Inflation, and sad looking plants

I'm not sure how long I have been gardening (or at least attempting to make a garden), but it started sometime in the early nineties.

I was thinking how much more my gardening supplies cost.

Plants like tomatoes and peppers used to come in a same 4-pack. At places like Walmart, these 4-packs cost something like 2/1.00, 2/.88, or on rare occasions even 3/1.00. A packet of seeds from a company like Burpee would cost a bit more than a dollar. I stopped buying tomato and pepper seeds. For a dollar I could get about eight plants and not have to try to grow my own leggy seedlings on the windowsill.

For other plants that were best grown from seed, I found cheaper packets. I found places that sold seeds for a nickel, and several more places that sold seeds for a dime or a quarter. I bought a lot of seeds, just never for tomatoes or peppers, and rarely from a big name company, unless that was the only way to get a particular strain of something.

At some point I bought some small tomato cages, two for a dollar. Then I bought some larger ones for a dollar. Then I made some larger ones myself.

I can't find 4-pack plants anymore. For a while there were 6-packs for a dollar, but now they are closer to two dollars. Then there were the 2-inch pots, first 4/1.00, then 3/1.00, and now 2/1.00 when I can find them. 4-inch pots are usually twice as much if not more, but they are supposed to be bigger plants. This year I am finding a lot of 4-inch pots that just have 2-inch size plants in them.

The tomato cages that used to cost fifty cents or a dollar now cost three or four dollars. That just seems like too much to me. Most of the places that had the nickel seeds aren't around anymore. Places that sold seeds for a dime last year are selling them for a quarter this year. The big name seeds that used to be about a dollar are now closer to two dollars.

Some things seem about the same. The small hand tools that used to cost a dollar are still to be found at the dollar store.

Hard work has gone up, sort of. I think when I started my first garden, I was making about minimum wage, which I think was around 3.80 an hour. Now minimum wage is 7.15. But I am older, and the ground here is clay, while the ground at the old house was mostly sand, so everything is more work, and I have less strength to do it.

Of course, at the moment I have no job, minimum wage or otherwise, so one way of looking at it is that as long as I'm doing the work by myself, it is free.

Except for the cost of aspirin and muscle rub.


Yesterday, I went shopping for plants. I made a trip to Fort Worth and spent about twenty dollars. I didn't buy as much as I planned.

I used to buy from different places for different reasons. One place tended to have less expensive plants, another might have more variety of plants, and still another place seemed to have bigger healthier plants. So I would go to the first place and buy a lot of stuff, go to the third place and spend a bit more to get a few plants that were bigger, and then go to the second place and pay a bit extra to get a few more plants that I couldn't find at the other two places.

Okay, the place with the less expensive plants still seems to have the best prices, if they have what I want. But, like everyone else, they seem to have no cheap 4-packs, and less of the 2-inch pots than they used to. Still, they have the best prices on herbs, so I bought about ten. Last year I bought everything, thinking that I would plant a big herb garden and never need to buy most of them ever again. Except that most of the herb garden drowned last year, so this year I'm trying to be a bit more cautious. Still, the plants I bought were worth the trip.

There were two places that I used to go for the variety. One of them is still quite good, but it is quite a drive, and I usually end up spending too much money there, and sometimes I buy too much and end up not having enough space for the plants and seeds that I get there. In the future I need to stay away from this place until after I have a bed dug and ready to plant.

Another place that I used to get unusual seeds from seems to be getting rid of those displays. And it isn't that I bought a lot of those seeds, it was just nice to know that they were there and that I could buy them someday.

And the place that I used to buy the bigger plants seemed to not have such impressive plants this year. They seemed to have a lot of 2-inch size plants in the 4-inch size containers. And half the place looked like it was dying. Maybe those are plants from last year and they are going to be replaced soon, but mark them down or something. Some of these sad little plants still had four dollar price tags. Who wants to buy a dying plant for four dollars?

So that leaves my local independent. I don't usually buy a lot from her, cause her plants usually aren't special in any way, not the cheapest, not the biggest, and usually not the rare varieties (though she was the first I saw with the Stevia plant). She does have two things going for her. She is the closest place I can buy from, and she takes the time to mark all of the plants. The 2-inch and 4-inch containers often arrive without the little plastic name tags (they are just on the trays, and not on the individual containers that you take home), but she takes the time to write the names on popsicle sticks so that you know you've bought a cherry tomato instead of an early girl. If you buy a plant without a marker, that's probably because the truck just made a delivery and she hasn't had time to write them out yet.

I think that she'll be getting more of my business this year. With everyone else raising their prices, hers seem to be closer to the mid-range, and if I'm not getting the cheapest plants or the biggest plants I might as well go to the closest place and get plants that are properly marked.

Taking the day off

I have been hard at work in the garden, partially just because I wanted to get started planting things, and partially because of some other stuff that I won't get into just yet. And, as I had the place to myself for most of the week, I did actually get a lot done, as I was getting up with the sun and going to work (for fifteen minutes intervals) through most of the daylight hours. So, on three of those days, in between breaks, I got about five or six hours work done. So, maybe twenty hours or so for the week, not counting that I had started on it the previous week, or tried to start working the week before that, or that little bit that I managed to get done before the great snow of 2010.

Anyway, I have been transplanting things and picking up trash and emptying pots and filling pots and moving dirt from one end of the yard to the other, washing rocks, putting down a few stepping stones, etc.... I go to bed tired and wake up hungry and between moving this and that have watched most of Stargate SG1 season 8.

And it is not finished. Still, I do see a lot of progress. I think to myself, this part over here actually looks nice. If the weather would cooperate (and my would health hold up, and my husband would stay out of town, and I could find a magic ATM that dispenses money without deleting anything from my account), I could make this whole place look nice and have flowers and yummy vegetables and everything.

Of course, most of that won't happen. But the weather might be okay for several days next week, and I plan to keep working on it.

I have made such progress that one of my nicer neighbors came and almost hugged me.

The yard still needs to be weedwacked, which is something I just cannot seem to get the hang of, so my husband will have to do it.

Anyway, I had planned to do more of the same today, but it was just too windy. See, I blame the fact that I did not get more done earlier on the rain that came (dirt I can deal with, though slowly, but mud is entirely different), and today I used the wind as an excuse to spend most of the morning shopping.

I got an early start on the shopping. First there was breakfast at a 24-hour taco place at around seven this morning, then I looked around Lowe's, and then I went to Walmart to buy day lilies. I guess that I waited too late to buy those day lilies, but then I thought I'd go to a different Walmart. I found Pardon Me and New Toy. New Toy wasn't what I had planned to buy, but I decided that two Walmarts in one day (without a sale) was enough. And then as long as I was in the general area, I might as well go to Home Depot too. By the time I did all that it was time for lunch, so I had to stop at McDonald's on the way home.

And then when I was unloading the car, I noticed the wind was a bit much. I decided that the plants could wait a while. About half a hour later, it was worse. The trash had not yet been collected, and some of mine was starting to get blown down the street. While putting it back on the curb I briefly lost my glasses.

At that point I decided that I was done for the day.

A bit later, I went to my brother's place to watch cable, and then he took me to dinner.

Well, it was nice to stay clean all day.

I didn't buy that much (though my wallet is much lighter), but I did a lot of window shopping. There is all this stuff made from recycled tires that I will be buying as soon as I win the lottery. And I saw this product for sale at Walmart. This is the sort of thing that you buy if you have a lot of money and want to do the new Square Foot Gardening, while I have no money and sometimes try to do the old Square Foot Gardening by buying scrap lumber. I would love to have several of these, but they cost about forty dollars each. (I spend about four dollars each.)

Still, go and look at this on their site. I'm not sure about their calculations, but it is fun to play with.

Eventually, I want to have no grass in the backyard. I would rather just have pathways between the garden beds and trees and such. This is not impossible, as I do not have a giant backyard. Still if I am not going to have any grass, I will have to have a lot of stepping stones or mulch or rubber mats and such to replace the grass. That would take a lot of money, and a lot of work. But I am thinking that if I just buy a bit every time I am at Home Depot getting something else, that I would eventually get it done, and the work would not be so terrible, and I would not notice the money so much.

Speaking of not noticing the money so much, I am trying to remember where it all went to. The stepping stones have gone up to 1.27. I bought six while they were on sale for .94, and then I bought eight more. I bought one 2x6 rubber mulch roll for fifteen dollars, two bags of sand at four dollars each, about twelve dollars of bedding plants from a local independent, 2.50 on two bluebonnets, two dollars on a six pack of petunias, ten dollars on day lilies, and a bag of rubber mulch for seven dollars. The bag of rubber mulch is less than half the size of the mulch I usually buy, but it costs about four times as much. But I have decided to try it anyway, because in most places where I have put mulch, I can only see what I bought last year, maybe in some places the stuff from the year before, and the rest is gone. I'm assuming that the rubber mulch will last a lot longer than that.

So that was around seventy-five dollars, plus I've been mostly eating the dollar menu at McDonald's, so that and the taco place was probably another twenty. So I spent all the money that I had this week (just in case I had jury duty), except for twenty dollars, and I was thinking that wasn't too bad, cause I would spend the twenty on a phone card that I need to get soon. I was looking at my last twenty dollar bill and telling myself that it was okay, that of all that money I had spent (mostly on Saturday morning) most of it was either something that I really needed (like the sand) or something that I had planned to buy (like the day lilies, though I had thought that they would be six dollars instead of ten), and that my only real impulse buys were the two bluebonnets (which if I didn't buy them I probably would have just bought a second pack of petunias) and the 2x6 rubber mulch roll (which I bought at fifteen dollars after seeing it someplace else for twenty, and I figured at 1.27 each for stepping stones that I would pay about the same amount to cover 2x6, so I might as well get the rubber and have a look at it). But then as I was leaving the Home Depot I noticed that blueberry plants had been marked down to four dollars, and I bought one of those too.

