Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
|
|
|
M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
|
|
Wednesday, December 31, 2008 Change of Plans We were originally going to go to Iowa for Christmas this weekend. Trash's mom has typically had us down to exchange gifts the weekend after Christmas, but we just got a call. Someone in her house has come down with something not life-threatening, but highly contagious to many of the relevant demographics. Pretty much the only member of the family who can still qualify for a visit this weekend is me. And I don't think Trash and M. Edium would appreciate my being gone for three days so I can open their gifts. Especially since there might only be room in the car on the return trip for mine. So instead we're all staying home. This also has some advantages. For one, we haven't even begun to think about packing. For another, it loosens up our schedule quite a bit for what remains of our vacation. And lastly, I think it will allow me to fix the ceiling in the main floor bathroom that kind of makes it look like we're squatters. I don't know why this is happening, but in the past few months, the ceiling has first cracked, then bubbled, then bubbled and cracked, and at this point a section of plaster or drywall is working on opening down on the south end of the shower like a trap door. I can't explain it. I run the fan when I shower, M. Edium generally doesn't splash higher than shoulder level when he's in the tub, and I don't think my lengthier visits to the bathroom have become significantly more corrosive in recent months. So now I'm in a situation where we need to either replaster or re-sheetrock the entire ceiling. I won't be sure which until I get started. So in that way, it's a little bit like a gift exchange. I'll still be opening things up and finding surprises, but those surprises might include things like dry rot, black mold, and spiders. Which I guess is what I get for trying to open my gifts after New Year's. What's going to be even more problematic is explaining to M. Edium what's going on. For the last week, every time we're in a store and his eye lands on something that "Santa forgot to bring me," we've been putting him off by reminding him that Christmas at Grandma's is still coming up, and who knows what he might get there? Now the question is, who knows when he might get it? Maybe we'll just tell him that Santa forgot to put gas in the car. posted by M. Giant 4:05 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:
Sorry about your thwarted vacation plans. Hopefully everyone gets better soon. Another look on the bright side: perhaps by the time the quarantine is lifted, the weather will settle the hell down and there won't be a 99% chance of a snowstorm during your trip.
By
Sorry we weren't able to connect when we were back home. On the other hand, I start Monday at my next clerkship, and that's back home. So, yay.
By
@KKB - I'll be checking that out.
By To add to the "boring and helpful/useless" category, you might want to check your showerhead. I once had one with a tiny crack in it that was shooting a stream of water right onto the ceiling, causing it to bubble and crack.
By Saturday, December 27, 2008 Christmas Crap Here's a sign we're raising our child right: the other night at Christmas, he told my sister through giggles, "Don't tickle me!" "Why not?" she laughed. "It's bad for the environment!" he insisted. In a few years he might even figure out a way for that to be true. * * * We also seem to be raising a science geek. Among the Christmas gifts he played with today were a small erupting volcano, an actual working microscope, and roughly fifteen different space shuttles. Check this out:  Just the Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow goggles are worth the price of the kit. He also got a bunch of WALL-E merch that, as far as we could tell, wasn't even available until a couple of weeks before Christmas. I've bitched before, either here or elsewhere, about what a trial it's been to shop for WALL-E toys this year. It's like the Disney Pixar people sat down with the toy distributors, who listened to all their ideas about possible toy concepts, and then threw it all out and flooded the stores with Speed Racer shit instead. Meanwhile, our son was greeting us every morning with ideas for toys that he had literally dreamed up the night before. Okay, so maybe a working Autopilot that attaches to tracks on your bedroom ceiling isn't entirely viable, but there's no reason we can't buy an Axiom security robot when the goddamn biplane that's in five seconds of Cars can be had for twenty bucks. But then Trash found a bunch of new stuff online and ordered about half of it. I won't go into everything, but my favorite item is a t-shirt that reads, "My family spent 700 years on the Axiom and all I got was this lousy t-shirt." Which isn't all that funny if you haven't seen WALL-E, I admit. But M. Edium has seen it several times, and he doesn't get it, either. He asked me to read it to him. I did. "What does lousy mean?" he asked. I told him. "But I like Axiom t-shirts," he protested, confused. I explained about how when I was growing up, kids would always come to school wearing "My parents went to Florida/Mexico/Hawaii/Syria" shirts, and how this was a play on that. "So it's like a joke," he finally said, with a little chuckle. He either got it or was pretending. Since both skills will be invariable to him growing up in my house, I'm fine either way. Then there's the t-shirt I'm wearing, courtesy of our good friends at Glakware:  I had to explain that joke to him, too. Naturally, I lied. posted by M. Giant 6:48 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:do you mean invaluable? I'm confused.
