Category Archives: Ideas

random ideas that pop in my head…

Discoveries By Accident

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I woke up today to discover that the front tire on my car was flat.

I took my tire off and started my grand search for the elusive nail or metal shard that punctured my tire and let the air leak out slowly.  Surprisingly, I couldn’t find the hole.  I recruited my son (whose eyes are much sharper than mine) to help with the task and after using the old soap trick, we still couldn’t find it.

What is the old soap trick?

This is where you  have the tire inflated and slowly pour soapy water over small sections of the tire while rolling it very, very slowly.  When the hole is detected, it cause more bubbles where the hole exists.  This technique has worked many times for elusive holes in the past.

Since I couldn’t find the hole, after I re-inflated the tire, I decided to put it back on.  After a short period of time, it started to look flat again.  At this point, I was clueless…  I didn’t have a cap on the tire, so I thought that perhaps that was the problem (knowing all to well that it wasn’t), so I took the cap off of the spare tire (really a donut) and started to put it on the stem of the tire.  That’s when it happened, as I was screwing on the cap, I heard that old familiar sound of air escaping.  It turns out that the tire stem had a defect in it that let air slowly stream out.

It seems that life if full of such accidental discoveries, some much more elusive and much more important than my little example.

So can Discoveries by Accident have a real impact on your life?  Since my discovery of the use of audiobooks while traveling, trips are much more enjoyable for me.

Do you have any discoveries that you would like to share?

 

Bests,

MR

Treasure Hunting With Kids

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Geocaching is searching for hidden prizes using a GPS unit (like Garmin).  This is great fun, and my kids and I had a ball doing this in the past.  And while I still enjoy geocaching, the prizes in the cache wasn’t exactly a great find, in fact my kids were pretty disappointed!

So why not go old school and actually create a treasure map?  You could go big time and buy resume paper that has a yellowed marble look, this would make the paper look old-fashion (at least to the kids, especially if you burnt the edges after printing the map with the direction on it). 

Next go to the dollar store and find the cheapest container that looks wooden or like a treasure chest.  I would go with a toaster size container or smaller if I were you!!!

Now bury the mini-treasure chest in the woods with money or a valued toy in a ziplock bag, or some kind of weatherproofing (maybe it would be better to wrap it in plastic, just to keep it more authentic).  Kids most likely don’t know that pirates didn’t have plastic back then…

I’m going to make the map just like we see on TV, with landmarks (try to make them cool as possible),  and the number of steps to get to the landmarks…

I think it would be best if one child does this at a time, but if both do it and the prize is money, you should have them come to an agreement to split the money 50/50 before the treasure hunting starts!

Of course I personally wouldn’t wait too long before searching for the treasure after burying it!!!  Tell them the day before that you’ll have a surprise for them the following day, just to build up anticipation!

I’m sure your kids will get a treat out of this if it’s done well 🙂

Optional Step:  If you kids are a bit older, make the map so that part of the instructions are missing, then have a GPS coordinate as an X marks the spot kind-of-deal.

Bests,

MR

Coinstar Counts Money For Free?

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Now you’re probably thinking “What? Coinstar now counts my coins for free? Are they crazy?”

And they answer is:  Why yes, Coinstar is NUTS!

Okay, not really…  I just couldn’t resist writing that.

Coinstar is the company that owns those cool machines that let you pour your pocket change into them and they count the coins for you and give you a cash voucher minus their 9.8% service charge.  That fee 9.8% is awful close to 10%, huh!

Since I would love to have a 10% (or 9.8%) return on my investments, I just couldn’t justify spending 10% of my money just to have it counted!  In fact, to me it seemed like highway robbery.

Needless to say, the old Coinstar and I were not friends!!!

But that was yesterday, now I’ve had a change of heart, and here’s why:

In what I consider a brilliant move on Coinstar part, they now offer gift cards for the full value of your coins, in exchange for their service instead of charging their normal 9.8% fee! How cool is that!!!

