Ann Silverthorn

In my city, the furor over a tires-to-energy plant is growing. Do you know where most of our electricity comes from? According to the U.S. Department of Energy, in 2006, nearly half (49%) of the country’s 4.1 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity used coal as its source of electricity. Here’s a breakdown of the methods…

So, I’m sure you’ve had to “activate” new credit cards for existing accounts before, right? It’s a damn scam. I received a new FIA Card Services Visa recently and decided to activate it yesterday. While waiting for my card to “activate,” the customer-service representative offered to review my account to see if there were any…

The other day, a pet chimpanzee attacked a woman and severely disfigured her face. The victim was a friend of the woman who owned the chimp. Travis, the chimp, wanted to go for a drive and took the keys to the car. The owner and her friend tried to lure him back into his cage.…

I found a great article in the February 1, 2009 issue of Bottom Line Personal. “Bulletproof Your Job and Ride Out the Rough Times at Work” is written by Stephen Viscusi. Here are the highlights:

True to my resolution this year, I’m keeping a positive attitude toward the snow, wind, and cold, which I can’t do anything about anyway. I’m sure retailers and travelers can’t find much good in the storms over the past few days. Retailers whose revenue was already down will experience depressed sales because many people will…

In my town, a tires-to-energy plant has been proposed, and it’s having trouble with the zoning laws. Apparently, the plant’s smoke stacks would be too high for the zoning regulations. If I lived downwind from the plant, I’d rather see the tall smoke stacks and know that the emissions would have less of an impact…

2026 note: This post is brought to you by the letter H. And this issue still bothers me! In the past decade or so, I’ve been peeved by the way people think they should treat “an” preceding words that start with H. I’ve heard news anchors referring to “an hospital, etc.,” and it makes me…

Today, I did some holiday shopping at Target on Peach Street, which during the holidays, is referred to as “Peach Jam.” It had just started snowing when I got to the store and only got worse while I shopped. After I cleaned off my car, I weighed taking the Peach Street route home or taking…

So–last week we bought daughter Kasey a new laptop for her much-deserved December college graduation. We had a specific budget to follow in order to be fair to oldest child, Krista, who received luggage and a photo printer for her also much-deserved graduation. Seeing an ad for a Compaq in my Sunday Staples ad, I…

Why did I take a solo trip along Route 66? Well, in 2008, I was a new empty nester, and a series of life events, including illness, death, and loss of various kinds, had left me depleted and disgusted. During this time, memories of happier times would pass in and out of my consciousness. Those…