Day to Day

TW thinks we should go back to IKEA

TW is nuts and we are certainly NOT going back to the big blue and yellow box today. No. Not for any reason. No.

We spent 10 hours there yesterday. 10. The van is so full of IKEA that I’m somewhat worried that we’ve exceeded the vehicles capacity and we may be dragging the ground on the drive home today. I’m also very worried about where we might put the stuff when we unload the van tonight. I wonder if I can con (or bribe) Michelle and Chris into moving all of the current office furniture into the Florida room before we get home…

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What the heck happened?

You know I started a new job a few months ago, right? And you also know that TW started a new job on Monday that brought her back to “work from home” status, right? I decided that I was going to need a new work day strategy, so I created one.

I decided I was going to create a mini list of three large things that needed to get finished every day. Three seemed perfectly doable, on top of all of the small things that need to be done every day – like 250 emails, a range of phone calls, reading blogs, leaving comments, etc…

So Monday, I finished everything on my to do list and had time to do some personal blogging, some personal blog clean up and do a wee bit of housework. And, I turned off the computer early.

Tuesday, same thing. I was really feeling good about this Three a Day thing.

Today, things went a little bit wrong. I’ve gotten my big three finished, well sort of – I’m having a coding issue that either will or won’t be resolved but there’s not much I can do about that. So I consider it finished. BUT I haven’t had any time to blog, read blog feeds or do any housework. And, I’m pretty sure I won’t be turning off the computer early tonight.

I’m not giving up on my Three a Day though. I think it works, mostly. I just need to leave a bit of wiggle room for things that go just a little wrong. Right?

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Don’t drink the kool-aid

I don’t care how much you want to, how good your boss swears it will taste. Don’t do it. Do NOT drink the kool-aid. And for you older folks, watch out for the Jell-o, too.

Image by nuthinfancy

Updated: I have not been asked to “drink the kool-aid” – all is well with me. Just wanted to provide a reminder for those of you who ARE being asked to “drink the kool-aid”. 🙂

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Being productive on my birthday

Well. I’m not sure anyone else would call what I’m doing today “productive” but it feels that way to me and since it is my birthday, humor me.

I have a troubling to TW habit – I save a lot of blog posts as “new” to read later or to save for possible blogging in the future. How many is a lot? This morning I started with 621 saved items.

TW constantly tells me to just get rid of them. She’s nuts. I saved them for a reason and I am NOT going to get rid of them without reading them, bookmarking them and blogging them.

So that’s what I’m doing today. Cleaning out my saved items. I’m down to 293. 115 of those are Queercents posts, heh. (The blog I most love to NOT read.)

Once I finish with the saved posts in my Bloglines, I’m moving to clean out my email boxes. I have hundreds of saved emails, most from TW on topics I’m no longer interested in (thank you new job!)

Go me.

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Stalked! (by coffee)

Many years ago, at a dot com I used to live at, I was stalked by coffee. It wasn’t just me, the entire community was stalked by Millstone coffee. There was a great free offer from Millstone and everyone was thrilled by that ad. Until the ad banners turned into pop up ads. Then we were not so thrilled. The ad banners and pop up ads were on every page of the site – every time you changed pages, you’d get another one. We were STALKED by Millstone coffee and we did not like it. We quickly went from being in love with Millstone for the free offer to calling for a boycott of Millstone.

Flash forward 10 years and I’m being stalked by coffee. Again. But this time I’m not calling for a boycott.

Juan Valdez has a great contest being advertised on BlogHer. Cool. Besides being on BlogHer, the Juan Valdez ad is on blogs all over the internet because of the awesome folks at BlogHer Ads. Cool.

So I expect to see a lot of Juan Valdez when I’m reading blogs. I did not expect to see Juan Valdez when I read my Juno webmail (the account attached to my homeschool blog comments). Nor did I expect to see Juan Valdez when I checked out About.com’s brand new weight loss product, Calorie Count Plus (which by the way looks fantastic and could easily give some of the more popular – or less popular – diet tools a run for their money.) I also did not expect to see Juan Valdez when I was surfing online newspapers for women blogging health for said newspapers.

Juan Valdez is everywhere I am. Stalked. Again.