By
Obsessed with grammar: You mean obsessed with vocabulary.
By
I thought of M.Edium while we were perusing the wonders of FAO Schwarz last weekend. Along one wall (which I only looked at in passing because we were hurrying to find a bathroom following an "Oh Mommy I have to go NOW and it is an EMERGENCY" announcement), they had a whole array of NASA astronaut gear. I'm talking space suits, helmets, etc.
By Thursday, December 25, 2008 Merry Christmas. 
posted by M. Giant
9:16 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:Let's hope there's a future for the space program. M. Edium is a natural
By Is that a cat in a pool float off to the left there?
By Sunday, December 21, 2008 Bed Bed Bed Last summer, M. Edium graduated from his race-car bed to the Kura reversible bunk bed from IKEA. He'd encountered one at a play date at a friend's house, and had to have it. Which meant we didn't have to go through a lot of drama shopping for the new one, plus the price was right, so everybody won. The pictogram instruction booklet even said I could probably put it together in ninety minutes. Although several hours into the assembly process, I began to wonder if that part of it hadn't been inserted by someone at Lie-KEA. By coincidence, my twenty-year high school reunion was that evening, and I began to literally wonder if I was going to finish in time. As it was, if anyone had asked me what I had been doing the last two decades, I was fully prepared to answer, "Putting my kid's bunk bed together." Part of the issue was that I hacked it a little bit. It's "reversible" in the sense that you can flip it upside down and turn it into a canopy bed instead of a bunk bed, but I thought "reversible" meant you had a whole menu of possible configurations. Before I started putting it together, I asked M. Edium which end he wanted the ladder on, and which end he wanted open and which end he wanted walled off. He wanted the ladder at the far end and the wall at the near end. It wasn't until I was more than halfway through until I realized that wasn't one of the options, and by then it was too late. The pre-drilled bolt holes that were pointing in the wrong direction would just have to stand empty. He loves his bed, of course. It's his most prized possession. It's the first thing he wants to show off to new people, to the point where if he were older it would be borderline inappropriate. But the configuration of his room has been less than ideal for us. I wasn't quite clear on Trash's vision that featured one end of the bed tucked neatly into the natural alcove formed by his closet. Instead, that alcove has been containing his dresser and a bookcase full of supply bins, while the bed has dominated the entire rest of the room to the extent that it's turned the room's floor plan into that of a submarine crewed by dwarves. I'd been putting off reconfiguring it the correct way for about six months now. I've been waiting for a time when a) I didn't have anything else to do, b) M. Edium was gone for the day, since the Saturday I originally put it up he ended up feeling so neglected by me it broke both our hearts, and c) I had a six-hour window, just on the remote chance that changing it around took as long as building it had. This past Thursday met all those conditions, since I had the day off work. I'd just finished stripping the bed down to the wood-and-metal frame, with all the linens folded into one overflowing laundry bin and all the stuffed animals in an even more overflowing laundry bin, when Trash suggested, "Maybe we should do it when he's home so he's not surprised and he doesn't freak out." My response was thoughtful and considered: "Are you shitting me?" I went ahead, and wouldn't you know, it took me about six hours. I nearly had to take the whole thing back down to its component parts just to swap around the ladder, the wall panels, and the four columns. Oh, and take some of them back apart again so I could dig out the specifically-sized nuts I'd put into a few wrong slots. A funny thing happened, though. When I was done, there weren't nearly as many extra parts lying around as there were the first time. The top end panel no longer opened like a trap door, dumping the outermost stuffed animals on the floor like it has been. And the whole thing felt a lot sturdier, to the point where I might have considered repealing the rule against jumping on the bed. The rules against wiggling, clapping, and sighing on the bed were already things of the past, as far as I was concerned. I was beginning to consider a rule against eating in the bed after seeing the quantity of crumbs that ended up on the floor, though. Then, as much as I might have wanted a nap at this point, Trash came and helped rearrange the furniture. The end of the bed got tucked into the alcove where it belonged, the dresser was pulled out to a place where we can reach into the drawers with both hands at one time, the giant bookshelf swapped places with a smaller one in the hallway, and the whole room seemed to become large enough that the last person in didn't have to be the first person out any more. But would M. Edium freak out? By this time, I was almost late to go pick him up, so he'd find out soon. He loves it. In fact, he's so excited about it that he can hardly go to sleep at night any more. That was not entirely the desired outcome. posted