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How Often Should You Clean Out Your Gutters?
Your gutters are one of those things that you assume will continue doing their job without your intervention. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Unless your gutters are equipped with gutter guards or another form of protection, you are leaving them exposed to the elements and all of the falling debris and leaves in your yard and surrounding your house. What it comes down to is this; You need to clean out your gutters on a regular basis. But how frequently is a “regular basis”?
The simple answer to the question is that you should clean out your gutters twice a year. However, there are some factors that could make it necessary for you to clean your gutters more frequently. These factors include:
• A tree or trees that have branches which hang over your roof and gutters
• Your home is positioned downhill so that one or more structures or houses are positioned above, at a slightly higher elevation
• You live in an area that’s notorious for frequent rain
If any of the above fits your situation, then you will most likely want to get your gutters cleaned up to four times each year. And now the big question—should you get your gutters professionally cleaned, or should you do it yourself? The main reason that you would want to go with a professional is that he or she has the skill, knowledge, and tools to make sure that all debris is removed from your downspouts and gutters, allowing water to flow efficiently. In most cases, you wouldn’t be able to say the same if cleaning out the gutters on your own.
As you can see, regularly cleaning out your gutters is a very important part of maintaining your home. Are you surprised by what you read in this article, or did you know it all already?
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3 Ways to Improve Your Lung Function
Lung capacity and function is important to your health, but it’s particularly essential when you’re exercising. Whether you participate in weight training, yoga, aerobic exercise, or organized sports, lung capacity is extremely important. If you’re not thrilled with your current lung capacity, then check out the following ways to improve your lung function.
1. Practice deep breathing
Each day, you should take five to ten minutes to practice deep breathing. This will help to maximize your lung capacity so that you can take in more air with each breath. The proper way to breathe deeply is to first exhale absolutely all of the air out of your lungs. Count out loud while exhaling—when you can no longer count out loud, you know that you’ve let all of the air out of your lungs. Be sure to keep your abdominal muscles relaxed. Widen your arms to help open up your chest to take in the next big breath of air. Now inhale for two counts and exhale for three counts. Continue until your time is up.
2. Exercise in the water
Swimming is a great cardiovascular exercise that also does wonders to your arm and leg muscles. First, come up with a stretching and weight training routine out of the pool. Keep this program up for a few days until you’re comfortable, and then bring it to the water. Go deep enough so that the water is up to your neck and begin your stretching and weight lifting routine. Research shows that your air capacity is decreased by up to 75% in the water, so exercising while in a pool can help your lungs learn how to be more efficient.
3. Learn how to play a woodwind or brass instrument
It may seem silly at first, but brass or woodwind instruments such as the trumpet, saxophone, clarinet, trombone, and flute help the player learn how to control his or her breathing while expanding lung capacity.
Those are just three ways that you can improve your body’s lung function. What other ways can you think of to share?
Does Cigarette Smoke Lower the Value of Your Car?
Everyone knows about the negative impact smoking cigarettes can do to your health. Numerous studies have been published showing how tobacco is related to a number of illnesses including cancer, emphysema, and more. Smoking can also have a negative affect on your wallet, as a pack of cigarettes has gotten more and more expensive over the past years. But did you know that cigarette smoke can actually lower the value of your car?
If you’re without auto insurance and looking to sell your car (or putting your car on the market for any other reason), then you want to know how much you can realistically aim to get for the vehicle. Due to a variety of reasons, cigarette smoke can reduce your car’s worth by over $1,000.
The interior condition of your car is one of the most important factors when it comes to determining its value. If someone has smoked in your car, then the following things can lead to the value decreasing drastically:
- Cigarette smoke leaves a harsh smell that can be impossible to completely remove from your car’s interior, particularly if it’s cloth. Cars that reek of cigarette smoke are a lot less desirable than those that don’t, so people are sure to offer you less money for the vehicle.
- The market for autos that have been smoked in is significantly smaller than that for cars that have never been smoked in. The truth is that many people won’t even consider purchasing a car that’s been smoked in. This smaller market results in less competition, leading to you selling your car for a lower price.
- If you’ve had your car for a long time and have smoked in it for the majority of that time, chances are that you’ve burned or stained your vehicle’s interior at one point or another. Unsightly burns or smoke stains can make your car appear older than it really is, which will decrease its value.
So think before you light up inside your car—you’re diminishing its value, making it harder for you to sell it down the road.
Katrina Robinson is a freelance writer who covers a wide variety of topics ranging from finances and car insurance to lifestyle and diet.
How Much Would Quitting Smoking Lower Your Insurance Rates?
