Can a Busy Woman Make Her Perfume Shopping Convenient?

Yes, they can. Cologne shopping excites fashionable women. They like to buy several branded perfumes to smell good. Looking attractive as well as smelling good are their topmost priorities as the combination makes them fashionable. Women who are busy with their jobs or family responsibilities, also like to look good and smell better. Here the problem is that most busy women find hard to take out special time for perfume shopping. Their busy life can make them slow in the race of fashion. In this situation, what measures they can opt to make their shopping for perfume convenient.

Online Shopping

Women’sperfume online is one of the most convenient ways to have a good collection of perfume. You will be amazed to know that online shopping offers to save more on your purchase. It is easy to find top online stores offering branded perfume at an affordable price. You can expect 10% to 50% discounts on branded cologne. The shopping can be done from your home or your office. Take out some time from your busy schedule to search an online store that is able to meet your needs. Searching a store for the first time would take some time, as you need to take many precautions in terms of selection of a store.

In other words, you have to find out the store carries admirable reputation in the online world. It is your topmost priority to save yourself from various internet frauds such as fake perfume shopping, paying high for a product etc. Take your time to go through the details help you understand the online store reputation. You can go through consumer comments to know their reaction against products. Noticing negative comments more than positive ones mean you have to leave that site and start searching others.

Once you manage to find a reputed store, you just need to sign up to the site and bookmark its URL to stay connected with it. Your registration with the site will keep you informed about its newly launched products, discounts and gift hampers through mails.

Local Shopping

How to make local shopping convenient? This is an important question that you want to know. Like online shopping, you have to make a local store your pet store for perfume shopping. This is the way to make your shopping for perfume from a local store convenient. This trick will allow you to keep informed about new brand perfume availability over phone or through mails. Local sellers are also smart enough. They are offering various services to lure consumers. Special offers and discounts on branded fragrance like Givenchy perfume will be informed to you from time to time.

Many of them offer shopping from the comfort of your home. You just need to make a call and the product will be at your doorstep within hours.

These are a few tricks to make your shopping for perfume experience pleasant and convenient.

Christmas Leave Is Almost Over

Time flies when you're having fun! Nine days have passed out of the thirteen days leave we have and I am beginning to feel a bit sad.

I can't believe that our vacation will soon end and we will have to fly back to home base. Although I am excited to be home again because I miss my youngest four-legged daughter Millie, my heart aches to leave my mom, relatives, in-laws and friends here. It will take time again before I can visit.

I'm just glad that I got to see my mom again and my family in Bulacan and also my friends and relatives. There's nothing more heart-warming than seeing the smiles and feeling the love of the people who truly matter.

Sending Christmas Cards The Old-Fashioned Way

I miss sending Christmas cards and postcards the old fashioned way. The advent of electronic greetings and social networks and other means of media greetings pushed the traditional way of sending love and warmest greetings via snail mail.

I intend to carry out the tradition of sending cards the old-fashioned way. I still have my blank Christmas cards and blank address labels to use for families and friends. Some I have given personally and others I will be posted, albeit after the holidays, when I come back from leave.

Buying Christmas cards and choosing the ones specific to a dear family member and friend is still my preferred way to convey my thoughts for the recipient.

I'm On Blog Holiday

My family and I are off to Manila on Wednesday early morning to spend the holidays. I will be on blog holiday from 19 Dec. until first week of January 2013. I may intermittently post while away but I will try to stay off the net to spend time with my family and friends on the most festive season of the year.

Allow me to wish everyone a very Blessed Christmas and a Prosperous 2013. Let's share the gift of Love, Peace and Hope this season and the coming year.

Elementary Shooting In Connecticut

More than a dozen are dead, mostly children, in the recent and horrific shooting in Sandy Hook Elementary school this morning in Newtown, Connecticut. Two gunmen are involved in the latest carnage. One of the gunmen is dead; however, the other one is on the loose.

The number of casualties are not yet fully determined but 25 people are confirmed dead. Police are on red alert on the search of the other gunman.

This event came only few days after the shooting in a mall in Oregon.

It is unnerving to hear stories like this one involving innocent kids. Why are there people who can do such evil acts? What has become of this world?

GMAT Test

College graduates who want to pursue further education in Masters or Graduate School level take up GMAT preparations by enlisting the service of GMAT consultancy firms like VeritasPrep or Veritas Prep.

GMAT stands for Graduate Management Admission Test which is a standardized computer-based test administered by universities for the acceptance of new students to their business school courses. It is used as a criterion of business schools to gauge their applicant's aptitude in verbal, quantitative, logical and analytical writing.

The GMAT is administered in secured test centers all over the world. There are a number of test centers in the US alone. Test centers like in Baltimore, Maryland can offer Baltimore gmat course for the applicants to be acquainted to the newly added integrated reasoning. This is a section added in GMAT to test the applicants' ability to interpret data coming from various sources in multiple formats. It consists of 12 questions which is divided in 4 different formats namely the graphics interpretation, two-part analysis, table analysis, and multi-source reasoning.

