Life is what happens in between planned events.

This week was filled with events.  One funeral and one wedding.  It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.

These two events were certainly memorable and lasting.  The bonding of people and the separation of people.  Again it’s about relationships.

Without writing much, the important thing to remember is that while you have time to spend with loved ones, do just that.  Spend time with them.  I heard that we are all equal in the amount of time we have every day.  The rich and the poor, the old and the young all have 24 hours a day and that’s it.  In those 24 hours will you be deepening friendships or dividing them, making precious memories or ruinous ones.

To make them better you know what to do, buy them a gift.

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Spring Break 2019

Ahh, the idea that spring is coming is a hopeful thought. To us in the north it means, no more scraping ice off windshields in 0 degree weather while our hands are frozen and the wind bites our nose. No more salt that ruins our car mats, house floors and garages. We can put away the outer layers of coats, scarves, gloves and hats and replace them with short sleeve shirts and casual pants.

The right of passage in spring break is commonly bestowed with a trip to Florida. I grew up in Florida so it’s like going home. That means driving like someone whose had 10 cups of espresso after being up all night. It’s a little insane on the east coast. The west cost is fraught with congestion and traffic. It’s best to get to your hotel or resort or rental home and walk. Walk to the ice cream shop, to the beach, to the restaurants and parks, or travel by boat. If you can do this you will have the best Florida trip ever. (And that includes Disney World, but there’s so much more to see than Disney.)

Visit Natural Florida. From the Florida pan handle to the Keys there are dozens of state and national parks. (If you have the time I highly recommend a trip out to Dry Tortugas. It is truly a dive into natural Florida. If you can I would recommend camping there. It’s one of the most spectacular night skies I’ve ever seen with great snorkeling around the fort too. You can rent a kayak and take it with you on the ferry, Yankee Freedom. Then if you’re real adventurous, I’ve done this with my son, kayak over to Loggerhead Key because the west side of that island has beautiful shallow water reefs where you can skin dive (snorkeling) and see thousands of tropical fish.

It’s a great opportunity to make memories with those you love. (Remember gift giving is all about relationships and this trip can be too.) With that said make sure you are prepared. Check our our TopList for a Trip to Florida. This list will also work if you are preparing for a Caribbean Cruise.

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Communication, the glue of a relationship

Did you know that people have different styles of communication from their heart? You can check it out in the book, “The Five Love Languages“.

Of course our favorite love language is the language of gift giving/receiving. Those people are our bread and butter, because.

  1. If you speak the love language of gifts, you’ll enjoy perusing our lists to find just the right gift for the situation.
  2. If your special other speaks the love language of gifts, and you don’t, you’ll be thankful for our lists to quickly and appropriately find a gift for any situation.

I would highly recommend taking the quizes on the Five Love Languages Website, they’re free, to find out your own love language. If you are in a relationship I would recommend you have your partner take the quiz too. You’ll find a much more satisfied relationship if you two know how to ‘talk’ to each other in your love languages. This is something that can help a new relationship and those that have been together 60 years.

Take the Love Languages quiz here.

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Spring

The further north you live, the greater chance you are affected by the seasonal blues. This time of year one can get very blue, waiting and waiting for spring to come. You know it will come but it helps to have a few milestones along the way. By that I mean some celebrations. If you or a friend has a birthday, it’s a great way to splurge and look forward to a party and fun. You can schedule a short trip to a destination close to your home, where you just get away from the rat race for a 2 or 3 day weekend.

Those simple scheduled events can raise the spirits even in the grayest of days in Northeast Ohio.

To prepare for the event or trip we have you covered in our top lists.

Get a camera. Make it romantic. Prepare for his birthday or her birthday.

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When in a relationship, choose the high road.

Every relationship has a pivot point. After that point that relationship it will either get better or get worse. How do you know?

Since nobody is perfect we all know that every one of us will screw up in some way. Sometimes it will be a big mess and at other times it will just be a minor issue, but how we deal with that mess will reveal how strong the relationship will grow.

There are two ways you can go after the mistake. The first I’ll call the low road. This road doesn’t try to clean-up the mess, it tries to hide it and ignore it. It is marked by lies and deceit. The poor defense usually makes it sound like it’s the partners fault. It’s littered with phrases like, “if only they had treated me better, I wound’t have done it.” “I’ll be good when they are good to me.” “I just can’t stand their complaining or their laziness.”

To sum it up, the low road means your actions only reflect the way you are treated. If you’re treated well, you’ll act good. If you’re treated poorly, you’ll act in kind. The problem with this arrangement is the question, “who will be the first to do the right thing and act kind, loving, faithful, etc if you’re waiting on someone else to do the right thing?” With this in mind and knowing the fact that nobody’s perfect, there will be a time when a mess up gives right to abandon the relationship.

The high road is more concerned about doing the right thing regardless of how they are treated. Think of it as a thermostat instead of a thermometer. It sets the standard for the relationship. It doesn’t wait for the temperature to warm up so the relationship can heat up, it sets the temperature. This high road is forthright in taking care of messes. It might not be cleaner but it throws the mess into the light and tries to clean it up.

Of course I also have to mention something about gift giving. My advice to you is to be the thermostat in your relationship. You can heat-up the relationship right now with a gift and if you need to you can buy a gift as an apology. Either way a great relationship is on the way with a great gift.

The pivot point is the way you handle the mess. Take the high road.

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Quote

I heard another saying today that provides a proper perspective on hate and love.

“Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses.”

Instead of focusing on hate and love in that saying, focus on strife vs the absence of offensive words. Meaning, if you see strife then hatred is behind it. If there is absence of offenses, it doesn’t mean that they haven’t occurred it just means that, they have been covered by love.

