Ever approached the security line in the airport and begun to wonder where you placed your passport or boarding pass?  With so many compartments in laptop bags and carry-on bags, it’s easy to misplace your passport or other travel documents and begin a frantic search before it’s your turn in the line.  The Rustic River Ticket Organizer is made to help prevent such embarrassing occurrences.

The ticket organizer has pockets to store your passport, tickets, and boarding passes, business cards, and other travel documents.  The organizer is made from genuine cow skin leather and has an Old West style and feel to it.

The organizer measures 9 1/4 by 5  inches and can be found at Rustic River Leather.

Amazon.com

• Amazon posts dozens and dozens of online specials, and for sure, they’ll be updated hourly on the big shopping days, below is the link to their special deals page.
• You can start now on the deals, or after Thanksgiving.  Amazon shows for how much longer or how much stock is left of the items.

Amazon Black Friday and After Thanksgiving Deals

LLG & Company

• Handstands CD/DVD Binders & Insert Pages
• Old Town Photo Albums
• Journals
• Discounts for bulk purchases
• Free shipping on orders over $25 (gift wrap available)

LLG & Company Black Friday and Deals Page

Rustic River Leather

• Refillable Leather Journals
• Gift journals
• Free shipping on orders $25 or more
• 10% off large orders (see site for details)
• Sports Logs (golf logs, hunting logs, fly fishing log journals)

Rustic River Leather Black Friday and Holiday Deals Page

REI

• Ski Equipment
• Coats, hats, etc.

REI Winter Sale & Clearance Page

Walmart

• Walmart is offering instore deals

Walmart instore deals link (enter you zip code once on the site for store deals)

• Online deals include TVs, cameras, toys, and a whole lot of other items

Walmart online deals page

NewEgg

• TV’s Laptops
• Contests

NewEgg Deal page

Target

• All sorts of home items
• Deals change on the page
• Free shipping on lots of items

Target deals page (2 day sale)

Enjoy!

Anyway, in this techno world that we live in, it’s become more and more easy to take pictures and store them.  I’ve found myself taking more and more pictures and simply storing them on my computer.  There’s really no constraint other than hard drive size, so away I snap.

More recently, I’ve begun storing pictures in photo albums.  There’s just something special (how quaint), about viewing pictures in an album.  Recently we took a horseback riding trip, and I wanted a great place to store the pictures.  The Rustic River Leather Photo Album hits the spot perfectly.

I got the Dark Brown Version (pictured is the Saddle Brown), and oddly enough, I found a spot for it on the mantel, and it looks great.  The leather is very rustic.  It’ll show marks and dings, but that’s part of the style.  However, I’m still pretty careful with it.  The album holds 100 4×6 pictures and is hand sewn.

The inside of the album is similar to a regular photo album.  It’s the outer construction that makes all the difference.  It takes a few tries to get the leather wrap knot correct.

So in our high-paced, ever changing world, it feels great to do something a little old fashioned.

I decided to try simplify and go for something new by trying a money clip.  I purchased the Dark Brown version on the money clip below and have liked it over my old wallet quite a bit because the money clip is more compact.

I do have to work a little bit to get some of the cards out, but as I really only use a couple of cards regularly, it isn’t that much of an issue.  Some day, I imagine, we’ll use our phones for credit transactions, identification, or perhaps our fingerprints, but until then, the good ol’ fashioned money clip works just great for me.

The Rustic Leather Money Clip can be purchased at Rustic Country Leather with free shipping (last time I checked).

A while back, I started using portfolio pads, and they were great except for the paper flipped vertically and it was hard to look up notes when you used both sides.

Now I’m exploring a whole new frontier in notetaking…an actual notebook!  And if you’re going to get a notebook, get one with style!

We got the Leather Composition Notebook by Rustic River Leather, and it’s great.

The notebook is actually a leather cover that is refillable.  The refills can be picked up for a couple bucks or less and are standard-sized.

Below is a picture of the composition notebook refill.  You can pick them up at Wal-mart, Amazon, or just about any office/stationary supply store:

What’s great about this is that it can be used over and over again (won’t fill up).

Video demo:

The leather is very thick and rustic. Hope to get a lot of use out of this one and hopefully save all those scraps of paper from suffering untimely loses!

Who’d have thunk a  Leather Notebook could be so cool!

A great device deserves a great protective yet stylish case. The iPod Touch Leather Case by LLG helps to enhance the look of the Apple iPod Touch.

LLG iPod Touch Leather Case

Problem with Silicon iPod Cases – Too Soft

Silicon cases tend to pick up lots of dust and lint especially if you put your iPod in your pocket.

