Flippy - I Rant, You Read

Saturday, May 23, 2009

the wee hours

Wishes for a very happy birthday

I just wanted to wish my friend, Nancy, a very happy birthday.  Not only does she have a fabulous name, but she’s a terrific friend.  The world of mommybloggers has given me, a childless homo, some of the most amazing friends.  I’m so grateful to have been able to make lifelong friendships through the oddest of ways.  I wish I was able to spend more real life time with Nancy & Helly, but I know that their friendship isn’t any less because it’s more pixels than, er, cells, I guess.  Plus, I got my very first 100% on the “How well do you know Nancy” quiz, after sinking as low as 14% for another friend named Nancy.  I’m so proud!  Anyway, happy birthday, Nancy.  We’re both really grateful for your friendship and hope that you have a terrific birthday.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

terribly early in the morning

Another Trader Joe’s Favorite

I’ve already professed my love for Trader Joe’s chocolate croissants and spicy spinach flatbread pizzas.  I could live on those two things alone, but now I’ve found another new love - Asian Style Spicy Peanut Vinaigrette w/ Jalapeno & Fresh Cilantro.  I love Chinese chicken salads and all sorts of noodly things, but I have a major hatred for ginger.  I can’t even count the number of soy sauces or asian dressings I’ve tried, only to hate them because they were overpowered by the evil ginger.  But the Spicy Peanut Vinaigrette doesn’t have any ginger and it’s just perfection.  Leigh-Ann made a cucumber salad from it a few weeks ago, and for the last couple of days I’ve been eating a bag o’ lettuce with the dressing on it.  I’m not even ashamed to admit that I ran my finger along the bottom of the bowl to eat up the extra vinaigrette.  It’s just that good.  My regular ol’ daily use camera died on me for some reason (I charge it and it seems fine, but then the lens remains popped out and won’t go back in after it’s used once), so I can’t post a picture of the dressing yet.  Also, my pro account expired at Flickr a couple of days ago, so if you notice any blog entries with missing pictures, that’s the reason.  It only lets you see the most recent 200 pictures…and I have thousands in my account.  So, hey, please buy the massage chair from us, so my blog works right again, okay?  Win, win - you get a great chair and I pay some bills and “splurge” on a Flickr account, so I can see my pictures again.  Or, get some cat food coupons and treat your kitties to the awesomeness of Merrick cat food.  For awhile, many moons ago, our little dogs ate the Merrick dog food (even when we made really good money from teh internets, it was still too expensive to feed to the big dogs - it would’ve been giving them each a $15 meal every single day, ten times what it costs for the little dogs), and they loooooved it.  I loved it, too, because it smelled yummy and looked all healthy ‘n’ stuff w/ visible whole blueberries and other such goodies.

I digress.  If you like Asian dressings, you should try the Trader Joe’s Asian Style Spicy Peanut Vinaigrette.  It’s unbelievably delicious.  Oh, and if you like fruit rolls (the 100% fruit ones) and aren’t particular about what flavor you get, TJ’s Fruit Ends & Pieces are terrific.  They hand cut each fruit bar, so they have uneven bits left that they sell in a bag.  The bag is assorted flavors/shapes and they mostly all taste the same to me, but the non-specific flavor is fine with me because whatever flavor it is, I like it.  The best part is how much you save by buying the bag versus the bars.  The bars are 50 or 60 cents each, and the bagful is only $2.99.  By weight, the cost is a fourth or fifth of what it would cost to buy the bars separately.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

the wee hours

I haven’t been blog writin’ lazy, just full o’ bad luck

I wrote this about two weeks ago, but I didn’t feel like editing it, so it’s just been sitting here.  I may as well just publish it.  Please edit it in your head. (whoops, I had two versions saved for some reason and it looks like I deleted the long one.  Oh well, you didn’t miss anything. )

