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Showing posts with the label diy

Finding a good baby carrier is like finding a good man...

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It takes a lot of time and you have to go through a lot of bad ones. Before I had a baby, I thought the simplest way to figure out what kind of gear I would need was to read reviews on sites like Baby Gear Lab and Baby Center (if only parenting were this simple.) As ergo was consistently named one of the best carriers, I felt fortunate when my sister-in-law re-gifted me her never used ergo carrier. Unfortunately, my baby did not feel the same way. I quickly discovered why the ergo was never used by my sister-in-law. Whenever I put my baby in the ergo, he cried. Not cute little kitten squeals, but full on pterodactyl type shrieks. So desperate was my little one to escape from the ergo that he would arch his back and use his feet to launch himself off of me in some kind of deranged baby suicide attempt. There was nothing ergonomic about the ergo for my baby or I, so we moved onto the baby k’tan. I loved my baby k’tan – it was soft, comfy, easy to put on and oh so cuddly. It rem...
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An Ice Cream Binge Across America

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For those of you who read my post about the science of ice cream making , you already know how much I enjoy making and eating ice cream. In her book, Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America , Amy Ettinger claims that the average American eats twenty-two pounds of ice cream a year. I bet I eat at least twice that. For an ice cream and book reading enthusiast, such as myself, Amy Ettinger's book, Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America,  would seem to be the perfect combination of my two great loves. Ettinger shares some interesting histories that I had not known before, such as the fact that the United States Food and Drug Administration considers ice cream a potentially hazardous food item because it "accounted for 2, 594 illnesses between 1990 and 2009, mostly from contaminated eggs or spoiled milk" (Ettinger 56). Ice cream is apparently so hazardous that some historians, according to Ettinger, contend that American President Zachary Taylor died after e...
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Special Friday Post - My Yahoo Portfolio Experience - Part 1

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If you have read the Koo Review before then you know that we are avid readers.  I have especially been interested in finance and investing as of late, as well as some marketing. One of the key items I've learned from reading The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham were strategies on how to invest in the stock market.  I created a Yahoo Portfolio account to track five companies that I found on the 52 week low list that I would have picked back on July 14th to invest in.   I purchased 100 shares of each company (to keep things simple).  My focus was: 1) Large cap companies. 2) A history of steady dividend payments. 3) Consistent positive net income for the past three years. 4) An established brand 5) The company sold or produced something that I understood So as you see below this is how our portfolio did after three weeks. So while it was not all great, you can see that the total gain was $558 as of August 4, 2017 at 10:45 a.m. ...
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Review on the Purple Cow - Transforming your business by being remarkable by Seth Godin

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The Purple Cow  by Seth Godin is a book on marketing, and focuses on the modern day environment.  Godin believes that the traditional methods of advertising are broken and ineffective.  He defines traditional advertising as companies that follow the P's of marketing: Pricing, Promotion, Positioning, Packaging, Pass-Along, Permission, and Publicity.  Godin believes that the key to successful advertising is by creating a remarkable product.  The metaphor that he uses for a remarkable product is a purple cow. The idea is that a purple cow is unheard of, and therefore it is a remarkable thing.  Godin believes that modern day marketing tactics should focus on just one P, the purple cow. Godin then provides cases in which remarkable products launched companies to the forefront of their industries.  An example is Google.  It is a website that has a slot where you can type in text and two buttons.  One of the buttons is completely arbitrary. ...
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The Science of Ice Cream Making

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Anyone who knows me knows that ice cream is one of my favorite things in the world. I love it so much that a few years ago I asked my husband for an ice cream maker for my birthday and began making ice cream in my home. Before I started making ice cream, I did not know how much science and trial and error were involved in the process. The science comes from learning about things like food stabilizers, which I discuss below, while the trial and error involves experimenting with the right quantity of ingredients to achieve your desired flavor. For those who have never made ice cream before, it is a more time consuming process than one would think, usually taking place over the course of two days. Ice cream requires many egg yolks (usually a minimum of 5 or 6). This means that first the eggs need to be separated and then they need to be tempered. Tempering is a process by which a food is gradually introduced to heat without really being cooked. In the case of ice cream, you usuall...
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9 Core Values to Help Disciplined People to Steadily Build Wealth

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This post is for people who are self-disciplined and looking to invest money outside of their employer sponsored retirement plans.  It is also for those who are aspiring to find ways to generate passive income. As an educator in New York City, we are provided an employer sponsored 403-b called the Tax Deferred Annuity (or TDA for short).  For more information on it, I wrote about some of my observations about educators and retirement in an earlier article called A little bit goes a long way.  For those who are not familiar with TDA, it offers a variety of investment options but the most promising is the guaranteed returned fix rate for UFT members at 7% annually, and 8.25% for all other members. The maximum contribution that an individual can make is $18,000 for the year, which is similar to a traditional IRA for everyone else. If you find yourself in a unique situation where you still have money to invest then I would like to share some of my own ideas that I h...
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