So my question is should use the rest of my emergency fund to move to a major city such as Honolulu to search for a better job or should I sit tight at the job that I’m in (with nary a vacation day or holiday pay) and hope things with get better as the emergency fund dwindles down? Any good stories on people succeeding in either venue would be nice but I do need a hard dose of reality.

Note: I am not encouraging people to buy stuff they don’t need. Just trying to help

My friend has one of them, a pink frosted elephant w/sprinkles, tattooed above his bellybutton.

Dang, I’m going to have to see if they’ve got any left on the shelf at H.E.B. next time I go shopping.

http://www.stauffers.net/products/animalcrackers/original

They are available here on the east coast-I don’t know where else.

I vote for Animal Crackers in the little railway car cardboard box. My childhood in the palm of your hand.

Anyway, for your link on Santa on a budget, when I was little mom used to tell us that Santa doesn’t give us everything we want and he has a set spending limit. Granted, I knew Santa wasn’t real so I never asked for a big present.

I just heard a good sermon the other day actually about disappointments in life and how we have to learn to live with them and accept them. Perhaps this will help the kids of today to become stronger, much like the Depression begot the Greatest Generation.

To figure out whether transcription is for you, pull up a recording of a talk radio show about medicine or science and start transcribing. Pause and rewind as necessary. If you have Quicktime on your computer, open the file in Quicktime and use its tools to slow the audio down. The amount of time it takes you to transcribe the recording should be about twice the length of the recording, e.g. you should be able to transcribe a 10-minute interview segment in 20 minutes. If you can manage that, you’re in business! Those who don’t have medical journalist friends can always advertise on Craigslist or the boards of groups like the American Medical Writers Association, or directly to big local hospitals.

If you’re a whiz with Powerpoint, you can also get gigs putting together slide decks for busy or tech-phobic doctors who need to give presentations. Those are harder to find, but they pay better.

I’m getting old. Sigh.

I guess part of their problem is that people like me don’t keep eating them in adulthood, but maybe I’m alone in growing out of them.

Circus Animals–vaguely animal shaped cookies, sometimes stuck together in odd ways, with overly sweet frosting and little balls on them– Good times, good times!

- Peter

something about the name “frosted animals” seems… wrong.

But they’re so good.