If you ever do try putting a silicon case covering your iPod Touch in your pocket, good luck getting it out. The cases are kind of tacky (not just in looks) they stick a little bit to everything.

Although they do provide a little bit of protection for the iPod there are better covers for iPod Touch out there.

Problem with Hard Shell iPod Cases – Too Hard

Hard-shelled cases tend to obscure the beauty of the Touch. I’ve tested some of the jumbo hard-shell, can’t-send-a-bullet-through-it types of cases, and although impressive that they’re so tough, they don’t impress in terms of function. They’re hard to use and hard to open. Good luck ever getting the iPod Touch out of the case.

The not-so-tough cases that are still hard shell are kinda-cool, but they really don’t protect the iPod if it gets dropped.

Don’t ever drop your iPod, but if you do, the thin shell cases don’t provide much protection. You’d be better off with the silicon case in this…um…case.

Related to this on are cases that have a “protective” screen that covers the iPod are usually hard to remove and can leave a residue on the device.

My iPod Touch is such a cool device, I don’t want to devalue it by placing some sticker over the front of it.

Leather iPod Cases = Just Right

The LLG iPod Case really does a great job of protecting the Apple iPod while keeping it classy.

The leather case fits the iPod Touch 4th Generation.

There is room on the side for access to the volume controls.

There’s also access for the camera on the back of the iPod Touch to take pictures without having to remove the iPod from the case.

You can store small cards in the wallet slots. Very big cards may have trouble fitting, but average to smaller cards should fit just fine.

You don’t have to take the iPod Touch out of the case to charge it or to access the headphone jack. Those connections areas are left open at the bottom of the case.

You can also access that top button on the iPod Touch that turns the screen off.

A small magnetic clip helps secure the case when the iPod is not in use.

Free Shipping on the Case

You can get free, 2-day shipping on the case if you’re an Amazon Prime member since LLGco.com is tied into the Amazon.com fulfillment system. Just be sure to select the option at checkout if you’re a Prime Member.

People love it

People I’ve shown the case to love it and ask where I got it.

LLGco.com is the manufacturer of the LLG iPod case, and you can view the case on their site here:

View the LLG iPod Touch Leather Case Official Site

There’s something about holding your pictures in your hand or in a photo album that you just can’t get by storing or viewing them on the computer.

It’s even easier now than ever to print your pictures whether at home from your own printer or through an online photo printing service that will mail your pictures to you, but where to store all those prints?

Until recently, our household stored our pictures in the paper folder they came in, and it was high time to get something better.  For a lot of photos, we’d just keep them on the computer for viewing, but we still felt like storing the photos in a more classic way.

Storing Pictures in a Photo Album

The Old Town photo album (pictured above) has plenty of space to hold pictures (300 4×6 inch photos) and includes room to hold 6 CDs (or DVD’s) that contain your pictures or even home movies.  We purchased a number of these albums to store family and vacation pictures.

The inside margin of each page has lines and space to write about each picture. The acid free pages will help protect pictures and preserve the memo notes about them in the margins. The leather covering and binding are great and should last a very, very long time.  The inside cover has a faux suede interior lining which is a nice touch.

A sleeve in the very back of the binder allows for storage for negatives or extra disks.

This Old Town Photo Album is available on LLgco.com.

Storing your pictures on Disc – Where to put the Discs?

If you’re wanting to store your pictures digitally on a CD or DVD, you might want to consider a DVD Storage Album like the HandStands DVD Binder.

Sure, you can leave your pictures on your computer, but how many times have you heard of someone having their laptop stolen, dropped, or just plain stopped working.

So, to prevent losing all your pictures (and other files) a handy way to save them is to burn a DVD disc with your pictures on it.

You could use a program such as Picasa and create a backup disc of your photos. Categorize you photos by disc how you like, but if you use the storage album by HandStands, you can label and store the discs in groups.

We have bunch of these and love ‘em. In fact, we wrote an in depth review of the ins and outs of this DVD storage album.

HandStands Bellagio Italia CD / DVD Storage Album

One reason why storing your backup copies on disc is a good idea is because you’ll always know where the master copies are kept. With many families having multiple computers or devices that can store pictures, it gets a lot hard to keep track of who has the photos from the vacation, etc.

Storing your digital copies in a DVD storage album helps keep everything organized and also looking great just like a photo album (but you can store tens of thousands of pictures on the discs). Which, when it comes down to it, we take tons of digital photos, and are not going to print them all and need a great place to store them.

You can read more about the details about the DVD storage albums here.