by M. Giant 9:18 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, December 17, 2008 Lost in Translation A couple of weeks ago, we needed an ingredient for an unusual dinner I was making. So Trash sent me next door to see if I could borrow some. I walked across the driveway to the neighbors' back porch. These are the neighbors who have lived here since before we did, whose college-freshman son was M. Edium's age when we first met them, the ones who used to come over and give Strat his insulin shots when we were out of town. I knew they'd come through for us. If they were home, that is; it was more late afternoon than early evening, and neither of their cars were in the driveway. But I gave it a shot and knocked on their back door. Their dogs went apefuck, of course, but it was a long moment before I saw a shadowy human figure moving around slowly inside. I leaned around awkwardly to show it was just me, but the person didn't move any faster. When he opened the door, I finally understood why. It was a middle-aged Japanese man. This was startling, but not entirely unexpected. Our neighbors had mentioned that they were expecting a houseguest from the Land of the Rising Sun. This, then, obviously, was he. And he clearly did not speak or understand a great deal of English. Which still wouldn't have been so bad, because I studied Japanese in college. Didn't know that, did you? Of course, I've forgotten most of it, and when confronted with an actual, confused-if-not-suspicious-looking Japanese person, what little was left fled my brain. I couldn't even muster up a simple "Konban wa. Sumimasen. Nihongo dekimasen. Eego dekimasu ka?" He understood enough English that I think I was able to communicate that I lived next door and was a friend of the neighbors, and would be happy to come back later. I would have been happy to let it go and sumimasen for bothering him. But he insisted I let him try to help me. So I reluctantly asked: "Could we borrow some Worcestershire sauce?" Which is not a question I would feel comfortable asking most native English speakers, up to and including many close friends and relatives, yet here I was trying to request it from a guy I'd just met. Plus, I've been recapping The Amazing Race all season, so I was used to watching people traveling around the world and running into language barriers. And here I was facing one, twenty feet from where I'm sitting in my house writing this. "Sauce?...To eat?" this poor patient man asked me. "Hai, tabemasu," I failed to confirm. He shrugged and vaguely suggested I come back later. I considered explaining, "In America, it is customary for neighbors to allow each other to rummage through their kitchen cabinets when they're not at home," but I wasn't sure I'd be able to get the concept across. So I agreed to come back later. And then went to the store. I saw him a couple of times after that during his visit. His English had improved. My Japanese never did. posted by M. Giant 8:32 PM 6 comments 6 Comments:
Wait - Worcestershire sauce is considered an unusual ingredient? Huh. That's one of our fridge staples. I use it probably at least monthly.... It always goes in meatloaf or hamburgers, for example.
By Our neighbor is awesome - I stopped by one weekend to get an egg from him - and walked back in the house with an egg, a bottle of wine and a 6-pack of regional microbrew!
By I have to second Heather that Worcestershire sauce is a key ingredient around our house!! But I guess you wrote "unusual dinner," not unusual ingredient!!
By Read the clue: "we needed an ingredient for an unusual dinner" not an unusual ingredient.
By
So, cool borrowing from neighbor story.
By Read the post immediately above yours, Teresa: NGS made the same point and managed to do so without being nasty to another commenter.
By Sunday, December 14, 2008 Three Decades of Snow Removal (Part II) I didn't want the snowblower. It was Trash who made me get it. Just as ministers' kids have a reputation for being hellions, I have a manifest distrust of internal combustion engines, and don't want to have to own any more of them than is absolutely necessary. I just hate the expense and inconvenience of maintaining them, and the frustration I feel when they inevitably quit working. I even cut my grass with an old reel lawnmower that belonged to my grandfather. It's older than John McCain, but guess how many times it's broken down? In 1994, we went to Las Vegas, where we basked in the sun on the roof of the Union Plaza. The next day I was shoveling snow out of our driveway. Same deal when we went to Mexico the next year, and seemingly every other warm-weather vacation after that. Finally Trash got tired of me having to spend one to two hours outside every time it snowed, and insisted on investing in the snowblower. Which broke down after the very first time I used it. I realize it was my fault. It seems you have to mix a little engine oil in with the gas before you put it in the tank. Well, I didn't have any engine oil, and it was dark and cold, and I couldn't get my car out to shop for some anyway, so I figured, heck, what harm can one session on pure gas do? Plenty, as I learned a couple of weeks later when I was helping my dad overhaul the engine in his garage. You know how people who've had their cars repaired after an accident say it's never the same? Well, I can't