Free Web-Resources for College Students

I'm sorry for the delay in posts, ya'll. My boyfriend and I decided to take a quick trip home before school starts up again. It was amazing but went by way too quickly! I got to spend time with my family, J's family, and even welcome baby Eli into the world! I am now an auntie three times over :)

I will continue the "What I Wish I Knew in High School" at a later date if there's any interest. For now, I thought I'd make another list of web-resources...but this time for college students!

01) Chegg - Buying textbooks is one of the most expensive parts of being a college student. You pay $150 or more for a book, then sell it back at the end of the semester for only $20. That is highway robbery! How about renting your books instead? I got all of my textbooks for this semester from Chegg and only spent $160. Once the semester is over, send the books back with a pre-paid UPS label. It's that easy and it'll save you big money!

02) Easybib - Creating bibliographies is a pain in the ass! There are different rules for each type of resource and its almost impossible to memorize them all. Easybib makes bibs...well, easy. All you do is enter in some basic information about your resource and Easybib will format everything for you! It will even create a bibliography page and list all of your resources in alphabetical order.

03) Skip Class Calculator - Skipping class can be tempting after the first month, but is it a smart decision? The Skip Class Calculator will ask you a few questions about the class you want to skip and will determine if you can get away with missing a day or not! This calculator has convinced me to go to class quite a few times haha. It really helps you think it through logically!

04) Rate My Professors - I keep two things in mind when I am planning my class schedule: the time of the class and the teacher! Screening your teachers can truly make the difference between getting an A and getting an F, and that's what Rate My Professors is here for. You can read "reviews" of professors at your school to decide whether or not you would be successful in their class. Reviewers will often mention the class format, humor of the teacher, extra credit opportunities, and even if the teacher is a hot piece of ass!

I hope you enjoyed this list! Am I missing any websites that are awesome for college students?

What I Wish I Knew in High School (Part 1)

Have you ever heard the expression "another year older, another year wiser"? In high school, I thought this was just a cliche that old people used to make themselves feel superior. Just three years after graduating, I realize that although it may be cliche, it is the truth. I've had so many "aha!" moments and realized a lot of things I wish I had known when I was in high school. Since those four years were awful for me, I figured it was important to share what I've learned with any high schoolers who might read this. Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and be inspired by my regrets or lack thereof.

01.) Popularity isn't everything. In fact, it's nothing. I was one of those girls who floated around in the middle of the spectrum. I wasn't a nerd. I wasn't popular. Therefore, I was kind of invisible to everyone except for my small group of friends. I hated that! I always hoped and prayed that one day the popular kids would invite me to one of their parties. I just wanted an opportunity to show them how fun I was and that I wasn't the same shy girl I was in middle school. That never happened, but I'm glad. Turns out that the popular kids were the ones who weren't fun to be around! They had to pop pills and get drunk just to have a good time. I would have missed out on so many amazing moments with my friends. Junk food filled sleepovers, prank calls, acting stupid, and laughing until our stomachs started to hurt. I'm glad I didn't grow up too fast!

02.) Just because you don't get asked on dates doesn't mean you're undesirable. In high school, I wouldn't have been able to pay a guy at my school to take me on a date!  Dances came and went, and I always had hope that this would be the time I was asked...it never was. I wanted a date to homecoming so badly that I finally decided to ask someone myself. He was my crush for two years: not that attractive or popular but he made me laugh and I really liked talking to him.  My crush, Nick, said "yes" and that had to have been the happiest day of my teenage life! I made sure I had the perfect dress, an adorable up do, and flawless makeup. We were supposed to meet at the dance and I nervously waited around the entrance for him to arrive. An hour later, I was still waiting and my heart began to sink. All of my friends reassured me and said "I'm sure he's just running late", but I knew at that point that Nick wasn't coming at all. I had never felt more undesirable, unwanted, and unattractive! Even an unpopular chubby kid didn't want to be my date! I slowly started to accept the fact that I wasn't going to have a high school sweetheart, a date to my senior prom, or probably ever be asked out on a date.

A month after graduation, I moved two hours away from my small home town to live on campus at my college. Immediately after moving in, I started to recieve male attention left and right (and not just from short stubby losers...normal, attractive guys!) I thought I had moved to some ass backwards town where ugly was beautiful, and beautiful was ugly but that wasn't the case at all! In fact, shortly after graduation, multiple guys from my high school sent me a message on Facebook and said "You are so gorgeous! What happened?" But nothing had happened! Their eyes had just finally opened. It took me a while to realize that there was never anything wrong with me, it was what was wrong with them. They were so busy chasing after what was considered beautiful at my high school (a preppy blonde haired, blue eyed Abercrombie wearing clone) that they didn't notice how great I was!  In the end, I'm glad it worked out how it did. A few months into college, I met the love of my life and we've been together for almost three years now.

To be continued.....

My Boyfriend is making me Fat!

