Looking at a banner ad for Myrtle Beach, I found that it was sponsored by the official tourism department for South Carolina. The headline of the banner was what caught my eye, “South Carolina: Made for Vacation.”

Now, I do love South Carolina and I love North Carolina. I love Myrtle Beach for family vacations to the Atlantic, (although I think the Virginia Beach area is a little cleaner and nicer now that they got serious about being a family friendly destination).

According to this tourism site, South Carolina has these activities to offer for a girls getaway weekend:

• Beaches
• Shopping
• Outdoors
• Golfing
• Historic
• Wine / Cuisine
• Theatre
• Ghost Tours
• Spas

One of the non profit organizations that I work with has started an email marketing program for some of their fund raising activities. I think that is a great idea, as most people now have an email address and access to the internet. So sending out emails is a quick way to get a message out to hundreds of people and it is less expensive than having materials printed or photocopied and then sent out by mail.

The only problem with sending out all these emails is that you need good email marketing software to handle the large lists and to provide templates for quick composition.

The last time I sent out emails to a long list of recipients, I had problems with my server flagging the emails as spam and limiting the number of emails that I could send at one time to less than 20. So to send out 2,000 emails, I would have to send the same template out to a list of 20 people 200 times. Let me tell you, that is very repetitive and tiring. Especially when there are email marketing solutions to handle those types of issues for you, faster and easier.

I love this scene from “Pretty Woman.” The best part of the whole movie! I especially love the false, forced flattery from the store manager. LOL!

Rented the movie, Cop Out and didn’t have high expectations for this movie. But I like Bruce Willis, so I though I would give it a look.

Well, this movie is hilarious. The dialogue is fantastic, with a lot of references to famous lines from a huge number of popular movies and TVs. The comedy is well delivered and the acting from an assortment of “B” List actors and unknowns is really good.

My only criticism is that the movie is supposedly set in New York City. Well, there is very very very little about this movie that looks, sounds or feels like New York City. They should have just changed the handful of references in the script to NYC and made it L. A. It would have made no difference to the story line and it would have been a lot more authentic.  I bet they spent maybe 2-3 weeks in NYC doing a handful of location shots to get the skyline in the background and the subway, then the rest of the movie was obviously shot in an L. A. sound stage.

There are some really funny scenes in this movie. I think I will buy it and add it to my DVD library next time I go to WalMart or Target.

As much as I love to travel, I am always looking for new things to do in the major cities and I love reading web sites about travel. This morning I found a site that has information on the top attractions of each city, discount rates on good hotels in each city, and package deals, too.

For example, I go to Boston quite a bit but when I thought about it, I only seem to go to Boston as a pit stop on my way to someplace else. Almost all the flights to New England ski resorts have to stop in Boston so you can change planes. Next time, I should plan to spend a day and night in Boston and see the sights and the top hot spots before going on to the ski resort in Maine or Vermont.

If I want to go to Florida and spend time at Disney or other Orlando area attractions, there is a great deal at a 4 star Orlando hotel for rooms starting at $109. What I like about the Caribe Royale is that they have three towers, with two for anyone, including families, and one tower exclusively for adults. So if you want to go someplace to get away from the kiddos, with all their noise and running around, then you can get a room in the adult tower.

If you have ever been to Orlando, then you know how hard it is to get away from families and children. But there are plenty of adult activities – Orlando is not just for kids.

Here is the video I watched last January when everyone was planning SuperBowl parties.I found it on Youtube a few minutes ago.

The video shows you how to pull the bones out of a chicken wing cleanly and easily so you can dunk the meat in dipping sauce and eat it without worrying about the bones.

Tonight’s call from my wonderful grandmother was a nice treat. She is spending some time in Naples with a friend. Usually she only goes to Florida in the winter and early spring, but her friend is having some health issues so Nana decided to got back and help for a couple of weeks.

Nana invited the kids and me to come visit. She reminded me that we have the use of her lovely two bedroom condo any time we want to go the Gulf Coast. I think she forgot that school starts early here, so we can’t go away for a whole week any more. We do have a nice break in October for 10 days, so we might go then. Then again, maybe I’ll get away for a weekend while the kids visit their dad.

Reading over some of the fun activities on the Florida outdoor fun web site called iOutdoor.com, I’m beginning to think that an adult getaway should be in my plans. I could use a couple of days of water activities, like swimming with dolphins or snorkling.

If I go to Naples and stay at Nana’s condo, an air boat ride would be great fun. Naples is just north of the Everglades and there is a lot of fun in the Dollar Bay and Bartell Bay. It’s been years since I took a cruise through the western edge of the Everglades to look at wildlife. Maybe I’ll take my new camera and get some shots of the birds and alligators this time.

Going through my friends list, I discovered three more friends from high school and the old neighborhood that have joined the network recently. One of them was a very good friend that I met in the fourth grade when she came to babysit us, but we lost touch over the years. She married and moved away from the neighborhood and then her parents moved away, so I had no idea where she was.

I found her on the network and it turns out that she and her husband bought Wilmington NC real estate when they had both retired from their first careers, they moved there. They had sold their house in New York and both of them have a pension coming in. So now they can either live an active retired life or they can live where they want to and earn extra money doing something they enjoy. They chose Wilmington.

That sounded like such a good plan that I looked up Wilmington NC real estate on the internet to see what the market it like there. There sere several pages of really nice, affordable homes in a variety of settings, from gated communities to condos to suburban properties with a nice piece of land.

Knowing that school was starting today, I began working with both kids last week on little refresher exercises. I started them each on reading a book every day and using flash cards to get them thinking about math. My daughter is learning basic addition and my son is learning division.

It is important to me for both of them to get a strong foundation in reading and math. To help them with math, the flash cards about all I can do. For more advanced  Math help I am going to use a free online tutoring system that I discovered last year.

My son was struggling with some of the multiplication tables, so I signed him up for Homework help with Tutor Vista. It worked great and got him over the hump with both multiplication and division concepts and sight drills.

When he gets a little older, I know he will want to take advantage of their Algebra help, too. Even though I took all the advanced math classes when I was in school, they are using totally different methods of teaching math to kids today. I can help with finding the right answers to their homework problems, but the step by step process is what they are trying to teach in Algebra and I don’t believe that my way of working through the problems is the way they want my son to do his work.

I don’t understand why it would be different, but I looked at my nephew’s Algebra workbook last year and it does not look anything like the textbooks that we had to use in school. So the last thing I want to do is cause any conflict or confusion for my son with his math teachers.