really say that, since I didn't have much of a pre-breakdown standard to compare it to, but it was always pretty rickety after that. I remember spending one frigid evening in the garage, trying to replace a tiny little engine part that looked like a pencil tip that I'd had to pick up from an outer-ring suburb for about thirty dollars. I actually spent very little time replacing it and a great deal of time fishing it out of the tiny spaces where my frozen fingers had dropped it. After several years I just gave up on the thing and got a new one. I gave the old one to my dad, who at the time was clearing his own driveway with a tractor attachment and probably used my machine to clear sawdust off the floor of his pole barn. The new one has worked out much better. In fact, I haven't had the cover off of it once. It's done its best work over the past few years, when I just leave the garage unlocked and the gas/oil tank next to the snowblower so the neighbor kid could come over and fire it up whenever we had a blizzard. But now the neighbor kid is off to college, and this past weekend, the discharge chute on the front just fell clean off when I was in the middle of clearing the front sidewalk. In case you don't know what a discharge chute is because you live in a climate that's fit for humans, it's the part of the snowblower that allows you to direct where the snow goes when it gets picked up from the pavement. Without it, the snow simply flies straight up into the air. Which is fine, as long as you don't have a big area to cover. You just do it quickly and hurry back inside before the snow comes back down again. I called the help line that's printed on the sticker attached to the snowblower, to see if I could order a replacement chute. The help line is open during business hours, Monday through Friday. This was on Saturday morning. Well, how were they supposed to know that it was going to snow on the weekend? Monday morning, I sort of got through to an automated line that would only recognize the numbers I was pushing if I mashed them down in long, repeated bursts. Which made entering my zip code problematic, unless I wanted to move to Young America. I ended up just finding the number for a local dealer, who referred me to a distributor, who referred me to a parts warehouse, who gave me the part number, which allowed me to order a new chute online my own damn self. And then we got half a foot of snow that night before it was even shipped. I was still hopeful I could work around it, though. I still had the old chute. I had a roll of duct tape. Unfortunately, that fell through. Even after scraping away the ice and snow, there wasn't enough surface area to tape the old chute back into place. And then the blade wouldn't work either, but I'll worry about that once I get the new chute delivered and installed. So there was nothing for it but to get out there with a shovel. The neighbors (actually, their houseguest) had done part of it early that morning, so that helped. I had always thought that a nice thing about telecommuting was that I'd be able to clear the driveway out during the day, instead of always having to wait until I got home at night. I forgot to factor in having a broken snowblower. Which I'm used to not having to do. The new discharge chute arrived a few days ago, but I haven't put it on yet. As of this writing, it's snowing outside. But this isn't a light, easily moved powder. It's a frozen, sticky spackle that doesn't cover the ground so much as laminate it. So I'm sitting safely inside my warm house, dreading tomorrow, when I'm going to have to quit putting it off and fix the snowblower. But there's another advantage of being a telecommuter. I can bring the snowblower into the kitchen and fix it there, because Trash will be at the office. It's all about finding the upside. posted by M. Giant 4:27 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:Thank you for reminding me why we live in the Pacific Northwest. Once or twice a year it snows a few inches so the kids can run out and make a (usually smallish) snowman, and then we're done with it for the year. Living in a rain forest does have some disadvantages, it's true (ummm... yes, it rains a lot) but no one is ever out there shoveling up the rainfall.
By
I suspect that this is the appropriate time to yammer on and on about living in Sydney, Australia - where it has never been known to snow. Ever. So yes, the downside is that it gets really hot sometimes during the summer and there are cockroaches that are THIS BIG and can fly. But no snow.
By
I was missing the upper midwest and cursing the weather here lately (73 degrees with HIGH humidity - I hate humidity), but you've reminded me that there are upsides to living in South Carolina. I could have lived without yesterday's earthquake (we live a mile from where two faults meet), but at least it is better than shoveling snow, slipping on ice, and paying exorbitant gas bills to heat the house.
By Sadly, Anonymous1, as you know, this year has been brutal for snowfall. And of course, no one in the whole city owns a snowblower. I'm surprised no 'neighbour kid' has had the entrepreneurial spirit to get a loan from his parents, buy one from Canadian Tire and make a killing. I guess the problem is that because the cities don't have snowplows, no one can get to a store to buy a snowblower...