So I no longer have twenty dollars left, I won't be buying that phone card til next week, and I now have a blueberry bush that I have to deal with. Blueberry plants are in the grand scheme of things, but I have not yet prepared that area where they will go, so now I have to wonder what I'm going to do with this plant until then.

At some point I went out and measured everything, but I seem to have misplaced the notebook where I wrote everything down, so I shall have to take all the measurements again. I should mark out where I want the fruit trees to go and build barriers to go around them so that I remember not to plant anything else there.

Now it is Sunday. Being all clean for a day was nice, but now it is time to get back to work.

Does this make any sense?

It seems that I've read a number of things that didn't quite make sense the way that they were written. I can't remember most of them, but this was in the 2010 Census.

This concerns either questions 8 and 9, or questions 5 and 6. And maybe there are different Census forms, and other forms don't look like this.



--> NOTE: Please answer BOTH Question 8 about Hispanic origin an Question 9 about race. For this census, Hispanic origins are not races.

8. Is Person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?

_ No, not of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin
_ Yes, Mexican, Mexican Am., Chicano
_ Yes, Puerto Rican
_ Yes, Cuban
_ Yes, another Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin--Print origin, for example, Argentinean, Colombian, Dominican, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Spaniard, and so on.

________________________________

9. What is Person 1's race? Mark x one or more boxes.

_ White
_ Black, African Am., or Negro
_ American Indian or Alaska Native--Print name of enrolled or principal tribe.

________________________________

_ Asian Indian
_ Chinese
_ Filipino
_ Japanese
_ Korean
_ Vietnamese
_ Other Asian--Print race, for example, Hmong, Laotian, Thai, Pakistani, Cambodian, and so on.

_________________________________

_Native Hawaiian
_ Guamanian or Chamorro
_ Samoan
_ Other Pacific Islander--Print race, for example, Fijian, Tongan, and so on.

_________________________________

_Some other race--Print race.

_________________________________



I don't know if your copy of the census looks like that. Mine had blue columns in English and green columns in Spanish. I don't know what race you are if you are Hispanic and Hispanic doesn't count as a race. What race would a Mexican American be if not Hispanic? He isn't White and he isn't Black, and he is not any of that other stuff listed. If White and Black are races, then maybe Brown should be race, but it isn't listed either.

I would not know how to deal with this if I had to answer that I was Hispanic. But I am not Hispanic. There are Hispanic people on my husband's side of the family, but he doesn't speak Spanish, so he doesn't even say that he's mixed, he just says that he's White.

I'm not sure why they need to know anyone's race anyway. Blacks and American Indians count as whole people now. The census is supposed to be counting to figure out how many representatives a state should get in Congress. That number isn't going to change because of a race majority or minority.

I also don't get the point of question three. Not that any of the answers were good ones for my situation, but I made a guess. Seems like there should be a few more boxes on that question, like condos or dorm rooms or even jail cells.

No, I do not live in a jail cell.

But, again, renters and homeowners and maybe even actual homeless people should count the same on a census. The state representative number won't go up or down either way. Why do they need to know if a person pays rent?

Whatever.


I heard another thing was was maybe poorly phrased.

My husband went to this meeting. This is part of a process to change the way that things are done so that my husband will start doing his job paired with one salesperson, while in the past he has usually worked with two salespeople. Most people don't like the idea. This isn't going to fix the problem. This is going to make everything better and get back those larger paychecks that a lot of them got used to getting.

And, it seems clear to me, that this means that there will not be work for half of the salespeople.

So this middle management guy (who possibly doesn't have a real job when he isn't going around giving speeches) gets my husband and other people with his same job and their two managers together, and a couple of the salespeople's managers were also at this meeting, though most of the salespeople were not there cause they'd already had one of these meetings.

So my husband is telling me about the meeting, how this middle management guy was trying to convince everyone that the new one on one system is going to be great (while most of us have figured out that it is a bunch of BS, but there's just no choice in the matter if you want to keep your job). And he starts out by saying that the new one and one system is a good thing, because right off it will get rid of half the problem. So this is a really good thing.

Sounds like he was saying that the salespeople were the problem, and that this was a good thing to get rid of half of them. And he said this not only in front of my husband and other people with his job and a couple of his managers, but also those few salespeople managers sitting in the back.

They were not amused. My husband did not laugh. Most of the other people didn't laugh either.

How about getting rid of half of the appointment setters and people who arrange for the accounts, since they bring in all the "customers" who don't buy anything. And how about getting rid of middle management, who probably don't do much when they aren't giving BS speeches.

But stand up in front of people and say that the new system will get rid of half the problem? What was he drinking?

A few more hours of doing mostly nothing

Okay, here is how my day goes.

I wake up. I wake up usually several hours before he does. I would prefer not to wake him up, but I cannot get back to sleep. I could either a.) suffer in silence, b.) flick on a light and quietly read next to someone who is trying to sleep, or c.) come in here and use the computer to maybe watch hulu or something like that. I would usually pick c, though that isn't possible when he is working, because if he worked the night before the computer is doing some work thing. So this morning it was b, which works if he is really asleep and I tilt the lamp at the right angle so that it doesn't light up the whole room.

Then I wait for him to wake up and do whatever it is that he's going to do. This morning involved: doing something over again with the computer cause it didn't do whatever it was supposed to do during the night, trying to cut the grass (actually weeds, but that is another post) (thanks for cutting the grass before we get a warning note), getting about half done with cutting the grass before deciding that new trimmer line was required, taking a shower, watching the episode of House that we missed, going to a hardware place to get new trimmer line, going to the library, going to Burger King for lunch, coming back here and looking at stuff online. The stuff in between taking a shower and looking at stuff online we did together. We do stuff like that together, which means that until he leaves for work I don't do much, cause I'm either doing something with him or I am waiting for him to get done with something so that I can do something else.

So I am waiting for him to get done looking at stuff online, when he asked me if I've done the insurance stuff.

No, I haven't done the insurance stuff.

Well, it needs to be done by Sunday.

Like I'm supposed to know that it needs to be done by Sunday. He's known about this for weeks and I only heard about it yesterday. Not my fault he waited so long.

Okay, let's do it now. It probably isn't any different than last year, and it shouldn't take that long if we don't change anything. And we don't change anything, cause we don't really know what we would want to change anyway.

So last year we took this little test, and I suppose that we should do it again this year. So he takes his test, and gets the same score as last year.

Well, if you don't lie, and you don't change your habits, your score stays the same.

So I start to take my test, only the computer takes me around in circles and I never actually end up taking the test. We can't figure it out. We tried the helpline and I thought I had it figured out from there, but I didn't. Now he's had to leave for work, and I can't take this stupid test.

Anyway, I can't take the test now cause it won't let me guess anymore passwords. Maybe I can take the test tomorrow, if I don't have jury duty.

And now, since I haven't started much of anything and three o'clock is only about an hour away, I might as well just wait for it to be three o'clock. I should be gardening or cleaning the backroom, but if I get jury duty I will probably not do either and will just do laundry and dishes and kitchen stuff instead. So I will just wait to see what I'm going to do.

Which means that by the time I do anything, I will probably only be doing it for about four hours before I call it a day.

I think that it is highly unlikely that I would get called on a Friday. They just don't start trials on Fridays. Still, there doesn't seem much point in starting what I plan to do today and tomorrow until I know for sure that I will actually be home to do it. So I am just mostly doing nothing for another hour or so.

It's sad. It is two in the afternoon and of all the stuff that I should have done today, so far all I have done is take a bath and eat lunch.

Another day without jury duty

Monday, I would not have minded getting it over with. As it is now, I think maybe I would like to put it off til next week, maybe even next Friday.

Not that I really want to get out of it entirely. Now isn't a really bad time, so it is better now than it might be later. Still, I am unlikely to actually get picked. It will probably only be the one day.

But if the one day had been Monday, that would have been better, since I would not have had to worry about parking. And, I had thought, that any day this week would have been the same. But my husband was unexpectedly added to this week's schedule yesterday. I can hardly complain that he's going back to work, even if it might not last.

Still, it would have been better to get the jury thing done without worrying about parking. Or, if I actually get picked for a jury, it would have been nice to go that first day without having to deal with parking. Worrying about all the other little details is enough for the first day. Worrying about parking could have waited til the second day.

But, it isn't going to work out that way. My husband will be working on each day that I might get called. So now I'm hoping that it is a week from Friday. I would still have to deal with the parking that day, but then I would have Saturday and Sunday off to deal with the traumatic experience, even if I did get picked. And I think that the next couple of days I might have other concerns that would be an added distraction that I don't need on top of maybe being a juror and having to deal with Dallas.

I hate Dallas.

