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Summer vacation is slowly coming to an end, the kids are bored and you’ve got to get out of the house. Sound familiar? Then you, like most families have the end of summer blues. If you’re looking for ways to entertain your family on a budget, here are some great ideas to keep your kids, and your bank account happy.

Skip the movie theater, and have movie night at your house. Let your kids invite a couple of friends over and rent themed movies (Disney, musicals, comedies, etc). If you’re looking for an evening activity, have a pizza party without the expensive delivery charge. Buy premade dough and lots of toppings and let your kids create their own pizzas. Too hot to turn on the oven? Heat pizzas up on the grill and beat the heat! Avoid long lines at the water park and purchase a slip and slide for your own backyard to cool off in the hot summer heat. It’s easy to enjoy time with your family before school starts. This summer, get creative and save money while keeping your kids entertained.

Giving a present is a wonderful way to show someone you care, and opening a present is half the fun of receiving one! If you’ve been invited to a party, or are giving a present for any occasion, you may be concerned with the amount of waste it can cause. Wrapping paper, tape, ribbon and more all increase unnecessary waste for the environment. If you want to limit waste, but still want to give a beautiful present to be opened, here are some great eco-friendly ways to wrap presents.

When you get groceries, ask for paper grocery bags, and re-use them as wrapping paper. The sturdy quality of the paper makes for a great wrapping, and can be decorated with stickers, markers and glitter. Old newspapers make for a great wrapping paper too. Remember to use as little tape as possible to further reduce the amount of waste. Save the fronts of old cards you’ve received and create new cutout cards from the unique pictures and designs. In no time you will be creating wonderful wrapped presents that are eco-friendly and cost effective.

One of the advantages of growing up in the South when I did was helping my grandmother’s in the spring and summer in their respective flower gardens. As different as these two women were, they were both master class gardeners and very active in their towns garden clubs. I didn’t know it at the time but “helping” would allow me to learn a few things about arranging flowers on the cheap. If you don’t have flowers in your garden that you can cut, go to one of the large warehouse stores where you can pick up fresh cut flowers in bulk. This will give you many flowers to choose from that are nice and inexpensive.

Simply cut some floral tape or electrical tape to crisscross and create a grid at the top of the vase. Take one strip and secure the grid by wrapping it around the top. Use the grid to arrange the flowers the way you like with your favorite cut flowers and finish it off by wrapping the vase with a nice ribbon of some kind. Once you experiment with this several times you will see how quick and easy flower arranging can be!

People do some crazy things for a living. Some people tightrope walk. Some people disarm bombs or chase down armed robbers or killers. The profession that I have always thought was incredibly intense was flying jet planes. Those immense pieces of government property go at incredible speeds and are usually piloted by only on person. At those speeds everything you do would have to be perfect. You would have to be able to listen for what to do, figure out what to do, and do it. And you would have to do that all in a matter of seconds.

I think it takes an amazing person to fly a jet. Your comprehension skills would have to be supreme and your reflexes would have to be better than that. You also have to be able to take the strain. The jet planes that they pilot often go at mach one speed. That is about 750 miles per hour. That is so fast that if you blink you may not see it go by. These same jet planes frequently go over one thousand miles per hour. That is the strain I am talking about. The strain of your body being pushed one thousand miles per hour through the air. But these pilots are strong and they can take it.

The Social Web is a fun playground to explore, with sites like YouTube making it easy to find and watch interesting video content. But what if you are tired of just watching and commenting? What if you want to get in on the action as a producer of your own content? We asked Carter Harkins, owner of Harkins Creative, a fun web video production services company, what he thought about the user-generated video revolution.

“It’s so much fun! Putting something on the web for others to see is a real high,” Carter said. “Tools like YouTube make it super easy and fast to get your work online, too.”

So how does one go about producing a video for the web?

“Pretty much like you would think. You get a web cam or a camcorder, get some footage, import it into your computer, edit it with software like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker or Adobe Premiere Elements for a little more advanced effects. Upload it to YouTube, and they take care of the rest. Takes a little time, but it’s fun.”

So what do you think? Care to try out your film making chops against Scorcese or Spielberg? No? Well, that’s okay, you’ll still have fun sharing your life in motion with friends and family!