By Thursday, December 11, 2008 Three Decades of Snow Removal One of the earliest conversations I can remember with my mom was about our favorite seasons. She said hers was summer, which I now agree with. But at the time, I said winter because a) I was three or four, and therefore b) stupid, and c) we lived in Oklahoma City at the time, where "winter" consisted of a couple of snowy afternoons every year. Obviously my opinions have changed. I remember the first snow shovel I ever wielded. It was an old-school model with a wooden handle and a bright-yellow solid steel blade that had been forged from a bulldozer. It weighed ten pounds unladen and up to four times that with a load of sticky wet snow in it. I thought it was awesome. It was April, 1975, our first month in Minnesota. Five minutes further along into April, 1975, I was pretty much over it. And winter, for that matter. I know this can't be correct, but I feel like shoveling the driveway was primarily my job from April 1975 until we moved out of that house in 1989. Both of my sisters probably think it was mostly their job as well, as do each of my parents. And the thing is, there was enough snow that all of us are right. Sometimes after really big blizzards, the oldest kid in the neighborhood would go around the block with his snowblower (the original early adopter, he also owned the first portable computer I ever saw, which weighed 26 pounds). But in most cases it was up to us. I didn't know how good we had it. Our driveway when I was growing up was a gently sloped rectangle two cars wide and three cars long, and we didn't even have a front sidewalk. Plus our arsenal of snow shovels expanded over the years to include more modern plastic models (with and without metal scraping edges), while that old yellow beast stuck around until the late eighties, when I think one of us ran over it with a car. After that we had to get rid of the car. When Trash and I moved into this place fifteen winters ago, after a few years of apartment living that helped me forget all about the pain of being responsible for snow removal, I had idyllic visions of shoveling our shared driveway with the neighbors and enjoying hot cocoa with them afterward. What a moron I was. Our driveway stretches all the way from the street, between our two houses, after which it splays out into an expansive Y whose branches extend all the way to the two-and-a-half-car garages in our backyards. The result is that it's like shoveling the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, only quieter. Until I got my first snowblower, that is. But more about that in a few days. posted by M. Giant 8:18 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:How are the Christmas cookies coming along?
By
Hey, I live in Oklahoma City NOW! At that age, you must not have been able to appreciate the...uh..."wonder" of an ice storm.
By
You know for the first time I think I understand why large parts of the US don't have sidewalks. I didn't realise you were supposed to shovel them too, along with the driveway and any other paths you actually want/need to use.
By
To Anonymous, re: "I didn't realise you were supposed to shovel them too"
By Monday, December 08, 2008 Seek and Ye Shall Find Trash wrote a couple of weeks ago about her obsession with Big Fish games. I make fun of her for most of these, but I have to admit that I like the "finding" games as much as she does. In case you're not familiar with them, the concept is pretty simple. You're presented with a ridiculously cluttered scene that could be a room or a cave or a beach or the deck of a ship, and then you have to find a bunch of items that are hidden there using various degrees of camouflage. It's not like we play these for the intellectual challenge; indeed, they're like word searches for illiterates. But there's something satisfying about focusing your attention on a sweeping image of, say, the Golden Gate Bridge until you've found a list of items that include a biplane the size of a dime, a rust stain shaped like Europe, and a blue tomato. The faster the better, of course. And you can play them cooperatively. Usually she sits at the computer and does the pointing-and-clicking, whereas I just point. We've been into these games for years now. There are a lot of different developers making them these days, and they all have their own theme. Some are based on exploring big cities, some borrow plots from Agatha Christie novels, some plop you down into a 360-degree panorama where you have to search from the skies to your virtual feet. But the first one we played -- and, as far as we know, the one that launched the genre -- was a game called "Mystery Case Files: Huntsville." Through the dozens of seek-and-find games we've played, MCF remain the masters of the format, in our opinion. It's not just because their scenes are surrealistically detailed to the point of being gratuitous, or that they hide their shit better than anyone, although that's certainly the case. It's because they keep taking the format places that it's never been before. What started out as cartoony little jewel-theft mysteries have advanced to a whole new level. "Ravenhearst," from a couple of years ago, was like being immersed in a gothic novel (complete with annoyingly clueless heroine). "Madame Fate" plunges you into a dark world of disturbing grotesques. But recently, "Return to Ravenhearst" came out, and Trash and I spent hours working through its search scenes and lock puzzles that came straight out of Myst, if Myst had been developed by Clive Barker on suicide watch. These games are getting darker and deeper at an alarming pace, and in more ways than one. In one sense, the most recent game makes even the previous one seem cute and quaint by comparison, so if you're thinking about giving them a shot, I'd suggest doing so in chronological order so you don't start wondering if I need to be committed. In the second sense, they only seem to be putting out one or two of these per year. The latter fact unfortunately leaves us a lot of time for the pale imitations that are out there (and save your recommendations, because we've played them all -- at least for the one-hour trial period). So I guess I'm just hoping that the next MCF game will come out more quickly than the last one did. Partly because I don't want to have to play this one more than four or five more times, and partly because the next one promises to be even more disturbing and I had enough nightmares from this one. posted by M. Giant 8:46 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:
I mentioned in the previous comments of Trash's post about my love for MCF. Return to Ravenhearst is awesome! I also liked Redrum. Talk about psychotic.
By There's a dive bar nearby with a few of these finding games. It's even more hilarious to play them after a few (and by "few", I mean "an inappropriate amount of")beers, around one in the morning.
