Time to highlight another great blogger. Today we are highlighting Mama's Money Savers. This is a blog with a very busy side bar, but some great information between them. A mix of advertisement blogs and quality posts, about places you can get stuff for free, get coupons, or make money online. Interesting blog. I found out some new sites that I'm going to check out and perhaps blog about.
Those busy side bars I mentioned. The seem to go on forever with every site she has ever signed up on, somewhere on the bar. They are in some sort of order, but they look like they are just tossed up there in any old fashion. Despite that, I looked them over and found some things that I'm signing up on. Hopefully some of those sites will help here and allow us to have a few more contests of our own.
It is important to be kind to people. Today, I ran across a site who says that they are trying to get people to do just that. I am a little unclear as to what UnexpectedThankYou, LLC actually it. They have a contact page to ask for someone to come and speak, but why would I want him to? I don't know who he is.
The posts are good though. Some great thoughts to keep us motivated. Although, he could lose that awful snow fall that so many sites are using these days. It makes it so hard to read.
It is time to play a Wild Card! Every now and then, a book that I have chosen to read is going to pop up as a FIRST Wild Card Tour. Get dealt into the game! (Just click the button!) Wild Card Tours feature an author and his/her book's FIRST chapter!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
My Review: We start off with the cliche orphanage where the inhabitants are sorely mistreated. Twin girls, always getting in trouble, are to be adopted by an insane writer, only she decides to only take one. The adventure begins leading the two girls (the Dobble sisters) and their friend Ganger down a roller coaster ride of trouble with danger around every corner. Will they make it? Will they survive? You will have to read it to find out.
Even with the many cliche points and predictable story line, I was unable to put this book down. If I did not have to work the next day, I would have finished it in one sitting. It took two. An easy read but very fun. I was worried about switching between comic and prose, but the authors/artists made the story work. At many points I could not tell which character in the art was which. Not just the twins, but the other girls looked very similar too. Most other characters were very stylized and easier to tell apart.
This story dragged me along. It was fun and well worth the read. Despite the distraction of the graphics and the predictability the story pulls you along at a very entertaining pace that makes me want to pick up Taylor's other books.
A motorcyclist and former rock band roadie turned Anglican minister, Graham Peter (G. P.) Taylor has been hailed as "hotter than Potter" and "the new C. S. Lewis" in the United Kingdom. His first novel, Shadowmancer, reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list in 2004 and has been translated into 48 languages. His other novels include Wormwood (another New York Times bestseller which was nominated for a Quill book award), The Shadowmancer Returns: The Curse of Salamander Street, Tersias the Oracle, and Mariah Mundi. Taylor currently resides in North Yorkshire with his wife and three children.
It was commonly thought that chat was just for nerds. I'm a nerd and have been using chat systems since 1986. I can tell you that while there are a lot of nerds who chat, many are regular people. I've met a lot of mothers chatting, even back in the 80's. My mother was one of them.
Now chat is becoming more and more specialized. Back them, I just went into the main room and chatted. Now rooms are dedicated to very specific needs. For example, Biker Chat Rooms are for those interested in chatting about motorbikes. This Biker Chat Room does not seem to have much attendance. I used a guest account (which only lasted 2 minuted before they kicked me out) and I was the only member logged in. Perhaps they will grow. Perhaps the owners of the site need to get all their friends to take turns sitting on the site until it builds up more traffic. Biker Chat City has a free membership, so they might build up some traffic, but they need to do some serious advertising.
Speciallized chat is nothing new. Back in the Qlink and PlayNet days we had rooms for special purposes. We chatted about all sorts of stuff. There may have even been a space for bikers, but since I didn't learn to ride a motor bike until 1998, I never looked.
Mommy Goggles is a site dedicated to product reviews & prize giveaways. Mostly she is aimed at moms, but us dads can find something useful there too, even if it is just an idea for mom. Tanya is a mother of two and wife and still finds time to write articles on products she has used. When I first looked at her site, I thought it was a little overrun with advertising. It also looked to me as if every article was an advertisement. While, in a way, that is true, her reviews are full and have a lot of information in them. The products are useful for moms and are worth looking at.
