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Improve your drive to work and de-stress

What do you listen to during your daily commute?  Is it your local radio station with your favorite music or the local news?  Would you like to read more and just cannot find the time?  I have a solution to maximizing the time you spend in your car going back and forth to work.

My solution is listening to books on CD.  Now, if you are a person that is easily distracted or has trouble listening and concentrating on driving, I don’t recommend this.  However, if listening to a book while you are driving is easy for you, you might consider it.  I find that it helps me de-stress and moves me into relaxation mode.

While books and CD can be expensive if you buy them, your local library has hundreds of books on CD of all varieties.  No matter what type of books you enjoy reading, the library probably has several that will meet your needs.  Also, with most libraries, you can reserve what books you want online and then pick them up at your convenience when they are ready.

My current favorite books are Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, Infinite Possibilities by Mike Dooley and Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson.  Have you started listening to books in your car?  Have you found that it helps you de-stress?  If so, let me know!

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Get your Groupon Coupon!

My favorite fairly new discount website is groupon.com.  This website offers discounts of usually a minumim of 50% off of the value of the daily offer.  How it works is that there is a daily coupon for a local business such as a local restaurant, wine bar, tour, museum, experience or merchandise in Seattle.  The offer will be for $40 worth of food or merchandise at the discounted price of $20.  Then, if enough people buy the groupon, then the deal goes through and you get your discount.  You then get your certificate e-mailed to you and you just print it to take with you and enjoy your discount.  You do have to check to make sure that follow any restrictions.  You may need reservations or there may be a restriction that you can’t use it on Valentine’s Day.  However, in my experience, I have not seen a lot of restrictions for the groupons.

Groupon offers daily coupons in many major cities.  You can look up any city you like such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. or San Francisco and they will have a deal of the day as well.  If you are travelling, it is nice to watch the groupon offers for that city for a few weeks so you can see if they offer anything that you might want to do while you are visiting.  I recently did this on a trip to New York City.  I got $60 worth of food for $30 in a restaurant I probably would have never found and it was the best meal of our entire trip.  Groupon also offers tourist type activities such as discounts on local attractions.  You might be able to get a tour or museum ticket that you were going to buy anyway but you can get for half-price.  You can also become a tourist in your own city by taking a tour that maybe you have been meaning to do but haven’t gotten around to it.  If you can do it at half-price, it would make it all the easier to go.

You can sign up on the groupon website to get a daily e-mail of the deal of the day.  It just takes a few seconds to glance at the e-mail and see if it is something your interested in or not.  The groupon usually expires at the end of the day unless there is limited availability and it sells out.  I have only seen that a few times.  So by all means, get your groupon!