By
I didn't comment on Trash's post about the time management games but I love them too. I'm completely hooked on Airport Mania right now. It's so cute and not very hard. I play these games to relax, not to be angry because I can't complete it.
By Have you tried Jay Is Games? (jayisgames.com) It reviews casual online games. Updates everyday, and most of the games it selects are independent and free to play. Good place for tips and walkthroughs if you get stuck. Should be able to find plenty there to tide you over though droughts. Personally I like the stuck in a room games and conceptis logic puzzles. Those things are the devil.
By I love the MCF games! Thanksgiving weekend was hilarious, with me, my mom, and my brother all playing Return to Ravenhearst on our respective computers.
By Friday, December 05, 2008 Bag It Tonight at the grocery store, I only had three small items, but I did something I try to avoid in such cases: I asked for a bag. I remember an old Sally Forth strip years ago when the supermarket bag boy asked the protagonist, "Do you want to kill trees or clog landfills?" The punch line was that she and Hilary ended up bringing everything in from the car by the armload. I don't go that far, but I've been trying to cut down on plastic bag use ever since I learned about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I'm not exactly clear on how my Walgreens bags find their way into the North Pacific, but since we're talking about a plastic bath toy twice the size of Texas, they must be pretty determined. Our bags live in two places. The paper grocery bags are stuffed into the narrow nook between the fridge and the pantry. We use them for recycling and occasionally wrapping a package. We keep running out of them, especially since we started recycling every scrap of cardboard and plastic that goes through here. At the supermarket, we try to remember to snag a few extra, but then forget, because we feel guilty about the bags we're already using, and a couple of weeks later the bottles go to the curb in a lunch sack. Or I end up getting a paper bag on a minor errand so I can carry home three things that would have fit in my coat pockets. The plastic shopping bags, on the other hand, are balled up and hanging from the side door in, you guessed it, another plastic shopping bag. We use the plastic shopping bags as small trash can liners (as specified by Stuff White People Like #64). The trash that accumulates in these bags goes out every week, sometimes more than once. That means six to eight plastic bags leaving the premises, because while we don't want to throw them in the trash, it's somehow better to use them to hold trash. What I don't get is how that big rustling bolus of polymers in our house never gets any smaller. Okay, that's not entirely true. When my PS2 broke a few months ago and I needed to ship it to Texas for repairs, guess what I used for packing material? It beat going out and buying bubble wrap, and it also took our plastic bag collection from two bagfuls to one. But since then, the level has stagnated. I can only assume that six to eight bags are coming in every week. Seemingly under their own power, possibly using whatever means of locomotion will later help them reach the ocean. At this point, I think the only way to get them down to zero is to throw them all away, and that's not about to happen. What would I throw them away in? And yes, I know all about reusable bags. We even own a couple from Trader Joe's. Trash keeps them in her trunk and uses them to shop there. Since Trader Joe's used to be a major source of paper grocery bags for us, it's not exactly a complete solution. So I'd like to offer a modest proposal. Let us use the plastic bags for recycling. Yes, I know they gum up the sorting rollers or whatever. I don't care. Get new rollers. Just carry them from the store in paper bags, okay? I'm worried about the environment. posted by M. Giant 6:58 PM 6 comments 6 Comments:Why don't you use canvas grocery bags? Then you don't have to worry about either bag making into the landfill. Every one in awhile I get a paper bag from Whole Foods just to put out the recycling. Plus, I don't know if this has reached you yet, but they are charging a 10 cent deposit (at least) on every non-canvas bag you use at grocery stores in the NYC area. That's got to be making its way to other areas..
By At the grocery stores around me, they have bins for those bags near the bottle return machines, and they allegedly get recycled. As for how they are getting into your home, I would check into how dirty clothes, tons of kiddie-art, and muddy boots get home from M. Edium's preschool or whatever. Your best clue comes from the side of the bag, which should say "Thank you for shopping at (X)." If X is a store that you or Trash shop at, it's your fault. If X is "North Pacific Mart," you'll know it's the result of the Garbage Cycle, and those bags need to be put in the bin with the non-recyclables so they can go back out into the ocean to feed, or breed, or whatever.
By The first time I walked into a grocery store in Germany, I was not hip to the no-plastic-bags-for-you deal happening there. We had a cart absolutely full of groceries, and there was no bag to be found. I am told that you can buy them, but at the time I didn't even see any that I could ask for. So, yeah, we dumped everything back into our cart, wheeled it out to the car, and had to haul everything inside in our arms. Saving the earth with our total lack of clues.
By Kohl's and Walmart both have a bin near the door for recycling plastic shopping bags. I have three bags of bags in my car waiting for me to remember to drop them off.
