MayhemNetworks

Some good movies have come out this year, but right now I can’t wait to see a few.  Why do they always make you wait until the end of the year for some of the good ones? 

This weekend December 15th Eragon, Charlotte’s Web, and The Pursuit of Happyness come out. 

Eragon is a movie about a dragon rider.  The trailers make the special effects and wardrobe look fantastic.  It gives you a Lord of the Rings feel just by watching the previews. 

Charlotte’s Web…what can I say, they finally made a real life version of the child hood classic.

The Pursuit of Happyness is going to be a tear jerker.  The trailers already have me on the edge of my seat.  In the short clips I have seen they are able to put you in Will Smith’s character and feel the same emotions and entrapment that one might feel in that situation.  Definately going to be an empowering film.

Demeber 20th ROCKY BALBOA IS BACK!!!  Yeah he may be old, but he’s still looking pretty good and once Rocky always Rocky right?  It’ll be interesting to see him duke it out with guys half his age.

December 22nd I await Ben Stiller and Robin William’s comedy in “Night at the Museum”.  You can’t go wrong with these two.   If the trailers can make you laugh I’m sure these two will have us rolling on the floors by the time the show is done. 

 And Finally, December 29th “Pan’s Labyrinth”.  Another Fantasy movie.  The previews give it a Grimm Brothers feel to it and the costumes and effects are unimaginable!

 Can’t wait!

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I graduated high school in 1997 and held a job that would fund my partying. I had no idea where I wanted to go with my future. Nothing sounded exciting enough. I finally decided to take a few courses of general education at a local college thinking I could knock my general ed out of the way and then figure out a major. I GOT BORED FAST! I got nervous because still after my hard work I didn’t have any clue which direction I wanted to go and thought that I may never know. So I continued working finding a decent paying full time job with benefits. After almost three years there I decided between the two things that interested me. Cooking and computers! Strange combo I know, but they are both very exciting to me. I checked into the culinary school and found out how expensive it was for a short term. In case you thought it was easy, it’s not. The course a 9 month program at a prestige school would run $27,000. That’s just for the Patisserie (baking) program. Sure I would be able to make some unimaginable wedding cakes and desserts, but I wanted the full deal. To continue another 6 months for the chef portion would cost an additional $27,000. Yes, you read right $54,000 for a 13 month program. Seeing as though I was a single mom I did not see anyway that even with financial aid I could afford this. Next stop, technical school…. I checked into a few local colleges and was finding out that I could accomplish the SAME thing through ITT Technical Institute or Devry as any of the jr. colleges or university’s, but in 1/3 of the time. I spoke to a counselor at ITT Tech and found that the prices were still high, but with student loans and financial aid I would probably be able to swing it. So I enrolled. My first quarter seemed pretty normal. I got my text books on time, classes began and ended as I was told before signing my life away, and it seemed like a typical school. I began to enjoy going back to school because I knew where I was going with my schooling and I knew I’d get the degree so many employers want to see now days. Classmates were nice, teachers were nice, and things seemed to flow as I had expected based off of what I was told by the recruiter. Little did I know that would all slowly begin to change…

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Today couples are spending close to $32,000 for their dream weddings, but there are several ways to save money if you’re on a budget. Trust me I KNOW! My husband and I got engaged May of 2006 and then married four months later in September. We not only had to budget time, but our financial situations would also require budgeting. This meant we had to make quick decisions and looking for ways to keep things beautiful, yet save some money. Weddings are always stressful for both the bride and groom, but the bride usually worries the most. Wanting everything to be “perfect” and just what she’s always dreamed of, the bride needs a high stress threshold to accomplish many of the money saving techniques. This means the bride IS the wedding planner. That alone will save you hundreds to thousands of dollars.

To begin your planning you should first find a location for your ceremony/reception. You don’t want to send out your invitations until you book a place to have your special day. We ran into problems here because of the short time we had to plan everything places were booked on some of the weekends we thought would be our wedding weekend. So we had to play with our date a little bit. If your engagement is longer this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. When we were checking with possible locations the rental fees were astronomical. The average price range was around $7,000 just for the site for 3 hours without catering, decorations, etc. Then the catering would be around $7-$10,000 to come out to the rental location. Then you would have to figure out the table settings on top of all that.

After a couple weeks with unreturned phone calls from possible sites and outrageous quotes, I felt hopeless and eloping to Vegas sounded better all the time. We knew we wanted to get married on the beach and were already getting the ceremony portion taken care of, but the reception location was becoming our problem because there were few places near the ceremony site and the ones we checked into were out of our budget. Finally, I thought about places that I could combine the rental site with the catering. I started calling restaurants and getting quotes from them, when it finally hit me! Why not try a local hotel. I thought of a hotel about a mile away from the beach we wanted to get married on and sure enough…they had accommodations for weddings. They even had 3 wedding packages to choose from and their prices were reasonable. They even offered a beautiful garden area with gazebo that you could have your ceremony at for a low additional cost. So after finding this we were in total agreement that this would not only save us money, but was the perfect distance from the ceremony site so our guests wouldn’t have to go far and out of town guests would have the convenience of staying close to everything.

So the reception site was finalized, but we still had to finalize the ceremony site, but that’s another blog…

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