Organic produce is really expensive especially in my country. I feel frustrated often because when I buy what we want to get in the grocery, most organic items are limited and very much expensive so, I try my best to follow EWG’s Dirty Dozen app.

It lists the 12 fruits and vegetables that contain the most pesticide residue and it also includes the list of fruits and vegetables which have the lowest amounts of pesticide residue. I am not a 100% health freak but with my age and my aim of making myself and my family healthier, I try my best to follow this app if I can but if I can’t find anything organic from the Dirty Dozen list, I consciously wash each produce twice, I know, I’m a nut case.

… is the current fave of my son. He loves listening to this song, I am sensing that our son is a music lover and my husband agrees. He is actually planning to buy him dj headphones to use at home. He sometimes listens to music non-stop and we also need peace and quite especially during night time so I think headphones is a great idea! Anyway, we found really nice ones and we are waiting for extra budget. Headphones will also be very useful when we need to watch a video alone. My husband usually listens to tutorials and we don’t want to listen with him and he can also use the headphones for that. This is one great buy for Christmas!

My son has so much activities in school but most of the events clash with my work schedule so I have to usually juggle my work and his school activities and during these days, I want to document his activities in school but carrying a heavy DSLR most of the time can be very hard since I have to go back and forth to two places. I need a point and shoot like the digital camera casio and with it’s 14MP feature, I am sure I can take better pictures with it. Clear photos are very important to me because I do digital scrapbooking albums for my son and blurry pictures will not turn out nice in an 8×8 album especially if I need to resize it and make it bigger. Anyway here is the Casio camera that I want…

Features:
14 MP
3.0″ LCD Screen Size
10x Optical Zoom range
CCD Shift Image Stabilization and/Red-Eye Reduction/Slide Panorama
Built-in Hybrid GPS system
720p HD video
Includes rechargeable lithium ion battery (NP-90

I am low on budget right now. A friend of mine is offering Apple laptops for a very reasonable price and a friend of my husband offered him some really cool toshiba computers but installments are not accepted and we can only live through installment plans these days. With our more important expenses to keep in mind, we had to say no to their offers. Too bad because I believe I really need a new laptop since mine is too old and it sends off these weird noises that scares the hell out of me, I am just always praying that it will not conk out on me. My husband on the other hand, needs a reliable pc when he’s at home to work on building websites, he has a netbook that doesn’t perform so much for the needed tasks. Hays, these are really the days when I wish to be a billionaire, so freakin’ bad!

I didn’t know that Mozilla Firefox is an open source web browser until I talked to my husband about it. We have been debating about particular web browsers and how I love Firefox because of it’s so many add ons that are very useful in my work. No wonder that it is the second most used browser in the world. Simple to download and absolutely free, I see no reason why any laptop or computer will have no Firefox as its browser. My husband also enumerated more open source downloads that are absolutely free. Let me name a few that I recognized from his list…

• VLC – This is one of my most favorite open source software we have and I don’t know what to do without it. When we buy a new laptop, it is always one of the software I download. It handles multimedia like DVDs, (S)VCDs, Audio CDs, web streams, TV cards and more.
• XChat – I once used this when I saw it on my husband’s laptop that is running on Linux and I find it very user friendly. It also runs in Windows, by the way. Using this made me remember of my college days when we used to chat in some IRC channels. This software will let you join multiple channels, what’s amazing is that file transfers are possible.
• Xvid – This is something I saw my husband used in encoding and decoding digital videos for their office. I find it a bit technical but when hubby explained bits about it, I kinda understood how it works. He highly recommends it at work for making videos at work smaller before storage in discs.
• 7Zip – This too is very useful for my husband’s work. Basically, it is a software that reads and writes compressed files and then can convert it to different formats, which ever they need to use. What he loves about it is that files can run from Windows to Linux or vise versa fast and easy.

I know too geeky if you ask me but I learned so much and since open source software have so many use, his work and mine are made easy and hassle free, at least most of the times.

My friend bought an Apple iPad and she got a really nice ipad warranty for it so what she spent was definitely worth it. Speaking of gadgets, we bought a major item for our workstation and that is a LED AOC monitor. We’ve been wanting a desktop at home but I am having second thoughts because my son throws his stuff when he gets excited but that was before, now that he is very well behaved and can control his temper, I reconsider and the right time was today, just this afternoon we made a purchase. It wasn’t that much but still it’s from hard earned money and great thing was we almost didn’t spend on the CPU because my husband made it from brand new and used parts. So this desktop is really not expensive at all. I’m just excited to see the workspace takes it’s shape. I will take a photo soon, when everything is put into place.

I love that it was invented. I can talk to my best friend every single day, I get connected to relatives who are thousands of miles away plus of course, will I ever forget my sister who now lives in Canada and I can talk to her any time I want to. Like yesterday, I was talking about prenatal vitamins to a friend who is pregnant and then a long lost friend just PMed me in the afternoon saying hello.There are certain aspects in technology that I actually hated but chatting is not one of them, I think it is the best thing ever invented online, well aside from blogging of course!