Other sections of the GMAT test are the verbal, quantitative and analytical writing. The verbal section will measure the applicant's aptitude in reading and comprehending written material and be able to evaluate and provide correct answers in standard written English. The other section is the quantitative section which gauges the mathematical aspect of the applicant's aptitude. The last section to complete the GMAT test series is the analytical writing section which is a 30-minute writing task to analyze an argument and be able to write a critique based on the reasoning behind the argument.

The GMAT scores ranges from 200 to 800 and is determined by the combination of scores from some sections.

Fun In The Farm

I miss visiting our ancestral home in the Philippines. My grandparents from my dad's side owned a large parcel of land. My family and I used to visit while my siblings and I were still young.

I remember seeing plenty of goats, carabaos in the rice fields and cows grazing in the nearby meadow. I have even seen my relatives milk a cow and wondered if they were into cheese making too during that time because my dad and other relatives loved cheese so much; not that I see them making cheese though.

My uncles and aunts used to give us chicken feeds to feed the chickens running around the property. Not only that, we climbed trees and picked fruits, pat the animals around and run towards the nearby beach to soak. It was sheer bliss!

My Printcopia Giveaway Winner's Prize

Darlene Demell is the lucky recipient of the 16 x 20 print canvas from the recently concluded Printcopia Giveaway here in my blog.

The prize was originally 8 x 10 as promised by the sponsor. However, there was a slight change in the shipping policy of Printcopia after the giveaway went live. Unfortunately, Canada was no longer part of their free shipping and the winner happened to be from Canada.

I am very grateful for Printcopia because they listened to my plea to let this one pass. Since it was an agreement anyway when I did the giveaway that Canada was part of the free shipping. Exchanges of email went back and forth. I even went as far as sending money to Darlene so she could claim her prize because she was the rightful winner and really promoted the giveaway. To cut the story short,  Printcopia agreed to ship it to her for free and what's more nice about Printcopia is that they upgraded the prize to 16 x 20!  I am very happy with the outcome and everyone's happy.

Here is Darlene's post about her prize from Printcopia. Please visit her site to read the full story.

Photo credit: Darlene Demell

Thanks Darlene and to all the promoters and joiners of the Printcopia Giveaway! I owe the success of the giveaway to all of you.

Thanks Princtopia for the beautiful memories in canvas!

Who Will Win in The Voice?

I have given up on American Idol 3 seasons ago. It does not have the charm anymore and I just have this nagging feeling that it's rigged or something. I am not saying that it is, it's just my gut-feel.

I live The Voice better amongst the other singing competition shows we have these days. At least in The Voice, contestants are chosen not by their looks when they audition but with their God-given talent in singing; hence the title of the show. The judges don't see them until they turn their chairs to see who's singing. So, contestants make their impression from the sound of their voice and that's more hard to do because you have to convince a judge to make him or her turn to you.

I have missed season one so I am following the succeeding seasons. This season 3, the remaining 4 contestants, namely: Terry McDermott, Cassadee Pope, Nicholas David and Trevin Hunte.

The performance few nights ago was so intense. My favorite is Terry, Trevin and Cassedee who took the stage and nailed their songs like a pro! But I say, Terry is so remarkable on his rendition of Journey's I Want To Know What Love Is. He sang it bare with only a piano and a cello as accompaniment. In his rehearsal, while jamming with the band with audio technica, guitars, piano and drums, his coach Blake Shelton decided to make him sing without the accompaniment of the other band instruments. It would bring out the passion and tenderness of his voice. Terry even quipped that in that arrangement, there was nowhere to hide. He was out in the open. Come singing night, he seriouly nailed it and I had goose-bumps. His voice is simply on the spot.

Trevin is another favorite of mine. He took the stage and owned it when he sang Jennifer Hudson's version of the song, And I Am Telling You. Oh my, he has a natural high-pitch voice and I am sure that he made the 2 Jennifers who sang that song very, very proud. America is proud of him.

Cassadee is another show stealer with her rendition of I'm With You is so amazing. I wish I have a voice like hers. She just soars and soars and soars!

Now, I don't care who will win because 3 of my bets are in the top 4. Go guys!!!

Christmas Shopping Budget

Photo credit: yahoo.com

I don't like cramming and most especially, I don't like crowded malls. So, if you're like me, you'll understand why it is always better to shop way in advance like I do.

I start my Christmas budget as early as June. And I do my shopping early too.  Six months of allocated budget for the festive season works well for me because I have a big, extended family. I keep around 50-100$ a month for the occasion or if there's an emergency. Otherwise, it's intended to be shared come Christmas.

