I'm trying to purchase a new vacation rental in the Poconos. I would say about 60% of the vacation homes on the market seem to be foreclosure (based on what I've found so far). The prices are great, they need a little work, but worth the pursuit to try to purchase one. This past week I put an offer down on one in Bushkill, PA, the second offer this year. The first offer fell through because the house was winterized and lots of things had to be done to apply for the loan. Lesson learned and this time I was going with a condo to minimize a lot of headache.

Something about the south just makes me smile. Maybe it's because New York City is really start to wear on me or maybe it's the good ol' southern cooking?

Wednesday I flew out to Memphis for a meeting. I'm staying through Saturday and flying into DC Saturday evening to go to the mountain in Virginia for a little.

I had an opportunity to eat at Neely's BBQ in Memphis and I think it may be the best BBQ I've ever had. I also tried BBQ Spaghetti and BBQ Nachos.

The BBQ Spaghetti were spaghetti noodles, spaghetti sauce, BBQ sauce, and chopped beef. It was quite tasty!

This week I'm proud to announce Weekend Oasis Vacation rentals has taken a step to "go green" even more in our properties! All light bulbs at BryceCondo were replaced with Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs. "If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR qualified bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year, more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars." We are going to be replacing all bulbs at Blue Mountain Oasis next.

If you know me you probably know I seem to have a view on everything. So why not some personal thoughts on the current economy and the impact it's having on people like myself? Today CNN Published my story on CNN Money's personal finance page. It's quite interesting because after less than 1 day I've had a few e-mails from clients letting me know they saw the article.

View the article on CNN by clicking here.

Today I had the joy of dealing with a rep at Verizon's call center to try to fix a little problem I'm having . To sum it up I've cut my cell phone plan back to the most basic plan. I'm using my T-Mobile BlackBerry for everything else and plan to cancel Verizon in July. To avoid the $175 early termination plan I changed my plan to the cheapest plan and will call in July to cancel. A few weeks ago I cut my phone on to make sure I had no voicemails (now I call and press # to check!). Right when it was on my e-mails (about a months work) started to down.

I just ran a postini report for the past 31 days to see how much inbound spam I've blocked. Shockingly I've blocked 13,987 spam e-mails! Roughly 451 spam e-mails per day!

Jamz Web Productions has completed another series of updates to Canine-Clippers adding additional groomer portfolios, more links, and more grooming related content. Please check it out to learn more!

BryceCondo.com at Bryce Resort has donated a 2 night stay for the St. Lukes House charity donation. St. Luke's House, Inc., (SLH) was founded in 1971 by concerned citizens from St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Bethesda, MD, to address the needs of patients being released from state psychiatric hospitals who had no place to go. SLH was established independently soon thereafter, and the first group home was opened.

We are happy to support St. Lukes House and involved in the auction on April 23.

It seems I'm on a kick lately posting about commuting. Census report data from 2006 combined with a larger analysis has ranked Washington DC the most congested city (traffic wise) in America! Having spent 4 years commuting in and around the mixing bowl I must say I wasn't shocked! On average each person commuting wastes 60 hours in in travel delays and 28% of total commuters have a commute of 45 minutes or longer!

It's been over a year since I haven't drove on a daily basis (to be exact, 1 year and 5 months). Just for fun I wanted to see how much I used to spend on gas and how much this saved me.

To start, I didn't have a real fuel economy car, but a Full Size Chevy Silverado with a 34 gallon fuel tank.

Average cost of gas is $3.25 a gallon in my area now, so it would be $110.50 to fill it up.