Today is a beautiful day. I regret wasting so much of it. I have even attempted a bit of gardening today. I am trying to mix some soil, and I planted one bluebonnet. Okay, one bluebonnet is not a big deal, but I waited too late to plant seeds. And the one plant should make seeds that would probably plant themselves nearby for next year. After that I had to mail a letter (a letter that I've put off mailing for about two weeks), and to get over that bit of unpleasantness I stopped at a local plant place and spent five dollars. I now have two pepper plants, two tomato plants, a spinach and a lettuce. I couldn't buy much more than that. I have to keep at least ten dollars on me, just in case I have to go park in Dallas I don't want to get my husband to go to the ATM after working so late. And besides, the beds really need a bit of work before I start filling them with tomato and pepper plants.

Yesterday I tried to drag out more stuff to sort out. As some stuff like the yarn seems to get more organized, it leaves me with this growing mound of other stuff that I haven't figured out where it goes. I have noticed now that the pile of stuff is large enough that it mostly blocks the path to the dryer. So either I can't do laundry, or I can't add to this mound of stuff.

But, no jury summons yet, so maybe I can put off the laundry one more day.

The first day of asparagus

There was asparagus in the back yard today. Not just tons of it, but I cut six stalks of it. I have enough that I will either eat it with pasta tomorrow for lunch, or maybe I'll eat it later today.

I mostly write this as a note to myself, so I'll know what day it was, so I'll know what day to expect it next year.

I didn't like asparagus until rather late in life. I must have been nearly thirty. I only like it if I cook it. Everyone else overcooks it or makes stuff with canned or frozen. I don't like any of that. Anyway, I decided to plant lots of asparagus where I used to live. And then when it was growing enough to eat it, I had to move away.

Maybe now I'll have to move away from here too.

I think it would be nice if there were all different kinds of asparagus, different flavors, different growing times, different colors. It would be nice if there were chili pepper flavored stalks that just grew out of the ground without having to plant it every year. Or tomato flavor. Or squash flavor.

I like my garden, but I don't like the work. Asparagus is a lot of work, but once it is done, it's done, and you can just enjoy it for ten years or more. Except for fruit trees and rhubarb, I can't think of much else that works that way.

I don't think that the yarn is ugly

In the previous post, Dmarks suggested that I get rid of my ugly yarn on eBay. I think that I have too much to say on the subject to answer as a comment.

First off, it isn't that I think the yarn is ugly. I think maybe some mice ate some, but I threw that out (and I'm trying to figure out how to wash some of it from that same box, like maybe in one of those lingerie bags). That is the closest thing I would have to ugly yarn, and I wouldn't want to sell it if I could fix the problem, and I wouldn't want to stick someone else with the problem if I can't fix it.

But most of it is not ugly or damaged or anything. I just don't quite know what to do with it right now.

When I first got into knitting, I bought a lot of stuff on sale, but then I didn't use it. It just didn't quite work for what I thought I would want. Like I wanted to make Dr. Who type scarves, and I found a thick yarn on sale (like Jiffy or Thick and Quick, but I really can't remember). I just bought a lot of different colors. The sad thing is that I found a picture of this stuff in an ad, and I went to the store and it wasn't supposed to be on sale, but I demanded to get the sale price because of the picture in the ad. They finally sold me the eighty dollars worth of yarn for about thirty dollars. I was very happy and took the yarn home.

Then I started looking online for pictures of the Dr. Who scarf and found a whole website about making the scarves, and the colors I had bought were not even close. I spent another two weeks collecting regular four-ply acrylic yarn that looked more like the colors I needed.

But now I still have this thick yarn, and I only have one or two of each color. It doesn't really suggest another project. I could still make a long multi-colored scarf, but it wouldn't look much like a proper Dr. Who scarf, and that is a lot of work for something that is not a proper Dr. Who scarf.

I bought other yarn when it as on sale, cause it just looked so interesting, but I didn't really have any idea what I would use it for. Or I had an idea, but either it didn't work out, or I needed something else to go with it, something else that I still don't have. I bought several skeins of purple yarn and several skeins of orange yarn for two dollars each, which was a good deal, as the skeins usually cost five or six dollars each. But for that project I also need a certain shade of red of the same type yarn, which I rarely find, and I never find it for two dollars a skein. So that project will be waiting a long time.

I have tried to be more selective about buying clearance yarn. If it doesn't suggest a certain project, I shouldn't buy it. It isn't a good deal if it is just going to be part of the stash forever and never get made into anything.

There are certain types of yarn that I should buy if they are really cheap, and eventually I will have enough of the right colors to make something. Certain types and colors that I have used before (Dr. Who colors and Hogwarts colors) I will buy on sale regardless of how much I have already, because I know that I will use it. I am trying to not buy so much of other colors, unless I already know what I plan to do with it.

I now have more than ten boxes of yarn. One box is of colors that I use on a regular basis for scarves. Another two boxes are of different color four-ply acrylic yarn. I don't doubt it will be useful at some point. I have a whole box of different kinds of white yarn, and I have almost that much black yarn. And the rest is just different stuff that I either don't know what to do with, or I am missing some other part of the planned project.

So that's it. I really have very little yarn that I want to get rid of on eBay, unless I could get a good deal for it, but I doubt that I would.

Friday's deadline is almost here

Okay, so I said that I should clean and do a bunch of things before Friday. Well, as you might guess, not much in the way of cleaning has been done. But I have checked other major things off of my list. My annual visit to the clinic is done (though I should probably do the whole cholesterol testing thing later), and my mammogram is done, and yesterday I got the car inspected. It would be nice to also get the oil change taken care of, but I'm not sure that I have the money left for it.

I need to keep some money, just in case I get jury duty. In fact, if they just have me sitting in a waiting room for two weeks, I'll have to spend about a hundred dollars just on parking fees. And then there's lunch, breakfast if I have to leave really early, and dinner if I have to stay really late.

And then there is always the possibility that I might actually have to be on a real jury instead of just going through the motions of not getting picked.

Or I might spend the next two weeks making phone calls and finding out that I don't have to go in at all.

There is just no way to know. I'm trying to be prepared either way.

Anyway, back to the cleaning. I had it in my head that I should start with the back room, that it wouldn't take long, that there wasn't that much to do since I had done most of the work back in October. But it is totally messed up again. I now have more than nine boxes of yarn and a box of finished scarves, plus a few more scarves that are almost finished.

Let me explain what I mean by a box of yarn. These boxes are the plastic totes that range in size between fifteen and twenty gallons. I picked out one of the boxes and counted twenty-two skeins of regular four-ply acrylic yarn, new, still with the wrapper. I figure that a few of these were colors that I bought by mistake and decided that it wasn't worth the effort of returning them to the store (since they were probably bought on sale and were a good deal anyway), or else I found them on clearance or at a thrift store, and so they were about a dollar a skein or less. So at an average of a dollar a skein, the box cost me about twenty-two dollars. If I went out and bought the yarn now, at about two-fifty a skein, the box is worth about fifty-five dollars. I figure that is about an average box, with some of the yarn costing me more than a dollar, some of the yarn costing less than a dollar, some of the skeins being bought for about what they are worth, most being bought at a major discount, a few of the skeins are larger, and some of the skeins are smaller (more skeins in a box than the twenty-two I counted). It would take some figuring to really remember what I paid and what the yarn would cost if I wanted some like it, but I think twenty-two dollars and fifty-five dollars are good amounts to work with without doing all of that, and that works out to I spent just under two hundred dollars on the yarn, and new yarn would cost about five hundred.

So that is a lot of valuable yarn, and I don't want to get rid of it.

Okay, I don't really seem to want to get rid of anything. But I especially don't want to get rid of the yarn. I just want to get it organized so that I might actually use it.

Anyway, there's a lot of taking things out of one box and putting them in another, and then sometimes deciding that I don't like that any better and putting things back the way they were before.

Maybe I should start labeling things as to what should be done with them if I suddenly get hit by a bus and die. The yarn should be divided between M and B and other B. The scarves should be divided between K and Dmarks. If one of the lost Dr. Who scarves is found, TB should get it (after my husband and Dmarks get theirs). Costumes should go to K (except one that should go to Dmarks, even though it is too small for him to wear). Anything Land of the Lost should go to Dmarks, except for the DVDs and duplicate items should go to my brother. Any artwork not promised to someone else, my brother should get first refusal. Same with the books. K gets first refusal on Halloween stuff. And K gets first refusal on other craft supplies, except for soap and candles, which should go to G. S should get back some things that he gave me for Christmas, that I never got to use, and give them to someone else who could use them. The rest to whoever wants it.

Then there are other things that I should put in boxes that say, probably no one will want this, donate to Goodwill. I can't seem to do that myself now, but I wouldn't want to die and have anyone thinking those things were important to me and that someone needs to preserve them.

I should get back to work moving stuff back and forth between boxes. I still need to make room for the six more boxes in the living room.

We're coming to get you, Barbara

As you may have guessed, I'm a bit slow sometimes.

There is this movie The Dish. If you haven't seen it (and you probably haven't), you should. It is about this small town in Australia with a big radio telescope, and during the first moonwalk this particular dish is supposed to help broadcast the television signal. Three or four guys with pocket protectors work there, and during this time another geek from NASA joins them. One of the pocket protector guys is really good with numbers, but not so good with social situations and jokes. Somebody tells a joke involving carrier pigeons. He doesn't get it right away. The discussion moves on. Five minutes later, when they are talking about something else, he suddenly gets the joke and laughs. Carrier pigeons!

Someone in my little group suggested that we all watch an episode of Nova or something called The Pluto Files. This seems to be a reference to The X Files, but I don't get it. I should have gotten it when something was mentioned at the beginning of the program, but somehow I didn't get it til the closing credits. Planet X. The X Files. The Pluto Files.

