Financial & Travel Musings

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

With Christmas just out of the way that means that 1) the sales are getting underway and 2) Valentine’s Day isn’t far off.

That combination makes for an excellent time to be shopping for your loved one right now. Shopping that little bit early also has the advantage that you’ll not find yourself madly racing around in some last minute rush to find something appropriate as most of us often do.

Lingerie generally figures quite high on the Valentine’s Day shopping list for most guys but generally lingerie of the fairly unrealistic kind. Added to that there’s the business of knowing what size to get.

Rather than hit the shops immediately what you need to do first is to check out the labels on the stuff that she’s wearing right now and note down all the sizes. Confusingly, some products require larger than normal sizes (typically anything tight fitting and made of not too stretchy materials eg leather/pvc and the like) and you’ll find that you generally need to go up a couple of sizes on things like that.

What makes should you go for? Well, the game plan is that she’ll actually wear the stuff so, for the most part, you can pretty much forget about nipping into the local sex shop and stocking up there. For one thing, it’s generally cheapo stuff of relatively poor quality material and manufacture and secondly chances are that she’ll not be too keen on wearing it anyway. It’s much better to look towards something like Shirley of Hollywood which has quite an extensive range of wearable yet sexy stuff and at pretty reasonable prices too (that little item in the photo is under $20).

So, sizes first, shopping second and do both now!

Popularity: 6% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

We’re moving back to our UK place soon and have already started thinking about updating some aspects of it as it’s been quite a while since it last had a facelift.

One possibility that would make quite a difference to the overall look of the place is to change the doors or at least some of the door hardware ie the door handles. Although that sounds like a fairly trivial change in fact it can make quite a difference to the feel of the house eg if we chose antique handles to replace the purely ancient ones there at the moment.

I’d be quite tempted to change one or two of the doors too but that’s a slightly longer term project as we figure that a large number of small updates is going to make a more significant change to the house than a small number of more major ones. So, as well as the door handles (the work of a morning perhaps), we’ve also penciled in changes to the bathroom fittings.

Popularity: 7% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I find myself in the unexpected position of just having passed the final course and picking up my modern languages degree (a phrase I’d never expected to be using!).

That in turn means that there’s a graduation to go to next September in Versailles. Wendy reckons that my “graduation suit” a) won’t fit and b) would be incredibly dated even if it did fit. Therefore ’tis time to consider a tuxedo or at least a new suit.

Actually, it’s time to consider a whole bunch of things. First up is whether or not to accept the degree funnily enough. Since I was never expecting to get a degree when I started out to “learn a bit of French” I wasn’t too bothered about the marks as I went along but now find that had one course mark been just a little higher I’d have had a better classification of degree. It turns out that I can change that by doing just one more course (an English grammar one) if I get a reasonably high mark in it and I’ve been mulling that possibility over for the last few weeks since I picked up the result.

Assuming that I do accept the degree (pretty likely as I’ve no particular interest in the course I’d need to do to change the classification), I’ve then to do stuff like book the ceremony, book the transport to it, book the hotel and finally to book the gowns and photographer. Or, I could just skip the ceremony and get the certificate in the post (can’t see me doing that though).

Popularity: 7% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!