Tony Brewer View

Can you remember the last time that you received any party invitations in the mail? To be perfectly honest, most of my friends and family members rely on word-of-mouth and invitations by email or on our facebook events pages, or even a new Internet service that calls itself Evite.com or something like that. So when Teri told me that the reason Andrea never comes to any of our parties is because she never got any “official invitation” in the mail, I was completely astounded! Now let me tell you that if Andrea was an eighty-year-old lady that insisted on “proper Emily Post etiquette” I might, just maybe, understand the reasoning behind this “I didn’t come because I didn’t get an official invitation in the mail” excuse. But in this day and age? For adult family and friends? Really?

So Teri and I have decided that this summer we are going to have a big family and friend barbecue party and we will actually go ahead and make an official invitation to the party on our computer and print it out on card stock paper and mail it to Andrea by First Class, registered, with return receipt requested to Andrea. We will even include a postage paid return envelope with an RSVP card for her to fill out and mail back to us. We are going to make absolutely SURE that she gets the invitation. As soon as we get the confirmation back from the Post Office that she signed for it we are going to call her up on the telephone and make sure that it was really HER that signed for it and verify that she is aware of the party and that she is invited.

To be perfectly honest, I think that Andrea simply doesn’t WANT to come to any of the family gatherings. I think that maybe she suffers from some kind of Social Anxiety disorder and that the “I didn’t get an official invitation in the mail” excuse is just that – an excuse to not have to go out to a party and risk some kind of embarrassment. I’ll be curious to see what happens when she actually DOES get one in the mail!

All day yesterday I found myself in a rotten mood for no apparent reason. It got so bad that I ended up going to bed much earlier than normal and tossed and turned all night long. This morning I found a voice mail message on my cell phone that had come in after I had retired, it was from an old friend calling to inform me of a very good mutual friend’s passing last night. Hence the bad feeling that kept following me around all day yesterday. Not a good start to a long holiday weekend.

Contribution by Saul Martin

I am very excited about moving this summer. I am happy here, but I think the change is going to be good for our family. We will be closer to our family, which is a huge bonus to this move! I think it will be good for my kids to get to start over and make new friends at their new school too. They seem to have made friends with a few kids that I think are bad influences and I am ready for them to make new friends. This move might just be the thing that they need. I am also picturing it making them closer to each other, because at first the only people they will have to play with is each other. I have the fondest memories playing with my brother the summer we moved to a new town, because we didn’t have any friends yet. I am trying to get everything in order for our move. I have us signed up for Bounce Texas and have gotten all the other utilities ready to be hooked up the day that we move in.

Teri wants to buy some flea traps for our place.  We don’t have any pets, but we have allowed some friends to bring their dogs over from time to time when they came to visit, so it is possible that some fleas came into our place with their dogs.  So I will humor her and buy some flea traps.

Every time I turn around I’m hearing Teri talk about the nomorerack bargains she has been buying online. At first I was a little bit worried that she was spending too much money, but after reading a few nomorerack reviews and checking out the website for myself I decided that she was probably not going to get herself in too deep.

The website is set up so that one time a day they post eight different products for sale, all at very low bargain prices. At different times of the day they offer up a couple of extreme savings that they call insanity deals. I’ve bookmarked their site as a place to keep my eye on for future gifts – they seem to have a nice variety of things that most people would like to have. I wonder how many other websites like this are out there yet to be brought to our attention!