kids

How many electronic “thingy’s” are plugged in at your house?

Posted on by Kelly aka LadyOTrout

When I was cleaning the other day,  I was noticing how many power strips I had in my house and how many “unused” things were plugged into them.  (Along with those things just plugged straight into the wall outlet.)

Motorola_Cell_Phone_ChargerThere are 2 people that live in my house.   We have 4 cell phone chargers – all plugged in and on any given day one of them may be charging a phone  for a couple hours.  I also have chargers for an iPod touch that is most often plugged in somewhere and not charging anything.  If you have kids with cell phones, Gameboys, etc.  you may find that you too, have lots of random chargers plugged in throughout your house.

Now along with doing the right thing and being green and stuff like that,  you also can be costing yourself more money with your power company that is unnecessary.  Unplugging TV’s may not be something  you feel like doing all the time and individually one charger doesn’t generate a ton of power, but if you have 10 of them around your house only being used occasionally, you may want to consider plugging them in when you are charging the devices they are intended for and not leaving them plugged in when you are finished charging.

*thank you CNET for the photo

Text Messaging – What do those "words" mean?

Posted on by Kelly aka LadyOTrout

I have no children, but I do hear horror stories from my friends that have them about the text messaging phenomena. This post is not about how bad your cell phone bill is or if Johnny or Suzy got into trouble in math class because they were “text-ting” their friends.

This post is how to understand what they are saying to each other when they text. If your child tells you they cannot learn Spanish or French while their fingers are flying on the keys of their cell phones, they are just NOT motivated to learn it. Text messaging is just like a foreign language or a type of shorthand and they are motivated to learn that because there friends are all doing it and they want to be in the loop.

You don’t have to learn all the words, but wouldn’t it be good to know if your kids are talking about a party and someone’s parents leaving town? My fathers biggest fear was having to learn Aerosmith on an 8 Track, boy have things changed!!

I found a pretty neat page on internet.com that has a list of all the terms. Click here to check it out. It even includes what all the smiley (emoticons) faces mean.

But if you are looking for a word specifically, click on this link and you can type it in and it is pretty good on finding the word what means for you.

So click away and take a look, once you get the pattern it will be more natural than you think and if you really want to throw your kids for a loop, text them yourselves and keep them guessing as to how much YOU know!!