I somehow missed one of those “last notice before we turn off your service” letters from my cable company, and I thought my due (or die) date was a week after it apparently was, but also, the cable company has always made a few days worth of phone calls to remind me that I’m about to lose my lifeline to the world.  This time, they did not.  And sadly, all of our lifelines to the outside world (phone, internet, and tv…although, we discovered that the tv still worked, so at least we were able to watch the Stanley Cup playoffs) were in the hands of a single company, and I couldn’t afford the amount they wanted to turn the service back on.  It felt really lame and depressing.  I’ve never in my whole life lost my phone or internet service.  I lost a car, but the internet is actually more important to us, because without it, we can’t make any money.  It was weird and isolating.  We have a cell phone, but we’ve been trying to sell it because it’s a pay-per-use phone that requires a top-up every three months of $15 to keep the account.  We very rarely use the phone, so it has more than $200 of credit on it, which the company won’t allow us to have back; hence, the reason we wanted to sell it and start over with a new account.  We’ve had the account for around five years and the most we’ve ever used the phone was for a few minutes here and there, every few months or so.  Plus, we used it to take pictures occasionally when we were out.  So, while we weren’t cut off totally, we didn’t want to use up the credit on the phone because we still want to sell it.  Plus, it’s a bit pricey for just random chatting.  The text messages though, at 15 cents each, were kind of a bargain (compared to 25 cents/minute for talking), so we learned how to send text messages to a few people, so friends and family were aware that we were weren’t dead.

After a week of being cut off from the world, we got our service back, which was good.  Although, toward the end of that bad week, things in life got much worse than just not having a phone or an internet connection.  I had to pick up a certified letter that my letter carrier only tried to deliver once.  That letter?  It said that our house was due to be auctioned on Thursday (that date is now June 1st - I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but I’m hoping that money will fall from the sky and someone will be able to buy the house in a short sale for pocket change and rent it back to us).  Some people think my blog is supposed to be rainbows and kittens all the time, no matter how crappy I feel, so I suppose I’m also supposed to keep my financial problems to myself, too.  Well, I’m not gonna.  While I feel like a total loser for having lost my car and having my house in foreclosure, I’m not into keeping secrets.  I didn’t do anything to deserve this other than herniating a disk and having Fibromyalgia, so I’ve ended up with lots of medical bills and the inability to run right out and get myself two jobs to help remedy the situation.  I’d love nothing more than to be able feel like a normal person and be able to pull myself up by my “bootstraps”, only I don’t have anything I can pull up.  I can push myself extra hard, but all it will do is make me feel lousy for longer afterwards.  Blech, it sucks.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

lunch time

If you’d like to help out Wee Paws Animal Sanctuary…

this is an easy way to do it.  It’ll make money for our rescues & and it’ll allow us to rescue more pets and give us time to foster them until they’re ready to find a good home, and all you have to do is do your search engine searches through Good Search.  Wait, I’ll let them write it up: Here’s a new easy way to raise money for your favorite cause. Just start using Yahoo! powered GoodSearch.com as your search engine and they’ll donate a penny to your favorite cause every time you do a search! In addition, do all of your shopping through their online shopping mall, GoodShop.com, where you can shop at more than 900 top online retailers and a percentage of your purchases will go to the charity or school of your choice. You pay the same price as you normally would, but a donation goes to your cause! Here’s the web site — http://www.goodsearch.com. You can also read about GoodSearch in the NY Times, Oprah Magazine, CNN, ABC News and the Wall Street Journal.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

late morning

Houston, we have a problem…

The Houston Zoo unveiled their new arrival today - Toby, the red panda.  He’s so incredibly cute.  So cute that even the other animals at the zoo have to agree:  “When asked about Toby, African wild dogs Blaze and Aries cooed in unison, causing the rest of the pack to join in with sighs of deep affection.  “Have you seen his paws?” gushed Blaze. “Go look at his widdle paws!”

The blog entry from the Houston Press blog, “Hair Balls”, is short, but a nice bit of Saturday happy heart bustin’ (iffen ya have one) supreme sweetness & joy.  Well done, John Seaborn Gray, well done!  Nice photos by several different people, also.

Photo copyright The Houston Zoo

Today is Toby’s debut at the Houston Zoo.  I’m sure he’ll be a big hit, and it can’t hurt to get a nice little write-up from Cute Overload on opening day, too.  Go to the blog link, the zoo link, and to Cute Overload for a bunch of adorable pictures.