Carrier pigeons!

Okay, so I haven't been feeling that good. I should be busy cleaning the house, but I'm not, which shouldn't surprise anyone. I haven't done much of the usual stuff, but I did have a project that I wanted to work on, and I should have been done with it by now, especially since I haven't been doing much of the usual stuff. I need to sort out the back room again (now ten boxes of yarn and mostly finished scarves), and I need to go through the holiday stuff again. I did most of this in October, how did it get to such a state in less than a year? Still, it needs to be done again, and I'm not making much progress, mostly cause I just don't feel well. Nothing serious, just the occasional headache or something, and no energy.

So I've spent a lot of time in bed, mostly reading or watching DVDs. So after my ordeal on Monday we went to the library, and I picked up a few more DVDs, one of them being Shaun of the Dead.

I told you I was a bit slow. This was the first time I had seen Shaun of the Dead. (I still haven't seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show either, but that is on purpose, as I think that someday I will win an award for being the oldest virgin.) This movie has been out for five or six years, and everybody loves it, and I just didn't bother to go see it.

It isn't what I was expecting. I was thinking that it was going to be a parody like Young Frankenstein. No, not like that. Still very funny, but not like that.

I didn't like it to start with. There is a lot of character development before you get to the zombie part. There is so much of this, that you start to wonder if you've put in the wrong disk. It is just one of those films about lowlife bums who live in England. Okay, they are not seriously lowlife bums. There are English films about seriously lowlife bums with pretty much no plot and no lines of dialog that do not contain some sort of profanity, and they seem to be made solely for the purpose of entering a contest to see how many times the F word can be squeezed into one film. They aren't that level of lowlife, just that Shaun's best friend does say the F word a lot, calls everyone c***s and n*****s, and is often seen scratching himself where it really itches. No one likes Shaun's friend, for good reason, except Shaun, but Shaun just won't give him up, and Shaun is no prize himself even without the friend screwing things up.

Despite the name, Shaun is not in fact, dead. He's just rather brain-dead a lot. But Shaun is not a zombie.

I very soon got tired of this and wondered, what has any of this got to do with zombies?

But then you start to notice things in background. Maybe there are zombies in this movie. Be patient. Be very patient. It will be half an hour before Shaun interacts with the zombies.

A few minutes later, the best friend yells, "We're coming to get you, Barbara!"

That was funny. If I had seen this in a theater, I expect that line was fall out of your seat laughing kind of funny. My husband didn't get it. It had been too long since he'd seen The Night of the Living Dead to get the reference.

I am not an expert on zombie movies. I have watched a few (and enjoyed a few) and I tend to like a few things such as 28 Days Later, which are sort of zombie movies. But I am not an expert, and I am wondering if I missed a lot of references. Maybe the whole movie was full of lines like that, and I just didn't get it.

There were a couple of things that reminded me of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and at one part the music made me think of The Thing. I wonder if they meant to do that, or if it is just me, as I am a bit obsessed with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and rather like The Thing as well. (By the way, I hear that that are about to start filming the remake or prequel or whatever it is of The Thing. Cross fingers. And if it is good may John Campbell get credit in very big letters.)

While I was not feeling well, I also sat down to watch TRON. I just never can get through the whole thing. The first time I saw it, the beginning was boring, and I didn't finish watching it. Over time I have seen bits and pieces of it. One time I was flipping channels and saw that two actors from Babylon 5 were on it, so I tried to watch. Of course by then I had forgotten the beginning of the movie, so a lot of it didn't make since. Not that it has just a brilliant plot anyway.

So there's supposed to be a sequel (supposed to be, but now we are having doubts since there isn't much in the way of new news on the subject since San Diego Comic Con two years ago), so I figured that I had better watch TRON cause all my friends are excited that there's going to be a sequel. Okay, I have now watched it, and I just don't get why everyone was so in love with this movie.

Well, not all of them have the hots for Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

I have just heard of something else in the line of stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which I thought started with Who Goes There. Apparently there was a Lovecraft story before that one, so I will have to read it. It is something that I look into once in a while, like the fictional history of the transporter. Does anything predate The Fly and the Doors that are sometimes in Asimov's stories?

I suppose that is enough for now. I have another ordeal this afternoon. It isn't so bad, and it will be good to get something else over with.

Not much going on

Last week I sort of scolded one of my readers for not posting and/or commenting for a couple of days. My readers do not live around here, and I tend to imagine them in ditches and covered with snow if they take a few days off from the blogging.

And here I see that it has been nearly a week since I posted anything myself.

Bad blogger. Bad.

But I haven't been doing much. Literally. I've spent most of my time in bed. (And no, I have not spent most of my time doing that. Just some.) And no, I'm not really sick either. I just feel like I'm going to get sick. I wish that I wouldn't get sick. I think that if I don't get sick this month either I won't get sick at all, or maybe I would get sick but soon get better. Long illnesses are more often a winter thing, and winter will soon be over.

Other than feeling like I might be getting a cold, I feel a bit queasy. I was wrong about the cabbage soup diet thing. It did not make me glad to eat food that is good for me, or at least, not for very long. I rather dislike the idea of eating anything green. No matter how good that it is, or how good that it ought to be, most of the veggies make me think of cabbage, which rather makes be feel ill.

And this after basically giving up on the diet after a day (or a day and a half, or two days with a non-diet day in between, depending on how you look at it). Imagine how it would have been after actually doing it the whole week.

Anyway, I don't feel so good and tend to spend a lot of time in bed. Mostly I have been trying to read, but it isn't a large print book, so I have to take off my glasses and hold the book two inches from my face. Still, this is probably the most reading I have done in four years or so. It is nice to read again.

Today I am sitting here because I cannot go back to bed. Today is that day that most women dread. I'm having to do it almost a month early, because if I schedule it when it should be it might interfere with possibly having jury duty. And though I do not expect to get picked, if I schedule something after the 12th I probably will get picked. It is one of Murphy's Laws or something.

So I am sitting here when I would rather go back to bed, cause if I go back to bed I might sleep too late and not be at the clinic by nine as I am supposed to be. What made me schedule it for nine in the morning anyway? I could have scheduled it anytime I wanted in the next two weeks. There's nothing to do at nine in the morning. If I had scheduled it for a couple of hours later at least I could have done a bit of shopping before, or had lunch afterward, or seen a movie afterward.

And I could have gone back to bed without having to worry about sleeping too late.

And I'm going to miss something on TV I wanted to watch.

But I didn't think of any of that, so here I am, trying to stay awake.

Okay, time for a bath. I need a nice long bath so that I'll have a nice clean a** for the nurse to look at.

The cabbage soup diet

I am writing this just after lunch on Tuesday. Before that, I had not eaten any meat since lunch on Saturday.

I guess that everyone has seen the magazine headlines for odd diets that promise to shed so many pounds or so many inches. Some of them sound good, some of them sound awful, and I guess that I just don't believe what most of them say anyway. The cabbage soup diet is supposed to help you lose up to ten pounds if you do it for a week.

The diets all say "up to" some amount. Losing zero pounds would be included in the "up to" ten pounds, right? So that would probably be what I would get for my efforts. Zero weight loss. Or maybe like two pounds of weight loss that I would put back on the next week.

And cabbage soup just sounded awful anyway.

A while back, my husband made some cabbage soup. Not a diet cabbage soup, just a soup that happened to have cabbage in it. It was pretty good. I thought maybe I had misjudged cabbage.

I was thinking that I should start eating better. Well, I am always thinking that, and never doing it. My husband was going out of town for a few days. It is easier to eat better when he isn't here. And, if I were ever going to try one of these stupid sounding diets, that would probably be easier to do when he isn't here.

So, I had pretty much decided to do this silly cabbage diet for a week, just to see what would happen. Ten pounds of weight loss sounded unreasonable. Maybe would it be five pounds. Five pounds would be worth the effort, right?

And then my husband's trip out of town got cancelled, but I decided to do some of it anyway. Maybe starting Sunday. Saturday we had lunch at Whataburger, and I had a fish sandwich. Fish isn't bad for you, but the ton of mostly mayonnaise sauce probably isn't too good for you.

Saturday night I went out with friends, and somehow we ended up at a Greek place instead of the restaurant we had agreed on earlier. It was more expensive than places I normally go to. I spent thirteen dollars on a vegetarian plate. It wasn't quite the cheapest thing on the menu, but it was the cheapest thing that I didn't have to pay extra for a side of hummus, and I like hummus. I had some fun talking to my friends, and I took half of the food home with me. It was good, just maybe not thirteen dollars plus tax and tip good.

Okay, now it is Sunday, and I'm supposed to start this diet, and I make some soup. Only then I remember that I have these leftovers from the Greek restaurant, and I have to eat them for lunch or the food will go to waste. And I'm not going to waste food that cost me thirteen dollars plus tax and tip. Besides, I like hummus. So the diet could not officially start on Sunday, so I also ate a couple of cookies and some nuts, but mostly I ate leftovers and a bowl of soup.

Okay, so then it was Monday, and I'm officially going to try this diet, sort of. I made this soup. I'm surprised that there's all this other stuff in the soup and only half a head of cabbage. I am missing a few things that were supposed to be in the soup, like a bell pepper and mushrooms and I didn't quite have enough tomatoes. And I didn't have Lipton's onion soup mix, so I substituted a ramen noodle seasoning packet. Close enough, right? The idea is to eat a soup that has no meat or added fat and just has a lot of veggies. I did that.

