It’s easy to know what type of furniture you want to buy for yourself. What’s not so easy is trying to purchase furniture that is going to be used in your home or office but is designed for guests. For example, you might spend a lot of money on a nice massage chair or office chair for yourself but you’re not going to want to spend that type of money on chairs for guests.

Here are some tips for selecting guest chairs and other items that are intended for use by guests:

• Consider who your guests will be. You might need reception chairs for office clients that will only be seated in them for a short period of time or perhaps you need living room chairs for houseguests. The type of guest who will be using the chair helps determine the style you need.
• Stick with one design. Don’t stray too much from the design of your other furniture or the guest furniture will look too out of place.
• Try to find furniture that can be used in mutliple ways. For example, perhaps your guest furniture can double as home office furniture when you have no guests. This reduces the cost of buying furniture because you’re only buying one item to meet two different needs.

The general rule of thumb to follow is to get guest furniture that is nice but not extravagant.

Technorati Tags: office chair, guest chairs, reception chairs

It started out with one pair. I was on vacation in Las Vegas and hadn’t brought any shoes that I could wear around the swimming pool. One of the stores in the mall there had a pair of Brazil thongs on sale so I made the purchase for the sake of convenience. And what happened was that I discovered that flip flops can go with almost any outfit.

You don’t really realize this living in San Francisco because no one wears surf thongs anywhere but the beach. But if you head to Vegas or Tucson or Southern California, you’ll see that there are people wearing thongs in every location from restaurants to hiking paths. And as you start to see how different flip flops can look good with different clothes, you realize that you need more than just one pair.

Or at least, that’s what I realized. Before I knew it, I had Havaianas thongs and cheap running-to-the-store thongs and dressy flip flops. And I also had several different colors of the original Brazil thongs that had gotten the whole thing started. Of course, I do still have some other types of shoes in my closet. It’s just not appropriate to wear flip flops to some of the places where I spend time in San Francisco. But when I can get away with thongs, there’s a whole closet full of them for me to choose from.

Technorati Tags: Brazil thongs, Havaianas thongs, surf thongs

If a U.S. soldier wants to receive calls from his wife as often as he wants, he can buy them an online calling card. Using prepaid international calling cards, any family member can call to Afghanistan for as low as $0.055/min rate. It means that to talk 20 minutes with his family every evening, he’ll only pay $33 per month (that’s 16 times less, than when using an US land line).

One can by lots of cheap calling cards – there are “heavy” callers who spend circa $800 a month buying online calling cards, which is 10,320 minutes calling to a land line which sounds convincing.

Other carriers in mind you’re used to? To call to a land line in Iraq would cost $9391.20 with Verizon. Savings up to $8591 per month, $103,092 savings a year - just recharge your calling card online via ComFi.com.

Or you can activate the autorefill service - each time you run low on a balance, the card is automatically refreshed and no need to have access to the Internet. Calling to a cell phone to the city of Basra via Skype telephony? Losing up to $1342 per month in comparison to the low rates of calling card Afghanistan, not to mention the quality, which is equal at the least.

Technorati Tags: cheap international phone cards, phone calling cards, calling cards international, prepaid phone card, calling cards