The Rat Zapper IS the best way to kill rats and mice. We’ve been using ours now for over a year, I couldn’t tell you how many rats and mice it has taken care of. We live in a rural area and our roof has rats in it and somehow the mice keep getting inside the main house. We heard about the Rat Zapper from a friend and didn’t really think it would work so we borrowed theirs to test out in the roof. Using only dog biscuits in the first week it took care of over 15 rats, BIG rats too, so long their butts stuck out of the end!

So we bought one for the roof and one for inside the house. If you have a problem with rats and mice then this is the product for you. Seriously, it is worth every cent. The battery life is really good too, we have the old style one which takes AA batteries and the newer one which takes four D size.

It has rid my house of three little mice in the past two days. Last night it got another one, which had been in the pantry. I spent a fortune on plastic containers for everything so they can’t get to anything. Just now (which is what prompted me to write this review) I was in the kids room and one scuttled past and hid under a cot. I got the zapper from the kitchen and put it in the room, within just a few minutes it was taken care of.

So what is so great about The Rat Zapper to me?

1) It doesn’t chew through batteries, they do last a long time, especially if just using as a deterrent they can last well over six months.

2) I don’t have to touch them or look at them!! I just empty it outside over the fence or in a bag and put in the outside bin.

3) It’s pretty cheap, just over $100 and I highly recommend getting the Rats Tail adaptor which will light up when it has been activated. It doesn’t always flash when it gets something, more so I find that with the little mice, so its good to just check it every other day.

4) I don’t have to use poison as we have dogs

5) Its a quick death for the rodents. With the manual traps they can get stuck in there and have a really painful death, I know they are vermin but still I’d rather them be done with quickly.

My tips having used them now for a long while:

We use one in the roof for rats; rats tend to be crafty so it may not work immediately on rats that have been living there a long while. It took a few days for our rats to get used to it being there before they ventured in. We keep ours right near the man hole with the Rats Tail attachment hanging down so we can tell if its been activated. Good practice to check it every week in case it hasn’t set it off. Use dog biscuits as they are strong smelling but won’t make a mess of the Zapper inside like peanut butter will. Cheese can go smelly if you don’t catch one immediately but a dog biscuit will always smell good to them even after a few months.

For mice, just put in a really obvious spot (away from children or animals though so you might want to use it only overnight if you have young kids/pets and your kitchen is accessible to them). When you see one running, just leave it in the place you last saw it and check it after about half an hour.

Other tips:

• Keep food away in containers.
• Clean up the kitchen each night, wipe away crumbs from the toaster etc.
• Don’t leave dirty dishes with left over food around.
• Don’t leave stuff lying around on the floor; they love to hide in amongst your junk in the house.
• Cut back thick bushy trees nearby the house, keep sheds as far away from the house as possible.
• If you have shrubs and ground covers near the house that is what they like to find cover in, clean up around the house and remove unnecessary water sources.

My verdict

If you have a problem with rats and mice, you need to go and buy one or two of these. You’ll never regret it!

** If you’re in Australia and looking to buy online these guys are really good. The business is It’s a Trap in Kyneton Victoria and they sell online too. I rang them the other day to get some advice on the cage traps an they were really helpful. Check out their page on the Rat Zapper too, it has heaps more info you won’t find on other pages. http://www.itsatrap.com.au/mice/ratzapper-ultra-zapped-with-style/

Mum makes the most delicious and succulent corned beef ever and well it would be mean of me if I did not share, so here it is.

Ingredients

1 large onion, peeled and halved

1 Silverside Beef

1 Tbs white or brown vinegar

1 tsp mustard powder

2 tsp sugar

Method:

Peel the onion and half. Put the silverside beef in a large pot and cover with water. You can take it back out momentarily while you add the other ingredients to stir. Add in the vinegar, sugar and curry powder. Mix well, add the meat back in and bring the water to a boil. Turn down to a simmer and cook for around half an hour per kilo.

Use a sharp knife to test if its cooked, it should slide in easily. If not, cook for another fifteen minutes and try again. The average cooking time of a three kilo beef is normally 2 hours.

*Note: You can cook this in the afternoon and leave it in the water until dinner time.

If you are using the WordPress .html on PAGES plugin by IntroSites and you are planning to use the Job Manager plugin by Gary Pendergast – you will need to instead use this version of the .html on PAGES plugin – so that the Job Manager will work correctly. The issue is with the Job Manager being coded to work minus the .html at the end of the page links.

This was edited by my talented husband Steve Brown.

html-on-pages.zip (4kb)

It can be very annoying to have your archive URL show up in the browser as
www.yourdomain.com/category/parentcategory/childcategory/postname.html

This easy fix removes the word category so your URL will become
www.yourdomain.com/parentcategory/childcategory/postname.html

In your control panel go to Settings > Permalinks > and in the Category base box type ./ (full stop and a forward slash) then Save.

It’s really not difficult to step outside your comfort zone and do a little something for someone to make a big difference. You can be a positive impact in the world around you, take any opportunity to do.

It suddenly struck me tonight how many people go through their own life and only leave behind small ripples that only ever go so far as a few family and friends. It’s not that everyone has to be Mother Teresa or someone known world wide for their humanitarian efforts, but it just hit me how many people are so limited in their thinking.

