Home window tint and film > best rated sunblock window film > Columbus OH

Columbus, Ohio Community pick for home window film, sunblock window film and tint:

Sun Block Window Film

3154 North Star Road
Columbus, Ohio 43221
p.  (614) 807-2443
Window Film FAQ

We’re all familiar with tinted glass in cars and the reasons for having it have become so obvious that all auto manufacturers have some level in all of their models.

We have two vehicles a 2007 Chevy Tahoe and a 2008 Chevy HHR, both with tinted windows throughout that are particularly dark in the back.  The reasons for auto manufacturers spending extra money for window tint in their vehicles are simple.  The tint keeps the temperature in the car down significantly, helps keep the glass in one piece in the event of impact, blocks damaging rays from the sun thereby protecting the occupants and interior and provides and extra level of privacy and security.

Window tint for vehicles is widely accepted and standard on all new models to some degree but why isn’t window film standard in homes?  Even in this economy your home is the clear winner in the asset column when compared to your car so why not have window tint for your home?  The reasons for installing window film in your house are identical to the reasons auto manufacturers have made it standard in their vehicles.

Let’s take them one by one:

1.  In your car the tint can reduce the interior temperature by up to 60%.  Reducing solar heat in your home works the same way by blocking solar heat.  We thought it would be fine to just shut the blinds but there are two problems with that.  First, you can’t see out and you have no natural light coming into your home.  Your home effectively becomes a cave with that solution.  Second, if you do decide to live with the blinds closed the heat builds up between the window and the blind eventually making it’s way out and overworking your air conditioner during the Summer months.  With energy costs where they are this solution doesn’t help at all.

2.  Window film helps to keep the glass together in the event of an impact.  This helps in a car tremendously but also helps in your home.  In the event of break in, an intruder will likely try to break the glass.  Home window film does not make your glass break-proof however, it does make getting through it quite a chore.  Most intruders are looking for easy opportunities and will likely move on if there is difficulty getting through the glass.  We haven’t had to deal with this yet and hopefully we won’t

3.  I remember the sunburns I used to get from driving my car around with the window down and before auto tint and UV protection was standard.  I also remember sun-cracked dashes and scaly leather seats.  Those days are over for the most part but not when it comes to your home if the protection isn’t there.  How many times have you been in a home where the furniture, natural wood flooring or carpeting is faded in certain areas or only one side?  It’s an easy cost-effective fix to add home window film though when the damage is done…it’s done and you’ll need to replace the faded sofa and carpeting

4.  Privacy is big these days, we definitely live in a different world than it was years go.  One of my favorite features of our HHR and Tahoe is the blacked out windows in the back that keep people from looking in at the contents.  To see inside they’d really have to work at it and get close all at the same time not knowing if someone is inside or not.

Home window tint varies in color and darkness depending on what you want but for the most part and from the street a person cannot tell by looking at the windows if there are people inside.  Yes, you can see out perfectly but this little feature of home window tint keeps your home private.

Home window film and tinting makes sense, that’s the easy part.  The hard part is finding a good company to install it for you.  Big name manufacturer brands won’t help you on the installation, warranty or service after the install.  You need to count on the company for that.  Here’s what to look for:

-Ask about the warranty.  Most people don’t but you should count on a decent warranty for the window seal, glass breakage, bubbling and cracking.  It’s also important to make sure the warranty is transferable if you decide to sell your home.

-Many people forget to ask how to clean the glass with window film installed.  It’s best to play it safe and make sure that standard window cleaners are ok to use.

-Ask for 3 references.  The company should be able to hand them to you almost immediately if they are proud of their work.

Remember the size of the company is not relevant but the work is.  Ask who will be doing the actual installation and how much experience they have.  You don’t want to be a practice house for a large company that recently hired 10 new recruits!

We found all of the above with a Columbus, Ohio company called Sun Block Window Film.

Columbus, Ohio Community pick for home window film, sunblock window film and tint:

Sun Block Window Film
3154 North Star Road
Columbus, Ohio 43221
p.  (614) 807-2443
Window Film FAQ

View Larger Map

Indoor activities for kids > hot day fun things to do > Stockton CA

Community Pick:  Things to do on a hot day for kids in Stockton, CA

John’s Incredible Pizza Co.
4555 N. Pershing Ave.
Stockton, CA  92507
(209) 954-1111

Sign up for email club
Virtual Tour Sweepstakes

I love summer.  School is out and the days are longer.  We swim a lot and go on evening walks.  The kids are participating in the summer reading program through the city public library and we’ve signed up for various kids activities in Stockton to keep the kids engaged throughout the summer.  Still, it’s difficult to get outside during peak hours of the day when the sun is high and the temperature is unbearable.  Especially with another 100+ degree heat wave coming.  The kids need to get out, and to be honest, I get a serious case of cabin fever some days too.

I’m always on the lookout for fun things to do with the kids in Stockton.  Staying fairly close to home is important to me because of ever-increasing gas prices.  And since we’re not planning a vacation this year, we want to make sure the kids don’t get bored and have some good experiences and create some lasting memories to share when school starts.

