Ed Icionsub

The Christmas shopping season is gearing up for this years buying spree. Most of the big stores who have championed “Black Friday” for years have decided to push their “Black Friday” up a couple of weeks and jumpstart the season with two more weekends of sales and special deals.

The grocery store has a bell ringer outside the entrance door already. The grocery store is also selling fresh cut frazier fir trees now. I think this is just too early to buy a cut tree and put it inside a house. Christmas is still 5 weeks away. That’s a long time for a cut tree to have to keep its needles.

One thing that it is not too early to consider purchasing is the Christmas cards for this year’s mailing to friends and family. I like the idea of ordering my cards online. The online greeting card printing is the same good quality printing that you used to have to order from a stationery store. But now you can go the psprint.com and pick from a huge assortment of card designs and place your order from the comfort of your own home. Choosing the inside greeting and placing the order is fast and easy.

Weekends are getting more precious – especially the days that we don’t have rain. Since the weather forecast is for rain tomorrow, we decided to get outside today and rake as many leaves as we could. We ran out of leaf bags and had to just leave huge piles of the leaves in the side yard. Hopefully I can get out to the store and buy more bags before it starts raining so we can get the leaves up off the grass.

All the women are abuzz today. Not only is the new Twilight movie in theaters, but Oprah has tearfully announced that she is quitting her TV show. It’s been a rough couple of days for estrogen.

Oprah is a huge empire of TV shows, movies, a magazine and who knows what all. When Oprah says that she likes something, there is an immediate surge in interest for that product. For example, this press release details a Christmas gift idea that Oprah has endorsed in her monthly magazine.

The idea behind the gift card is that you can customize the card with a photo of yourself, your family, your dog, your company logo – just about any graphic that you want to upload and print on the card. So it is a very personal gift idea.

Just about every teenage girl that I know and their moms are all excited about today. They’ve all been counting down the days to the USA premiere of the second vampire movie, Twilight: New Moon.

I did watch the first movie. It was pretty good. I don’t think it was worth all the hype we are getting for this series of books about a clumsy, silly high school girl and her vampire boyfriend.

We will soon find out if this new movie is as good as the first one – my daughter and wife are going tonight to the 11:00 pm showing. It was the first one they could buy advance tickets to see – the earlier shows have been sold out for two weeks.

When my brother had his martial arts studio in Virginia, he had enough students to make it worthwhile to run classes each night during the week and then three classes on Saturdays. The only problem with running the studio himself is that he never to got to take a day off. So he had to train and use another teacher to help out. Once he had some help, he was able to start competing and taking his best students to competitions.

Once you get to the advanced levels, you learn how to use different weapons and need to buy Martial Arts Equipment like padding and some of the weapons. His studio sold some of the basic things but when he needed special equipment he would get online to find the right things and have them shipped to his home.He began a nice collection of weapons and trophies as he advanced through each fighting level.

Thinking back on all those fights, I think he did a great job in each of the competitions and he taught quite a few students who went on to win championships, too. When he suffered his stroke, the hardest thing for him was admitting that he would not be able to teach karate any longer. Letting go of the studio was probably the saddest day in his life.

I still think of him when I drive by the area where his studio is being used by the teachers he trained. I’m glad to see his dreams and life’s work continue to help others even after he has passed.

Last week we enjoyed warm and sunny days – a rare thing for November. Our temperatures were in the 70’s and then the weather changed. Within just 2 days, it went from 77 to 47 degrees.

Of course, things could be worse. If we lived in Colorado we would have about a foot of snow on the ground right now. Good for the snow skiers. Not so good for the people who have to schlep back and forth to work in the mess.

The past couple of days we have heard rumors about a waffle shortage. The Eggo brand of frozen waffles has had to shut down production and there are not many boxes of the waffles left in the pipeline. So the grocery stores will soon be out of Eggo waffles. The only estimate that I’ve found predicting availability again is for the second half of 2010.

Holy moly! What could have gone so wrong that they can’t make waffles somewhere and keep the product on grocery shelves? If one plant has to be shut down, why can’t they use another plant and put on a third shift?

This make no sense to me. Usually when something makes no sense it is because I’m being deceived in some way. So I want to know more about this – even though I’m not a big waffle fan. I just hate being lied to.

My friend Pam picked the worst time to get into real estate as a career move. Just as she got her real estate license, the economy turned bad and the housing market has been crumbling. The best way to learn about real estate is to get involved in the actual deals and get out on the street to learn the available inventory. It is hard to learn when there aren’t many deals happening and even harder to pay your bills when there aren’t any houses being sold.

I’ve been working with her to let her know that she can hang in there and that things will get better. In the meantime, she can enhance the services that she offers and build a network of other related professionals.

If she offers extra things like help figuring out what the closing cost items are and how much will closing cost, having a list of home warranty companies that can be used, and providing a home inspection checklist on her web site are all extra goodies that will impress her clients and bring her referrals in the future.

She has a nice web site and is starting to use emails in a direct marketing campaign. I got an email from her yesterday explaining the new government rebate program that was renewed and the changes that were made to make this program better and available to even more potential homebuyers. All of these things can help now and also help build her brand.

Funny how something unusual presents itself and then once your awareness is raised you see it everywhere.

I have a good friend in Australia who just broke up with her boyfriend and is moving back to the States. I feel bad for her – she left a good job and a nice condo in San Francisco to be with him. Now she has to “go home” to nothing and start over.

Then my brother says he is going to Australia for two weeks over Christmas. Funny how Australia came up twice this morning.

Now I have a request from someone on FaceBook to be a friend. And she is in Australia. How funny! Do you think Australia is calling out to me?

My brother is taking his whole family to Australia over Christmas for a two week holiday. They have always wanted to travel to exotic places and Australia seems to be a great destination for a family trip, especially since it is summer in December.

He has been busy booking flights and checking Car Rental Prices. Although he makes very good money, it is always a good idea to save what money you can, especially when traveling. After all, the money he saves on the flight and car rental can be used for more fun things while in Australia, like a deep sea fishing trip or expedition to the outback.