My boyfriend, J, is a fat ass! Not literally...he's actually quite slender. Figuratively. He will eat or drink almost anything in his sight; day old soda that is flat, the leftover broth from my chicken noodle soup, an entire pack of fruit snacks a day, etc. His obsessive eating didn't really bother me until he started eating up all of my food. When we shop for groceries we buy mutual foods (things for meals), he'll pick out lots of snacks, and I'll pick out one snack. That snack, my snack, is sacred. I'll eat a few of my cookies the first day, and come back the second day to an empty container! Or even worse, find one cookie left....half eaten.

You shouldn't mess with a woman on a diet's snacks! You need to indulge every now and then when you're dieting. If you don't, you might give up and binge eat like you'll never see pizza again! Unfortunately, binging has been the result of my boyfriend's food stealing. I'll buy a snack on my day off when he is at work and compulsively eat it before he gets home. All of it. If I leave anything, he'll just finish it off and I'd never get to enjoy it again! Oh God, I sound so fat right now.

So yes, my boyfriend is making me fat haha. Not only that, he is also trying to kill me. I bought women's low calorie protein bars to use as a meal replacement for breakfast. I went to grab one and noticed there was already one on the counter, half eaten, still in the wrapper. Knowing that if he didn't finish it he probably didn't like it, I grabbed it and decided to finish it myself. As I'm eating it, I feel an ant crawl on my wrist. I flick it off. Then I feel another. And another. I take the wrapper off the protein bar and notice ants crawling all over the protein bar. I almost puked lol.

So moral of the story is....don't let your boyfriend eat your sacred snack foods. Or you will get fat and die from ant poisoning. Don't get fat and die from ant poisoning.

Top 5 Web-Resources for Small Business Owners

When I decided to start my own business last December, I had no idea where to begin! I didn't have a lot of money to invest and I didn't know any entrepreneurs to ask for advice. Despite my fears and reservations, I decided to jump in with both feet! I have since found a lot of resources that I'd like to share with other small business owners or anyone considering entrepreneurship.

01) Fiverr - Fiverr is a marketplace with products and services for just five bucks. A lot of the "gigs" are just for fun or humorous, but there are actually a lot of great business resources as well. You can get a logo made, purchase a video testimonial for your product, or get a SEO analysis of your website....all for $5!

02) Kick Starter - Kick Starter is a fabulous way to find funding for your new business! All you have to do is create a "project", explain your idea, set a funding goal, and create a deadline. You attract backers by offering incentives for pledging money towards your project. To protect both you and the backers, you will only receive the funding if your goal was reached by the deadline.

03) Square Up - Your business can be just as mobile as you are! Square Up is an app for your smart phone that helps you accept credit cards virtually anywhere! Once you sign up, they send you a free credit card scanner that plugs right in to your phone's headphone jack.  Once a payment is processed, Square takes 2.75% as a processing charge, and deposits the rest in your bank account. It couldn't get any simpler!

04) Vista Print - Business cards are an essential for any business owner! If you don't know how to design your own business cards and/or want to save money, Vista Print is the place to go! They have hundreds of business card templates you can customize to get a professional look. They offer 250 business cards for just $10, and that includes free shipping. If you subscribe to their newsletter, you can get even better deals if you watch for them.

05) Webs.com - When I first started my business, I didn't want to pay for a domain name and hosting right away but I DID want to make sure I had an online presence. It was hard enough to find free hosting, let alone free hosting that offered a shopping cart option for my customers. I finally found what I was looking for from Webs.com! You can set up a shopping cart on your free website through Paypal or Google Checkout. Also, making your site look professional is very simple thanks to their templates and drag and drop editing.

I hope this list helped! Feel free to add on to the list by leaving a comment below.

Subway Conspiracy Theory

Being on a diet sucks! "I'm really craving a salad," said nobody ever. Why can't salad and fish be the fattening foods and Ben & Jerry's, cheese fries, and cupcakes the healthy alternatives?  That is one diet I could definitely stick to! Actually...that's the diet I have been sticking to *blushes*. I'm working to change that, though. Eating those foods is the reason I went from 140 pounds to 172. Although I wouldn't consider myself "fat", I am not at a happy place with my body. Clothes don't fit me the way I'd like them to and I'm embarrassed to let my boyfriend touch or see my stomach. And that has got to change!

When I used to make plans to eat healthy, all I could think of are chicken breasts, cheerios, Jimmy John's, and chicken noodle soup. ((Oh and...I just figured out that Jimmy John's is really not a diet food. My sandwich there is over 600 calories alone! Jared must have been hired by the sandwich industry to deceive us all into thinking sammiches=weight loss. Very sneaky, Subway. Very sneaky.)) Anyways, after three days, my limited options of "diet foods" get boring so I go back to the unhealthy foods. There is only so much un-fried chicken a girl can take!

I finally realized that I need to go about dieting in my own way. I've decided to make small, slow changes to my diet so I don't just binge and I give up. My goal this week was to have a Smoothie King smoothie every weekday for lunch and only have one soda the entire week. I was able to successfully do this and I really didn't feel challenged by it at all until the weekend. That might not seem like much of a diet to some of you, but its a definite improvement for me. I was having 1-2 sodas a day and I usually ate Taco Bell or McDonalds for lunch. But hey, I'm a work in progress! Wish me luck!