Well, even with only half a head of cabbage and all of this other stuff in the soup, the soup mainly tastes like cabbage. And it is nothing like the soup my husband made. For one thing, my husband's soup had potatoes and lots of this fancy bacon stuff. This soup doesn't have either of those. And when my husband made the soup, he didn't add the cabbage until right before serving. So I should have made the rest of the soup and then just added the cabbage right before reheating, but I forgot, so the first bowl of soup had nice fresh crisp cabbage, and all of the rest had regular mushy cabbage that I don't care for.

On the cabbage soup diet, you make this soup, and you eat as much soup as you want, and then you eat this other stuff, depending on what day it is. So on the first day, you eat soup and you drink water, and you eat all the fruit you want except you can't have any bananas. Okay, so on Monday I ate some of the soup and some pineapple and an apple. By Monday night I really hate the soup, even though I've only had about three bowls of it.

I am thinking that the point of the cabbage soup diet isn't really about however much you might lose that week, but how much you would appreciate other foods after you get done eating this awful soup. You would be just so happy to eat skinless chicken breasts and broccoli and fat-free salads and anything else you're supposed to eat as long as it isn't this cabbage soup.

I think that I am there already. I don't need to torture myself for the rest of the week. Boring skinless chicken breasts and broccoli sound really good.

Still, I spent money on this stupid idea, and I'm not going to waste the food. I'm going to eat the rest of this soup. I didn't make that much of it, and what I did make I have eaten half of it. I will eat the rest and try to make something better tasting with the rest of the veggies. I will try to eat the rest of the cabbage too, maybe if I remember not to overcook it.

The second day of the diet you are supposed to drink plenty of water, eat as much soup as you want, and eat as much veggies as you want but not have any fruit. And as far as veggies go you are supposed to stay away from beans and peas and corn. Avocados aren't mentioned, but I'm assuming that you stay away from them during the whole diet.

I remember that a friend mentioned getting a free sandwich from Jack-In-The-Box on Thursday. Maybe I can do this diet thing until Thursday.

I look on the computer and find out that the free sandwich thing is today, Tuesday, not Thursday. Happy to have an excuse, I go to lunch with my husband and get a free sandwich after buying a giant soda. I wonder how many calories were in the sandwich? I think that I drank about two hundred calories of soda, and then I put the rest in a bottle and into the fridge for later. Drinking the whole soda was probably close to eight hundred calories. I don't need it. Not today.

Okay, diet experiment over. Bad idea. I will force myself to eat the last of the soup later today, and tomorrow I might think about eating only veggies tomorrow. But then after that I'm going to eat a nice sensible low fat chicken. And I've already bought the chicken, so there's no way that I'm not going to eat it.

A trip to the library to find The Road

If you have been reading a while you know that I used to read a lot of books, but now, not so much. Most of the time, I don't have the attention span required to enjoy reading books, and my eyesight isn't so good either. So I don't read that many books now.

Which isn't to say that I don't go to the library a lot. Most weeks we go at least twice, as there are several libraries to choose from, and we are nearly always near one. He still reads plenty of books, and he gets audio books for long trips. And I get the occasional book to read, and a few books that I don't read so much as flip through and look at the pictures (cookbooks, how-to books, etc...), and once in a great while I look at a magazine.

And I get a lot of DVDs. I check out tons of DVDs. I very rarely go to a video store unless I am really wanting to see a particular movie. The newly discovered Redbox has only been used about five times. But I tend to get a minimum of three DVDs per week at the library.

So while I am often at the library, I don't use the library catalog as much as I used to. Which is a good thing, since I don't like the newer programs as much.

The first program we used was just like the card catalog. You selected author, subject, or title, and then typed in something, and you were taken to what you had typed, or the closest thing to it. If you typed in Asimov, you were taken to lists of books written by people named Asimov, and you would scroll down a bit til you found Isaac, and then you would scroll down more to find the particular title you wanted. If you did not spell Asimov correctly or otherwise made a typing error, you would be taken to the nearest thing that the computer could find, and then maybe you would notice your error and correct it. If you still couldn't find what you were looking for, maybe you would have to get help from a librarian.

So that was the old program, which was very useful to people already used to the old card catalog, if you could type. It was fast. It wasn't very pretty, as it was yellow letters on a black screen. No pictures. But you could see about twenty-five titles per screen before you had to scroll down.

Then the bigger libraries got some new programs, which I found to be a bit of a headache.

These programs showed pictures of the books. But, in return for that added feature, you could only see about three titles at a time instead of twenty-five. And it took time to load all of those pictures. When they first got the new program, they didn't yet have the new computers, and it seemed to take a long time to find anything. They soon got new faster computers and all was well.

Except that if you misspelled or otherwise incorrectly typed Asimov, it didn't take you to the nearest thing. You just get a message that says no entry found. Since it is inconceivable that there are no books in the library by Isaac Asimov, you must have made a mistake. Try again. But when you are not looking for Isaac Asimov, when you are looking for a lesser known author with maybe only one or two books, then maybe you have misspelled something, or maybe the library just doesn't have any of the books you want. There is no way to know.

You have to go and bug the librarian.

Now that we have computers, we can list things under more than author, subject, and title. We can also add things like series. You can look up a list of all the Star Trek titles the library has.

The computer can now search through everything in the library with something called general keyword, which would have just been impossible with the paper card catalog. Like, if someone recommended a book to you, but you didn't write down the name, and you think that it had the word roses in it. Under general keyword, you can type in roses, and then you will get a list of everything the library has that roses in the title, and if you are patient enough, you might find your book.

Okay, so yesterday we went to the main branch of our little library. Our little library has three branches now, though one of the branches is so small that I have only been there once. And I don't use the catalog much anymore, unless I am looking for a particular title, cause I already know where the DVDs are and where the cookbooks are and so forth. I just walk around and see if anything gets my attention.

Recently, we had seen the movie The Road. The Road is a pretty depressing movie, which makes you want to go out and see a nice happy movie, like The Book of Eli. But someone had said that the book was better, and that it had a more uplifting ending, and I should read it. And I like to read books after I have seen the movie, and I like post apocalyptic stuff, so I thought that I would check out The Road, only I forgot who wrote it.

Okay, so I go to the computer and type in The Road. Only the thing seems to be stuck on general keyword search. In alphabetical order it listed six hundred and something entries with the word road. The Road, which probably would have been the first entry in a title search, was on page 35 of the general keyword search.

But I do eventually find it, and I find out the name of the author is Cormac McCarthy, which is what I need to go and look for the book on the shelf. And I see that the library has two copies, and that one is checked out and that one is checked in.

Also, it is on the adult fiction shelf instead of the science fiction shelf, but we won't get into that.

Anyway, I go and look, and I can't find it on the shelf.

Time to bug the librarian.

Maybe the second copy is in paperback or something, and I will have to look somewhere else. Or maybe it is on display. Or maybe it is still in shelving.

So the librarian tells me that their copy is checked out, but I say that I thought there were two copies and that the other one was checked in. She says that the other copy is at a different branch. But then she tells me to wait, that she'll look for one in the large print section.

For some reason, it hadn't occurred to me to look for things in the large print section. I guess that I hadn't even noticed that this particular library had a large print section. The bigger libraries have one, but rarely got anything from there. I left those books for the old people who needed them.

The librarian said that the large print edition was checked in and pointed me in the right direction. I found the book.

I read the book yesterday. I can read the book without taking off my glasses and putting my nose an inch away from the paper. I might have to start reading again on a regular basis.

The Road the book is not much different from the movie. You still don't know for sure what the catastrophe was, though you can still assume that it was a nuclear war or a big meteor. As for the supposed uplifting ending, it is the same except that the woman talks about God in the next to last paragraph.

Monday Morons-- how's that going to help anything?

Okay, I said that the problems with my husband's job deserved its own post, so here it is.

My husband got this job about three and a half years ago. It was much like other jobs he has had in the last fifteen years or so, just this was a different company. Some jobs he does his part, and then weeks later a salesperson will follow. Other jobs he has been paired with a salesperson and they work at the same place at the same time. (Once I was the salesperson, but I wasn't very good at it.) At this company he has been working with two salespeople. Most of the jobs he gets paid at least some commission. If a good salesperson is assigned to work with him, this is good. If a bad salesperson is assigned to work with him, this is bad.

At this company, when he gets to work with two good salespeople, this is really good.

So, for a time, my husband made a lot of money at this company. Okay, maybe not a lot of money, but almost twice as much as he was making before. That year, we both bought new cars.

And then this whole economy thing happened. People lost their jobs and had no money to spend. Other people who didn't lose their jobs were afraid that they might lose their jobs later, and they didn't want to spend much money either.

So, my husband still has a job, but not really steady work. And when he does work, people don't spend as much as they did, so he doesn't make as much money.

So, when he has a bad day, he makes about fifty dollars. When he has a good day, he makes about three hundred dollars. There are now a lot more bad days than good days. And then there are a lot of days that he just doesn't work at all.

The company has decided to change things around so that instead of working in groups of three, people will work in pairs. To make up for the change, my husband is supposed to get a slightly higher percentage commission. After doing some math, they have decided that the new plan will raise the current average pay of one hundred and seventy nine dollars per day to one hundred and ninety dollars per day.

This still doesn't get them anywhere near the previous three hundred dollars per day that he got used to getting paid on a regular basis.