By And what about those bags that cover the newspaper? I stuff mine inside a regular plastic bag and then hand them back to the newspaper lady once that bag is full (and since I found out that the little shopper paper publisher actually charges their carriers for those bags, I feel even better about the solution).
By A reusable bag that actually lasts would give you the lowest carbob footprint. I have been using one called The Best Bag and while being made of plastic, I have used it for over 2 years! That's a low carbon footprint!
By Wednesday, December 03, 2008 Putting the Fits in Benefits Before Trash and I found jobs in our chosen vocations, we had jobs outside our chosen vocations. They paid the bills, plus they helped us gain knowledge that we have continued to use in our regular lives. For instance, I spent nearly a decade toiling in the retirement plan services industry, so I'm in charge of our 401(k)s. You can probably imagine how well that's been going lately. But in my defense, I'm a tad rusty. Trash, on the other hand, used to work for a large health insurance company, so now she manages our benefits at around this time every year. She compares the plans offered by my employer to the plans offered by her employer, then decides which one we're going with, or whether we each go with our own. It's all completely over my head. I start getting these e-mails and interoffice packages during the fourth quarter, and I just dump them in her lap and say, "Here." And she does her thing, and somehow we all get to keep going to the doctor and getting our prescriptions. I'm glad to say that this year, her job turned out to be almost as tricky as mine. Her employer has a few standard health plan options. My employer has ditched all traditional health plans in favor of several brand-new options that nobody has even been offered and that nobody understands. Trash is used to comparing apples with oranges for this kind of thing. This time she was being asked to compare apples with time-traveling robot werewolves. Making things trickier was the fact that her benefits enrollment deadline for next year passed a few weeks ago. My benefits enrollment period didn't start until the week after hers was over, and details about my plan options were pretty hard to come by in advance. But after a weekend of agonizing, she decided to let her deadline pass so we could sign up for one of my futuristic space-benefit plans. Then we found out something interesting today. I've got one of those health reimbursement accounts where a little money comes out of each paycheck pre-tax. For this year, we've been putting in enough for prescriptions and copays and a little extra just in case of an emergency. That "little extra" is turning out to be a problem. When I signed up to make the contributions last year, I knew that anything in that account that I didn't use over the course of the year would be forfeit Which was fine; even if ten or twenty dollars were left behind, I'd still be ahead in tax savings. What I didn't know -- until I got an e-mail today that Trash had to interpret for me -- is that if there's even a dollar left over in that account at the end of this year, I lose a quarter of my medical benefits for next year. Those time-traveling robot werewolves just went rogue on us. Trash and I were already in a mode where we've been casting about looking for anything to get that account balance down to zero by the end of the year. For one thing, kids don't seem to need to go to the doctor as much during their fourth year (or their parents don't seem to need to take them there as much). But, like, I got my glasses fixed, and we've been refilling every prescription we can find around the house as fast as we can, including some we haven't used for years (hello again, leeches). And after doing everything we can come up with, we're so close. About a dollar close. So I think what I'm going to have to do is this: stop by a Target clinic and complain of a general malaise, just so I can get charged a twenty-dollar copay. That's not fraud, is it? I actually am feeling a malaise, for real. I think it's been brought on by worrying about our health care benefits. That'll make anyone feel malaise-y. Besides, I don't think I have a choice. Otherwise how are we going to cover the cost of the ulcer Trash is going to get from all this? posted by M. Giant 7:33 PM 8 comments 8 Comments:Are you on one of those plans that allows you to spend on ANYTHING medically-related? Or does it have to be prescribed? Because I've used mine up with a giant bottle of Advil in the past (or maybe TUMS, for Trash and her ulcer).
By
Flu shot!
By
I am in that same situation, except we've got a lot more money left. That email almost made me cry.
By Do your plans ever include massage therapy? Ours do. That's what I'd be spending that leftover $ on.
By I always use my extra flex-plan money to buy OTC cold medicine, which I will inevitably need sooner or later.
By You are switching from an HRA to an HSA, aren't you? You are screwed. Seriously, unless they let you buy OTC meds, which many don't, someone is going to have to visit the doctor by the end of the year.
By As someone else said, mine let me pay for all sorts of nonprescription meds (basically anything - tylenol, allergy meds, etc). It also works for chiropractic & acupuncture appointments. Good luck!
By
All flexible spending (health reimbursement) accounts have the same rules. You can spend the money on anything health-related (OTC drugs, supplies like bandaids, etc.). Drugstore.com is a good place to go spend the leftover cash in your account -- they have an "FSA Store" that only lists eligible items.
