Louis G

I'm interested in learning how to weld. Not for professional purposes, just to learn how to do it for basic stuff. Working on old cars, fixing the lawn mower. That kind of thing.

I have looked around online and found some technical schools in the area, but they all have in depth courses that cost over 2000 dollars. I don't need anything that intensive. Something like a one or two weekend "just the basics" type course.

I am planning on selling my house in the near future and moving into a larger one. My family is growing and we need the space. I am not upside down on the mortgage, but I don't know what the house will sell for and after realtor's commission I don't think I will have much left to put down on the new house.

I do have a fairly sizeable amount in savings to help with the down payment. I have an additional amount of money that Will be coming at the end of the year but I am not sure what to do with it. It's enough to pay off my car ( financed at 2.9%).

I have no credit card debt.

Should I pay off the car with this money, put it into my mortgage to lower the balance, or just put it into savings to use when I buy the new house?

I need to sell my house before i buy the new one. Can't afford to pay two mortgages at once.

Savings is earning me only about 2% in interest.

My mortgage is fixed at 5.25% ( but mortgage interest is tax deductible..)

I hear this repeated all the time. "the poor are poor because they don't work hard". The Rich got rich through hard work"

This is nonsense. Hard work is a prerequisite to have a job, any job. How much you earn is a function of how rare your skill is and how much demand there is for that skill. That is why Lebron James earns a ton of money yet the guy who repairs the toilets has very little. Both work very hard. The plumber may work harder than The NBA star in fact.

We live in southern NJ. Our 2 and 1/2 year old daughter has been playing in the back yard alot. she normally ends up with a couple mosquito bites despite our best efforts to prevent them. yesterday we noticed that her ankle looked puffy and quite red. she was itching at it and said that it hurt. we put some hydrocortisone lotion on it. today it looks the same and still bothers her so we took her to the pediatrician. the DR said that it looked like a mosquito bite and told us to keep putting the cream on and go home.

it looks nothing like a mosq. bite to me. i think i can see two small puncture wounds.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3448/3769775369_258...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2546/3770573774_948...

Sometimes when I wake up at night or early in the morning my eyes feel really dry and it actually hurts for a bit. It almost feels like there is something in my eye for a second. I have to like blink alot and hold them closed for a bit. I also work in front of a computer all day and my eyes get irritated and strained alot.

I am wondering if there are any non-prescription treatments for ADD or ADHD that people have tried?

I have a Pioneer stereo that I bought a couple years back. It's connected to an Infinity 5.1 speaker system.

When I am listening to the radio it seems to work normally. When I turn it up it gets loud and when I turn it down it gets quiet. I don't have to turn it up very much at all for it to get loud.... WHen I change the input over to my DVD player, TV or PS3, the volume seems to get cut in half. I have to turn up the reviever to 75% power for it to be at a normal level. If I swtiched over to the radio it would blow my ears out it gets so loud. So why is this happening? It happened when I had RCA connectors going from my TV to the stereo and it also happens when I have a TOSlink cable going from my PS3 to my Reciever. I can't figure it out.

every time I sign in it goes to "page can not be displayed"

We are dogsitting for a week for a good friend of ours. We already have a dog and the two dogs get along quite well. Thier dog is very sweet mostly well behaved. However... the dog seems to be very jealous of our 18 month old daughter. Obviously we give our daughter alot of attention and anytime we leave our friends dog to tend to our daughter the dog defecates in the house. Usually the dog seeks out something that belongs to our daughter. Her diaper bag, her shoes, the carpet next to her crib... and craps right there on the floor. It seems fairly obvious to us that the dog is being vindictive and it resentful that we aren't paying it attention so it shows us that it's angry by defecating in the house. The dog NEVER does it while it is with us, only when we leave it alone to care for our daughter. We are stuck with the dog for a week. WHAT DO WE DO??

P.S. Our friends do not have children so the dog gets all of thier attention. It's a West HIghland Terrier and poodle mix.

I ordered 4 bare root plants through Dutch Gardens. ( candyland climbing roses) They just arrived this past Thursday at about 7:30 AM. I had a planting bed already prepared and ready. As soon as they arrived I took them out of thier boxes and put them right in the ground and watered them in. I live right at the very bottom of Zone 6, it may even be right at the tippy top of zone 7. ( south jersey outside of philly ). Anyway I am wondering how long before they really start growing? One of the plants looks like it has a couple of buds growing out of the stem but the other 3 look dormant.

I have a dehumidifier in my basement and during the summer I have to empty the bucket atleast once a day sometimes more. Would there be any problems running a drain from the dehumidifer to my sump pump baisin? I imagine that the sump would operate much more frequently doing this. Is it common practice?