And, everyone will usually have to work an extra hour per day and do a lot more work in general. Not really worth an extra eleven dollars a day, even if the plan works.

Okay, so they now have three people working together, and they don't have enough assignments for everyone they have already hired to work on a regular basis. Now they are going to change everything around so that people work in pairs. So either they will have to fire half of the sales staff, or they will have to hire more people who do my husband's job.

Now, if they fired half of the sales staff, and they manage to fire the half that doesn't make much money anyway, this might work out okay. If they just go out and hire more people, that will mean that my husband will only work about half the time that he has been, and he isn't working that often now anyway.

I have never heard of this company actually firing anybody. They just give people bad shifts and wait for them to quit. Some of them just don't quit, though I don't understand why.

Those are the salespeople my husband will probably get stuck with.

None of it really makes any sense. But they just refuse to deal with things the way they really are. They don't want to get rid of salespeople who aren't selling much and they don't want to cut back on the schedule so that they only work at sites where people actually want to buy stuff. They want to mostly keep doing things the way they have always been done. They want to try to bully people into buying stuff, even though the people just don't have money to spend on stuff.
Now, if they really want to improve things, they should maybe get rid of some of the people who schedule the accounts. They obviously don't care if the account makes any money or not. That isn't their problem. They don't get paid by how much money an account makes, just how many accounts they can schedule and how many customers they can lure in, even if the customers don't spend any money. So they should get rid of these people, or at least change the way that they get paid, so that they don't waste everybody's time working a site where there is no money.
So, they should get rid of some of those people, and get rid of some of the salespeople (those who aren't making much money anyway), and then see how many people are needed to work with them that do generate some business. Instead they are either going to hire or fire people based on this silly idea of having all the workers pair off.

I have been lazy

I guess that is nothing new. But I can't seem to get much done, and I get even less done when my husband is around, which is pretty much all of the time now.

The people who run the company my husband works for are about to do something that most of us think is pretty stupid. I won't get into it much here, because it deserves its own post, but let's just say that they are going to change things in such a way that either they will have to have to fire half of the sales people or hire a bunch of other people so that everybody can work in pairs instead of how they work now. If they fire half of the salespeople (the half that never make any money anyway) that would be good for my husband. But they rarely fire anyone, they just make things annoying so that people will want to quit. So that probably means that they will hire a bunch of extra people, and as it is they don't have enough work for the employees that they already have.

So this is bad.

I will have jury duty next month, and I have to schedule a few things so that they don't interfere if I get picked to be on a jury. Not that I expect to get picked, cause I never have been picked before, but I think that I should try to be ready just in case. I should set deadlines for myself, so that I have a lot of stuff done by the middle of next month. It would be nice if I didn't have anything major to do in April. I keep talking about all that I need to do, but I never get started with it. Something always comes up.

In the few moments that I did feel like I could get something done, I started painting that scrap lumber I bought recently. I have a few pieces left to do, but I'll probably finish with that today. Other than that I managed to finish the pilot's Christmas gift attempt number three, which looks nothing like the other two, but he made a suggestion for something he would like and that gave me an idea for something else. So hopefully I will show it to him on Saturday and see if it meets with his approval.

And while I was briefly doing useful stuff, I thought that I would go through a couple of boxes of stuff, thinking that I would take three or four things out of the box and want to get rid of the rest of it. And it turned out to be the other way around, with my getting rid of three or four things and then putting the box back where it was.

There is this theory that if you put something in a box and don't use it for a year that you don't need or want it and that you should get rid of it. Except that I can't seem to get that to work for me. For one thing, seasonal stuff goes in boxes that don't get opened except for once a year, and if you are busy during that season the boxes don't get opened that year at all. But that doesn't mean that the stuff in the box is unwanted, just that you didn't feel up to the whole seasonal decorating thing that year. The decorations will still be good for next year. I can't see any reason for getting rid of the decorations, unless maybe a person has suffered a crippling injury and will never be able to put up the decorations in the future, or maybe if the person becomes Mr. Scrooge and doesn't like holidays anymore. So I have just stacks and stacks of those boxes, and I have no intention of getting rid of them.

Same with the craft stuff. Just cause I didn't do ceramics this year is no reason to get rid of the stuff. Soon I'll be old and I'll join the senior center and do ceramics there.

Okay, the senior center is still years away. Just not as many years away as before. Anyway, the craft stuff stays.

It is the other boxes of odd things that bother me. I would think that stuff should be gotten rid of if I haven't used it in a year. Except that it turns out the main reason I didn't use it all year is that I forgot where I put it. Now that I've found it, getting rid of it doesn't seem like such a good idea.

Like I found one of those cookie sheets that I misplaced. Not that it was in this box, but still, I found a cookie sheet. Maybe I will get back to the whole cookie making thing soon.

Anyway, so I went through this box of stuff, thinking that I was going to get rid of most of a box of stuff, and I just ended up with a slightly lighter box of stuff. And then I also went through a box of paperback books, thinking that I would want to get rid of most of them since I don't read much anymore, but of course the box contained those few books that I would actually want to re-read if my eyes felt better. In fact, I've pulled out a few to re-read anyway. So I still have most of a box of books, though I did find that I had two copies of a certain book, and I have decided that I probably won't re-read the Joy Adamson stuff, and I don't think I will be re-reading this Blake 7 book. Watching Blake 7 is one thing, but taking the time to read it is something else entirely. And how many years has it been since I've given any thought to Blake 7 anyway?

Saturday, I will try to find good homes for these six paperbacks, otherwise they can go in another box that will eventually end up going to Half-Price Books. The rest of the books went back in the box.

But it isn't really the stuff in boxes that bothers me, it is all this other stuff. I have boxes of stuff, and I have books and art on the shelves, and then there is all this other stuff. If it doesn't go on the shelves and it isn't a book and it doesn't go in a seasonal box and it doesn't go in a craft box, where is it supposed to go?

I was just about to head out the door

And then I noticed that the bathroom light was on. It hadn't been on a minute ago. We were expecting the power to be out for the full eight hours.

Okay, it didn't actually say that the power would be out for eight full hours. It said that the power would be out for up to eight hours. But I still thought that it would be close to eight hours. And the power outage was supposed to start at 7:30, which did not happen, so I started to think that maybe they were wrong and it had been postponed yet again. But no, the power went out, though it was closer to 8:00 than it was to 7:30.

Still, I expected eight hours, so eight hours started at 8:00 would end at 4:00, or close to that. Having the thing over at just after 12:00 was a pleasant surprise.

Having done what I was told for a change, I now had to go around the house and turn on the heater and plug in the computer stuff and plug in the TV stuff. And then there was a bit of a wait while the computer did its thing, and I had to fiddle with four remotes to get the TV and the VCR and the two boxes to all talk to each other again.

All done now, four hours ahead of schedule.

So, I am glad that I did not head out the door a minute sooner, as I was about to waste a dollar and five hours or so at the dollar theater, on a crowded half-price Tuesday, watching movies that I don't really care about, since the two movies I want to see will not be there until Friday.

Okay, so what am I doing now? Nothing. I had planned on this being a totally wasted day, and I guess that it will still mostly be a wasted day. Just that I won't be wasting it at the crowded half-price Tuesday dollar theater watching movies I don't really care that much for. I can stay home and save my dollar and save my gas and just maybe read a book and do a little bit of knitting (when I am not already watching TV or doing something on the computer).

Later, I will probably go to the grocery store and buy milk and eggs and tomatoes and whatever else I've been trying not to buy for the past two weeks cause I knew at some point they were going to turn off the power for a bit and everything in the fridge was going to spoil.

Okay, I think that some of this stuff still needs to be thrown out. But I think that some of it just needed to be thrown out anyway. But the freezer full of stuff that I was afraid of losing looks just fine.

I think that I will go rent The Transformers or some other DVD that my husband cares nothing about seeing.

The snow is melting.

I think the official snowfall for the area was 12.5 inches, with the previous record for the area being 12.1 inches in 1964. I don't think that there was actually that much snow in my yard, but there was a lot.

The snow in my yard is already starting to melt, while most of my neighbors still have a solid blanket of white outside. We think that is has something to do with our having green plants (weeds), while most everyone else has dormant grass. We have seen a few other places with green grass next to otherwise solid white areas. And there is a snowman at the corner, and another one on the next street over. The snowmen are a bit odd looking. Obviously none of us know how to make one.

My husband seems quite obsessed with the fallen tree branch in our front yard. Someone helped him mostly pull it out of the street when we first found it. That was not to his liking, and he has twice moved it a bit more by himself. He keeps wanting to go to the office to get someone to cut it up or haul it away. I wanted to stay in, and I think that they were busy doing other things anyway. Yesterday he wanted to go to the office again. Yesterday was Saturday, and there's no one in the office on Saturday. It can wait til Monday. In fact, now that it is out of the street, it can wait indefinitely. What is the big deal about a tree branch? Other people around here have to deal with having no power, or leaking roofs, or broken windows, or damage to their cars. Leave the branch alone. Either the maintenance people will come and deal with it next week, or it can just stay there for a while. It isn't even touching the house. It isn't a problem.

Well, he worked on Tuesday as scheduled, had Wednesday off because as usual there isn't enough work to go around, had Thursday's job cancelled because of the snow, had Friday's job cancelled because of the snow, ended up working at a different place on Friday cause someone else got stuck in the snow, got to come home early on Friday cause even though that particular job wasn't cancelled on Friday most of the customers decided to cancel anyway, and then he didn't go to work on Saturday cause even though the roads were now mostly okay to drive on the job had already been cancelled. This week should be almost back to normal, and he is scheduled to work four days.