Smoking cigarettes is one of the worst habits that you can have—particularly because of how difficult it can be to quit. Smoking is awful for your health. Research shows that smokers are twice as likely to have heart disease as non-smokers, and smoking or use tobacco has also been associated with a number of cancers, respiratory diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, and more. As if this isn’t incentive enough to urge you to quit smoking, did you know that smoking cigarettes can also have a negative affect on your insurance rates?
Here’s something to think about: smokers can pay up to three times the life insurance premium of a non-smoker. While some smokers see this as lifestyle discrimination, the facts are undeniable. The average smoker dies a full 25 years earlier than the typical non-smoker, so it only makes sense that their life insurance premium would be higher.
So what’s the technical difference between a smoker and a non-smoker? According to the majority of life insurance companies, you’re not a true non-smoker until you’ve been free of tobacco use for a full year. At this point, you can qualify for a standard life insurance rate, and if you can abstain for three years, you might be able to qualify for preferred rates. Stay away from tobacco for a full five years, and you could even get the best rates available—preferred-plus rates.
But how are the life insurers going to know if you smoke occasionally? Well, when you sign up for a life insurance policy, you will undergo a urinalysis, which will look for the presence of tobacco. If you’re able to quit smoking for a couple of weeks in order to pass the urinalysis, and then later on you pass away due to a smoking-related illness, your claim would most likely be denied, meaning that your beneficiaries would be left with absolutely nothing.
Now that you know the facts, are you ready to quit smoking?
Katrina Robinson is a freelance writer who covers a wide range of topics ranging from finances and online insurance quotes to lifestyle and diet.
3 Ways to Keep an Eye on Your Gutters (Without Taking Smoking Breaks)
If you’ve been smoking for any length of time, you know what your smoking triggers are. For some people, a ringing phone is a signal that it’s time to light up, while with others, popping open a beer is a trigger. People who work in non-smoking offices and who must go outside to smoke quickly discover that any time they go from indoors to outdoors they have the urge to smoke.
That means that over a weekend of doing outdoor chores, you may face several trigger events, and that’s a lot of temptation if you’re trying to quit. Here are 3 ways to tackle that gutter cleaning or other home maintenance task without setting off your desire to smoke.
1. Ask a friend for help. Sometimes it’s as simple as calling up a trusted non-smoking friend and saying, “Dude, I need to check the gutters and put in gutter guards this weekend. Come keep me company so I don’t smoke.”
2. Keep hands occupied at all times. If you have a simple, one-story house and a small video camera, invest $20 in a telescoping monopod, which is essentially a long stick you can attach to your video camera. Then it’s just a matter of holding up your camera-on-a-stick and taking video of the tops of your gutters. Even if you’re strong this is hard to do one-handed. No free hands means no hands available to hold a cigarette.
3. Get someone else to do it. You can hire a professional gutter cleaning service to inspect your gutters for you, or have your spouse or college-aged kid do it. Just make sure that whoever has to use a ladder to look at your gutters is insured.
Recognizing and coping with your own everyday smoking triggers is one of the keys to conquering your smoking habit.
5 Ways to Survive the Flight Cigarette-Free
Going 12 or more hours without a smoke is no laughing matter to someone addicted to cigarettes. In that time period, smokers may experience withdrawal symptoms that can take all the fun out of those cheap tickets they booked to a dream destination. If you’re a smoker, here are 5 ways to get through that flight with minimal cravings.
1. Get a good night’s rest beforehand. Starting a travel day well-rested is the key to having a less stressful flight. Get all details taken care of early so you’re not rushing around the night before your trip working yourself into a tizzy.
2. Get nicotine gum or patches. This is a matter of personal preference. You can pop the gum as needed, or have a steady supply of nicotine from a patch. But don’t do both: it is possible and dangerous to overdose on nicotine.
3. Don’t drink at the airport or on the plane. For many people smoking and drinking go together. Many smokers find that drinking is a trigger that sets off a strong craving for nicotine. Remove the drinking and you have one less possible trigger.
4. Consider a sleep aid. If you go with a prescription sleep aid, try it out at home before your trip. People react differently to them. You don’t want to try out a new sleep aid on a plane only to find out it amps you up rather than mellowing you out. You might try an over-the-counter sleep aid like Benadryl, Dramamine, or melatonin instead.
5. Do a trial run. Once you know you’ll have X number of hours without a smoke, do a trial run at home. Use the gum, patches, and maybe a nap to make sure you can get through that time period without major nicotine cravings. This will boost your confidence on the day of your flight.
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How Much Money You’ll Save By Qutting Smoking
If you smoke a pack a day and you live in West Virginia, where the average pack of smokes costs $4.74, your cash outlay for a year’s worth of cigarettes is $1,706.40. If you’ve smoked for a decade, that means you’ve spent $17,000 on your habit. That’s the price of a decent used car!
