"Miles on the MBTA" is our Friday Link as we welcome new residents to Boston and try to remind others of the great resources we have to make life better in Boston.
Miles is covering miles and miles of MBTA (and other area mass transit) routes and reviewing the routes and the stations.
Over on Reddit Boston, there are a lot of questions about the best ways to commute. Those readers should take a look at what Miles has compiled.
Add Miles on the MBTA to your daily reading list, follow him on Twitter or Facebook, and get to know more about getting around Boston carfree!
Do you have an Amazon Gift Certificate to use? Or do you need to buy one for a gift? Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site!
Details:
Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino Screenshot from Miles on the MBTA
"Miles on the MBTA" is our Friday Link as we welcome new residents to Boston and try to remind others of the great resources we have to make life better in Boston.
Miles is covering miles and miles of MBTA (and other area mass transit) routes and reviewing the routes and the stations.
Over on Reddit Boston, there are a lot of questions about the best ways to commute. Those readers should take a look at what Miles has compiled.
Add Miles on the MBTA to your daily reading list, follow him on Twitter or Facebook, and get to know more about getting around Boston carfree!
Do you have an Amazon Gift Certificate to use? Or do you need to buy one for a gift? Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site!
Details:
Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino Screenshot from Miles on the MBTA
Today's "Friday Link" post will take you to some of our favorite farmers market toolkit items.
Bring Cash
Ones, fives, tens, and quarters. The farmers will love you, and you'll shop faster! Each year, more stands take credit cards, but they tend to be the ones with higher priced items like meat and specialty foods. And, cash is fast, a bonus for you and your fellow shoppers.
My farmers market cash comes with me in a special accordion credit card wallet. Ones are on one side, fives on the other, with tens and twenties in the card slots. For ease in recognizing denominations, tens are folded in fourths and twenties in thirds. Change is in its separate compartment and my "Market Share" cards are in the outside window.
We love the Sterilite Ultra-Seal Food Storage Containers for transporting food home in our backpacks. They are strong, the seal is tight, they don't leak, and they are lightweight. We prefer glass for long term storage or for any hot food, but these plastic ones are perfect for protecting fragile items.
Remember, a local farmer doesn't grow and pick fruit and vegetables to make them perfect for shipping, they grow and pick them to make them perfectly delicious. You also save the farm the expense of the bags and baskets and help the environment.
We recently discovered and adore these ice sheets. You can wrap this around a product or lay it on top of a bag of items that need refrigeration.
Carry with Ease
We walk to markets and have always used backpacks to lug things home. This season, we decided we needed lighter versions for visits to farmers markets, since we now buy a wider selection of products there than in years past.
For marketing, we are using two of these lightweight Outlander backpacks. Penny likes hers so much that you'll often see her wearing it this summer. Many times, she has the second one tucked inside so, if the day brings on serendipitous shopping, Ed can share the load.
Do you have an Amazon Gift Certificate to use? Or do you need to buy one for a birthday or wedding gift? Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site!
Today's "Friday Link" post will take you to some of our favorite farmers market toolkit items.
Bring Cash
Ones, fives, tens, and quarters. The farmers will love you, and you'll shop faster! Each year, more stands take credit cards, but they tend to be the ones with higher priced items like meat and specialty foods. And, cash is fast, a bonus for you and your fellow shoppers.
My farmers market cash comes with me in a special accordion credit card wallet. Ones are on one side, fives on the other, with tens and twenties in the card slots. For ease in recognizing denominations, tens are folded in fourths and twenties in thirds. Change is in its separate compartment and my "Market Share" cards are in the outside window.
We love the Sterilite Ultra-Seal Food Storage Containers for transporting food home in our backpacks. They are strong, the seal is tight, they don't leak, and they are lightweight. We prefer glass for long term storage or for any hot food, but these plastic ones are perfect for protecting fragile items.
Remember, a local farmer doesn't grow and pick fruit and vegetables to make them perfect for shipping, they grow and pick them to make them perfectly delicious. You also save the farm the expense of the bags and baskets and help the environment.
We recently discovered and adore these ice sheets. You can wrap this around a product or lay it on top of a bag of items that need refrigeration.
Carry with Ease
We walk to markets and have always used backpacks to lug things home. This season, we decided we needed lighter versions for visits to farmers markets, since we now buy a wider selection of products there than in years past.
For marketing, we are using two of these lightweight Outlander backpacks. Penny likes hers so much that you'll often see her wearing it this summer. Many times, she has the second one tucked inside so, if the day brings on serendipitous shopping, Ed can share the load.
Do you have an Amazon Gift Certificate to use? Or do you need to buy one for a birthday or wedding gift? Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site!
Each day a Massachusetts Air Quality Forecast arrives in my inbox. This service from www.enviroflash.info informs me about air quality for the next day. Green and I'm good to go, yellow means I might curtail or rearrange some of my outdoor activities, orange or red and I'm staying inside as much as possible.
You can also get health information from pollen counts to air quality on some weather sites. I like the health maps on Intellicast to check on the current status when my email alert brings a problem to my attention. Sometimes things change for the better or worse.
Air Now also has a reference page that explains the details of the Air Quality Index, who is included when they alert danger for sensitive groups, and what triggers an air quality emergency that impacts all of us.
