Sunday, December 21, 2008

terribly early in the morning

Depressing

We just cleaned out the Equinox, and I switched the cars around and put the Aztek in the garage.  The Equinox, with about 10 minutes of cleaning on the inside, will look brand new.  It runs perfectly.  It has a driver’s side window that works!  It doesn’t “seep” oil.  It smells like new car, instead of fake cherry air freshener.  It’s 3.5 years old with 12,200 miles on it, instead of 8 years old with 94,500 miles on it.  I wanted to beat it up before I gave it up.  I don’t know, maybe I’d feel differently if the guy who was supposed to fix the Aztek window would effin’ call me back!  Yeah, it doesn’t help if you charge less than the dealer, if you don’t do the job.  Big whoop.  I can say that I charge $5/hour for car/body repairs and people can get really excited, until they realize that I’m not going to leave my desk.  The Equinox is supposed to be picked up tomorrow, although the b*tch from the credit union didn’t respond to my email, so who knows.  But, the first day I’m supposed to use my windowless Aztek and drive across town for a doctor’s appointment...it’s supposed to rain.  Luckily, I’m still borrowing my dad’s Mustang or I’d be all wet by the time we got there.

Oh, and if you have any appliances, computers, portable heaters, that have plugs in the wall that are hot, don’t leave them plugged in if you’re not home.  Our heater started a fire in the outlet, and if we weren’t home, the house would’ve burned down and all of the pets would’ve died.  No wonder I’m not so cheerful.  Maybe it’s not all Equinox related.  Anyway, let this be a lesson that you can learn from too.  I don’t want anything to happen to you - I have so few readers as it is.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

terribly early in the morning

Pet pictures & car stuff (good & bad) & Las Vegas snow

But, stay tuned for more episodes of the Days of Our Poverty Lives, where we lose our “with still new car smell, 2005 Equinox, w/ 12000 miles on it”, but buy a rode hard/put away wet, 2001 Aztek with 94,500 miles on it.  We’ve always missed our Aztek and it was a big mistake not getting it fixed when we originally had it, but we didn’t have the money to put out all at once and made a longer-lasting bad decision.  Oops.  The Aztek comes as-is (we pick it up on Wednesday) and it has some cosmetic issues and a driver’s side window issue (no drive-thrus, unless I put Leigh-Ann in the back seat to order...or use an ATM, or pay for parking somewhere) that we hope is fixable, but if it’s not, they’ll make sure the window stays up, instead of down, like during the test drive when it was 35 degrees outside.  The heater works nicely though, but the poor salesman in the back seat couldn’t have been too comfortable.  Anyway, the expensive car payments will be gone and car insurance will be cut in half.  Keep your fingers crossed that the car gets us to the grocery store, the doctor, and to visit family, which is about all we need it for, hence the 12000 miles on an almost 4 year old car.  We’re easy on a car, so it’ll be like the Aztek is getting a vacation by moving in with us.  We will, however, get our big ol’ cup holders back (the Equinox has wimpy little cup holders, not up to holding large drinks from Sonic) that we’ve missed for years.  We’ll get even more storage space, and we won’t have to worry about getting that first ding.  I think dozens of people/things have taken care of it for us.  Also, instead of another boring white car, we’ll have a red car.  We can be official ambassadors of the Las Vegas Wranglers.  Maybe they’ll want to put a wrap on the car, thereby covering the damage of the dings AND advertising the local hockey team.  Win, win, no?  Also, as lovely as the Equinox is/was, the Aztek seats are a lot more comfortable.  And the Aztek has a kick-ass stereo with like 10 speakers, so if we were teenage boys, instead old fogies, we could blow out your eardrums at stoplights.  Because we’re nice (and old), we’ll just listen so’se we can hear it, not you.  We would, however, like to figure out a way to get that kick-ass (older) stereo to play our MP3s.  We got a couple of cheap dealies from Woot that were supposed to work on an unused radio station frequency here, but alas, either all of our frequencies are used or it just doesn’t work well here.

Hmmm, I wasn’t going to write all of that, but it burst forth.  But, I’ll mitigate the sadness with new pictures of some of the pets.

This is Bunny, with her awesome checkerboard coloring, which goes right down to her gums.  It’s amazing.  I love her coloring, plus she’s an adorable & spunky cat.

Here’s Blackjack, looking curious.  For the moment, she’s not yelling at the dogs/cats or barking or saying, “No smoking!” Usually our parrots get short shrift when it comes to blog publicity.

