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Originally posted at: Lafayette Real Estate News

Most homeowners would benefit from a home energy audit, especially those with older homes. An audit will uncover where your home is wasting energy and how to best remedy the situation. Remodeling your kitchen, bathroom or living room may add to your home’s resale value, but the following energy-efficient upgrades add value and save you money on your monthly utility bills – and you’ll help the environment, too.

 

The city of Scott, Louisiana knows boudin—with the highest number of boudin vendors per capita, Scott has been designated as the Boudin Capital of the World since 2012!  Every year since then, the people of Scott celebrate their boudin-related success at the Scott Boudin Festival, a weekend full of music, dancing, and of course, plenty of boudin!  This year’s Boudin Festival will be held from Friday, April 1st to Sunday, April 3rd at the Scott City Hall grounds.

The fourth annual Scott Boudin Festival is expected to have a huge turnout.  The Festival was voted Number One New Festival in 2015 and was also voted one of the top 20 festivals of 2016.  But the Boudin Festival Association still isn’t satisfied; they’re working to ensure that this year’s festival will be a record setting event, with more food and entertainment than ever before!

This year’s Boudin Festival will include carnival rides, arts and crafts booths, dancing contests, a boudin eating contest, and live Zydeco and Cajun music all in a safe and family-friendly atmosphere.  Local food vendors will be cooking up enough boudin for all of South Louisiana, so be sure to come hungry!

Friday night is Family Night and admission is free.  On Saturday and Sunday, admission is $5 and children under 6 get in free.  If you plan on attending all three days, be sure to purchase your “Passport to Fun”, which gives you unlimited access to rides for the whole weekend!  These passes can be purchased at Scott City Hall until the 31st.

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Originally posted at: Lafayette Real Estate News

The Lenten season is almost over, but there’s still time to try out this sweet and spicy Thai baked salmon!  Trust me, you won’t regret squeezing this into your meatless menu before Sunday.  The juicy, tender salmon fillets practically melt in your mouth, and the homemade Thai sauce gives the perfect balance of sweet and spicy.  This recipe does require the salmon to be marinated for a few hours, but it’ll be ready in less than 20 minutes of active cooking time!  Serve this dish with a side of roasted asparagus or a crisp green salad.  Pair it with a glass of Chardonnay and enjoy!

INGREDIENTS

• 6 x 6 oz sockeye salmon fillets, skin on or off
• Pinch of salt
• 2 – 3 tbsp green onions, chopped
• Cooking spray

For the sauce:

• 1/2 cup maple syrup
• 1/4 cup water
• 2 tbsp white vinegar
• 1 tbsp cornstarch
• 1 small garlic clove, crushed
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp chili flakes

INSTRUCTIONS

1. In a small saucepan, whisk all sauce ingredients until combined. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and simmer for 10 minutes or until thickened.
2. In a large baking dish, lay down salmon fillets in a row. Sprinkle each fillet with a pinch of salt and top with 1 tbsp Thai sweet chili sauce. Brush or rub with your fingers to coat fish with sauce evenly on top, bottom and sides. Cover and let marinate in the fridge for at least 2 hours, up to 24 hours.
3. Turn oven’s broiler on high and position top oven rack 5″ – 6″ below the heat source. Line large baking sheet with unbleached parchment paper, spray with cooking spray and place salmon fillets skin side down. Coat with remaining marinade from the dish (if any).
4. Broil for 8 minutes, rotating baking sheet once. Remove from the oven and brush top of each fillet with 2 tsp of Thai sweet chili sauce. Return to the oven and broil for another 5 minutes or until salmon has caramelized. Serve hot garnished with green onions and extra sauce with brown rice or quinoa on a side.

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Originally posted at: Lafayette Real Estate News

When you buy a new smartphone, it often runs quickly for a few months, and then seems to slow down. But it turns out that it’s pretty easy for you to keep your smartphone — either an iPhone or an Android phone — running like new. Read on for 7 easy ways to speed up your phone and keep everything run smoothly.

1. Keep your software updated

This is unarguably the most important step and should always be considered first. The latest version of your phone’s operating system, whether iOS or Android, often contains updates and bug fixes to make your phone run more smoothly and more quickly. On an Android smartphone or an iPhone, you can check for updates via the Settings app. While you’re at it, also make sure that you’re keeping up with updates for the apps installed on your phone. When you’re running the latest version of all of the software, things are more likely to keep running smoothly and quickly.

2. Uninstall apps that you don’t need anymore

Almost everyone has installed some apps that have outlived their utility — maybe an app for that airline you flew only once, the camera app that you never could get the hang of, or a game that just wasn’t as entertaining as you’d anticipated. It’s fine to change your mind about an app, but make sure that uninstall the ones you don’t need. Unnecessary apps use up storage, and even system resources if they’re occasionally running tasks in the background, so periodically evaluate the apps you have on your device and get rid of the ones that aren’t useful to you anymore. For apps that come preloaded on your Android phone and can’t  be deleted, disable them to keep them from using resources.

3. Cut down on background tasks

In both iOS and Android, you can take a few steps to make sure that the apps you decide to keep aren’t negatively impacting the performance of your phone. On Android, consider reducing the frequency with which apps like your favorite mail app, or social media apps like Facebook, connect to your account and load new updates. In iOS, be mindful of which apps have Background App Refresh enabled, and consider reducing that number to decrease the resources being used in the background. Additionally, turn off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when you’re not using them.

4. Clean up your home screen

Android’s many home screen options — and widget support — make it easy to have everything you need within easy reach. But if you get carried away, a cluttered home screen can impact how quickly your phone runs. Get rid of unnecessary icons (a task you likely completed if you got rid of apps you don’t use anymore) and only keep the widgets that are really useful for you. The same goes for iOS: clean up that home screen and don’t keep widgets that will eat up lots of unnecessary resources if you don’t ever actually look at them.

5. Reduce animations

If your phone is slow to move from one task to another, consider turning off some of the animations that appear throughout the operating system. On Android, enable developer options via the Settings app, and then reduce or turn off some of the animations. If you’re using a live wallpaper, consider replacing it with a static image. On iOS, forgo the live wallpaper for a static image, and turn off parallax and app zooms by opening the Settings app and navigating to the Accessibility section.

6. Clean out some storage

If you uninstalled apps but still are short on storage, delete downloaded files that are just sitting around, or back up and remove the years’ worth of photos you’ve accumulated on your phone. (Sync them with your computer, or use your favorite cloud service’s app to back them up and then erase them from your phone.) Get rid of old message threads that hog storage. And on Android, make sure to clear the app cache occasionally to get rid of the data that apps save to streamline their operations, or on iOS, clear the history in apps like Safari.

7. Reset your phone

When your phone is running slowly, it sometimes works to clean up unused apps or simply restart it. But other times, you try everything else and your smartphone still isn’t performing the way you want it to. In that case, you can take a more extreme step and complete a factory reset, which can often solve random issues with apps and eradicate problems that elude diagnosis. Just remember that before you reset your phone, you need to back up all of the important data and media.

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Originally posted at: Lafayette Real Estate News