Now, if you live in New York, you’re probably thinking that $1,700 a year is nothing. That’s because, at an average of $11.90 per pack in New York, you’re spending $4,284 per year on cigarettes. Smoke for a decade, and you’ve spent the equivalent of a down payment on a house.
While these are the obvious financial costs of your smoking habit, there are other expenses too. If your friends are always bumming smokes, you’re spending more. And if you have a habit of leaving lighters in your pockets so that they go through the wash, you’re paying for a bunch of new lighters every year.
If the nicotine stains on your teeth bother you, you might be dropping an extra couple of hundred at the dentist to get them bleached. And if you are in a profession that requires you to wear a suit to work, dry cleaning those smoke smells out can cost a pretty penny.
Nobody’s saying it’s easy to quit. In fact, smoking is one of the hardest addictions to conquer. You’ve heard the lectures about what smoking does to your health, and you’ve probably cringed as you watch your pocket money disappear. But think of what you could do with all that extra money. With an extra 17,000 bones a year, you could pay off your credit cards, take an epic vacation, or pay off a chunk of those student loans. Once you stop smoking, it’s like getting a decent sized raise at work. And in today’s economy, that’s a big deal.
What Smoking Is Really Doing to Your Car
If you’re a smoker, you already know the standard talking points on why you should quit. It messes up your lungs and your heart, stains your teeth, and gives you unsightly wrinkles around your mouth. You’ve heard it a million times.
You may not realize the effect that smoking has on your driving and your car. Chances are if you smoke, your car insurance premiums are higher, because statistically you have a higher risk of getting into an accident. Furthermore, if you smoke in your car, you’ll have a harder time selling it. If you want to trade your car in on something nicer, you’ll get a lower trade-in value if you smoke in your car.
When a buyer or a car dealer is determining what they’ll give you for your car, the condition of the interior is a big factor. Even if you’ve never dropped a butt and burned the upholstery, the smell gets into the seat covers and vents and is just about impossible to get out. That’s why you’ll get hundreds or even thousands less for a car that’s been smoked in.
You may think, “That’s OK. I can sell my car to another smoker.” Sorry, but that isn’t the case. Even other smokers pay less for a car that’s been smoked in. Nicotine-stained headliners and scorch marks in the ashtrays aren’t appealing to anyone, including heavy smokers.
The smoke that remains in your car even when nobody is smoking there has a name: third-hand smoke. You may not notice it, but if you ride in your non-smoking friend’s car (even if you don’t light up), he or she will notice a lingering smoke smell after you get out, sometimes for days. If you’re a smoker, you’re extracting resale value from your car every time you light up, making smoking much more expensive than you might have realized.
5 Ways to Quit Smoking With Your Coworkers
For decades, companies have used cubicles to give workers a degree of privacy while still encouraging interaction. Work-based friendships often revolve around various workplace routines, including smoke breaks. But what if you want to quit smoking? Do you have to give up your smoking buddies along with tobacco? Here are 5 ways you can quit smoking without damaging relationships at work.
1. Be prepared for a bit of loneliness or even backlash. It may be lonely to miss smoke breaks, and some coworkers may feel a bit chastised by your determination to kick the habit. This will pass as you develop other routines to replace smoke breaks.
2. Keep lines of communication going. Let your smoking coworkers know you’re not giving up their friendship just because you’re quitting smoking. Tell them that although you’ll be their number one supporter if they decide to quit, you’ll respect their choices regardless.
3. Provide distractions. Whether it’s a book, a handheld gaming system, or fun apps on your phone, give yourself something to occupy your mind and your hands when you would otherwise be smoking.
4. Plan to get together with coworkers in non-smoking situations. Perhaps you could start a new tradition of lunch out once a week (at a non-smoking restaurant), or participate together in a company-league sports team.
5. Consider getting a small air purifier. Office cubicles sometimes retain smoke odors that come in on the clothes of smokers. An air purifier in your cubicle will help eliminate these smells and the temptations they may bring to light up again.
Quitting smoking when your work friends smoke is hard. But if you have a plan, you’ll not only succeed in giving up an unhealthy habit, but retain your friendships as well. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even inspire others to quit smoking too!
Quit Smoking without Any Problem
Nowadays it is fashionable to stay healthy so it is very important to understand there are many different ways to quit smoking, and you have to find the one that suits you best. First of all, yuo can try different focus groups or get together with friends which may help you begin.
For cravings and difficult moments you can go for the electronic cigarette canada, which is a modern device that simulates the act of smoking without causing any damage to your health.
Make sure you stay on top of your fame with this and order the electronic cigarettes online which is a fast and easy way to shop especially in the rush of holiday stores filled with people. This could be a great gift for the people you love and may come in handy for those who are trying to quit right now.
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