Do you have an Amazon Gift Certificate to use? Or do you need to buy one for a gift? Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site!
Details:
Words: Penny Cherubino with screenshots from the sites featured.
In February we told you "We Love Our Spam, Scam & Robo Call Blocker." The names and phone numbers of most people from whom we actually want to receive calls are already built into our phone system and they pop up on the screen with proper identification. We block all other calls and then check them out over on, White Pages Reverse Phone Number look-up.
Yes you can put the number into a Google search box and get a list of links to pages that might or might not be safe to visit. White Pages is a site that has been around for years with a history of legitimate service.
When the identification of your caller pops up on White Pages, you get a spam level report and other users who have been harassed by this phone number supply information about the calls they've received. One benefit to immediate blocking is that many users say they get constant calls from the same numbers. We don't. Once they're blocked, we don't hear from them again.
Should we discover that a call is legit, like a recent one from a mail order pharmacy, you can unblock the number, add it to your system, and contact the caller.
Since we purchased our CPR Call Blocker V202 in February, we have blocked 95 specific phone numbers. In addition to spam, scams, marketing, charity, and political calls, this includes phone numbers from a parking lot system that kept printing our number as one of theirs in the directory they distributed to parking attendants and in other print material. Now all those numbers seem to reach a dead or non-working phone line. We have also blocked all private numbers, unknown callers, international and out of the area callers, and unavailable callers.
We have most certainly seen a drastic decline in unwanted phone calls since we began using the blocker. Most of the real calls we receive come in on our cell phones. The constant ringing of our land line was from spam, scams, and other annoying calls.
During election season, we plan to block any and all political and polling calls.
We love the sound of silence from our phones!
Do you have an Amazon Gift Certificate to use? Or do you need to buy one for a gift? Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site!
In February we told you "We Love Our Spam, Scam & Robo Call Blocker." The names and phone numbers of most people from whom we actually want to receive calls are already built into our phone system and they pop up on the screen with proper identification. We block all other calls and then check them out over on, White Pages Reverse Phone Number look-up.
Yes you can put the number into a Google search box and get a list of links to pages that might or might not be safe to visit. White Pages is a site that has been around for years with a history of legitimate service.
When the identification of your caller pops up on White Pages, you get a spam level report and other users who have been harassed by this phone number supply information about the calls they've received. One benefit to immediate blocking is that many users say they get constant calls from the same numbers. We don't. Once they're blocked, we don't hear from them again.
Should we discover that a call is legit, like a recent one from a mail order pharmacy, you can unblock the number, add it to your system, and contact the caller.
Since we purchased our CPR Call Blocker V202 in February, we have blocked 95 specific phone numbers. In addition to spam, scams, marketing, charity, and political calls, this includes phone numbers from a parking lot system that kept printing our number as one of theirs in the directory they distributed to parking attendants and in other print material. Now all those numbers seem to reach a dead or non-working phone line. We have also blocked all private numbers, unknown callers, international and out of the area callers, and unavailable callers.
We have most certainly seen a drastic decline in unwanted phone calls since we began using the blocker. Most of the real calls we receive come in on our cell phones. The constant ringing of our land line was from spam, scams, and other annoying calls.
During election season, we plan to block any and all political and polling calls.
We love the sound of silence from our phones!
Do you have an Amazon Gift Certificate to use? Or do you need to buy one for a gift? Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site!
A great question. And the Reddit community came through with great answers. (Also at the link to the question.)
From arepas (above) at Orinoco to soup dumplings at Dumpling Palace, we are thrilled at how many of the group's cultural favorites we have enjoyed and, in some instances, shared with our readers.
Please hop over and read the recommendations and then set out to try a few.
Here are some that we have covered that were mentioned by people from the related ethnic background.
You'll have to wait until August to try Galleria Umberto's pizza. But it's worth the wait until they've had their vacation and for the wait in the fast moving line for your turn. (Read our tip on how to avoid that line at this link.)
Sweet Cheeks was the choice of one self-proclaimed Southern Girl.
So share your background and favorite places for a taste of your past. Who cooks like the best cook in your family? Where do you go to enjoy food memories?
Walking through the lobby of Massachusetts General Hospital last week, I was reminded of this post and this container for the disposal of prescription drugs. We have updated the links to help our readers who would like to clean out drugs from their own medicine cabinet or help an older relative or neighbor deal with the medications they no longer use.
This particular site is just for prescription drugs. But when I did a bit of research on the topic, I found some sites for other classes of drugs.
These take human and pet medication and over-the-counter meds. They don't take needles, aerosols, or a few other categories, so read the list before you pack that bag from your medicine cabinet cleanout.
Walking through the lobby of Massachusetts General Hospital last week, I was reminded of this post and this container for the disposal of prescription drugs. We have updated the links to help our readers who would like to clean out drugs from their own medicine cabinet or help an older relative or neighbor deal with the medications they no longer use.
This particular site is just for prescription drugs. But when I did a bit of research on the topic, I found some sites for other classes of drugs.
These take human and pet medication and over-the-counter meds. They don't take needles, aerosols, or a few other categories, so read the list before you pack that bag from your medicine cabinet cleanout.
