Foreign Perspectives

This summer has just flown in. Way back in June we had all kinds of plans for July and August in loads of different areas of our lives and yet we find ourselves at the end of the summer with hardly any of the things completed.

Following the fiasco of last summer we decided to be more proactive in ensuring that James didn’t fall backwards quite so much in his reading so we collected two separate collections from his teachers and planned to run right through with those plus Kumon. What we’d not allowed for was that the summer holiday activities were at least as tiring as school-time ones were so we just about managed to get through the Kumon and didn’t manage to even open the other two.

We’d also planned on getting away on one or two long-ish holiday trips but haven’t, yet, managed even one.

And now we find ourselves wondering if it’s time to buy some rain boots for the winter!

Popularity: 1% [?]

With the demographics of most of the western world lurching towards an older population there’s a rapidly rising interesting in means of fighting off the signs of ageing just about everywhere.

Predictably this includes assorted cosmetic preparations notably in the line of eye cream which, in most cases, is basically just filling in the cracks rather than doing something about them. Less obvious is an interest in continuing education which, on the whole, tends to attract older than average people.

Oddly it can also lead to an increase in availability of things like gyms which can have a surprisingly elderly clientele at times.

Popularity: 1% [?]

With the advent of dedicated photo printers you’d think that full color printing was finally with us. But, of course, it isn’t really.

The problem is a combination of the cost of the inks and of maintaining the various print elements within the printer. Add those two together and you’ve a whole lot of cost and effort involved to produce the quality of prints that you can get quite easily from online printers these days.

Speed isn’t really an issue as delivery is pretty fast these days so unless you really need the prints in your hand today you probably don’t really need that fancy photo printer.

Popularity: 1% [?]