Their vision only goes as far as their little world around them. Maybe it’s time to change the title of my blog from My Little World… because it isn’t little anymore. My eyes have been opened to the whole world around me. I feel the heartbeats of the world humming around me everywhere I go. It doesn’t overwhelm me but it does urge me forward to think about where I can leave my fingerprints.

I don’t want to get to 86 and find myself dead and look back upon a fairy empty life where only little ripples disturbed the pond I lived in. I think if we try hard enough we can all create a wave large enough to carry someone else along with it. Isn’t that the point of life, waves that carry others when they sometimes can’t swim themselves?

…It’s like being reborn again. They say when you become a Christian, and you accept Christ into your life that you are born again. I wonder if it happens more than once?

At first you start again, like a baby, you have to learn everything again, undo all the stuff you were taught by the world and re-educate yourself about yourself and the world as God tells it. Then one day it all clicks, you spent long enough wondering what His purpose was for your life, to be told it is to love the Lord your God and love others.

Love God. Love others as yourself. It’s the foundation on which to build your life.

I did a group activity many moons ago which demonstrated that what you say about others is a reflection of yourself. I’ve just about had it reading Facebook statuses from people slagging off others and name calling. It’s truly amazing the insight to people you get through reading the bible that are so spot on. Matthew 7 gives us so many important messages but the first one is this:

¹ “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. ² For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

³ “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? ⁴ How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7: 1-5 NIV)

I think this is why the saying is so important to me, because it reminds me that if I talk trash about others, then I am only reflecting my own personality… if I talk good about people, then thats a reflection of who I am also. I would much prefer to be remembered for being a nice person than someone who bad mouthed others.

The ironic thing is, the people who are saying these things are those who not too many years ago were making their own mistakes and still are (as we all do!).

One of the important things I have learnt is this:

A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. (Luke 6:45 NIV).

It means, when a person talks trash about someone else, what they say comes from their heart. If your heart is in a bad state you’ll speak those things from your lips. If your heart is in a good place, you’ll speak things that reflect that.

Be mindful about what you say, because words hurt. But more so, what you say about others is as reflection of yourself.

So this morning I was watching Enjoying Everyday Life, as I have for the past nine years and I thought to myself about how I stumbled upon it one morning at 4am when I had woken up to meditate on God as my then ‘religion’ instructed me to as the ‘vibrations’ of the world were still and you could get a good connection to God… I was suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to turn on the television, so I did and this woman started talking and telling me about a better way to live my life. I still watch her program every day nine years later.

So… my challenge to you is this. If you are looking for a better way to enjoy everyday life. Set your tv recorder up to tape each weekday at from 4:25 to 5:05am on GEM, Joyce Meyers tv show Enjoying Everyday Life and each morning, before you start the day or head off to work, watch it in full (goes about 20 minutes). And in just two weeks, I’ll bet there starts to be a change in your thinking. If you happen to be outside of Australia you can download them for free through iTunes as well.

What have you got to lose?

Start now by watching this episode to get you going, don’t miss out on a message that could caterpault you from where you are, its the second part but thats ok Watch Now

I had great trouble trying to find a solution to access my Google Bookmarks with FireFox without having to use the web based page. I finally found an add on which works well. It’s called Google Bookmarks for FireFox and creates a drop down menu in the top of the browser to access your bookmarks easily. The only thing I found a pain was it only used a slash / to seperate folders from sub folders and I had previously used a colon : so it meant heading into Google Bookmarks through the browser to update all my subfolder titles. Still, it works well and a handy alternative now that Google kindly stopped allowing the Google Toolbar to be used with FireFox 5.0 or higher.

To install from FireFox go to Tools > Add-ons > Get Add-ons > Google Bookmarks for FireFox (by Suchi Software Solutions) or visit the developers website.

During my escapades with WordPress and various templates we’ve put together and worked with, I’ve discovered an interesting problem with a number of the DHTML menus that are generated from the WordPress categories or pages (using wp_list_categories or wp_list_pages).

If you have a hierarchical page system (which this blog and performs a nice demo site for my plugin!) then it may very well be that the item that forms the top menu item is not actually a page you want people to be able to visit – but WordPress forces all Categories or Pages to be clickable links when they’re returned through wp_list_categories or wp_list_pages.

Take for example the following menu structure;
Home Marketing & Design Company
Web Site Design About Us
E-Commerce Testimonials

It’s highly likely that the menu items Marketing & Design and Company do not need to have pages of their own, but because the DHTML produces a drop down menu, they still need to be clickable links, so that the menu will drop down when you hover over the top.

This is where my plugin comes in. It will alter the destination urls for the top menu items (ie, Marketing & Design and Company) so that instead of going to a page they actually just go to ‘#’ – which most browsers will simply ignore when you click – but still allows the browser to display the drop down menu when you hover over the item.

To install the plugin, first determine if you’re working with categories or pages, and then download the appropriate plugin below. Install it into your WordPress installation in the normal way. Go to your Administration for WordPress, choose Filter Top Menu under the Settings and enter the page/category numbers of the pages/categories that you wish to not have actual pages. It’s that simple!

Filter Top Menu

**Please note if you are using the latest version of WP you can create your menu using the menu builder and just put a # in the link address to have the parent category ‘deactivated’. This plugin is really only useful on templates which don’t use the menu options that come with WP.