This can apply to others or to yourself. Do you hate yourself and stir up a lot of strife? You need to start with loving yourself and cover all offenses. That means all offenses not just the ones you choose.

Of course this too is all about relationships and that’s why we built this website, to build relationships. (We weren’t thinking about relationships with oneself but if you want to buy yourself a gift, that’s fine too.) Relationships blossom when a value is recognized in the other person, and giving a gift is a material representation of that value. So look over our lists and start building relationships.

The TopLists.Shop Team

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Quote

I read this quote recently and liked it so I’m passing it on.

“Happiness is a journey, not a destination.”

If you haven’t arrived at your goals yet, you don’t have to put off happiness, because if you don’t have it while your striving for your goals, you wont have it when you achieve them.

The TopLists.Shop Guys

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Spring

Here is another post to increase the ‘content’ on our site.

How old are we? We’ve been around long enough to remember it was fun to scroll down in an alt.chat room and see images created using just the characters on a keyboard. Long before images flew around the internet we just used characters. Keys on a keyboard. Sure you might not even be able to conceive of such an internet, all black and white and text, but it’s true. That’s why when we first saw The Net we were in awe when she orders pizza online. Talk about blowing our minds.

It was a better time because communication was more than just an image. It was words put together in a series of thoughts and not just doctored images to improve our looks. We had to put ourselves out there with thoughts and ideas. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Here we are today where one image can change a life. (I’m talking about Alliston Stokke) And who knows what images are real, for even today deep fake videos look absolutely real.

Whoa, this is a little deep for some ‘content’. The point of this rambling is that relationships are essential to truly living and relationships greatly improve with gift giving and that’s why this website is created. To improve your real life, not your online, doctored image, life. Use your online life to improve your real world life and buy those you love some gifts and don’t get confused with the priorities of family.

Sincerely,

The TopList.Shop Team

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Our Website’s Content

The content on our website isn’t meant to be dressed up with lots of adjectives and adverbs which just take up a lot of time when you’re trying to do your shopping.  This site is about whittling down the parts of other websites that provide platitudes and descriptions that explain how great a product it, without truth.  (I will say though that soon we will be rolling out a new button on each list.  It will be the Premium product button and it will list the finest items in each list.  They will be items you’d find at Buckingham Palace or at the Ritz in New York City.)

The current buttons at the top of our lists provide a way to help you quickly find the products that fit your budget while still meaningful.  They include the <$50, <$100, <$200 and No Limit buttons, and they do just what you’d expect.  They remove the items that would be greater than the amount listed on the button so you will only see the items that are <$50, or <$100, etc…  Also if the items on the list are all less than $50 or greater than $200 then you won’t see the buttons appear on the list.

The other types of buttons include a way to quickly filter products specific for Him or Her.  Other lists are meant just for him or her so you won’t see those buttons.  You might notice, though, a background of a dress or dress shirt though.

If you are wondering why a list you are viewing might be missing some numbers, it’s most likely that you have filtered out some of the items and are seeing only the ones that fit your selections.  There also might be more than one item for a number on the list.  Like Item #4 on our Graduation List currently has more than 20 different items.  They’re all Yeti insulated tumblers but they are from some of the most popular schools in the USA.  To view all the items under the specified list number you must click on the green button labeled: [More Options for #  Click HERE].  Once you click, an expanded selection will appear.

The expanded selection for any List number might contain items of different color or size, or it just might be Comparable items at other stores.  If you are on your cell then you will also notice a -View link that shows a popup of the comparable item with the price listed at Wal-Mart, Macy’s, Best Buy or Neiman Marcus.  If you are on a computer then just hover over the button to see the popup and information.

We do thank you for your continued support and promise to continue to make shopping for gifts and products easier for you.  We use the lists too.  Oh shoot I just remembered my wife’s birthday is coming up.  I’d better check the Birthday List for Her.

Sincerely,

The Guys at TopLists.Shop

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How to make money on the internet

I’m a programmer. I started programming in Assembler language. I’ve adapted and learned many new computer languages along the way. I’ve learned: Cobol, Fortran, JCL, PHP, Pearl, SQL, HTML, Java, etc. but I’ve never tried to make money from a programmed website, until now.

In order to monetize this site, I’ve been told I need to create unique content, but not unique in a way that states a point so I need to write stuff in the English language and not just computer languages but do it so as the computer languages make money without really saying anything. Therefore I’m writing this blog. It’s not going to be political (which is what most content on sites end up being). It’s not going to drive the dogma of a religion. It’s just going to be what it was setup to be.

And what’s that you ask.

Here’s some background.

When my wife and I first got married we would tell each other what to buy as a great gift but the gift buyer would always want to be more creative then just buying what they were told to buy so we bought a lot of gifts that were never used, enjoyed or even liked. It wasn’t until we started buying exactly what was asked for that we started to find joy in gift giving and gift receiving.

Fast forward to today. This site gives you some of the best gifts we’ve received from each other over the years. Gifts that were enjoyed, useful and truly appreciated. Of course they are not the exact gifts, like the music on the site is from current bands, cameras are much different now but still thrilling to receive, jewelry is similar but new materials used to create necklaces, earrings and pins allows for stunning presentation of precious stones. (Also if you haven’t looked at the Swarovski Crystals jewelry please do just for the sake of beautiful jewelry at a really reasonable cost. The crystal pieces are in the price range you’d usually buy for your children, not your spouse, but the pieces are gorgeous.) AND on and on.

The best part of it is that you, our visitors, get the prices at the best online website, be it Amazon, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Neiman Marcus and we receive a small percent of the transaction. For which we are very, very grateful. We both end up with a Win.

So peruse the lists and buy gifts for your loved ones that will sincerely be enjoyed and cherished for years to come.

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