I absolutely love to cook and I always have. I remember baking cakes all by myself at six years old. By the time I was in high school, I was preparing all of the family meals. It has always been a passion and recently I have taken to learning to cook different ethnic foods.

I enrolled in a course that offered Indian video recipes. The films taught me a lot about Indian food and how to properly prepare it. Every time I master a different type of ethnic cuisine, I host a big party where I make several dishes for my friends to come on over and share with me.

They all love this and it is great for socializing, as well as for giving me a reason to cook for someone other than myself. When I prepared many different India recipes for my friends one night, I got great feedback. A few even mentioned that it was my best work yet. I think my next step will be learning to cook Greek food and I am really excited about that.

It seems that every day that we’re alive we are faced with many choices that will shape our future.  Some of the more notable ones that I can think of would be cheating on an exam, driving under the influence, and stealing from the grocery store.  While most choices you make will have a positive impact on your life, all it takes is one bad choice to ruin everything.

Perhaps the greatest example I can give you is about my friend Steve whom I met in college.  Steve was a really smart guy who got excellent grades and was even part of the college basketball team.  I met him in my first year and we have been friends ever since.

But Steve made a bad choice when he decided to buy research paper and submit it as his own work.  Unfortunately for him, it was the year is that the college started a screening system to look for purchased custom research papers.  His dissertation writing was flagged and he was sent to a review panel.  Their decision was final and he was expelled from college.

To this day, he regrets ever purchasing a term paper and ruining his dreams of becoming a lawyer.  So be sure that you consider the consequences before you make a choice - sometimes the price is just not worth it.

Every year, our city has a big exhibition. There are all kinds of rides and carnival games, so the kids love to go. For me, there are all sorts of different venues where I can shop and I also like to take in a concert or two at the grandstand. We have a great time and look forward to it every year.

Each year, we try to buy event tickets in advance, as you usually save quite a bit of money by doing it this way. It usually saves on admission for the kids, as they get in with their unlimited ride pass and I get a discount on my admission, since I do not go on the rides.

Another great thing we look forward to is the food. It is so expensive and so bad for you, but as we do this only once a year, we do not feel so bad about splurging. We get candy apples and elephant ears and spud nuts until we are all stuffed. Then we waddle home and wait until next summer when the fair comes again.

While I was living in Pakistan, I knew that I would one day want to live in Canada. I had family members there and they all said what a wonderful place it was to live. I knew that I would have to work hard to be able to go there and I wanted to one day be one of the Pakistanis in Calgary. One day my dream came true and I got to go there.

Shortly after I was there, I decided to get an Alberta’s learners permit so that I would be able to drive myself to my job. I did not have a job yet, but I knew if I could drive I could work anywhere in the city. This was a great start to my new life in Canada and I was never as happy as I was when things were all working out for me.

I decided to look for work selling Pakistani foods in Calgary. I thought I would be good at this and that people would want to hire me because I knew all about the foods and I would be able to help people who wanted to be more knowledgeable. I live here and I love it. I am proud to be in Calgary and I want to live here forever.

It is kind of funny how much one family can change in such a small amount of time. Less than a year ago, we bought our first television. Before that, we had never had the desire to have one and our children were young enough that they did not even realize they were without.

We received a television as a gift and were offered a cable package free for six months. By then end of the six months, we were hooked and ended up subscribing to it. Our son had his favorite channels and we had ours and so we had to subscribe to the whole package.

Last month, we got a free viewing of Playhouse Disney and my two-year old daughter got hooked. She would cry if we turned it off and her tantrums started to get the best of us. That is when we made the decision to get rid of the TV and go back to how we used to be. I think we were much happier then and I don’t really miss it at all. (Much).

I have been a part of a mentoring program for teens for a long time now.  I thought that I could help them out and inspire them to live a good life like mine as a way to say thanks for all the blessings that I have received.

Now, I have been doing this for a number of years now, and I have mentored about five kids that have all turned out wonderfully.  I think the oldest is twenty five now and is expecting his second kid.  The experience has been great so far.

But, it turns out that the sixth child, Brad, has been another story.  He has been mixed up with the wrong group of people and has run into some problems with the law.  He called me to ask what he should do, and I suggested that he call a good Minnesota Criminal Attorney that I know, and maybe he could help him out.

Though I am not their parents, it makes me really sad (and angry) when things like this happen.  I just hope that he hasn’t got himself into too much trouble - he wouldn’t tell me what he did.

My parents will be downsizing their home to an apartment from a big house.  Their argument is that they no longer need all the space now that we are grown up.  But, they don’t want to give everything away, and they said that they wish to give us their furniture.

The big problem for us is that we don’t have a very big home either, so we will not have anywhere to put it.  That being said, I don’t want to give away their nice furniture either, so we decided to put it in a self storage facility.

So, we have been going around to the many self storage locations in town and getting price lists so that we can compare them to find the best deal for us.  We just have a couple more places to go before we can make our decision.

Now, our only problem left will be to find a truck to move everything - that will require a little more work.

Many people have many different goals in their lives such as traveling to certain countries, meeting people and attaining career goals.  I do have those aspirations in life, but I also want something bigger.

You see, all my life, I have been playing piano.  Sure, I wasn’t playing it when I was a baby, but I think that I learned how to play my first song at the young age of three.  From that point on, I spent at least a couple of hours each day practicing in order to get better.

It is this dedication to playing piano that has shaped my life goal to learn and master piano.  Though each day I do get better, I want to attain a level of perfection so that I can carve my place with the great masters such as Beethoven and Bach.

But I am a ways off, and I have many years to go.  But that is my goal: to become a master pianist.

For all my life, I have been taught that you get what you pay for.  This applies for everything including clothing, cars, and electronics.  For me, every time that I have gone with a non-brand name product, I have ended up in the middle of a disaster.

That is why when I had my wedding and my husband to be suggested that we go with cheap favors, I told him to give his head a shake.  I had to explain my philosophy on the whole brand name thing to him twice, before he decided to go for it, and realize that I was right.

Instead of the cheap favors that he wanted, we purchased Weddingstar favors from an online retailer.  They were of high quality, and nearly flawless, just like our marriage was going to be.

The wedding was amazing thanks to all the brand name products we had purchased.  Though I am still working on my husband to see the value in brand name products, I will forever be a brand name kind of woman.

With the hot housing market in our town, it is sometimes very hard to find a good deal.  What happens is that the price is too high to begin with, and the seller just won’t budge.

Today, I was out looking at a three bedroom house that was for sale by owner (FSBO).  I had found the house on a FSBO website for our town, and the pictures on there looked promising.  I thought that the price might be something that I could negotiate, as it was a little high compared to other homes in the area.

While looking through the home today, I noticed many different things that were not showcased on the pictures.  Things such as heavy water damage in the basement, cracked cement pad in the back yard, and the train tracks right behind the home.

I asked the seller if they would budge on the price, due to the fact that these problems had been overlooked on their sales page.  He turned all of a sudden from being polite to rude and told me that the house was already a deal at the current price and he asked how I could ask him to lower the price on such a great buy.

I had to walk away at that moment.  The price on the house was out to lunch – and not worth it.