Just to name a few of the participating companies in the new Coinstar gift card deal, here is a short list:

  • Amazon
  • Starbucks
  • JCPenny’s
  • Old Navy
  • Lowe’s
  • CVS
  • Gap
  • Regal Cinemas

I’m willing to bet that the list of companies participating in the Coinstar program will continue to grow!

So in the past, whereas I would never consider wasting my money on such a service, it may now be my preferred route.  Time is money, and the time it takes me to count and roll coins vs using Coinstar while shopping for groceries is a no-brainer!

Not only am I going to use their service…  I’m also going to take a hard look at their stock (Ticker: CSTR, current priced at $46.11) as an investment.  I can now imagine people throwing their coins in a piggy bank as a Christmas fund, or similar type of plan, then cashing them in at Coinstar machines!

Oh did I mention that Coinstar is also the company that owns the RedBox machines that are now found practically everywhere!

If Coinstar does a good job marketing their new service, I think as a side benefit, people in mass might start to save their coins at a higher rate than previously recent years.

If I seem a little excited about this new, well I am!  This new coinstar program is a win-win-win!  A win for me by making my life easier, a win for coinstar via higher participation rate from consumers and a win for the companies participating in the Coinstar program via increased sales!

It’s rare to have triple wins from a business change like this!

Do you think as I do, that the new service model that Coinstar offers is a win?  Do you think that you will start to use such a service, especially while you grocery shop?  How about as an investment, do you think Coinstar now looks undervalued?  Will you look at pocket change differently now, I think I might!

 

-MR

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Oh, and by the way, this I’m not getting paid for this and I don’t own any Coinstar stock (at least not yet)…

Frugal Fun With Bunk Beds

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Fun With Bunk Beds

Tonight, I’m having a sleepover with my son in his bunk beds.  I’m sleeping in the lower bunk while he gets to sleep on the top bunk.  Like most boys, sleeping on the top bunk is the preferred bunk bed because it’s cool.

Bunk Beds

Bunk Bed memories

He has been asking one of us (either me or my wife) to have a sleepover with him for the past few years.  Last week, he had a friend sleepover in his bunk beds, and the week before that my daughter slept over too.  My daughter wanted to try out the top bunk, which she seemed to love!

Initially I thought that bunk beds were a military invention, but it turns out that the first know reference to bunk beds has been found all the way back in ancient Egyptians times.

Frugal Bunk Beds

When I was a boy growing up, I wanted to have a clubhouse out in my backyard.  I never got the clubhouse that I wanted, but luckily, I had bunk beds, and they served as a cheap substitute.  While not exactly the same, they still worked out quite nicely.

I would take a few blankets and let them hang down from the sides of the top bunk bed, which would make the lower bunk completely dark inside.  Next, I would get a flashlight and hang it from the upper bunk’s rails, which effectively made a light for the lower bunk, thus enabling me to make the lower bunk a fort/clubhouse.

Mostly, I would just take my dog in my clubhouse, but occasionally I would get my grandmother or a friend to play along too.

I use hang pouches to the upper bunk rails and tape pictures to the wood sides of my cheap clubhouse (bunk beds), so that it really did look like a fort/clubhouse.  It was both cheap and fun, not to mention easy to convert back to bunk beds.

At night, I initially I would leave my clubhouse alone, and sleep on the top bunk.  Later, I found that it was sometimes more fun sleeping in the clubhouse because it was like a private room within my bedroom.

During the day, I wouldn’t always want the bunk bed to be completely dark, so I would flip up one of the side blankets, to let light shine onto half of the lower bunk.

Another fun activity that I would do was to pretend that my bunks beds was really a boat, and I would pretend that I was a captain, steering it when I was on the top bunk.

As a 9-year-old, I thought my bunk beds were awesome, and I still have fond memories of them today.  So I have to admit, I was kind of excited to relive the past memories of sleeping in the bunk beds as a 9-year-old would.

-MR

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