I am still wondering if they will postpone that scheduled power outage yet again. I will do a lot of cooking on Monday, just in case it is still on. I have heard that most of the stuff in the freezer will be okay, but I'll have to throw out a lot of stuff from the fridge. Of course, it is about time to clean out the fridge anyway.

I have received a jury summons. Contrary to popular belief, I do not have the answer to getting out of jury duty. Not that I'm going to try this time, I think that it is one of those that pays forty dollars a day, and I might as well get it over with next month. I'm a little concerned with the instructions I received. It says something about no electronic devices. That doesn't mean cell phones, does it? Surely they don't expect us to find our way to the courthouse and such without our cell phones.

Saturday we went out to lunch at Cheddars. After all the giggling we did when we were on the road and heard about people waiting hours to get into the place cause it was new, we actually like the one here, though it does not take hours to get in. Having been mostly stuck in the house for days, we decided just to go where we wanted to go instead of looking for coupons and such. We will call it an early Valentine's Day dinner.

I bought some more scrap lumber. So now I have quite a stack of it, though it looks like it will be a while before I can paint it and otherwise do anything with it.

Sunday we went out again. My whole front yard is now melted except for a couple of snowballs. Other people still have a lot of snow or not. And there are a lot of places that only have snow where someone tried to make a snowman or an igloo or something. Big mounds of snow here and there on an otherwise melted yard or field.

After having the nice lunch on Saturday, Sunday evening we just went to Whataburger for some buy one buy one free deal available only to people who had nothing better to do than go to Whataburger for dinner on Valentine's Day. After that we went to the grocery store, and then mostly couldn't remember what we were going to buy since we were trying not to buy anything that needed to be put in the fridge. Then we got a couple of DVDs from Redbox and went home.

Okay, not very exciting. It was just good to get out for a bit.

Still snowed in

Oh, I guess it wouldn't be that bad if I really needed to get out, but I don't need to. It mostly looks like snow, not ice, though I am really not used to seeing the snow this deep.

A big branch fell off of our tree and into the street. It wasn't quite as big as the one that fell earlier, and my husband and someone who came to check on a neighbor pulled the branch out of the street. Also, the tree in the picture from the previous post was damaged, though not as bad as ours.

And it isn't like I really care about this tree anyway. I just don't want parts of it to fall on the house or the car.

It is just now getting above freezing, so snow is falling in big clumps from the trees and the roof. It will probably be very bad tomorrow when the snow melts and then freezes on the streets. But I guess the snow will still be here for a while.

Doesn't matter much. I have no place that I need to go.

After all the talk about planned power outages, my mother's electricity went off. It was not planned. And she doesn't have gas, so she'll have to wait to have a bath or cook anything. She hasn't called yet to say if it is back on. But yesterday she said that she was okay and didn't need anything.

We will just sit around the house and watch movies and make soup.

It is snowing here

And it never snows here. Or at least, it rarely snows here, and most of the time when it does it isn't enough to stick. But the snow is here, several inches of it, and it will stick for a while.

Here's a tree in my neighbor's yard.

It's a good thing that they postponed that whole power outage thing, or it would have been tomorrow. It has been planned again, for the third time, for next week. I wonder if they will have to postpone it again?

My husband's work called and cancelled. This is the first time that he has worked his regular job in weeks, and so of course this happened on the second day. Tomorrow and the next day are probably cancelled too, but that won't officially happen until tomorrow and the next day are here.

We should be doing something useful, but we are mostly either on the computer or watching television in between short periods of going to look out at the snow. We're not much for actually getting out in the snow. That lost most of it's appeal after I turned twelve.

I think that the driving looks bad, but it is just mostly the way it looks. Tomorrow there will probably be more in the way of solid ice that is really bad to drive on.

A couple of weeks ago, I was all ready to get out the rakes and shovels and other garden tools and get to it. Now I can't even see where the garden beds are. There's that much snow on the ground.

Still, I expect that it will all be gone by Monday.

What smells like beer?

Before I get too much into the boring details, let me say that I mostly had a good weekend.

And if you were planning to eat your spaghetti dinner while watching the latest episode of Being Human, alter your plans a little bit.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to make some cookies. I don't think that I have made any cookies from scratch since I have lived here, but I thought that it might be a good idea after I found this recipe online, and I remembered that I would have three things coming up that would require me to bring food.

So I took the new mixer out of the box and I went and spent five bucks on a new cookie sheet (cause it had been so long since I made any cookies I couldn't find the old ones) and I got together the ingredients that I already had and went out and bought what was missing. The new cookie recipe was not that great, but now that I had this new cookie sheet and all the ingredients for making cookies, I decided to try making an old recipe except to substitute whole wheat flour. That wasn't great either, so I went and bought some regular flour and tried again.

The cookies weren't bad, just not like I remembered. They are sort of tall and fluffy. I don't know what I did wrong. Also, I don't taste the baking soda. Chocolate chip cookies have baking soda, and I am quite sure that I put in the baking soda, but I can't taste it. Does baking soda get old or go flat or something?

Again, the cookies aren't bad, and in fact I am starting to like them, though I sort of doubt that anyone else will. I just can't figure out why they are different. Anyway, I took some of the whole wheat ones to the annual meeting, cause I had to take something, and most of them did not get eaten, which is okay cause that left more for me. I took the regular flour ones to the party, and again not many were eaten, so again I have leftover cookies for me, which I am not complaining about. But I think that I will give up on making the cookies for anyone other than me, and I will figure out something else to take to the last thing, and in fact there is no reason that I have to take anything to that at all if I don't want to. But I'm thinking that I will just purchase some candy instead.

All day Friday and Saturday, I had been very careful to read any emails from the group, in case it had something to do with the party that I would need to know about. Not that there was much, just people asking other people if they were going, and what are you bringing, and once in a while what are you wearing, etc.... And there was this new guy that hasn't been to a regular meeting yet, though he's already officially a member of a club, just that most of us hadn't met him yet and didn't know who he was. And he was asking about the party, and no one else answered him, and I didn't quite know what to tell him. But I thought that somebody had to say something. It wasn't an official club function, just that someone had invited pretty much everyone in the club. If he had joined a few weeks earlier, he would have officially been invited already. I didn't think that it would be a problem if he came, but I really couldn't invite someone I didn't know, and I thought that he should talk to the couple giving the party, though by that time it was too late. He already knew where the party was, so I told him the time and a little more info, hoping that someone else would chime in and say whether he was or was not officially invited, but again no one else said anything.

So after all this wondering what I should take to the party and what I should wear to the party, I have bought a black blouse and this sort of black thing that is not really a shawl and yet another black dress, and then I decided that it was too cold to wear any of that and just gave up and decided to wear what I wore last year. Except that I couldn't find what I wore last year. So I ended up wearing some really dark blue stuff and black boots and this black thing that used to be part of a Masonic costume.

I was getting ready to leave early, cause I hate driving in the dark, when I realized that I forgot to charge my phone. So I wait a little while to put some life into the phone, and then I head out, and as I am just nearly there I realize that with moving things from one bag to another and getting my keys sorted out and everything that I have somehow not transferred my wallet and do not have my driver's license or any money or a debit card or anything. Not that I expect to need any money or anything, but it would be very upsetting if something happened and I needed to show my driver's license. I didn't expect that would happen, and I was nearly there anyway, so I kept going, and nothing bad happened. But it was still very annoying.

So I got there at about the same time as a couple of friends, and we were all about twenty minutes later than we had intended, but we were still the first there from our group, and the parking lot was mostly empty. And I have been to this place several times before, but I am always surprised by the layout when I get there. There is this sign that says something like "Lake Ahead", and literally, the lake is right there after the sign. Not that the parking lot I'm looking for is ahead, but the lake is ahead. By the time I read this sign I have already missed where I meant to go, and I have to turn around and go back a little bit.

So we go in and see all empty tables, as everyone who is already there is in the back helping our hostess. So we are relieved that we are not late.

More people come in and bring food, and I am surprised how many of them are not wearing black. A few more of my friends show up, and some of us sit down and eat. And then this guy comes in by himself, and I think that's probably our new guy, and then I restrain myself from blurting out something like "Are you the new guy?" and he looks around a bit and goes to the back of the room. So maybe he isn't our new guy. But a bit after that someone brings him over and says something like these are some of the people in your group. And then there is a discussion between the four guys about steampunk stuff, and then the new guy and the other guy wander off to meet other people.

I get up to get some more food, and I'm wondering what smells like beer?

Probably beer.

I don't drink alcohol, but I do like several things that are made with alcohol, mainly beer bread and beer chili and beer cheese soup. But there was none of that, just beer.

So there was a lot of talking to people I don't really know and whose names I can't even remember. And I talked to the new guy some more. And I talked to M.

This is not M my friend the Klingon, this is the other one, and I see him once in a while, and I have finally decided that it isn't weird and running into him a couple times a year is not a problem. So that's what I thought, so I kept talking to him. I was wrong.

I had a few items of clothing that I decided I needed to part with, though I would rather give them to someone I knew would appreciate them and make costumes from them, so I brought them to the party. I gave a t-shirt to my host, who thought it was such a cool picture that it didn't bother him that it was started to tear. And I looked around the room for women who might fit into the dresses, and I asked a few if they were interested, and they said no. And then I noticed a certain person I did not want to have any of my things, so I did not make an announcement like I had planned. But then another friend arrived, and she said that she wanted the whole bag, so that worked out. I'm glad I thought of it instead of just dumping the stuff at Goodwill with the rest of the clothes I got rid of.

