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Lights of America 65 Watt Outdoor Fluorescent Floodlight

This outdoor fluorescent floodflight (Costco item 464411), manufactured by Lights of America consumes only 65 Watts of power, but is as bright as a 500 Watt incandescent bulb. Even better, it only costs $8.49 at my local Costco warehouse.

This is not just a bulb, but it includes the housing. You need to wire it up to your house's electrical system. It's much easier than that sounds, if you just replace another external fixture.

I installed this in under an hour. First turn off the power to the current fixture, at the breaker box. Unscrew the current fixture from the wall, and pull out the power wires from the box. Disconnect the power wires from the current fixture, and use the screw caps to connect the power wires to the new fixture. Screw the new fixture onto the wall, and turn the power back on.

If your new fixture doesn't light up right away, don't panic. This Lights of America fluorescent floodlight has a built in light sensor that shuts off the power to the floodlight during daylight hours! You can use this as a security light that will automatically stay lit all night, and shut off in the morning. (You can still test the light, by covering the sensor with a piece of black electrical tape.)

The bulb is rated at 10,000 hours. If you leave the lamp on all night, you'll average 12 hours of use per day throughout the year and the bulb should last you about 2 and a half years.

Baby carrots at Costco

Want a cheap, healthy snack. Pick up the organic peeled carrots snack pack (Costco item number 22457) in your warehouse's refrigerated section. This is a fairly new item, although warehouses have stocked the big 3 pound bag for quite a while. These cost $5.79 at my local warehouse. Eating one pack will get you 60 calories, zero of those are from fat!

This item contains 24 individually packaged and sealed 2.25 ounce servings of organic cut and peeled baby carrots. These are packaged by Grimmway Farms and are organic. They are grown without the use of synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizer.

Baby carrots were invented by a carrot farmer in the late 1980's. He noted that much of his crop was too ugly to sell in grocery stores, and came up with an automated process to cut and peel these ugly disfigured carrots into the tasty looking baby carrots we have today.

Occasionally you might get a bag of slimy carrots. The slime occurs when the bag was not properly refrigerated. This might occur when a truck is being unloaded and the carrots are left on the loading dock for too long, for instance. In my experience, it happens more often in the hot summer months.

Wilmar 45 Piece Stubby Set at Costco


You can find the Wilmar Performance Tool Stubby Set (Costco item number 213484) in the auto/tool section of your warehouse.

The set includes 1/4" and 3/8" drive ratchets, a stubby precision adjustable wrench, a high torque screwdriver with slotted, phillips, hex, and star bits. It also has SAE and Metric sockets from 5/32" to 3/4" and 4-17mm.

This sells for $9.97 at my local warehouse. For comparison, vendors on Amazon are selling it for $17 to $25, and you will have to add about $8 for shipping.

This makes a great Father's day gift. You can keep one in your car, or at your office. If you have a someone going away to college, give them one. It's a quality little tool set for whenever you need to fix a small job.

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