She also has many contests going on constantly. Her readers seem to love the contests and many have dozens of entries on them. I entered one of her contests and am considering entering others. Many of the entries are what I
I was looking over a reverse directory site calls CallerBase.com looking to see what information I could dig up on my family. First I searched my own numbers. They are unlisted, so as I expected, nothing was listed. I then checked my in-laws; it again came back with nothing. "That's funny, I thought they were listed." I said. I checked another site, and sure enough, they showed up, with plenty of information.
Just to be sure that it was not a fluke, I checked a couple more numbers I found to be listed and sure enough, nothing shows up. This company claims that they can find out who has been harassing you, when all you get is a phone number on your caller id. Reverse lookup is the process of looking up someone by their phone number, instead of by their name.
Well, I have a couple of problems with this. First, if you are truly being harassed, you should not be contacting the harasser, let the police do it. Second, if you can get the phone number, finding the owner is fairly easy. It is nice that they offer a reverse lookup, but when they don
Do you love mushrooms as much as I do? I've harvested them a few times. Many varieties are too expensive in the store, so I only get them when I find them in the wild. But how do you know which ones are good to eat? And once you do find them, you need recipes. Can they be grown in your backyard garden? I wondered about all these things. With the books I'll be reviewing now, we can answer all these questions.
Foraging
I've been foraging for mushrooms for years. When I first decided to do this, I was not going to just go out and start picking, I needed to know what was good to eat and what was not. I found two books that have been in my library ever since and I reference every time I go foraging. My favorite field guides to mushrooming are by David Arora: Mushrooms Demystified: A Comprehensive Guide to the Fleshy Fungi and All That the Rain Promises, and More ...: A Hip Pocket Guide to Western Mushrooms. These are two great and very different guides to mushrooms. Mr. Arora is a bit of a hippy who loves to go out after a good rain and find all the best mushrooms he can. He seems to know about every type and his books are a must have for any fungi lover who wants to go hunting.
Mushrooms Demystified is a huge tome of a book. About 2 inches thick and 1000 pages, it has details on over 2000 species along with information about if they can be eaten, if they are hallucinogenics, how they are classified, where they grow and so much more. You will even find information about using some as dyes and medicines. This is NOT a field guide. It does not fit in your back pocket and would weigh you down too much if you tried to take it with you. Keep this book at home, then when you are out, with our next guide, if you find a specimen you don't know, you can bring home the specimen and it will have all the details you need.
All That the Rain Promises, and More ... is your pocket guide. It is made to fit into your back pocket and is used by people all over the world to find mushrooms. It has a key in the front and back that will guide you to the right place in the book to locate details about the mushroom you have found. It has the most popular mushrooms, with nice full color pictures and some information about them. In the notes, it tells on what page in Mushrooms Demystified you can find more information about it.
If you are only going to get one mushroom guide, I recommend All That the Rain Promises, and More ... as you are likely to carry it with you when you go foraging, and what is the good of having a guide and not using it? If you can get both, Mushrooms Demystified has more information, more species, and makes a great addition to have at home. For instance, if you run across a Fat Jack in the woods, you look it up in All That the Rain Promises, and More .... There you find out the important piece: "Edibility: Edible". You then take it home and look it up in Mushrooms Demystified. There you find much more: "Edibility: Edible. It is generally listed as mediocre, but one collection I sampled had a rather pleasing lemony flavor."
Use MD to get some details about a mushroom before hand, such as where to find Oregon White Truffles (MD p.858-9). "Habitat: Solitary, scattered, or gregarious in woods and at their edges, associated mainly if not exclusively with Douglas-fir (Usually trees between the ages of 8 and 65 years); found from California to British Columbia, but especially common in Oregon. Although it normally grows underground, I have found specimens on the surface." You can then head out to your nearest Doug-fir patch, with a shovel, and go digging for them. If you are lucky you will find some. Be careful though "widespread collecting can be destructive."
Cooking
You collected your Black Morel (Rain p.230, MD pp.790-1 & plates 199, 202) and your Lion's Mane (Rain p.200, MD pp.615-616) and now you need to know what to do with them. I headed to the library website and put a couple of books on hold. These two will provide you with a good collection of recipes to keep you busy for a while.
Mushroom Feast: A Celebration of all Edible Fungi, Cultivated, Wild and Dried, with Recipes by Jane Grigson was the first I looked at. It first tells you which are the "best" edible mushrooms and then has several sections on different types of foods. The book includes information on mushrooms in history, legends, and some recipes from the far past. Very nicely written book and a fun read, even if you don't try the recipes.