Our lists of family, friends, godparents and godchildren to give gifts to are quite long. I am sure it will make a dent in the savings but hey, Christmas is the time to share. And when we have extra to give around, we're happy to buy gifts to the people we love. This Christmas, we have already spent over the intended budget because we're coming home for the holidays. We don't see our family every occasion so we want to give them the best.

How about you? Do you have a Christmas budget? Do you stick to that?

Graphics Software For Card Making

I don't know how to use Photoshop. I only know the very basic of that software so I find it hard to make digital cards because I am not familiar with the other commands to use for layering and other features to enhance the project. I bought some software online graphic design software sites to help me with my digital projects. However, I have no idea if they will work with Mac. I haven't checked when I bought them.

The app store from Apple has so many graphics software to choose from but it well out of my budget. Either I use my old PC to use the other digital softwares or just stick to the conventional way of making paper handmade cards. I'm a bit torn.

Christmas Vacation - Coming Soon!

Few more days and we will be spending the most joyous occasion with our families and friends back home. We have been very busy catching up on our Christmas shopping for families and friends so my schedule is out of whack these days.

Christmas shopping is not only the activity I have during weekends. I also have to fulfill blog assignments, do some household chores and finish my sister-in-laws handmade baptismal invitation for her youngest son. I commissioned to do it as my gift to her. It's a good way to get the creative juice back and I am glad that it's trickling in. Although it came a bit late, the creativity juice that is. I would have created some handmade cards to giveaway. No fret, I'll start early next year with that project.

All I know is, we're counting the days and the excitement is building up. I can't wait to see my family and friends once again.

Advance Merry Christmas to all! I'll be very busy these coming days so let me greet you now.

May the blessed season bring joy, peace and love in your hearts. Happy 2013!

The Practical Way Of Having A Vehicle

Ever since recession hit the whole world, people are very particular about where their hard-earned money goes. I think, it is fair to say that 90% of the world's population is scrimping on their money so when buying high-ticket items like vehicles, land, residential units and even the day-to-day necessities are all meticulously thought of.

If you live in the US or places in Europe where part of your necessity is having a vehicle to take you to and from your work, you may want to consider the practical side of owning one. You will also have to take into consideration the money you will shell out without sacrificing the vehicle's features and safe-worthiness as opposed to its price.

Buying a vehicle according to the purpose and preference do not have to limit you to new cars only. There are second-hand vehicles around where you can get a very good deal for a well-maintained vehicle. You can search the internet and other classified ads for leads on used and brand new vehicles. If you are in the US, you have greater chances of finding good offers in your state or locale. For example, if you live in Utah or nearby states or area, you can search for used cars orem and you will be surprised to find a plethora of vehicles within your budget and preference. And if you look hard enough, you may even score a brand new car for a price of a used one. These vehicles will most likely be old models or surplus types. Do not let that turn you off because a lot of the old model vehicles and surplus ones have features which may not be present on the showroom models and they fetch for almost half or even 3/4 of the showroom and brand new kind.

So, if you are one of those contemplating to have a vehicle because of necessity,  be wise in choosing. Be practical too. You don't have to drive a fancy sedan or even a limited edition of the same model you prefer. They may make you look good but be pragmatic on your approach to owning a vehicle that will lasts a long time without burning your pocket.

Cost Of Raising A Child

Young married couples these days are either postponing having children or opting not to have one because of the cost of raising a child.

I remember my own parents lecturing me about having to face a very huge responsibility when I get married and have a child of my own because my role as a parent will not be just a care-taker and a guardian but a provider as well. I almost balked at the thought but then, having a child is one of the greatest gift a parent can ever have.

This is the reality we have to face for choosing to be parents. The info below will give you, future parents and for the curious, an insight on the cost of raising a child.

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My Type Of Christmas Tree Decoration

We recently bought a slim, 6 ft. tall artificial Christmas tree. It's similar to Scotch Pine with bushy leaves so the whole trunk is covered. I love Christmas trees that are bulky and chunky looking because I want it to look so real and the leaves have to be sturdy enough to carry all those pretty ornaments I will hang.

Our humble 2012 Christmas tree

Our theme this year is blue and silver and few touches of red. We had the same theme 2 years ago so we just recycled whatever we have already. The only addition to the ornament is the NYC circular ornament we got last Oct. 2012 from New York. My hubby had a light bulb moment when he purchased the NYC ornament. We thought of buying similar ornaments from around the world. So the next time we travel to another country or even in US states, we will definitely get one of that.

Our tree is quite simple in terms of decoration. I don't feel like over doing the decor since we won't be spending the Christmas here in Dubai anyway. I told my husband that we'll go crazy like the one below when we have our dream house because I prefer having a very tall Christmas tree so there'll be enough room to adorn it.

