Daily Dose

Daily Dose of Cupcakes

grinch.jpgWho knew it was so tough to find grinch figures? Must be a run on faking the joy this year. You can get a 3 piece set w/Max here (of course they have the more traditional Christmas and Hanukkah cupcake toppers too, for you normal people). You might get lucky and track down enough of these Grinch nerds dispensers or maybe you can pick up a few packages of Grinch Trading Cards and call it a day. Happy whatever errr Holidays to all of you Whos down in Whoville!

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The Good and the Not so Good

It’s almost 9pm and I have no idea how we managed to fit so much activity into the day. But, we did it and it hasn’t killed any of us – yet. My ears are threatening to explode any moment and TW is at the laundromat where any number of odd things could happen. But for now, we are all alive and semi-well and I’m ready to share some good and not so good stuff we learned today.



Eragon the movie, not so good if you were hoping to see a film that stuck closely to the book. Good if you’re just into dragons and special effects and such. Not so good if you were expecting werecats and faeries.



Having a sister who sends children Shut the Box (a really beautiful version) and just the right sketch kits for each child and all of the solution books for Treasure Trove and The Alchemist Dar is very good. Not being able to find the original Treasure Trove book on the shelf is not so good, (it should be with the purple books and it isn’t!).


Super Snow in a Bag from Dunecraft is very good but the slippery sidewalks after snow fights, well, not so good. Luckily the postman and the Fedex guy and the UPS guy walked carefully and nobody took a fall.


Vegetarian meatballs from gardenburger, very good. Spaghetti sauce all over an eight year old who wants to hug everyone right this second, including the cats – not so good.


It’s nice when even the not so good stuff is pretty ok, isn’t it?

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Feel Better Tea Fiasco

OK it wasn’t a fiasco, nobody died or anything, but I think I have proven to everyone in the house (who is awake) that I am not a foodie.

See, we’re sick.  All of us who are awake.  Russian plague sort of sick.  The kind that sneaks up on you and hits you when you aren’t expecting it.  The kind that doesn’t give you a fever but makes you wish you had one so you’d have a valid reason for going to the hospital and just dying. 

I thought I’d be brill (can you tell I’ve been reading a lot of English books set in the 70’s?) and make a pot of "feel better tea".  Ha.  We didn’t have most of the ingredients so I substituted.  It’s not great.  In fact it’s not good.  And TW is laughing because I thought a can of crushed pineapple would do pretty much the same thing as a few tiny cans of pineapple juice.  She’s laughing more because I didn’t add any cloves (do we even have cloves) or any sugar. 

Well she can keep laughing, laughter is good medicine and I’m sure it will help her feel well enough to spend her day driving kids around town and playing with all of the games Santa appears to have delivered today.  Not to mention those puzzles that still aren’t quite finished.  And there’s the laundromat to visit. 

Oh if she keeps on laughing this way, I’ll be able to stay in bed with my really bitter non-feel better tea while she plays superwoman and knocks out 6 dozen cookies and makes those two quiches tonight for dinner.

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Making Hotel Reservations

Life is funny.  I just finished making hotel reservations for a trip to Charleston after Christmas and now I find an email asking me to review HotelReservations.com for ReviewMe.  I wish I’d gotten this paid review request earlier in the day.

The first thing I noticed about HotelReservations.com was the $100 Rebate button.  I clicked.  Not a bad deal.  If I had booked my brief trip to Charleston through this site, I could have had a $20 rebate on top of a rate that is $2 per night lower than booking straight through the hotel’s website.  That, my friends, is a deal.  Which makes it worth going to a website that has a typo right on the front page (Advence should obviously be Advanced). 

Another thing I noticed, when searching for a hotel in Charleston, SC for a few days after Christmas, is the ability to sort by a lot more variables than other reservation sites.  You can choose from a huge list of landmarks and ask for hotels close to those.  That would have come in handy for me on a few trips to south Florida and a trip to Atlanta where we found ourselves a little bit further afield than we’d originally hoped. 

I went surfing around the vacation packages, too.  I almost bought a package and that never happens.  Actually I was torn between two and I may still go back and grab one, if I can decide between them (and choose a date that works for us, and scrape up the money to pay for the trip).  I have no idea how the site managed it but they showed me TWO hotels that I really love in NYC in the first page of results.  That simply never happens because neither hotel is a top pick on the other reservation sites I have used.

I haven’t had any problems using the search.  The site moves quickly and hasn’t returned any odd results.  I might actually give this one a try the next time I book a weekend.  If I do, I’ll come back and blog about it again. 

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