Yay for freebies!

It seems that all my hard work signing up for freebies is paying off! It took a while to get going (most offers take 4-6 weeks), but now it seems that almost daily I am getting fun mail! I have gotten my first two issues of Country Home and ReadyMade magazines (both free subscriptions!), coupons for free salad dressing and CoffeeMate, a free sippy cup for Noah, tons of product samples. It’s so much fun. It’s like a birthday party in your mailbox everyday, LOL! A great place to get started with free samples is Walmart. They always have a great variety available.

Sweet Dreams

It’s amazing what a good night’s sleep with do, isn’t it? I absolutely *love* my mattress. I find it very comfortable, though some people have told us it’s quite hard. I don’t know… makes my back feel A-OK. I know my brother loves his memory foam mattress, but I find it a little squishy. I guess as long as you are comfy, that is all that really matters!

First of May…

Well, April is all but a memory now. How did May spring up so fast? Seriously! I feel like it was just Easter and that was at the end of May!!! Today I’m spending some time going through my coupons and sorting out the expired ones. I also hope to hit CVS tomorrow to grab some of the May deals so I need to work out my scenarios. I hope I have time to head over there. Tomorrow my five-year-old has a half-day of school and then my husband and I are attending a charity dinner in the evening so really I’ll only have a couple hours in the morning to run errands. If not, there is always the weekend.

CVS May Extra Care Card Deals

Can you believe that April is almost over? I know, I feel like it just started! Well, I did not too a tremendous amount of “CVS’ing” this month. I had a couple OK runs, but there were a lot of deal I did not take full advantage of. I thought I’d give you a heads up on some of the monthly deals coming up in May.

Here are the freebies:
Aquafresh Toothpaste (Advanced Whitening 6 oz or Extreme Clean 5.6 oz)
2.99 Limit 3

Adidas Action3 Anti Perspirant 2.8 oz
4.99 Limit 3

Orapik Traveler Twin Pack
2.79 Limit 3

Tums Quik Pak 24 ct
4.69 Limit 2

Freestyle Lite or Freedom Lite Blood Glucose Monitor
10.00 Limit 2

CVS Allergy Relief 5 ct (Compare to Claritin)
3.79 Limit 3

Colgate 360 Clean or Deep Clean Tooth Brush
3.99 Limit 3

I know there are coupons out for several of these items so they have the potential to be money makers. I have been slack in getting the newspaper the last couple weeks, I might be out of luck But free is good too!

Other good deals of note:

CVS/Pharmacy brand items
Buy 2, get 1 free

CVS/Pharmacy Indoor/Outdoor Allergy Relief 60-100 count
Get $5 ECB Limit 5

Chapstick 100% Naturals
Get $1 ECB Limit 5

Green & Black’s Organic Chocolate
Get $1 ECB Limit 5

Buy 2 Ass’t Drinks (Lipton tea, Sobe Life Water, Aquafina)
Get $1 ECB Limit 5

Celestial Seasonings Teas
Get $1 ECB Limit 5

Betty Crocker 18.3 Fudge Brownie Mix
Get $1 ECB Limit 5

There is so much more in the May book, but these are the deals I am most interested in.

Free Quaker Simple Harvest

I love Quaker products and just found a new sample when I logged into StartSampling today. Get a free Quaker Simple Harvest sample. You can choose either the chocolate chunk granola bar or the maple brown sugar with pecan instant hot cereal. Yummy!

Free Subscription to Blender Magazine

If you are a music fan, you might be familiar with Blender magazine. Get a free subscription by taking this Rewards Gold survey!

Playing Around With Logos

As you might know, in addition to this blog I also have a wine blog that my husband and I write. I started out as wine blog editor for one of the blog networks, but for a variety of reasons decided to leave that network and start my own blog. I wanted the freedom and flexibility that you just can’t get being part of a corporate entity. It’s mostly just a fun hobby for us, but I do get samples on occasion and I get PR queries so I thought I’d play around with some logo designs. I don’t know if I really want to develop a brand identity for my blog, but it might be a good idea to have business cards to give out, you know?

I found a site called LogoYes that made the process really easy. Just a few clicks and poof! Like magic you have a very professional-looking logo for your business. You can get biz cards made up too. Here is a sample that I mocked up (minus my phone number because I really don’t want that made totally public :

There was a variety of graphics and font styles, and I really love how the color you choose for your icon matches up to the color in your business card. As you can see I chose to use grapes and a shade of burgundy because they make people think of wine. LogoYes had a lot of great-looking designs and the whole process took me all of 10 minutes. Having made business cards elsewhere before, I can say this was a lot quicker and easier! Check it out for yourself.

Traffic Peeves

My list of traffic and driving-related pet peeves is a mile long, and with people becoming more and more careless I just don’t think it’s going to improve. My current peeve involves a piece of technology that seemed to be really popular last year at Christmas: GPS tracking. It’s fine to use it, don’t get me wrong, but I feel like people are getting so hung up on watching their little screen that they are clueless as to what is going on behind them. Last week I was driving home on a 30 MPH road and the guy in front of me was crawling at a pace of maybe 10 MPH. I could see the light from his GPS and it was clear that he was looking for a street. It wasn’t dark, it wasn’t like he could not see the signs. He was just distracted. People, I plead with you: it’s cool to use the latest geek gadgets, but don’t be dumb about it! Remember that there are others on the road!

Holistic Managment Tools

Have you ever heard of business process management (bpm)? It is basically a way of efficiently aligning your organization with your clients’ wants and needs. There is a company called Prophix that delivers these services (such as budgeting, forecasting, reporting, consolidation, personnel planning and other financial functions) in a single solution. Their solution can help with business in a variety of industries from entertainment to healthcare to mining and engineering.

Cruising

I just realized that this is the last full week of April coming up! Where does the time go? Next month, Drew and I will have been together for 10 years and in June we’ll be celebrating our 7th anniversary. Seems hard to believe it has been that long. Hopefully we’ll be able to go out to a nice dinner (alone!) to celebrate. For our 10th anniversary we are planning on taking a cruise. A friend of ours who is quite a bit older goes on one or two cruises a year and always has an amazing time. My brother has gone on a couple cruises too and always had a great time. I do know that it’s important to pick a reputable cruise line, though (such as Royal Caribbean). It can make a huge difference on how enjoyable the trip is. We haven’t gotten quite that far in the planning yet, but it’s fun to think about!