of stamps. It was horrible.

Find the open positions meant looking in the paper every day, hoping to get a tip via word of mouth, or using a head hunter.

I was overjoyed when the internet made finding a job a breeze. I still tailor each cover letter, but I save my base in a Word document and send each version to the printer. Zip, zap, done.

I’ve not used an actual newspaper to look for jobs in years! There are online job sites that will rival any classified section. Monster is probably the biggest job network online. I’ve been using them for years now. You can look for jobs, search for employees, post a resume, browse hiring articles, and more. The site will even notify you via e-mail when a job listing you are suited for gets posted.

There is an entire section just for employers. You can post and manage your listings, search the candidate database, and learn how to make your listings more attractive. The more jobs you post, the more money you save. Monster even has services that allow you to totally outsource your recruiting and hiring efforts.

If you are looking for jobs, Monster is free to use. You presence is an important part of their database and because of that, they provide all the tools you might need to build the perfect resume and search for jobs anywhere in the world.

In years past, October meant it was time to “fall back”, pushing out clocks back an hour and adhering to the rules of daylight savings time here in the United States, as well as in other parts of the world. Last year, the government starting looking at some of energy issues and reevaluating the reasoning behind daylight savings time. DST in our modern times is a convention of the last century and it came into its current incarnation in 1916 as a wartime measure aimed at conserving coal.

Starting in 2007, most of the U.S. and moved the end of DST from the last weekend in October to the first Sunday in November. In the U.S. this was in part due to the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

So, this is all to say that our clocks will not fall back in the next hour, but rather at about this time next weekend, Saturday November 4 (which for some strange reason I have always remembered is Ralph Macchio’s birthday).

I was reading Jade’s blog again this morning and she was talking earlier this week about weight loss and what she feels like she should look like, what is a comfortable weight, how she wants to look when other people see her, all of the things that go through a girl’s mind when you consider your own body. It got me thinking about how I had made a big decision when I came back from my grandmother’s funeral in September to work on my body.

I gained a LOT of weight in my marriage and also when I was pregnant. I was in a miserable marriage. I had accepted it, but it did not change the fact that my marriage took a strong, independent woman and changed her into someone afraid to cross her husband, who was yelled at daily and blamed for his every disappointment in life. I could on forever about all of that, but the point here is that I started thinking while I was reading Jade’s post that I know what she means when she says she is just ready to be herself again.

I need to double back and begin again on my motivation. I am still staying away from fast food and eating out as often. That has helped. But, I have backed off on the exercise and I am back to snacking at night a bit. I don’t need a bowl of soup if I am not rally hungry. It just feels nice to eat it. That mindset has to stop now.

That said, I need to go get dressed. My friend’s father died and the viewing is in a little bit.

I’m not naming names. That said, I will now tell you about a most pleasant experience I had this afternoon. I had an appointment with a government agency at 1:30 today. I have an appointment at the same agency about every three months. Usually, I get there early, sign in, wait for a VERY long time and then wait some more. Today I went in early, signed in, got called right to the desk and immediately serviced, so to speak. It was lovely! And, it was an absolute first for me.

I worked several years at a small publishing house. About halfway through my time with the company, we hired a new president. He came from a government agency in town. Upon his start with the publishing house, he stopped hiring anyone unless they came from his old agency. He basically just cherry picked the best of the best from his old office. Now, these were indeed great individuals with a lot of talent, BUT they worked at a snail’s pace. It shocked each and every one of them to see salaried workers staying late to meet deadlines and working as fast as possible to up our productivity. Talented or not, they were just not used to working at the pace of most public sector businesses. I find that most government workers are just conditioned to draw things out to fill the hours. And, any of my family or friends who worked in government jobs blithely admitted as much.

Anyway, kudos to the unnamed government agency who served me today.

I rarely agree with the commentators who contribute articles to the CNN website. Somehow, though, I am compelled to keep reading. I like to hear other people’s points of view. It keeps my mind healthy, even if I do not agree with them.

Today there is a piece by Roland S. Martin that I agree with heartily.

He entitles it “Saving marriages must be a national priority”. Amen. I’ve been screaming this for a while now. Our divorce rate is sky high and I experienced first-hand a situation where my ex-husband shared the views with so many people in the U.S. He decided he was finished being married and refused to see how counseling or trying would change the issue. He moved on as easily as if we had only been in a dating relationship. He treated it like a casual breakup. In Florida, you can file a no-fault divorce and be out in a matter of months. Even though I tried to stretch out our filing, our divorce was done from start to finish in about 5 months. It was easier to get divorced in Florida than it was to get a marriage license.

Martin says “Americans are either getting married for the wrong reasons or are not making the effort to spend more time working on their marriages to save them, and instead, run to divorce court at the first sign of trouble.” He comes at this view from experience. He went through a situation much like mine. He had a spouse who refused to see any options besides a divorce. He never agreed with the split, but in the end the papers were filed and made legal.

Martin says he feels that too many people go into marriage with the starry-eyed disillusion that marriage will be perfect. When the relationship begins to show bumps and rough spots, people leave. He cites an example that most of us will buckle down and work harder when things begin to get tough at work, but in marriage people just leave home, often times subjecting children to the divorce.

I think this analogy hit home the hardest for me. If more people would work, buckle down, and just give it everything they have inside of them to make their marriages last and become more successful, then our divorce rate would go down. Yes, it can be that simple. We are a nation of quitters when it comes to family relationships. Our statistics show that to be true. A divorce rate hovering around 50% is embarrassing. If you are not being physically abused, if your life is not threatened, there is no reason not to try, to seek outside counseling, to make changes in the way you look at your spouse and the way you communicate.