The Complete Mushroom Book: Savory Recipes for Wild and Cultivated Varieties by Antonio Carluccio is a combination of a field guide and a cookbook, or so it claims. It is beautifully illustrated and well laid out. In the field guide arena, I would not count it as very good since you can't easily find the mushroom you are looking for as there is no key. Besides, it is far too heavy a book to bring into the field, even if you cut out the recipe book and just took the field guide. As far as a recipe book goes, it is your standard fare. A little information about where the author got the recipe, the recipe, and a great picture of it. Nicely done, but I like the history and whatnot of Mushroom Feast even if it does not have all the great illustrations.
If you want one mushroom recipe book, get Mushroom Feast if you like history and reading. If you prefer to have pretty pictures to go with the recipes and a nice pretty layout on the recipe, take The Complete Mushroom Book. If you want a third choice, I found a copy of Wild Mushroom Recipes by the Puget Sound Mycological Society, but it is hard to find. It is just a simple listing of recipes, no pictures or anything. What I liked about it is that the recipes are grouped by genus of mushroom. This makes it really nice for finding a recipe specific to a certain mushroom you found.
Growing
Hooked yet? How about growing your favorites? Check out these two books on cultivating our fungal friends in your back yard. They want you to grow them! You know they do! And you want to grow them too! Pick up these books, they don't go boo!
I've wanted to grow mushrooms for a long time, but never have. I've never really had a place to do it. Still, I want to learn how. I checked a couple of books that are recommended in Mushrooms Demystified and read them. Like David's books, one is a tome, the other much smaller.
The tome is called Mushroom Cultivator: A Practical Guide to Growing Mushrooms at Home and is by Paul Stamets and J.S. Chilton. It has all the information you need to grow mushrooms on any scale. It has great detail on every aspect it speaks of. I found it to be a little overwhelming, but if I was going to take growing mushrooms very seriously, I'm sure I'd want this book in my collection.
A while ago, Laura Williams won a contest here and I said I'd write a review of her site. This is that review.
Laura is a Christian and homeschools her seven children. She blogs about various things, including contest, saving money, raising kids, gardening, homeschooling and whatever else she feels like writing about. She must spend a lot more time blogging than I do, because she manages to write at least one article a day (her daily contest list) and usually four to seven articles. I'm lucky to get four to seven a week.
Often when I see blogs that have several articles a day, most of them are short and useless articles. Not the case with Laura. She has a lot of good information there. She has a list of great recipes, making money articles, games and more.
Laura has been on my list of sites I regularly visit for a while. I really enjoy reading her blog and when she entered my contest, I was thrilled to have her on it. I was even more thrilled when Random.org made her the winner (of course with only three contestants, she had a good chance). Thanks, Laura for entering the contest, and thanks for having such a worth while site.
I signed up with a site called PayPerPost: get paid to blog. They are a site for bloggers who want to make a little extra cash. They coordinate with businesses that want bloggers to write reviews or other information and will pay us to do so. The pay is between $5.00 and at current $125.00. To make the big money you need to meet certain criteria, such as a lot of visitors to your site, high Google PageRank, low Alexa ranking, good ratings from advertisers for your previous posts, etc.
Some people really hate the idea of PayPerPost. They think that it is evil and selling your soul to the devil. They think that getting paid for a post on your blog is fundamentally wrong. How can we have credibility in the blogging world if people are shilling out their work like this? It will be the death of the blogging world. Really, they are building up PayPerPost and giving them more advertising.
There were some legal problems with PayPerPost a while back. This caused some "posties" to loose their page rank. The FTC was also cracking down because they did not require people to disclose that it was a paid post. That seems to be required now. Even if it was not, I'd disclose, because it is ethical. I see no mentiontion of it since early 2007. I'm not sure if it just died away, or if the changes to their policy fixed Googles "smack down". I know it got the FTC off their backs.
Television and radio have been doing this for years. Have you ever watch a show and seen them zoom in on the Ford Focus or the can of Coke-a-Cola? Did you know that your favorite DJ is paid to say that he likes that product he pushes? Some DJs will only say they like it if they do, but they still have to do sales pitches. It is their job. Many bloggers have no ethical problem with PayPerPost, but still don't use them. All these points have validity, but I personally see no ethical dilemma, as long as the makes it clear they have sponsored reviews and write honest reviews, even for the sponsored ones.
