Environmental Cleanliness

If you've got children who play in the fields and pick up and take home everything they find, you may want to enter your street into the search engine on the Geotracker website. It lists such toxic waste sites as LUFTs (Leaking Underground Fuel Tanks) and SLICs (Spills, Leaks, Investigations, and Cleanups) and links to online reports as to the cleanup status of each. Developed by California's State Water Resources Control Board.

Real Estate Blogs

Localism.com is a website that lists and promotes real estate professionals. In beta now, it hosts profiles of many Escondido Realtors and allows each to write blogs. The next three links are current examples.

Sharon Filbig, Prudential (Real Estate) - San Diego County Real Estate

Rich Johnson, Windermere (Real Estate) - Windermere Exclusive Properties

Lee Rumble, (Mortgage Lender) - Rumble Financial

Real Estate Investing

Here are three new books that could help you make a large amount of money in the currently poor housing market.

The pre-foreclosure real estate handbook : insider secrets to locating and purchasing pre-foreclosed properties in any market / by Frankie Orlando. Ocala, Fla. : Atlantic Pub. Group, c2006.
Call #: 332.6324 O
ISBN: 0910627665; 9780910627665
Description: 345 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.
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Clark smart real estate : the ultimate guide to buying and selling real estate / by Clark Howard & Mark Meltzer. New York : Hyperion, c2007.
Call #: 333.33 H
ISBN: 140130785X : 9781401307851
Description: xii, 143 p. ; 24 cm.
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Real estate investing for the utterly confused / by Lisa Moren. New York : McGraw-Hill, c2006.
Call #: 332.63 M
ISBN: 0071472347 : 9780071472340
Description: ix, 223 p. ; 24 cm.

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Providing Information to Improve Your Living Situation

Why a blog?
The Escondido Public Library set up a blog and not just a web page or a wiki because the world changes rapidly and many people are worried about whether they are getting the most current information. Web pages are great places to provide information and to provide links to even more information, but they often stagnate. Wikis can be topical and extremely current, but they are also chaotic, and the background used to reach their current state is fairly hard to retrieve.

Can you tell me when there are updates?
Blogs allow people to sign up for RSS feeds to inform you when updates are made. Feeds from many blogs can be organized by a site like Bloglines or Google's Feedburner so you are notified when content is added rather than having to open the site to check for new content. Please consider subscribing to our feed today by clicking on a link in the right hand column.

How can I find articles of interest?
This blog will contain labels which will allow you to easily pull out subjects of special interest to you and ignore the rest. Labels are in the right hand column. You can also search through the text of these blog entries by using the "search blog" search box in the upper left corner. In these ways the blog can contain a variety of information for contractors, gardeners, Realtors, landlords, home buyers, or students.

Mission
The posts on this blog will attempt to provide factual information from which you can form your own opinions and in doing so you can improve your living situation. Comments made in response to these posts will be moderated to encourage users to also stick with facts whenever possible.

Using the posts.
A large number of these posts will highlight new books coming into the Escondido Public Library. As this website ages, many of the books mentioned will be removed from the library collection. Before visiting the library for one of these books, please check our catalog using the link in the top right. If a book that interests you is checked out or is no longer in the collection, there is a WorldCat search box on the page to simultaneously search the catalogs of thousands of different libraries. If you don't find the item in a local library, the item might be available through the Escondido Public Library's interlibrary loan program. Please visit the library during our open hours so we can help you with your research.