About once a year I try and go through our house and replace all of the window blinds. They tend to start looking kind of rough and faded after a while and it really changes the looks of a room when you hang new, clean blinds. This year I have decided to replace all of the plain mini blinds with some nice natural wood blinds. I wont have to replace them for a long time, and I can just go over them with some furniture polish every once in a while to keep them looking nice. They’re a little more expensive than standard blinds, but they look so much nicer.

Last year my brother in-law had his house broken into while he and his family were on vacation nearly 2000 miles away. As soon as his alarm went off, he received a call on his cell phone from ADT’s customer monitoring center letting him know that his alarm was going off and they wanted to be sure everything was alright. My brother in-law informed them that they were on vacation and nobody was at the house. ADT alerted the local police and they were there within minutes. My brother in-law purchased his home security system from ADT right when they moved into the house. My sister told him that it was a waste of money because they moved to a “very safe neighborhood” and wouldn’t stop complaining about spending the money on a full home security system when they didn’t need one. Well, it turns out that even the safest neighborhoods still get houses broken into occasionally and that you can never be too safe. If they haden’t installed the alarm system, who knows what they would have came home to.

I can’t even imagine coming back from vacation to a trashed house with all of my family’s possessions and heirlooms gone. My sister now wants him to install security cameras on the house so that they can monitor them from any computer wherever they are. I’ve been thinking about installing cameras at my home for a while now, and I think I might go out and buy a full video surveillance system when I get my income tax check next month.