I still do not “believe” in divorce, even though I have been through one. I do not think what happened to my marriage had to happen. It was not the last resort. I had no legal path to fight the filing in Florida, though. You have to speak up and reply to the filings or you lose everything in this state. There are very few situations where if someone came to me for input that I would not advocate doing anything humanly possible to save a marriage.

I can only pray that by the time y daughter is an adult, America can boast lower divorce rate statistics.

In an age where so many of us have actually had to endure identity theft, this next story is going to make you choke.

Right down in Sarasota, Fl a man was looking in a Blockbuster store’s dumpster for clean boxes when he came across video store were membership forms and employment applications that included names, addresses, credit card numbers and Social Security numbers.

He says that he told the store what he had found, but even so the very next day when he went after more boxes he found “credit card stuff.”

Federal and state officials said no law was broken.

Blockbuster claims they have a company policy that says “documents generated in-store, including customer information, must be destroyed when no longer kept on file.” This, according to a spokesman for Blockbuster Inc.

I guess they feel like tossing these items into a dumpster constitutes destroying them.

Think twice before providing personal info to businesses, even national chains.

If you don’t count everything that I have in my storage unit (which is almost everything), then I just now unpacked the last box from my move. Everything that I am keeping out to live with is now out and put away for the purpose of getting on with my life. It feels good. I have to admit, though, that all this time I kept hoping I would come across some small box or bag or envelope that had my diamond rings in it. I want to think the best of people, and it still eats me up inside to know the movers took my wedding set. We never got any help from the moving company, so now some trashy chick in Ohio is probably sporting one outrageously expensive set of diamonds.

The reason I wish I could find them is so we could sell them and put the money in an account for Gigi. If anyone deserves to benefit from the things, it’s my daughter. She has probably developed even more scars than me through this whole divorce. I was in college when my parents split, so although it was tough, it was also slightly surreal and removed. Gigi was three days away from her third birthday when her father pulled his dramatic walking-out extravaganza. The poor kid was the one to come upstairs and find me crying in the bed to tell me her father was making loud animal sounds and laying on the floor. The guy had quite literally gone fetal and was wailing like a cow with a broken leg — and all of this in FRONT of my daughter. It has never left her poor little mind.

Yep, she deserves those rings, in the very least.

One of my vehicles is a Dodge Grand Caravan. We bought it the last year that the seats have to actually be removed from the car if you want to use the extra space in the back. We had just been to the Nissan dealer and I had seen their van with the seats that folded down into the floor. We decided we would rather have the Caravan, but would wait if an upcoming model was going to feature the Stow and Go seats like they do indeed have these days.

The dealer – this is the Gainesville, FL Dodge Dealer – lied boldly to our faces, saying that there was no possible way the van would be changing in that respect. So, we bought the current model and off we went. Do you know that within Two months I started to see the TV commercials for Dodge Caravans with seats that folded into the floors?

There is NO POSSIBLE way the dealer was unaware of the new models that were coming out so very soon. The freaks were thinking only of that day’s sales. Greedy, greedy Dodge dealer in Gainesville, FL. Avoid them like the plague, please. (Plus, their service department is slow and inaccurate. Expect to wait approximately 4 hours for an oil change. I kid you not.)

Anyway, for the longest time I just kept the two back seats in the garage. I just used the two middle Captains chairs. I have company coming Monday, though, and we will want to drive over the beach. Plus, I am driving the following week for my daughter’s school fieldtrip. Obviously, it was time to put those seats back inside the van. What a chore! It is close to impossible for a lone female to get the seats in correctly. Today I did somehow manage to get one latched I, but the other is presently careening wilding around in the back. I am hoping my company can help me on Monday.

Freaking Gainesville Dodge. If they had just been honest, we would have SYTIIL bought from them, but just a couple of months later.

I’m not really a gun kind of person. My ex-husband had guns and they all left the house along with him. I’m not sure how much good one would have done us in an emergency anyway. I remember one night when we heard a sound outside and he got up, stumbling around in his underwear, spilling bullets from the cartridge all over the floor. If someone would have come into the house, he would have been down on the floor picking up the bullets.

I did get a stun gun a week or so back. It’s a full-contact model and legal here in Florida. I know that as a single woman (a single mom, no less) I need to be protected. Even though I am not a gun person, I AM a dog person. My dog Echo passed away in August and I’ve been thinking about getting another dog to bring into the home.

This time, though, I would consider a larger dog, perhaps one who knows how to guard. Echo was a great alert dog, but she would have been hopeless in a physical situation.

There are businesses like Command Control K-9 that specialize in obtaining and training protection dogs. This particular company sells breeds like German Shepherds, Dutch Shepherds, and Belgian Malinois that have been specifically trained to both protect your family and act as a companion dog at the same time. While I will probably never personally need one of their very top level dogs, the idea of having a pet that knows how to protect my home is appealing. I think good, well-trained protection dogs could be the absolute best deterrent to someone who would have otherwise picked your house for a home invasion. Home invasions are becoming more and more common in my area, so this kind of thing crosses my mind often.

We have several family members who have been living in Israel for going on a year now. They have not set up an international cell phone plan yet and for the most part we all communicate with them via e-mail.

The holidays, though, are a time of year that I find myself more in the mood to hear the voices of my family members, rather than just reading letters or e-mails. You cannot replicate the immediate response and sound of emotion in a live conversation.

What I have in mind is to get my Christmas shopping done a little early for my relatives. I’m going to set them up with an international phone card that they can use when they have time to make calls. By purchasing pre-paid time, you can take advantage of bulk pricing and take the time to find the best deals available. For example, PhoneCardsAvenue has inexpensive international phone cards as well as a 3% cash back rebate program. By shopping around like this, I can get more minutes for my money.

Of course, I could just send my family some of the good old American food products they have been missing over in Israel, but I’m feeling a little selfish. I would rather just hear their voices.