Eli romping in the snow.  It snowed allllllllll day here yesterday, although not a lot of it stuck in our area of town.  I’m sure there are zillions of new pictures from the Lakes/Summerlin area of town on Flickr w/ snowmen and such.  We mostly ended up with icky puddles in the back yard.  It hasn’t rained much here in the past year or so, so the ground is hard (harder than normal) and isn’t very absorbent.

Our snowy yard, which could use a little palm tree trimming.  Any volunteers?

Thursday, November 20, 2008

late evening

I miss my desktop!

Yes, I’m writing this blog entry from bed, but it’s not what I want.  I’ll never understand you people who love your laptops.  I miss my split keyboard, my comfy mouse (I bought one for the laptop, but it’s not very convenient to have a smooth hard surface nearby, unless you’re at a desk....where a desktop should be!) and my at-eye-level bigger monitor.  Typing on this thing and using the keyboard hurts my wrists.  Hmmm, maybe people who love their laptops don’t have carpal tunnel.  But, we spent our last dime at the grocery store tonight, without being able to get the Advil & Benadryl, so the power supply for the desktop will have to wait.  At least I have all of my email addresses set up now - for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what the passwords were.  I use Roboform for every other password, but never put my email address passwords in, so we had to change them at the server level.  Lucky the server is ours or I’d still be guessing passwords.

I can’t think of anything interesting to say.  Maybe I should go off and find some harmless memes to do.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

late at night

What “tomorrow” brought

Well, it’s official now, my desktop computer is dead.  Leigh-Ann thinks it’s probably the power supply.  At least that’s cheap to fix, if you don’t buy the power supply from Dell or Dell’s approved vendors.  I haven’t seen my email since the wee hours of Monday morning because I can’t remember my passwords.  I’m sure there’s more bad news in there, so I’m thinking of just never looking at my email again.  Frankly, I don’t think I should touch anything that has any sort of power supply - we seem to be killing off everything electric, slowly but surely.  Last week, the pool motors finally died, so we’ll soon have a mosquito pit in the yard.  Our microwave started its death throes a couple of weeks ago when it decided to turn ON when the door was opened while it was plugged in.  We can still use it, but we have to unplug it when we open the door.  However, it’s started making a burning smell, so it will die completely soon, I’m sure.

For something fun, here’s part of the Justin Timberlake/Beyonce “Single Ladies” video parody from SNL.  Unfortunately, NBC has made YouTube remove the skit videos, while at the same time NOT making the clip available on their website.  Stupid.  Annoying.  Nonetheless, I loved the skit and I can’t get the song out of my head, nor Justin Timberlake lisping, “We’re the dancers.” I’ve never been a big Justin Timberlake fan, but every time I see him on SNL, he wins me over again with his talent.  He’s a funny guy.

Monday, November 17, 2008

terribly early in the morning

Newspaper Mystery Shampoo/Conditioner

Did any of you get shampoo & conditioner packaged with your Saturday (or was it Friday?) newspaper?  They’re little bottles with big question marks on them.  You’re supposed to try them for two weeks and then you’ll swear that they’re way better than that fancy schmancy shampoo/conditioner that you pay through the nose for at the salon.  In two weeks, they’ll reveal the name of said mystery brand, so you can go to the store with your new coupon (I’m sure), which will appear in that day’s paper, and buy big ol’ bottles of the stuff.  I smelled both bottles (they smell good, by the way) and my guess is that they’re Pantene.  Considering that I don’t buy expensive shampoo, I’d be perfectly happy to buy the mystery brand if they give me the big ol’ coupon.  If not, I’ll continue to use my non-mystery Pantene that’s in the shower right now.  I’m not picky, it just has to smell good.  In general, my hair doesn’t require a whole lot of effort - the normal routine is wash hair, lightly towel dry hair, get out of shower, squirt some gel into my hand, rub it into my hair, make some spiking-like efforts for a few seconds, let air dry, done.

Right now, since we haven’t been able to afford to pay our hair stylist (let’s just say that she costs more than Supercuts, although she really is worth it), so I cannot do my hair properly.  I had to [gasp!], use a blowdryer to tame my unruly locks because it’s too long to let it dry by itself.  I have wavy hair that, when it’s not cut every 5-6 six weeks, will stick out in odd ways.  I hadn’t remembered how awful it was to do my hair when it’s too long, and the reality of the horribleness of it was making me contemplate cutting it short myself.  If I screwed up, which I’m sure I would have, it’s easy to hide with short hair all gunked up with product.  Our lovely stylist has taken pity on us, however, and is going to run a tab, so we can get our haircuts on Friday.  We hope to figure out how to make it up to her until we can afford to pay her all that we owe her.