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I'm looking for any tips, ideas, food, hints, places to go and what to see while in Italy.
On September 26 i'll be going to Italy with Karrie and her mom and some of their friends. We are going for 10 days, 2 days spent flying, and coming back October 5th. Our hotel for the 8 days will be in Rome.
Here are the places we are planning to visit. Most city's are +- 350 miles north of Rome and we plan to visit for only a day each:
- Rome - Trevi Fountain (5 minute walk from the hotel), St. Peters Basilica (30 minute walk from the hotel), Pantheon, Piazza di Spagna (Spanish Steps), Piazza Navona, The Sistine Chapel
- Florence - Academia (Michaelangelo's David)
- Venice - ???
- Milan - ???
- Vatican City - what is a good day to go? Sunday or during the week?
- Pisa - the tower with the poor foundation
We are thinking of getting a 4 day Eurail train ticket to get to the different cities, but it will cost around $250.
Anyone have any thoughts as to things we should see?
A while back i was all fired up about trying to figure out online penny auctions. Since then i sort of gave up, but i wrote down what my plan was.
In case you don't know there are tons and tons of sites on the internet called "penny auctions." They are sort of a combination between an auction and ebay. The trick is that you have to pay for every time you bid. Quibids.com is just one of those sites. It's the site i decided to focus on.
Here you pay 60 cents for every time you bid. At first glance it looks like an amazing deal. Tv's being sold for $50, two-hundred dollar gift cards being bought for $9. The thing you have to remember is that the bidding started at 1 cent and for it to get up to $30, that means that it received 5000 bids at 60 cents per bid. That means that the web site made 5000 * 0.60 = $3,000 for the TV. The site makes it's money when things are being bid on thousands of times. There are hundreds of these sites and they all basically look and work the same way.
Quick, hurry up and bid on that Xbox, you have 19 seconds and you can get it for $1.42. So you bid $1.43, spending 60 cents in the process. Then 3 seconds later someone else bids $1.44. This process keeps going and going.
You sign up, buy a number of bids (100 bids costing $60 at Quibids.com) and then you can start bidding on whatever you'd like.
A great site is bidcentz.com which keeps track of some of the items sold, at what date, time and price Most people just bid without any information, sometimes they get lucky. But my goal was to have as much information as possible about history, trends, etc, so the site bidcentz.com helped a lot. Let me just say now that this is still a total shot in the dark, i didn't try any of this, it was just an experiment to see if it could work.
I decided to look at 2 of their popular items. 1 expensive item and 1 cheaper item.
- Item #1 - Apple iPad 16Gb Wi-Fi. This, along with the 32 and 64 Gb models are very popular on the site. They can sell for as little as $3 and as much as $90
- Item #2 - $100 gift card. They are not as popular and usually sells around $10
Again, the key thing to remember here is: the website doesn't make money on the final price, they make money on the number of bids. The iPad retail price is $600. That means at 60 cents per bid, the website profits anytime the price reaches $10. 1000 bids * 0.60 = $600 on average the iPad sells on their site for $35. That means on average they get $2,100 for each one they sell.
The trick, I THINK, is to follow the trends to find a date and time and you can narrow down when to bid. For example IF on every Friday at 6pm one sells for between $30 and $40, then there's no real point in bidding between $0 and $30. Odds are that it won't sell then.
I started tracking what would be the best times to buy and iPad. It turned out to be early on Tuesday's and 4pm on Friday's. Around those times they usually sold for less than $4. It was basically just a little bit of information to narrow down times and prices, giving you an advantage of when to bid. Sort of like investing in the stock market.
But this is the point where i gave up. I never signed up and tested to see if the bidding strategy would work.
I borrowed a pressure cooker from someone at work because Karrie made lots of really good salsa. We did the first batch, 4 jars, but then figured that since we had the pressure cooker we should do more. So we made another pot.
We had to look up online how to use the pressure cooker, how much water to add, how long to cook and at what pressure. 
We ended up doing 10 pounds of pressure, 15 minutes after it started boiling. Here's a video of what it looks like when you are at the correct pressure.
The first batch was fine, all the jars sealed. The second batch had 3 jars that didn't seal properly so we re-pressure cooked them.
Here's all the jars and lids, ready for the second batch.
Boiling the lids, just before sealing.
Well i know now what it takes to get them to grow. Abnormally warm Michigan weather. It's been very warm, it was even 90 degrees here for several days and the plants grew great.
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The best thing about having them outside is that the pads don't dry up and turn brown. Growing them outside is definitely the way to go. High heat/humidity and lots of sun. The water in the buckets got up to 80 degrees. 
First though, let me go back. I originally learned about the American Lotus when working at the CE Power Plant in Monroe Michigan a year ago. 
It has a bay next to the plant, which is part of Lake Erie. 
The seeds were everywhere, i picked up a few over the course of 3 days. 
This is what the bay looked like last year sometime around July or August. You can see the huge lotus bed.
Early this year. It's foggy there a lot. 
A month and a half ago, still no signs of the lotus, but by now they are probably visible. The nets are used to stop plants and dead fish from getting into the turbines.
While i was there last year i saw some weird seed pods and grabbed a couple of seeds that had washed up. I tried growing the plant indoors during the winter, but it didn't go well. Here's what i've learned about trying to grow a lotus, inside, in Michigan, during the winter:
1. High heat - keep between 70-80 degrees, if it's too cold it slows down their growing. Heater, light. Not only for growing but also for starting the seed.
2. High humidity - don't let the leaf dry out once it reaches the surface, for me that meant covering the bowl with Saran wrap.
3. Let the roots start before planting in the mud - i noticed that if i put the seed and stem in the mud too early that the roots never started growing. But if i let the plant grow in a bowl of water the roots started fine. Then i was able to carefully transfer it to the mud.
4. Change the water frequently - i'm not sure if it's bacteria or algae but a white scum develops in the water during the first stages of growing.
Here's what i saw when i finally figured all of that out. If i planted the seed too early it would die. But if i waited till the roots grew an inch or two then planted it in mud it did ok. 
I even checked the PH of the water. It's suppose to be between 6 and 8.
The plant will grow just in a bowl of water for several weeks. There's enough energy in the seed for it to develop roots and put up around 4 lilypads. 
These were grown in just water.
This is what it looked like in March earlier this year. It was still too cold for the plants to start coming up. Although i could get them to start growing, they would turn brown and soon die. 
Early this spring, on the way to the CE plant i got off I-75 at exit 11. There's another power plant on Lake Erie where the lotus plant grows right near the road. You can see last years stems in the water.
I already commented on what i thought about the lotus being protected here in Michigan. In Missouri, Rhode Island and other states it's a nuisance species, you can get fined for planting it. Here in Michigan it's protected, you get fined for taking it out. That's dumb.
Anyway, i found it very difficult to grow them inside during the winter. But since it warmed up and i moved the buckets outside they are doing way better. Outside now there is high humidity and high heat, the two things i was having problems with inside. I'll know by the end of summer how well they grew.
I then put the dirt back on top of that. I'll probably have to fix this again next year.
Here you pay 60 cents for every time you bid. At first glance it looks like an amazing deal. Tv's being sold for $50, two-hundred dollar gift cards being bought for $9. The thing you have to remember is that the bidding started at 1 cent and for it to get up to $30, that means that it received 5000 bids at 60 cents per bid. That means that the web site made 5000 * 0.60 = $3,000 for the TV. The site makes it's money when things are being bid on thousands of times. There are hundreds of these sites and they all basically look and work the same way.