I talked to the new guy some more, and it is always nice when someone attractive is paying attention to you. He made suggestions, and though he said upfront that it would not be a date, I'm afraid that he didn't really mean that so I declined. It seems like the guys that I have known for a while who suggest something that is "not a date" really mean that and totally get that it is not a date and is not going to lead to anything resembling a date, but guys that I have just met are thinking that the "not a date" will either somehow become a date or at least end with me agreeing to a date later. So no more "not a date" type things with anybody I don't already know. I will be happy enough to talk to you when we just happen to be at the same place at the same time, which is probably going to happen a couple of times later in the month anyway.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, M has reached a whole other level of stupid. And it is hard to believe that anyone is really that stupid, so he must just enjoy making other people uncomfortable. I am thinking that if I have anymore trouble from him, I will start a new blog totally devoted to answering the question, is M really that stupid?

The party ended a bit after that, and I waited for certain people to get their things together so that I could walk out with them and not be around either M or the new guy, even though the new guy was being totally nice.

I managed to drive home without anybody finding out that I didn't have my license in my purse.

Sunday we ate at Taco Bell, after my husband saw a commercial for something he wanted but they hadn't had for a while. And then there was the Superbowl, which he watched, and I watched commercials in between Googling stuff.

Yesterday we went to various thrift stores, but I didn't buy much, and it got cold and rained and we came home earlier than we might have and watched Caprica and Being Human.

And then we got some bad news about this job he was applying for. He had read somewhere what the pay was, but then he couldn't find where he had read that, so he sent another email. And we can only hope that they misunderstood the question. Surely no one gets paid that little. We were only thinking about the job because he read that it was a lot of money, and we wanted some clarification on if that was the most you could make or if that was an average or what. And on top of that you had to provide your own transportation to the interview, which was out of the state and would require either plane tickets and cab fare, or would require driving a lot and get a couple of motel rooms. And then you had to provide some of your equipment and buy somewhat of a uniform, plus nicer clothing was sometimes required.

Anyway, that is the end of that. We would have serious problems with paying to get to the interview even if we thought it would mean a good paying job. There is no reason to even waste the time if it is really such a low paying job. It was about half or less of what we have read about similar jobs, and even those do not seem to pay enough. So that was disappointing, but at least that particular discussion is over.

The video contest

I sort of want to label this a Monday Moron post, except that I'm not really sure who is the moron in the story, unless maybe it is me, and I was the moron last time.

Anyway, several months ago (I think it was September, though it might even have been August), I found out about a certain contest. The idea was to video a bit about what you could do with a certain amount of money, and then you post your video on YouTube and this other site, and then people would leave comments about the videos and vote on the videos, though the contest was supposed to be decided not by the public votes but by a panel of judges.

I had never made a video before, but I had a few ideas, and I noticed that there were not very many entries. There wasn't a big money prize either, but I thought that I might as well give it a try. First place was five hundred dollars, second place was three hundred dollars, and third place was a hundred dollars. With less than a dozen entries, the odds were good.

Now if I could just find a video recorder.

First, I thought that I would borrow my brother's. Now, he didn't have a problem loaning me the camera, he just said that it was old now and didn't have an easy way to convert to digital, which is what I would need to get the video on YouTube, so I decided to look elsewhere.

Dmarks pointed out that I probably already had a video recorder on my husband's digital camera. I didn't think so, but it turns out that Dmarks was right. Making videos with the camera was not recommended and did not produce videos of high quality, but it would probably be good enough for making short videos for YouTube.

My husband and I made the first one together and uploaded it on his account, cause I forgot the password for my account, and then I thought of a few more videos that I could make on my own. We put up two more videos on my account, though these were not as good as the first. Then we waited to see if we won anything.

The deadline for the contest ending was pushed back several weeks, cause there just weren't many videos. This upset me a little bit, because at the time the public vote had our first video in third place, and if the panel of judges agreed with the public we would have won a hundred dollars. At the time, I really wanted that hundred dollars. I planned to buy Christmas presents with it. If the entry deadline was postponed, there might be a new video that was better than mine.

But, there was nothing that I could do about that. I re-edited the two videos that I made myself and added a third one. The entry limit was five, but I couldn't think of another one. And I emailed the people having the contest, explaining that my husband and I had worked on the first one together, so that I really had four entries, though probably we could have gotten away with making five videos each and entering ten videos. I asked for some clarification on that and some of the other rules, but I received no reply. We both got a few automated responses for stuff like the entry deadline being pushed back.

There were more videos posted, but there still weren't a lot. Our first video stayed in third place. The second deadline passed, and we waited to hear if we won anything. This was in October.

And for about a week, nothing happened. And then my husband got an email saying that we had won third place. I sent an email thanking them and sent our address and phone number and such, and waited for our prize money to show up in the mail.

Another week went by, and nothing happened.

I then received an email thanking me for the three videos that did not win. Actually, I got three emails, one for each video, though all the emails were the same. I was told that I would receive a small prize for participating. I wondered if I would receive one prize or one for each video. I emailed back, again with our address and phone number, again explained how my husband and I had worked on the first video together and I had done the three others by myself, and I didn't want anyone to think that we had in some way cheated, cause the limit was five videos, and this only gave me a total of four videos. And I asked if I would still get the consolation prize since I had already won third place, or would my husband get third place and I would get one consolation prize, or would my husband get third place and I would get one consolation prize for each of the other three videos?

And I waited, and I didn't hear anything for another week. Finally, my husband received an email saying that he would receive the third place prize after he filled out some forms, and there was a fax number where to send the forms. And I received an email that said I would receive a consolation prize for each of the three videos that did not win, again after I filled out some forms and faxed them. One of the forms needed my our social security numbers, which I really didn't want to send if it wasn't necessary (which they said that it was needed for tax purposes), and if it was necessary did it have to be sent by fax? Both forms had the wrong amount, and I asked that they be changed, and then I saw that I could change the amount myself and did so, and I emailed about the change and that I would rather not send a fax, and I filled out the forms and waited for an email confirming that I could send the forms by regular mail.

I waited about a week, and nothing happened.

Okay, fax it is. I think that there is a fax on this printer, but I couldn't figure out how to work it. But, we had a new printer (sort of a spare, which we had put back in the box after printing one or two things with it), and that seemed easier to use, and I sent the fax.

And I waited about a week, and nothing happened. It is now November.

I was about to send yet another email to complain, when it occurred to me that the mistake might have been mine. So I again took the new printer out of the box and tried to send the fax. This time I see that it doesn't work, that the line is busy. I figure that they are just busy, that it is a Monday morning, and they probably just get a lot of faxes on Monday morning. I try again later in the day, but I get the same message. And I try again several times later in the week, but the same thing happens regardless of the day of the week or the time of day. Line busy, line busy, line busy.

I decide that the problem is on my end and give up trying to fax with that machine. I will have to pay someone to fax this thing, which I don't want to do. We aren't talking about a lot of prize money, and I can't even think of who does that sort of thing, other than hotels and maybe Kinko's and the places that rent mailboxes and such. Those places were not near my house, they were near school, and while I used to make that drive everyday when I was in school, I didn't want to waste an hour doing that when I had no other reason to drive there.

My husband had a few out of town trips, so I thought maybe I would use the motel fax. Except that most of the trips were to the middle of nowhere and he stayed at cheap mom and pop motels where mom usually doesn't speak much English, and I don't think that they had fax machines for us to use. But there was one trip in a city at a nicer motel, and I just assumed that I would send the fax from there, but I was told that they did not have a business center.

It is now December. I figure that I will find something while I am out Christmas shopping. I get busy with other things. I forget about the whole fax thing.

After New Year's I was in the grocery store getting some lottery tickets, and I notice a sign that says the fax machine is being repaired. I didn't know that they still had a fax machine. They used to offer fax service, and bill paying services, and copying services, but the copier has been gone for a long time, and they had stopped doing a lot of the bill paying services, so I had thought that that whole service thing had been done away with because most of us could do the same thing ourselves on our home computers. Not so. The copy machine was gone because it was just too big and they needed the space for something else. The bill paying stuff was mostly canceled, not by the store, but by the companies they were forwarding payments to. The fax machine was still there, just it wasn't used much.

I went back the next week after the machine had been repaired and paid to have the fax sent. And I got the little printout that says the fax was successfully sent, instead of "line busy" like I kept getting when I tried to send it myself.

I went home and sent an email explaining about the delay but that I had sent the fax.

While I was looking for the email address, I found an unopened email confirming that I could send the forms by regular mail and confirming the mailing address and such. I wanted to send the forms regular mail from the beginning, I just didn't want to do that without them confirming a mailing address, and here it was. The email just didn't show up on the day that it was sent. By the time I got it, I had a bunch of other emails that I hadn't deleted, so I couldn't see the email a few days later, cause the way the email is listed it appears in the order that it was sent instead of in the order that it was received.

Doh!

Okay, but that doesn't matter, cause I've already spent money to have someone send the forms by fax.

And I wait a week, and nothing happens. And because I have to think that this is mostly my fault and that they are not trying to cheat me, I wait another week. I still don't have my money. But I now have a confirmed mailing address, so I will send the forms yet again, this time by snail mail, which is what I wanted to do in the first place.