Author Archive for YaShekia

Before we signed, we should’ve checked …

Published
by
YaShekia
on December 26, 2008
in photography
. 0 Comments

My husband and I celebrate seven long months of marriage this month, just in time for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

We truly can’t believe how fast the time has gone by in 2008. But what we can’t believe even more is how we didn’t receive our pre-paid wedding photos, album and DVD until about six months after our wedding.

Our months of waiting for the photos that captured our big day were very interesting, to say the least. Our photographer was stellar — wonderful at the art of photography, reasonable in providing us with the contracted amount of hours for taking photos and patient with a bunch of excited guests and family members at the church and reception hall. However, it took my husband and my sending several e-mails and making many phone calls — most unreturned in the more recent months — to finally get the rest of our materials. They included a specially colored 8-inch-by-10-inch photo, a nicely designed album and the DVD containing our 500-plus photos. (Our other smaller wedding prints trickled during weeks prior.) When we finally got the rest of our goods in the mail, it was as if we’d received an early December Christmas present that really should’ve arrived for Christmas in July!

Unfortunately, the first report we filed using our Angie’s List membership had to be a sub-par one because of the situation. We certainly look back on our wedding day as a wonderful time we’ll never forget, but the pictures also reminds us of the importance of not only getting every agreed-to product and service in writing, but also getting the specific details, along with a date of completion, in writing, too.

Here are some tips from Angie’s List about what you should to before you sign on that dotted line.

YaShekia is an associate editor for Angie’s List magazine. Her favorite movie is The Temptations, and she loves riding roller coasters, singing and dancing.

Holiday calories, I’m ready for ya!

Published
by
YaShekia
on November 27, 2008
in fitness training
. 0 Comments

For some reason, chocolate just seems to call my name repeatedly during the holidays.

It’s as if the last two months of the year were created to serve as fuel for plenty of “I will exercise more this year”-type New Year’s resolutions that likely will never be kept past the first week.

First, there’s Thanksgiving: I’ve always loved to indulge in turkey with gravy and cranberry sauce (the turkey can’t be too dry, though); mashed potatoes; corn; stuffing; and, of course, sweet potato pie and candied yams.

Then, there’s Christmas: Even more dangerous than Thanksgiving, calorie-wise, with its oven-baked ham, macaroni and cheese, collard greens with rice and, of course,x egg nog and some type of fruit-filled pie to go with it.

And for New Year’s, my mom has always cooked our family’s traditional 15-bean soup. I’ll likely take a stab at cooking it this time. In fact, I’m getting hungry just thinking about all of the scrumptious meals embracing me this time of year.

All of this talk — plus years of old-time positive reinforcement from health class — has led my husband and I to get more serious about working out.

I’m not quite sure how that’s working out, though.

Still, we at least have begun to shop around for exercise equipment at area department stores. As we wait to see if a home we recently placed a bid on will end up being ours, we’re already thinking ahead regarding our working-out component.

Right now, we hardly ever use our apartment complex’s workout facility. Our excuse? It’s too far (especially in the cold, for me). And yes, I agree that’s a very lame one. So we figured if we purchased one or two pieces of fitness equipment to put inside our potential new home, we’ll have no excuse not to start a far more consistent workout regimen.

My husband’s really into the treadmill, while I really enjoy using the elliptical trainer. I like how the elliptical makes me feel like I’m jogging without actually jogging and hurting my joints, back or hips. I don’t mind short sprints, but I’ve never been too crazy about long-distance running. (That’s probably because I get winded easily, which is probably because I don’t work out enough — and the cycle continues.) Anyways, I also like the fact that the low-impact elliptical machine additionally works the upper body using the moving handlebars, unlike the treadmill.

In any event, with high blood pressure and diabetes running in our families, my husband and I certainly value the importance of staying fit — in addition to eating responsibly during the holidays. Angie’s List’s fitness equipment and training companies could possibly even offer some good tips on what kind of equipment would good for us to use, or training exercises we can do to stay fit in 2009. And, I guess, the tip end of 2008.

But I certainly won’t mind splurging on some miniature Snickers every now and then.

YaShekia is an associate editor for Angie’s List magazine. Her favorite movie is The Temptations, and she loves riding roller coasters, singing and dancing.

From dorm room to home

Published
by
YaShekia
on November 10, 2008
in housecleaning
. 0 Comments

About five months into our marriage, my husband and I had had enough.

No, not of each other, thankfully. His little idiosyncrasies — like making sure the kitchen pots are hung the right way on the hooks — plus my own nuances — like helplessly striving to get all the streaks off the bathroom mirror — aren’t enough to put either of us over the edge … yet.
But the profusion of boxes filled with some useful items but mostly useless literature were enough to push us to a cliffhanging situation recently.

A few weeks ago, we underwent fall cleaning — a belated version of the spring cleaning that never took place. The daunting task consisted of digging through papers upon papers — mostly my husband’s old bills and receipts and some seemingly ancient books and assignments from college.

Boy was that an adventure. Talk about dealing with scraps — both the physical scraps of old documents and the emotional scraps of a husband, wife and mother-in-law (his mom) trying to come up with the best way to clear out a cramped apartment on little food and a less-than-desired portion of sleep.