The city of Stockton offers a wide variety of family activities, such as day camps, Summer Discovery Camp, Children’s Museum and more.  Be sure to check out their website for more information and dates.

Even with all of these great and some free activities, we need to get out of the heat and find something fun to do indoors where it is cool.  With another heat wave coming, we’re looking for an indoor retreat from the heat.  When the kids were younger we loved taking them to Chuck E Cheese.  That would be more fun for our youngest, but the 7 and 6 year olds need something more geared to their age group.  Scandia and Boomers are also fun places to go, but many of their rides and activities are outside in all that heat.

We have found a place that has something to suit each age group and all of it is indoors.  John’s Incredible Pizza Co. is a welcome alternative and has everything you need for a fun day out.  You can even make a daycation out of it.  Pretty much all you’ll need to bring are the kids.  John’s has a wide variety of food to eat and activities that will engage kids of all ages (Moms and Dads, too).  Even their amusement park style rides are indoors!  Some of the rides are geared toward smaller children, so your toddler can be included.

Here’s what we love about John’s Incredible Pizza:

The Food:  We’ll say this is the best food set up for kids and adults anywhere.  John’s offers and all-you-can-eat buffet of pizza, pasta, salad and desserts.  For each category they offer many toppings, flavors, combinations and choices.  The kitchen is constantly bringing out hot pizza while replenishing the salad and pasta bar.  Beverages are all-you-can-drink with an additional cost of $1-2.

The Fun:  John’s is unique in that it is completely indoors but offers the fun of outdoor style rides and things to do.  Our two favorite traditional rides are the tea-cups and the bumper cars.  We mix up the ride fun by playing video and other games.  The great part is when the kids get hungry from all the play, you just walk back over to the food side and fill up again.  This is one reason why John’s is perfect as an all-day activity for the kids.

A Break for the Parents:  John’s is a very active environment, but they still offer quiet seating for dining in their multiple themed rooms.  The themes range from cartoons to music videos and one with a more log cabin feel, which is intended to be the most quiet of the bunch.  They also offer beer and wine with a 2 drink limit.

If you’ve never been to a John’s it’s probably hard to imagine what it looks like inside.  You can go here and take a look.

John’s Incredible Pizza has 8 great locations:  Bakersfield, Buena Park (coming soon), Fresno, Modesto, Montclair, Riverside, Roseville, and Stockton.  You can view maps to each location here.

Community Pick:  Things to do on a hot day for kids in Stockton, CA

John’s Incredible Pizza Co.
4555 N. Pershing Ave.
Stockton, CA  92507
(209) 954-1111

Sign up for email club
Virtual Tour Sweepstakes

View Larger Map

Bodybuilding products and supplements > how to gain muscle fast > CA

Community pick:  bodybuilding products, bodybuilding supplements, program and plans
Parrillo Performance
p.  (800) 344-3404

A Bodybuilder Is Born:  Generations

Episode 17: Get out of the middle of the road!

By Ron Harris

School had just let out for the summer. This meant that my 14-year-old daughter would be a rare sight until after Labor Day. Sharing the common adolescent belief that her parents are not only un-cool, oppressive, and an embarrassment to be avoided, Marisa would manage to become as much of a fixture at her friends’ houses as possible without actually being furniture. During one stretch last summer, she was at one particular chum’s abode so often that I contemplated having her mail forwarded there. My eight-year-old son was a different story. He not only wanted to be around me, he wanted me to take him somewhere fun and exciting every day. “Daddy, what are we doing today?” was his echoing refrain. I tried to keep him occupied while still attempting to get my writing work done, but nothing short of a day at the beach or an amusement park like Six Flags constituted ‘fun.’ In fact, I was a little miffed at Six Flags for their onslaught of recent TV commercials rating the ‘fun level’ of everyday life (which never seemed to earn more than one flag on this scale) to the thrills and good times of plummeting down 300-foot dips and being spun upside down at 90 miles an hour on a roller coaster. In case you were wondering, the adrenaline-stimulating, not to mention gut-churning and bladder-loosening attractions of Six Flags, earned the following review from a maniacal Japanese guy screaming, “Six Flags! More flags, more fun!”

Of course, this advertising campaign was still a big improvement over the “Mr. 6″ commercials from a few years ago. I suppose the character was meant to embody the wacky and carefree spirit of the place. Mr. 6 was a young man with theatrical makeup to make him appear to be in his 70’s or 80’s, with an ill-fitting fat suit, a bowtie, and these big creepy cartoon-like glasses. Seen hip-hop dancing with wild abandon to the catchy dance hit “The Venga Bus is Coming,” I suspect he frightened away far more potential customers than his shenanigans attracted. I know I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that spastically dancing goon.

My training clients Jared and Jeff were off on a very early summer vacation, having literally just begun heading east for their beachfront house on Cape Cod. I had never been there, but brief descriptions had given me a good idea of the place - not quite a compound, but more than you could simply call a ‘beach house.’ I wouldn’t see them for two weeks or so.

