I don’t “celebrate” Thanksgiving per se, but I certainly agree with taking a moment to be thankful. I hope that all of you have many things to be thankful for – I do.

Linked In is a networking site where you can connect to present and past colleagues and classmates in order to build your own network for professional purposes. I don’t remember when or why I joined originally, but I now have over 50 connections, and have found and been found by several old friends through it. I don’t know how useful it is for work-related networking, but for personal networking, it’s great.

It’s been ages since I blogged anything, and you’ve all probably given up on me, but now that I’m done with my book, things have settled down and I’m ready to blog again. Coming soon are more pictures of Costa Rica, details of our trip to Nicaragua, and other assorted goodies. LKL’s blog will live again! 🙂

Amazon is one of my favorite stores, online or off. I quickly became addicted to buying books from them, and I’ve since graduated to kitchen items (my second favorite thing to shop for). A week ago, they were offering $25 off an order of $125 in housewares, so I took advantage of that, along with free super saver shipping. Unfortunately, a single item was on back order, so the whole order wasn’t to be mailed for over a month.

In order to avoid having to wait so long, I decided to replace that item with another, but it turns out that isn’t possible. I deleted the old but there was no way to add the new, and since I was no longer over 125, the price went up by $25. Plus, the ship date didn’t change, even though everything in my order was in stock.

I wrote to customer service, who responded by fixing the ship date (there was some kind of glitch) and upgrading me to regular shipping. I thanked them for that, but explained that I was still disappointed that I couldn’t add an item to meet the coupon requirements. I wasn’t mad, but they reacted as if I were threatening never to shop there again. They said that since I’m such a great customer, they’d go ahead and take the 25 off anyway.

How can you not love being treated like that?

We recently found out that our well water is highly contaminated with e. coli bacteria. Strangely, we don’t have any symptoms, but this may be due to the fact that we were sick from e. coli more than a dozen times during the 2½ years we spent in Morocco>. In any case, everyone kept telling us that we needed to dump a bunch of bleach in the well to disinfect it, but since I do not use bleach (it is very toxic), I wasn’t wild about that idea. After much research, I found a better solution: ultraviolet purification. I just thought I’d share one of the more helpful pages I found, in case anyone else had similar troubles: Everything You Need to Know about Ultraviolet Water Purification