By Monday, December 01, 2008 Dealing with the Back-and-Forth Remember at the beginning of last month when I talked about how Trash's car was broken and I was going to have my dad come look at it since the warranty was expired? It turned out that we did have to bring it to the dealership, because the difficulty with the car proved to be beyond the technology he possessed to remedy it. But he shouldn't feel bad, because that turns out to have been the case at the dealership as well. I've lost track of how many trips we've made to and from the dealership at this point, so let me just write them down. 1. On November 5, my dad met me and a sick-ish M. Edium at the dealership, talked to the service guy with me, and then drove me home before taking the kid back to his house for the day. 2. That evening, Trash and I returned to pick the car up. They had replaced the computer in it, which is apparently covered by a more extended warranty, which is good because that sounds expensive. The challenge was getting back to the dealership, because I had left my entire key ring there that morning, and I discovered that Trash doesn't have a key to my car. Since I don't know how to hotwire even my own car, we borrowed the neighbors.' 3. On the way home, Trash's car was doing stuff it hadn't done before. Like, the alarm wouldn't chirp, the dome light stayed on, and the driver's door wouldn't stay locked. After a couple of weeks of living with this, we brought it back in on November 20. Oh, and the original problem was still there. When they called me at home later, they said that the problem was a broken door switch, which is a button on the side of the dash that tells the car that the door is closed. If it's not working, the car assumes its being driven around with the door hanging open. The service guy denied having anything to do with this problem, which was apparent the night Trash drove it off the dealer lot and not before. "Our technicians didn't work on that part of the car," he insisted. "Your technician didn't get in and out of the driver's seat?" I queried. In the end, we agreed to pay half of the repair cost. Oh, and the car suddenly needed an oil change. 4. As for the other problem, they needed a part that they wouldn't have until the next day. But Trash needed her car, so BuenaOnda was nice enough to ride with me back to the dealership and then follow me back home in her car. For this she flew in from Mexico. 5. On Sunday the 23rd, BuenaOnda followed me back to the dealership so I could leave the keys in the late-night drop box, and then she drove me home shortly before The Amazing Race started. This was beginning to feel like a never-ending Detour. 6. On Monday the 24th, they called to let me know the car was fixed and I could pick it up any time. So Trash asked Bitter to drop me off at the dealer on her way to work on the afternoon of Tuesday the 25th. Which she did. I drove Trash's car home, filling up the nearly empty gas tank on the way. 7. After dropping M. Edium off at school on the morning of Wednesday the 25th, I had serious difficulties backing out of my parking spot. I don't normally like talking on my cell phone when I'm driving, let alone yelling at people, but in this case I made an exception. They told me to bring it in again when I could. Yesterday, Sunday was a full day of errands for Trash and M. Edium and myself, which including getting our holiday photos taken, ordering new lenses for my glasses, picking up supplies, and other stops. The first stop was the Saturn dealership. At least this time I knew right where the after-hours drop-off was. 8. This morning, they called to let me know that they had reproduced the problem, and were going to just replace the entire wiring harness, whatever that is. Except this wouldn't be in until Wednesday (which I take to mean Thursday or Friday), which is too long for Trash to be without her car. Even though I telecommute, it would still be too time-consuming for me to drive my car to the dealership to retrieve Trash's, and then jump back and forth between cars every block or so to get them both home. And frankly, I'm tired of having to go back there all the time. So I asked the guy," Can't you just have someone drive it to my house?" "Sure, we can do that," the guy said. Sure enough, about fifteen minutes later, my doorbell rang and there was a dude on my front step. Trash's car was parked on the street behind him. I was quite pleased, although I couldn't figure out why he wasn't handing me the keys or leaving or anything. Finally he asked, "You gonna drive me back?" Which, two minutes before a scheduled teleconference, kind of defeated the purpose. 9. Of my many recent trips to the Saturn dealership, the one where I sat in the passenger seat while some dude drove my wife's car was probably the longest. 10. Drove home. So I guess that makes ten. Here's hoping the next trip is the last, making it an even dozen. posted by M. Giant 3:47 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:Awesome. Just awesome. That's all I have to say about that.
By As I was reading this, I was thinking, "It's gotta be a Saturn". I know, because I am the unfortunate owner of one. And I don't know what's worse: The car, or the local dealership.
By Our Saturn has been giving us issues for the last month. We would get it fixed, it would be fine for a day then the same thing would happen. This happened 3 times in the course of 8 days. We are content that the check engine light is just a "feature" and will fix it after the emissions test. Good Luck!
By Saturns are notorious for electrical problems, which end up being muy pricey to fix. I'd rather have a car that I had to keep replacing the radiator (or something mechanical) than one with electrical problems (this from the chick who's put two transmissions and an engine in her minivan, but it earned them).
By 
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