That was fine, because I had a lot of work to do. I was only three weeks away from my first guest posing appearance. Some of you may be unfamiliar with that term. A guest poser is someone who goes to a bodybuilding contest to perform, even though he or she is not competing in it. Your photo typically appears on the posters and flyers, which is meant to get more people to come watch the show. The guest poser is supposed to be at a higher level than the competitors, which is why most of them are professionals and appear at amateur events. If you’re really lucky, like the folks that attend the NPC New England Championships here in Boston
every year, you get to see Mr. Olympia Jay Cutler flex his monstrous 300-pound physique for your entertainment. If you happened to be going to this other contest in mid-July, you got to see me. I am not a pro, unless the pro is short for procrastinator. My only claim to fame is that I won this same show last summer, and I also happen to write a lot of training articles about the pros. I find that the more of these I do over the years, the more some people get confused and mistakenly think I’m a pro bodybuilder myself. I don’t pretend for a minute to resemble the magnificent beasts that are today’s pro bodybuilders. But, being the reigning champ of the show, being a decent poser, and being willing to do it for the right price (the promoter’s undying gratitude and the roar of the crowd), I was all set to get up on stage again in less than a month.

One of the reasons I immediately agreed to take the gig was that it would more or less force me to get in shape for the summer. If you are going to be in shape on the East Coast of the USA, summer would definitely be the best time. For a brief couple of months, everybody wears shorts and tank tops. And all of you that work hard on your bodies know how much a little appreciation helps keep us motivated over the cold, dark months that are never too far away. We all look better leaned out and with a tan. That’s when I get a lot of people asking me, “Are you a bodybuilder? Do you compete? Are you getting ready for a contest?” In the winter, the questions are usually more like, “Are you one of those slightly slimmer Sumo wrestlers?” and my favorite, “Hey pal, can you move it along, other people are trying to get all we can eat at this buffet too, you know.”

There was only one problem with this whole plan to get in shape to guest pose. I was not going to be competing, therefore I had nobody to worry about beating. That took a lot of pressure off me, which in this case was a bad thing. All that was really at stake was my pride, which would take a big hit if I showed up out of shape and smooth as a baby’s ass. And thanks to the World Wide Web, the people in the audience would not be the only ones to bear witness to my lack of dieting discipline. Oh no, pics and comments would be uploaded in a flash, and my nickname throughout the Western World would be ‘Fat-Ass Harris.’ The news of me looking like crap would be more of a topic of conversation in my industry than the Presidential election.

The show was in mid-July, and I had been putting off going on a really strict diet for far too long. Sure, I would eat a couple super-clean meals every day along with a couple shakes that were blends of Hi-Protein^TM and Optimized Whey^TM, but I was also not passing up the occasional two or seven slices of pizza, big bowl of ice cream, or bucket-sized bowls of sugary kids’ cereals like Honeycombs, Golden Grahams, or Honey Nut Cheerios. Because I was eating clean sometimes and putting down pure junk at others, I was on neither side of the road - more like the middle. I don’t know how many of you remember “The Karate Kid,” but Mr. Miyagi expressed the idea of doing something half-assed in a similar manner. “Walk on left side, okay. Walk on right side, okay. Walk in middle -”And with this, he clapped his hands together and made the universal sound effect of a car smashing into a hapless pedestrian and turning said pedestrian into a meat pancake. At about six weeks out from the contest, I looked in the mirror and realized I was in the middle of the road and had to move my ass away from there before I too got run over - if not by a Mack truck, then by the online jeers and mockery that would follow me appearing out of shape as sure as night follows day.

That’s the thing with getting ripped. Unless you are one of the few metabolically blessed types that can see a deep six-pack on their midsection no matter how much junk you eat, it takes a totally strict diet followed for a substantial amount of time to see significant loss in bodyfat. By giving in so often to cravings, I had been taking the proverbial two steps forward, one step back. Actually, since I had not been getting any leaner, it was probably more like two steps forward and two steps back.

You also have to do your fair share of cardio, and it can’t be the wimpy Valium-trance pace you see most people doing. I had never been guilty of that, and I had never been afraid to work hard on my cardio. With seven Liver Aminos^TM at each meal, I didn’t need to worry about iron deficiency, or ‘sports anemia.’

So now, at the eleventh hour, I finally had my shit together and was seeing better definition almost every day. But it only happened once I made a full commitment to stay on a contest-type diet. If you want to get really lean, that’s simply the only way to make it happen. The junk has to go, cold turkey. You can’t be a recovering alcoholic and still drink on weekends, and you can’t be on a contest diet to get ripped and be eating a ton of sugar and saturated fat once or twice a day. You’re either sober or you aren’t, and you’re either on a diet or you’re not. It took me almost humiliating myself looking flabby on stage to come to terms with that.

Now I just had some calculations to do before I decided where to take my son on our next family outing. Would it be cheaper to pay for gas for the 200-mile round trip to the nearest Six Flags, or to fly from Boston to Orlando to experience Disney World? For now, Six Flags won out, but as prices for fuel continued to climb, it might not for much longer. Six Flags, more fun? I worry that by the end of summer we might be lamenting, “Six bucks a gallon for gas? No fun!”

Community pick:  bodybuilding products, bodybuilding supplements, program and plans
Parrillo Performance
p.  (800) 344-3404