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iPod Touch

Michelle confiscated my iRiver months ago and I haven’t seen it since. OK I have seen it, every day, attached to her ear as I’m driving her to school or work. I sometimes reach over and pet it, and she snatches it away. It has somehow become hers. And I want it back.

So, I did the only thing I could do. I bought her a new music player. An iPod Touch, to be exact. And she has no idea. She knows I bought her a present and it was arriving today. She also knows I was thrilled that it was arriving today because she has school til 2:45 and then works from 3 til 11. This means I get to play with her present before she does.

And play with it I have. It is awesome. Not quite awesome enough to buy one instead of an iPhone but very close. Very close.

Awesome.

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Wii Problems

We’ve discovered some problems related to owning a Wii. The problems started out small, but like in “Give a Mouse a Cookie” they have snowballed into, well…

Problem number one – constant cleaning of the living room (where the TV is). Animal hair makes my eyes itch so I spend very little time in the living room, where the animals spend a lot of their time. With the addition of the Wii, I’ve cleaned the living room three times – in 7 days. Cleaning means really cleaning – sweeping or vacuuming (or both) and dusting every inch of space where animal hair might land. I hate cleaning.

Problem number two – we have a lot of kids so we decided we needed four wii remotes. This in itself is not a huge problem. We ran over to Target and picked up a couple. Not a huge expense and one neither of us minded at all. But as we were leaving the store with our purchases we both began to wonder about the size of our living room and whether it could accommodate four people playing tennis at once (particularly the four we were envisioning). Frightening images danced through our heads and some of those images became reality on Monday. I will spare you the details and just say I will never play tennis with RJ again. Ever.

Problem number three – since the living room really can’t accommodate us and I will obviously play tennis with RJ and so will her sister, though I’m sure Liz has some misgivings about that, we really do need to solve the size problem. The best idea is to switch the living room and office around. The current office is wide, except there’s that whole fireplace issue but still the room would work much better as a Wii room. It will be a pain in the XXX to move all of the books but well worth it.

Problem number four – when considering moving the rooms around, this obviously leads us to want new living room furniture, and a new rug and of course new office furniture. All of which we’ve talked about for quite some time but have never seriously considered doing. Now we are seriously considering our furnishing needs and locating the money for those needs.

Problem number five – this leads us both to consider ditching work and driving 5 1/2 hours (one way) to the nearest IKEA (and daming IKEA Orlando for not opening until November – how dare they inconvenience us again?)

Problem number six – which of course leads us to the need to rent a van for the drive.

And at this point, I am done thinking about the Wii and the problems related to owning a Wii. If I think about it for much longer, I will pack it up and send it to my ex in laws or to the nearest retirement community where people who don’t have these types of problems can enjoy it.

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Cat Fight at Walmart

Maybe it isn’t college students who are dumb. Maybe it’s everyone in this town. I’ve seen 4 car accidents in 24 hours. Someone followed the neighbor home and cursed her out for running a red light or turning on a red light or something. People are running across highways (not just the incident yesterday, there were more today). And there was a cat fight at Walmart this evening.

TW and I were at Walmart searching for a certain cupcake topper we need for a certain someone who is having a big day on Friday. We thought we could easily find this at Walmart so we ran in there after work. (well actually we ran in there after we ran into Backyard Burger after work)

We were talking about students being back and promoting fighting in a Top 5 party school town when this young woman starts screaming BITCH as we walk past. No, I didn’t know her and she wasn’t talking to me. (Some of you were sure she was talking to me, you can admit it.) She was with another young woman and I thought they were playing around, name calling the way teens and young adults do. All of a sudden the chick takes off running down the aisle, screaming BITCH over and over again. TW and I were still walking and we glance down the aisle, both of us really thinking teens are idiots and we see they really ARE idiots. They are beating the hell out of each other. And everyone is standing there watching.

TW and I just kept on walking, shaking our heads. We glanced down the next aisle and see a very shell shocked older woman, a Walmart employee, obviously trying to decide what to do with these girls. TW and I just kept on walking, shaking our heads some more.

As we were leaving, not having found the item we were sure any Walmart would have, we saw one of the young women bleeding all over the women’s clothing while a couple of store employees tried to patch her up.

Insanity. Who was it that decided Gainesville is the number one place to live in the US? Have they actually visited this town?

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