I was recently given a bottle of Leopold Bros Cranberry Liqueur for Christmas. I love to try new liquors, so needles to say, the cork on the cranberry liqueur only lasted until the same evening I brought it home and popped it open for a sample. Though I am not a fan of sweet type drinks or liqueurs, they do have their place; either for mixers or sipping on a cold, winter evening. Leopold Bros is a small batch distillery in Denver, but the cranberry liqueur is made from real cranberries from New England. I was impressed with the 20% alcohol rating on the bottle and thought this might be something I could enjoy either as a splash in my vodka martinis ala cosmopolitan or mixed with bourbon whiskey for a tangier tasting Manhattan. Of course, it can also be drank straight which is how I tried my first sip.
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Summary of Shake Weight Reviews

What are Shake Weights?

You have probably noticed these Dumbell-looking exercise devices called Shake Weights near the check out stands of your local department stores. I became curious as to what they actually are supposed to do as opposed to your typical, boring set of 10lb, 20lb or 30lb dumbbells. Shake Weightsare basically dumbbells with a pulsating motor in them. The inertia of the motor inside the dumbbell is designed to give you better upper body strength and tone through the physics of Dynamic Inertia. That is what the makers of Shake Weights claim, anyway. The motor doesn’t actually run electronically. You activate by simply doing what the name of the product implies: shaking. Typically, the product package includes one shake weight dumbbell along with an exercise video and sells for about $20.00. That might not seem complicated, but like any popular fad, I’ve noticed a number of different sizes, colors and flavors; as well as a shake weights package for men and a shake weights package for women.

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Sometimes I get so excited about a product that I have to review it before I even try it. After some exhaustive research on electric meat grinders, I just ordered the Tasin TS-108.
I am looking forward to this as much as a kid looks forward to a Playstation 3 for Christmas. One of the top reasons I chose this particular electric meat grinder over all the others is that it seemed to the very favorite of those who are actually using it for my very same purpose: Making homemade, raw cat food or dog food. I viewed a very detailed video demonstration of how this meat grinder could be used to make a raw cat food recipe with the same ingredients I wished to use. (You can view this You Tube Video of the TS-108 in action at the bottom of the page). As demonstrated by the video, this electric meat grinder makes quick work of whole cuts of meat and bones. The Tasin TS-108 easily handles and grinds-up the bones in raw meat like turkey, chicken, hen and other poultry products. This is perfect for making a delicious raw food recipe for cats or dogs. Dogs and cats need the nutrients from the bones and skin on raw meet. We tried buying our own raw cat food in a brand called, Rad Cat. This is an excellent product, but shipping, handling and the middle men who bring it to the pet stores make it cost prohibitive  as a long term solution for feeding our two cats. I knew there was a better way, but it would require a high quality electric meat grinder to make it possible. Of all of my research, the Tasin TS-108 comes on top for a few reasons:
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Were Starbucks K Cups worth the Wait?

...and the extra money?

Okay, now that the wait for Starbucks K Cups is over, are they worth all of the hootin’, hollerin’ and mouth-watering anticipation? More, importantly, are Starbucks K Cups worth the extra cost? On average, Starbucks K Cups are 15% more expensive. From Walmart for example, you can expect to pay $13.88 for an 18-Pack of Starbucks vs $11.88 for the other top brands; Emeril’s, Caribou, Newman, etc. I gave Caribou Obsidian, Newman’s Extra Bold and Emeril’s Big Easy Bold all very high marks in previous K Cups Reviews. Since Starbucks is no longer being made in T-Discs, just about anything available in K Cups for the Keurig is superior to the weak and inferior Gevalia which is about all you can find for Tassimo brewers at the store these days. The Tassimo K-Cups, however, were so superior to anything else I’ve tried for the Tassimo brewer that it became my standard for which all other K Cups are measured. Starbucks Columbian in T-Discs remains my very favorite single-brewed cup of coffee. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do an exact comparison of Starbucks T-Discs vs. Starbucks K Cups because they do not make them in Columbian. They do makeVerona, however, which was a close second in my opinion, to their Columbian T-Discs. I also think that the Newmans, Emeril’s Big Easy Bold and Caribou Obsidian Black were pretty close runner-ups to my Starbucks Tassimo favorites. Starbucks offers six different blends of coffee for the Keurig Brewer, ranging in light to very dark: Breakfast Blend, House Blend,Verona, Pike Place Roast,Sumatraand French Roast.  As to whether or not any of these Starbucks K Cups are worth the extra cost, it is impossible for me to answer until I’ve had the more time to enjoy them all. There is a couple on the list that I won’t buy because they are either too dark and smoky or too light and acidic. First, I will give you my run down on how all of these K Cups Taste and below that a table which describes their tasting notes and a preliminary rating from 1-100.
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75 South is a lower-shelf, blended whiskey. I picked up a 1.75 Liter bottle of this at a Safeway store in Tucson, Arizona while my wife was shopping for wine for Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll be honest, when I checked out of the store, I still wasn’t sure if I was holding a bottle of bourbon or scotch. The label didn’t exactly go out of its way to explain what this brownish liquor was, either. The bottle simply read, Blended Whiskey.   At $10.99 for a 1.75 Liter bottle, I figured it was a bargain whatever it was and I can drink either bourbon or scotch so the 75 South was worth sampling. The label, 75 South, sort of hinted to me that it tastes a little bit more like something from Kentucky than say, Scotland. There is a section of Interstate 75 South that runs throughTennessee,Kentucky,Georgia andFlorida. Does that geography have something to do with its name? The whiskey looked a little darker in color which also made me think of the richer, darker taste of bourbon. I tend to gravitate more towards heavier whisky in the colder months of the season, so I wouldn’t mind having a bottle of bourbon on hand. Read the rest of this entry

Are Solar Christmas Lights worth the money? In a word, no. In two words, it depends. Let’s start worth the no, then we’ll move on to the depends part of the equation.

 

Solar Christmas Lights Disadvantages

If you want to light-up the outside of your home like the City Courthouse, you’d better have enough money to buy the courthouse, if not a good-sized town. One string of 50 Solar LED Christmas lights typically costs $20.00. For kicks, my wife and I decided to try the

Solar Christmas Lights

experiment this year. For starters, we bought two strings of LED lights for $40 and were able to decorate two small bushes in the front of our home. Just think, for another $2,000 we could have purchased 100 strings for a whopping total of 5,000 lights. In case you’re wondering, that falls about 10,000 lights short of competing in your neighborhood Christmas Decoration contest. If cost is not a good enough deterrent for the Solar Christmas Lights experiment, we discovered a few other problems:

 
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