On top of that, we had to move furniture around and adjust our flat-screen television without disrupting the cable connection — the climax of the day. That’s when we realized we didn’t know where those finicky orange and green cords went and how in the world our TV’s new location would work without stretching one of those cords beyond its capacity. But we did it. And we’re all still alive to tell the story.

Our apartment has suddenly come to life as well — even if the two trees we purchased to “spruce” up the place, no pun intended, are admittedly artificial. Hey, we moved heaven and earth to get our apartment looking like it’s now a step up from a college dorm.

It was this kind of situation that led us to regret not hiring a home organization services company earlier. Angie’s List really would have come in handy that day.

But alas, the day is over. And now that the mammoth mess is out of the way and our living room no longer looks like the maze from “Labyrinth,” my husband’s back to hanging pots and pans and I’m back to cleaning those stubborn mirrors.

YaShekia is an associate editor for Angie’s List magazine. Her favorite movie is The Temptations, and she loves riding roller coasters, singing and dancing.

It all adds up

Published
by
YaShekia
on October 21, 2008
in financial planning
. 3 Comments

I’ve always been good at math. And, contrary to popular belief that journalism is a refuge for the mathematically challenged, I’ve actually always liked learning everything from the basics of decimals to the more complicated formulas of calculus derivatives.
My husband? Not so much.
So in our home, I’m the controller of the checkbook. Before my husband and I got married a few months ago, we had already decided that I’d record all expenses and that we’d both make joint decisions about purchases. The thing is, we never really narrowed down how much we’d actually be willing to spend, or what we’d agree to buy, or how often we’d dip into our wallets.
So then the idea we often talked about but never got around to seriously developing — the word everyone dreads but everyone knows they need to survive in this world — it became a reality for us a little more than a month ago.
A BUDGET. That’s right. We’re finally on a budget.
I can’t say it’s been smooth sailing just yet. Fortunately, we’re using a Microsoft Excel sheet to keep track of our monthly expenses in a variety of categories, including rent, renter’s insurance, utilities, cable and Internet, gas, groceries and tithes. And I’m proud to say that we’re scraping up the extra money we have every month to go toward savings for retirement (God knows we’ll need that!), emergencies and even vacations. But we’ve hit a few bumps along the way, which have only shown us that we can never really plan a month’s worth of spending exactly.
Take, for instance, the weekend we had to spend about $200 on my husband’s black suit for a church choir program. Or the time my husband decided to buy a backup hard drive after getting repeated error messages on his computer for the past year. Or the time we had to shell out a few hundred dollars to get my husband’s front car bumper fixed and get my own car’s worn serpentine belt replaced. Hey, that’s no chump change for us.
But while shuffling between being “dead in the red” and then “back in the black,” we’ve felt the self-actualizing victories of successfully pinching every penny to stay within budget, or having a triumphant week where we actually didn’t go over our food/entertainment budget (thank you Jimmy John’s!)
At least now we know where our money is going and how much more we’ll need to save to meet our larger goals for a house/family in the next few years. Who knows, maybe we’ll even start our own business? (My husband can cook some pretty good Chicken Francese!) As our finances continue to get more complex, maybe a financial planner on Angie’s List could actually help us, too. The good thing about my current math work is I don’t have to worry about taking a test in 60 minutes. I just have to make sure we don’t go bankrupt.

YaShekia is an associate editor for Angie’s List magazine. Her favorite movie is The Temptations, and she loves riding roller coasters, singing and dancing.

One leak too many

Published
by
YaShekia
on September 29, 2008
in auto service
. 2 Comments

My boy’s been sick. For a while, he seemed to get worse by the week.

This is the same boy who carried my sisters and me to the East Coast last summer (and was accidentally rammed against a fence by my twin sister; he required cosmetic work that cost more than a grand).

He’s also the same guy who took me back and forth between Northern and Central Indiana nearly every week for almost a year to visit my then-fiance, and he accompanied me on my dark three-hour drives home on roads surrounded by cornfields.

And of course he was with me on my way to and from work as I slid on ice and snow in Northern Indiana, an area my husband calls Siberia because of the day we got a dreaded 18 inches of snow. Continue reading ‘One leak too many’

YaShekia is an associate editor for Angie’s List magazine. Her favorite movie is The Temptations, and she loves riding roller coasters, singing and dancing.

A house hunting we will go!

Published
by
YaShekia
on September 8, 2008
in appliance repair, doors, homeownership, painting - interior and real estate agents
. 2 Comments

BoxesI’m homeless. Actually, both my husband and I are. Well, admittedly, that’s a bit of a stretch. We have a place to live, but we simply could use about 1,000 square feet more of it.

For the past several weeks, we’ve been scoping out the wonderful land of Central Indiana, hoping to MapQuest or TomTom our way to our new dream house in the potentially money-saving realm of foreclosed homes. Continue reading ‘A house hunting we will go!’

YaShekia is an associate editor for Angie’s List magazine. Her favorite movie is The Temptations, and she loves riding roller coasters, singing and dancing.