Of all the subjects I would expect to hear being discussed over breakfast in our sleepy little Central Ohio village, futures trading wouldn’t be my first guess. And yet this subject is just as likely to be overheard among local farmers these days as how many acres they already have planted and when, which new equipment they’re planning to buy, and the price hogs are bringing at auction.

The faces of these farmers aren’t the old, grizzled salt-of-the-earth types I remember from my childhood. The men — yes, all of them are men — may prefer jeans, flannel shirts and boots like their fathers before them, and getting dressed up may mean switching from work boots to cowboy boots.  But there the resemblance to previous generations of farmers ends.

Many are savvy agri-businessmen who have learned to use futures options to minimize losses in a market when grain prices plunge. This is not your father’s agri-business anymore.

Although I am no expert on the subject, I think one of the keys to a happy relationship, is to make some time for each other each night before you go to bed.  For me this could be playing a game with my husband, watching a movie with him or just sitting in having coffee with him.

For one of our wedding gifts we received a relationship book that basically answers any question we would ever have about communication, closeness and connection with each other.  It is one of the best books that I have ever read in my life and I would say that I have a better marriage because of this book.

One of the other things I do that I think helps my relationship with my husband is listen and put into practice Dr. Phil advice on relationships.  The man has an incredible marriage; the kind we would all like to have and I hope I do, and I think that has a lot to say about what he teaches on his television show.

My father-in-law is one of our city’s top real estate salesman and my kids love going to visit grandpa at his office.  Every time we stop in to see him my kids come home with a whole bunch of promotional items that grandpa is supposed to give out to his customers.

I kind of feel sorry for the guy as when my kids ask for some of his promotional products he can never seem to say no.  In fact, I don’t know if he has ever said no to his grandchildren for anything.  I guess that is one of the reasons that they love to stop in and see him all the time.

Last time we were there, he had a few boxes of corporate gifts that he was going to give out to his staff because they had a really high sales month.  My kids were looking at the gifts and I could see the look in his eyes, knowing that he was going to have to say no to them for the first time.  I took pity on the guy, and ushered the kids out before they had a chance to ask.

Sometimes the Internet frustrates me to no end. I think that it is a highly valuable resource for finding whatever you need, but it is so frustrating to come up with the thousands of things that you do not need when you are doing a search on something.

My friend was telling me about some great aromatherapy products that she had purchased and I decided to go and look online to see if I could get them at a good deal. My results showed up with tons of massage therapy equipment, but nothing like what I had been looking for.

I decided that I would just buy them at full price rather than to waste my time searching for something that I may never find. I was frustrated and that is not a frame of mind that I like to be in. I decided that it would be best just to let it go.

Someone should be researching the feasibility of time travel. If you knew which stocks or high yield investments were going to pay off in a big way, you could make a killing. On the other hand, someone else could go back in time and make sure you were never born. So then we’d need to have a way to reverse temporal crimes.

It’s one thing to take a single person out of history, but can we ever know the influence we have on the lives of others? Remove one small but influential individual and the ramifications are mind-blowing.

It’s like “It’s a Wonderful Life” meets Star Trek: Voyager ®. No wonder in that series they invented time police who clean up temporal incursions that altered the past, the present and/or the future. Oy, it makes my head spin!

I take it all back. Let’s return to the moment I started to write this article and …erase.

If you’ve ever visited friends or relatives when a heated discussion arose between spouses, you’ll remember that desperate urge to tiptoe from the room. You’re embarrassed, you have no desire to be drawn into their verbal warfare, and you don’t care one way or another about the subject. You just want them not to argue in front of you

This happened to me when I visited friends in Chicago.

He said, “We have wood siding. I’m not installing vinyl windows.”

She said, “But I found a great Illinois window company. You love shopping local.”

He said, “You’re not listening to me. No vinyl.”

She said, “The window company says vinyl is about half the price for the style we want and there’s no maintenance. You’ve been wanting to cut down on the time you spend on the house. This would do it.”

He is silent. Finally he says, “Do they do vinyl siding, too?”

Now, I know usually most people get cash, or trinkets from their inheritance when someone near to them passes away.  Usually those types of things are convenient ways to split the wealth of the deceased, but sometimes things don’t work out that easily.

You see, when my uncle passed away, it turned out I was the one in line to get everything.  He didn’t have any children, and we were the closest out of all the family, so I inherited the lions share of his wealth  – his UK land.

Problem was, I don’t even live over there, so I had no way of using it at all.  So, I decided I would list it as land for sale on a few land investment websites.  I figured that someone would see the value of it and someone would have a better use for it.

It didn’t take too long before I sold it and made a tidy sum of money and I was able to put it to better use than the land.

I am one of those people that can easily be swayed by people trying to get me to sign up for home based businesses. I have tried many of them. Some were successful and some were definitely not. In fact, I am a good source when it comes to wanting to know the best home based business.

I think the ones that are the best home based businesses are the ones that allow you to make a fifty percent profit into the product that is sold. I also think it is important that you really believe in the product that you are selling. In the end, though, my downfall is that I am not an especially good salesperson and I cannot convince people that they absolutely need what I am selling.

I keep telling myself that I am not going to be suckered in again, and in fact, it has been quite awhile since I have signed up for anything. I mostly do not even go to the home shows anymore. I guess I will start attending again when I meet the man of my dreams: Mr. Will Power!

There is some controversy over MMA (mixed martial arts) and women fighters. Many believe that women can’t fight as well as men do in the arena of this sport. Mixed martial arts is exactly what it sounds like. Two fighters get in a ring or cage and use a variety of different martial arts skills to fight their opponent.

Many people think that women do not have the strength or the required skills in the various disciplines. Others have seen proof that that there are some great women athletes in this sport though.

The equipment involved is much the same for both sexes. Both women and men, wear the same fight gear with the only difference being that women wear a top or sport bra.

In spite of, or maybe because of the controversy regarding women in MMA, there are new leagues dedicated to bringing women to ring. UFC, one of the biggest recognized leagues doesn’t see women as a money maker though and so we won’t be seeing them there any time soon.

I have a good friend that is a little different I would say.  You see, she dumps every single man that she dates that gives her flowers for a gift.

She tells me that she used to have a boyfriend that gave her flowers all the time, and then it turned out that he was cheating on her.  So, from that point on, she has been unable to trust any man that gives her flowers.

It is too bad too, since there have been a few boyfriends that she had that were winners, but they gave her the “dreaded” flowers.  So, out they went.  You would almost say that they were falling like flies.

Thankfully for her latest man, he has been giving her jewelry gifts – something that she really loves.  Hopefully this guy will last long enough – I would hate to see her go through life alone.