So, I signed up for them. I am blogging partly to make a few extra dollars to make ends meet. I also blog because I like it. I blog about things I like and care about. Sometimes I blog about things I don't like. Sometimes I'm indifferent and am just talking about something. But one thing for sure, I will always blog what I feel and I'll be honest. So, if I am blogging about something I'm paid to blog about, I will tell you. I am getting paid for this blog entry.
Since you might not know me from Jack the Ripper, you will have no way of knowing if I am being honest, so that is why I am telling you that I am getting paid for the entry. That way, you can take that into account when you read the review.
Oh, you know your favorite movie reviewer? (S)He gets paid to review those movies. They even get into the movies for free and probably get free popcorn. Most reviewers get paid. It is up to you to decide which ones you trust. It is time that bloggers also get paid for the reviews they make.
I've been contemplating getting an AeroGarden. My big windows are all north facing and the south facing windows in the house are limited with no place to put plants. I want some greenery in the living room. Without the light, and my forgetting to water them, plants don't last long. The AeroGarden has some very good options to help me.
The AeroGardenuses aeroponics. Aeroponics, is a form of hydroponics, so uses no soil. The roots are sitting in a humid chamber with the nutrients in the water (humidity). It grows well with all the nutrients sitting there for them.
You buy the starting kits, with the plants. Put them in the tray, and with just a few minutes work every week, you will get some very nice plants. You can get various plants in the kit, including lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and herbs. They also meet AAPFCO (American Association of Plant Food Control Officials) standards for organic gardening.
The garden also uses only a little power. It uses less than a 60 watt bulb. And with the computer controls it has, that reminds you when it is time to add nutrients and water, people like me, that are a little forgetful, have a chance to grow. Not only that, but they guarentee it with a 30 day money back guarantee.
Now for the bad news. They are expensive. I love when they say "just 3 easy payments of $49.99" plus the $19.99 shipping and handling. That adds up to $170. A little more than I want to spend for it, but I'm cheap.
As is my way, once I see something I like, I like to see if I can find a way to make it cheaper or better myself. I did not find any plans in the countertop variety. In fact almost all the plans I found were dedicated to those that want to grow marijuana. That is not what I'm interested in.
I did find some large scale plans, such as this which will cost over $100 to setup, but will hold 30 plants, instead of the 6 the AeroGarden holds. I'm considering altering the plans for a countertop version. You also have to remember that these plans do not include a light source, and they do not include a computer that will tell you when to add water and nutrients. Of course, you could just use a calandar and mark when you add the nutrients and actually watch to know when to add water.
Garden Groom
Disney DVD
and 
. These are two great and very different guides to mushrooms. Mr. Arora is a bit of a hippy who loves to go out after a good rain and find all the best mushrooms he can. He seems to know about every type and his books are a must have for any fungi lover who wants to go hunting.
by Jane Grigson was the first I looked at. It first tells you which are the "best" edible mushrooms and then has several sections on different types of foods. The book includes information on mushrooms in history, legends, and some recipes from the far past. Very nicely written book and a fun read, even if you don't try the recipes.
by Antonio Carluccio is a combination of a field guide and a cookbook, or so it claims. It is beautifully illustrated and well laid out. In the field guide arena, I would not count it as very good since you can't easily find the mushroom you are looking for as there is no key. Besides, it is far too heavy a book to bring into the field, even if you cut out the recipe book and just took the field guide. As far as a recipe book goes, it is your standard fare. A little information about where the author got the recipe, the recipe, and a great picture of it. Nicely done, but I like the history and whatnot of 
by the Puget Sound Mycological Society, but it is hard to find. It is just a simple listing of recipes, no pictures or anything. What I liked about it is that the recipes are grouped by genus of mushroom. This makes it really nice for finding a recipe specific to a certain mushroom you found.
and is by Paul Stamets and J.S. Chilton. It has all the information you need to grow mushrooms on any scale. It has great detail on every aspect it speaks of. I found it to be a little overwhelming, but if I was going to take growing mushrooms very seriously, I'm sure I'd want this book in my collection.
by Bob Harris is a much simpler guide. It is a good beginners guide and once you get more advanced, 
