Tony Brewer View

I’m all for getting the best deal that you can get on a service or a product, and I really like using the Internet to help me with that endeavor.  However, I want to make sure that I’m not throwing my money at a foreign company if I can get a good deal locally.  After all, my livelihood depends on the local economy! 

So when I need to buy something, or obtain a service, I like to do a local search to see if I can a good deal here in my local neighborhood.  Oftentimes if I bring the local merchant proof that I can purchase the product or service somewhere else for a lower price they will offer to meet the deal.  I’m really glad that there are websites that have search engines that act like local yellowpages and help me find the local businesses.  I’ve found that sometimes they have listings that the paper version doesn’t have at all!  And it’s a lot easier to find local restaurants on the Internet than it used to be!  And what’s good about finding them on the Internet is that often you can read a review of the restaurant that you would not be able to get from the paper version!

When I got on the Internet this morning I was surprised to see in the news headlines that the parents of “the balloon boy” are being brought up on legal charges in relation to the drama that occurred when the entire country got wrapped up in the search and rescue mission of their son who was supposedly in a runaway balloon, when in fact he was safe at home hiding in their garage’s attic.

I had heard that this family was trying to get their own reality show on television. Well, it looks like now they’ve got one – just not a paid one! I wonder, though, if a few years down the road they end up with a paid one anyway! I hope not – this grandstanding effort should not be rewarded with good fortune!

Even though people are not buying houses as much as they were a couple of years ago, they are still moving around the country.  They are just opting for rentals instead of buying houses.  And some of them are moving frequently because of landlord issues or because they find out that they can get a better rate somewhere else.  So there is still quite a demand for Local Moving companies.

Whenever my clients ask me for recommendations on Local Movers I suggest to them that they use the Internet to get Local Moving Quotes.  It is rather quick and easy to fill out a form on a web page to ask for Moving Estimates, and you can do it at your own convenience.  You would be surprised to see the great disparity of rates that there can be between the different companies!  One word of advice that I have for you, though, is to make sure that the company you hire will cover the cost of repairing or replacing broken items.  And if they are moving antiques, you should get a written appraisal of their value before you move!

A few weeks ago I bought several iron-on patches to use around the house.  I had a pair of lounge pants (Teri calls them “jammy pants” that had ripped, and a quilt on our bed had ripped open.  Teri said that the quilt was going to be impossible to repair, and the pants weren’t worth repairing because they were old and threadbare anyway.

Well, I went ahead and bought some clear iron-on patches and ironed them on myself.  Teri told me I was wasting my time, but I was sure they would work.  Well, apparently Teri knew what she was talking about!  Those iron on patches only held for about a day and then they ripped too!  Very annoying!

My friend Linda asked me to help her create a new webpage.  She’s starting a new business on a shoe-string budget and didn’t want to spend any more money than she absolutely had to.  So I decided to build a free website for her as a quick little starter, so if people ask her if she has a webpage she can answer “yes!”

There is a cute and easy Internet website builder that gives you a free website and lets you customize and build the webpage.  All for free!  I decided to give it a try this morning and I went ahead and built her page.  It was a little confusing at first because I wanted to insert an image and I couldn’t figure out from the step-by step directions that they give exactly how to insert my own image.  So it took about ten minutes to look around and figure it out.  But all in all, creating the web page was fast and easy, and I have to say that I was fairly impressed with the process.

So now I’ll tell her that she can be adding her web page URL to her business card, and to let me know if and when she wants anything added to her page!  Oh, and here is a screen shot of the page I created, in case you are interested to see it!