A Couple Reviews

I wanted to let you know about a solution I found to what I *think* is a common problem. Grease stains on clothes... I'm talking about grease from your fryer - not from your car!! :) (haha - for those of you that know my husband, know we don't have any car grease on our clothes! heehee!) I also seem to have an issue with not checking pockets before washing clothes and end up washing chapstick, which if you've ever done that, YIKES - it will ruin almost everything in the load with little grease stains that constantly look "wet". So does this happen to the rest of you? Do you get stains like that on your clothes? Sometimes I end up with them and am not even sure how they get there!!! Anyways, I've always struggled to get them out and have tried numerous products. Well, recently one of my favorite shirts got a nice big grease stain. This is one of those mysterious stains and I don't really know how it got there. I got to doing a little research online and saw some suggestions for Purple Power, which can be found in the automotive section of Walmart (or in automotive stores). It is a degreaser. I thought - what the heck - it's worth a shot! So I went to Walmart last night and purchased some Purple Power Degreaser. (I'm attaching a picture, but the bottle I bought was actually clear and you could see the purple liquid.) So I tried it on my shirt last night and guess what - IT WORKED! Good as new!! I'm so excited! I did read online that if the stain has been washed & dryed a couple times (which mine had) that you may have to spray with Purple Power and wash it a couple times.

I have a couple other "laundry issues" I'm going to try to tackle as well... ink stains (again, washing without checking pockets... WHO puts pens in their pockets!?!? MY HUSBAND!!) and also mold stains. That sounds gross, but what happened was my son had gotten his white shirt very dirty and I sprayed it with Shout and threw it in the laundry basket. Well, I obviously waited too long to put it in the washer, b/c when I took it out of the basket it had brown mold spots on it!!!!! :( I was so disappointed, it's one of his favorite shirts! Well I've done some research on that as well and have a little potion I plan to try tonight. I will let you know how it goes!

The next thing I wanted to tell you about is Google Voice! Have you heard of it? It's Google's latest & greatest product! (I swear, Google will take over the world!!!)

Google Voice is the Internet based phone forwarding service by Google. It is free except for international calls. Google Voice gives you a separate phone number which you can give out as if it is your regular (and ONLY) phone number. You can then change your settings to have calls forward to any of your phones. Now you don't need to program someone's cell, home and office numbers. If you know their Google number, they will set it up to "find" them wherever they may be.

You can forward to one group of phones during the day and another at night. You can have calls from certain numbers forward differently than calls from other numbers. You can block spamming callers and send some calls straight to voice mail.

You can even leave different greeting messages on your voice mail for different groups of people! So when your friends call, you can have a fun & crazy greeting, but when your boss calls, it can be a professional greeting!

You can send yourself an SMS message or an email whenever you get a voice mail message, and you can check your voice mail from the Web or from your phone. Plus it transcribes your voice mails for you, so you can sit at your computer and read what someone just said in your voice mail!

The online app is really cool and you can send SMS messages (text messages) from your computer to someone's phone! I'm much faster at typing on my computer than my phone, so I think this is really cool!

Google is just starting to release this product to the public and I'm sure over the next couple years it will have tremendous improvements and even more functionality. One thing they will be adding is a way to use your current cell number (or whatever number people know best) as your Google number. They are also implementing a cell phone application so you can run the online version straight from your phone and people will see your google number show up instead of your cell number.

It's pretty cool - and hey - it's FREE! Check it out and sign up to get an invitation. You may have to wait a little while to be invited as Google is still slowly releasing this.

http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

Have a good weekend everyone!