Photo credit: trendytree.com

Gift Ideas For The Music Lovers

Gift giving this Christmas is never easy especially if the person you will give a gift to has a certain inclination to music. The usual gift ideas you can have for music lover family member or friend is to buy them anything related to their passion for music.

Here are some gift ideas to give for the music lovers:

1. MP3 players like iPod, iriver or any mp3 players within your budget
2. Turn table for the DJs
3. Vintage vinyl records for the DJs and collectors
4. CDs of various genre
5. Dr. Dre Beats headphone or other brand depending on your budget
6. Various up-to-date piano pieces for the pianist
7. Guitar for the acoustic lover with matching pick
8. Brass Stands at WWBW or any music store
9. Conductor's stick for the maestro
10. Microphone for the karaoke fanatic
11. Drum seat for the rockstar
12. Concert ticket for their fave artist's show
13. Ticket for their fave musical show
14. Rental voucher for a recording studio for the popstar in the making

There are more great ideas of the perfect gift the music lovers out there. You can add more to the list above for the perfect music-lover's Christmas gift.

Christmas Caroling

I have fond memories of my caroling days when I was still young. My friends and I would gather and discuss the different Christmas songs we would sing. Apart from, we would plan which house to visit and which one to skip. Everything would be written down to the last detail so everybody remembered the lyrics and how our caroling should go.

We didn't practice. We just decided to start caroling which coincided with the first Sunday of the Advent. We had so much fun the first night. We were chaperoned by one of my friends' sister so we had adult supervision. We did our first round in our street and our neighbors were delighted to see familiar faces singing beautiful (to me, we sounded like the best carolers in the world that time!) Christmas carols. Some of my male friends even brought their guitars and mini-organ which none of them knew how to play. They brought it for props and I say, it helped getting the much needed money or tip.

We caroled until Dec. 23 and we earned a decent amount of money. We split the money amongst ourselves and concluded our Christmas caroling activity that year. That was 1984. We had so much fun!

I miss those times. I am reminiscing the days of my youth and so happy that some of my friends from that caroling group is still around. I'm not sure if I can do any caroling again. I haven't sung for the longest time and when I do, I would sing praise to the Lord. Maybe in the privacy of my room but my songs of Christmas carols will all be for Him because it's His birthday. He deserves that praise in hymn.

Making Time to Check Deals and Giveaway Sites

We often come across trustworthy sites offering deals, promotions and giveaways, and we wish we had more time in our schedule to follow them and to enter the promotions we find. But with a little motivation, most of us can make room for this kind of time investment. This post is meant to help you fit this wish into your schedule.

The key to making room for any new and recurring activity in your life is routine. It’s awfully hard to keep track of all the things you need to do in a given day, but if those things become part of a routine then you hardly need to think about them. Begin by identifying a time of day when you can make room for checking deals and giveaway sites. Maybe it’s in the morning before work, or after the kids go to sleep—just pick the time that’s most convenient for you.

In setting up your routine, keep in mind that you don’t want to go too long without checking these sites, as you may miss out on new offers. But by the same token, you don’t want to check them too often, lest they take too much of your free time. So plan to check these sites once or twice per day at the time(s) you’ve identified.

Once you’ve established one or two times per day when you can check these sites, set an alarm on your phone or leave a note on your desk to help you remember to stick to your schedule. Once this kind of activity becomes part of your routine, it will become easy to remember and you won’t need any more reminders. Soon, checking your favorite deals and giveaway sites will become an easy and stress-free hobby that can give you great rewards and help you save money.

Anne Perkins is a freelance writer focused on how to live large on a little living. She writes financial savings tips for QuickQuid, an online  short-term loan lender providing quick loans to those in need. At her blog, AnnieIdea.com, you can get tips on how to take any idea and make it easier or cheaper to complete.

MyMemory Suite Project - 3D Stars For Christmas

This is an excellent paper project just in time for Christmas. So, gather your kids, nephews, nieces and the young at hearts around to make this 3D Star project to hang or put on your Christmas Tree.

If you don't have the MyMemory Suite Digital Scrapbook Software, you can purchase it here (http://www.mymemories.com/digital_scrapbooking_software) by using my 10% discount code. Yes, 10% off the price! So grab my code now and use it for your wonderful paper, printable projects with MyMemory Suite.

10% discount code ----  >   STMMMS30652

 

http://www.mymemories.com/store/share_the_memories_kit_1

 

http://www.mymemories.com/store/share_the_memories_kit_2

http://www.mymemories.com/store/share_the_memories_kit_3

These stars are super cute when they are done! Check out the tutorial found online at
www.mymemories.com/craftables/3dstar

You can find the free template on the right side of my blog bar entitled "Freebies."

The links will only be available until Dec. 10 so hurry and download your free template for this 3D Star project brought to you by MyMemories Suite. Pls. do not sell the free template. It is for your personal use only. Thanks!