The sump does have a battery backup so there is no worries about it overflowing during a power outage.

I discovered a small area of my lawn that had 5 or 6 little holes all about the size of a narrow pencil. There is a small pile of dirt around the hole. The hole is much bigger than something an ant would create and they are multiplying. At first there were 5 or 6, now there are dozens of holes all over. I have never really seen anything in or around the holes but once I swear I saw a bug that looked a little like a hornet poke its head out and then go back in but I could be mistaken.

We recently had out basement waterproofed. Now that that step is complete, I am in the process of partially finishing the basement. I am going to be laying down some carpet, probably a berber style and I am not sure about the floor. It's a bare concrete floor right now. Should I lay down some OSB first before putting down the carpet and pad? Should I skip the OSB and just used a rubberized carpet backing? Is there an advantage to doing it one way or the other?

So I need some kinda laptop bag to carry my new lappy to and from school. I'm not 18 or 21 anymore so I don't want some crazy bright blue or red or whatever laptop bag with hello kitty or Optimus Prime on it. I'm 30 years old but I'm not an old fogey. I'm a geek at heart.

I also do not want a trendy 300 dollar case from some designer I never heard of. I just need something that will fit a 17" laptop and something that the college kids won't laugh at when I bring it into class .

Do I need something that doesn't exist?

If you have stock options at the company where you work and that company gets acquired you have two choices. You can either surrender your options and take a cash payout or you can exercise your options and still take the same payout but aparently there are different tax implications for each case. What are the differences? Is it better to do one or the other?

We have an old house, built circa 1920. I believe the doors that are here are original to the house. They are odd sizes, the front is 32" x 77" and the back door is a little smaller 30" wide and a little shorter.

The contractor would need to remove the siding around the doors, enlarge the opening, and do all that stuff. I guess it's a bit of work because the openeings need to be enlarged..

I got an estimate from lowes and they quoted me 1700 dollars just for installation.

That seems really high to me. I was thinking closer to 1000.

Am I way off base?

I imagine that this varies state to state, but who must yield when traffic is trying to merge onto the highway in NJ? I have heard people tell me either way, and a search on the internet did not yield any results. In some instances, cars have very little room to merge and must immediately get onto the highway or come to a full stop blocking all other traffic trying to merge and traffic trying to exit. In this case it would make sense to me that the merging traffic have right of way.

However in other cases cars have plenty of room and there is no crossing traffic trying to exit, so in that case it would seem to me that the traffic already on the highway have right of way.

Is there a law in NJ about yielding to merging traffic ?

I am a young investor ( 29 ) and currently I have my 401K plan heavily weighted towards equity. It's about 80% equity ( 40 international and 40 domestic ) and 20% in multi-sector bond fund. Recently there have been indicators that the market will go through a "correction" and Merril Lynch inssued a whole house sell order and advised it's clients to reduce there equity holdings. If there is a correction I will certainly have time to ride it out being only 29, but if I move to safer waters for the time being and then move back towards equity once the market has stabilized, I stand to come out ahead. That is my thinking anyway. Am I mistaken?

The Labor department released new employment data today.

Since most of the neo-cons around here continue to crow about how great the economy is, I thought I would ask them to respond to this latest batch of less than stellar economic news.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070504/ap_on_bi_go_ec...

"The nation's unemployment rate edged up to 4.5 percent in April as cautious employers added the fewest new jobs in more than two years, signaling that the labor market is starting to feel some of the strain of the sluggish economy.

The new tally of jobs added to the economy was the fewest since 65,000 jobs were added in November 2004.

The new report also showed that job gains in February and March turned out to be a bit weaker than previously reported.

The economy in the January-to-March quarter grew at a feeble pace of 1.3 percent, the weakest in four years. It's the most up-to-date figure on gross domestic product, the best barometer of the country's economic fitness

After the Dow hit 13000 they all came out of the woodwork to talk about what a great job BUsh was doing with the economy... Despite the fact that a stock market index like the DOW is not an indicator of overall econommic health they touted thier success.

Now when the REAL economic information comes out, That being the GDP figures produced by the government Commerce Department, they fall silent?

The GDP growth figures released today are even weaker than we expected them to be. The economy is slowing.

"The Commerce Department reported that the U.S. gross domestic product grew 1.3 percent in the first quarter, its lowest level in four years. The figure was below the average economist forecast and down sharply from 2.5 percent in the previous quarter. The government data also showed that pricing pressures were rising -- raising the concern that U.S. consumers may slow spending."

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070427/wall_street.html?.v...