Sunday, December 09, 2007

terribly early in the morning

Some questions, a little American Idol talk, some dog food tips and the always enjoyable coprophagia

When you’re getting your paycheck, do you like to know the exact date you’ll be getting it or is okay with you if it’s any time within a seven day period?  Am I the odd duck who likes to know exactly what day the direct deposit or wire will show up?  And, if you don’t care, does that mean that you won the lottery or you got Andruw Jones contract with the Dodgers of $36.2 million over two years.  I think that if I got paid $1,000,000 a month or say, got direct deposit of $500k every two weeks, I’d probably have enough savings that if a couple of payments were later than usual, it wouldn’t matter.  Well, unless my house payment was $500k and due 10 days after the last game of the pay period and all of my savings had been donated to a variety of people & businesses…and I was starting my rainy day savings account again from scratch.  So then, I suppose I’d need to know exactly when that $500k was going to be in my bank account, so the down payment check I wrote for my first house payment (you should see the cool house you can get with a $500k down payment) didn’t bounce, right? 

I haven’t purchased an album since the last P!nk cd that was released last April.  But yesterday, I was feeling wild and reckless, so I bought the Blake Lewis “Audio Day Dream” album directly from my iPod.  If I still cared about music like I did when I was a youngster, buying Mp3s online would be way too easy and tempting.  But, I don’t, so that’s good.  I like music, but I like Rhapsody, which lets me listen to any album or song, but I don’t own anything.  It just saves me having another thing to gather dust. 

 

So yeah, Blake’s album is pretty catchy, wholly unlike Jordin Sparks’ extremely boring album.  She has a decent voice, but the songs are snoozers.  I was going to say that generally I don’t like the American Idol contestant albums, but I have Kelly Clarkson’s two cds and Kimberley Locke’s cd (zzzz, and religious, so extra zzzzzz - I think it was like half price or something, and had one good catchy song…the one I’d heard before I bought the cd), and I listen to Carrie Underwood’s music all the time.  I also like the Daughtry album.  But Ruben, Clay, Fantasia (though I thought she was fabulous on the show), Bo, Taylor, Katherine (I expected to like it, but thought it was rather average), Elliott, and all of the other top tenners who tried to capitalize on the show…did nothing for me.

Anyway, if you liked Blake on AI, you’ll really like his album.  If you have no idea who he is, click on his fancy schmancy picture up there and listen to some song snippets.  If you like any of what you hear, I promise that you’ll like the whole album.  Plus, it has lotsa songs - kind of like getting a book that has lotsa pages.  You feel like you got a better deal.

Cricket is still feeling kind of lousy - I can tell that she’s in pain.  She has almost all the signs of pancreatitis.  The special fancy prescription food we had to get for her is Eukanuba low-residue food and is filled with crap.  I can’t believe how much they charge for it, when they use meat by-products and corn grits.  So, not only does it cost as much as the really excellent human grade ingredients of foods like Merrick & Fromm, but I can’t let Phoenix lick Cricket’s bowl when she’s done (which Phoenix enjoys very much, even when there’s nothing left in the bowl), because she’s allergic to corn.  These aren’t the exact ingredients on Cricket’s cans, but this answer at Yahoo Answers does a really terrific job of describing the veterinary prescription diets.  I’m only whining about six cans of food though - if Cricket needs to stay on a low-residue diet, we’ll find a new food for her.  The big problem is that when the food isn’t the raw food that she & Phoenix have been doing so well on for the past six months or so, or a food that looks like people food (chunks of meat, chunks of vegetables, visible other ingredients like blueberries, apples, carrots, and peas), like the Merrick & Dick Van Patten (giggle) Eatables, she eats her own poop.  So, we can’t feed her anything that looks like paste or mush or anything that you wouldn’t look at and think, “Hmmm, that looks & smells really good, I wonder how it tastes?”, because we all suffer in various ways from that final result.  Blech.  So, if your dog is eating its own poop, try changing its diet to better food.  Their bodies use up all the nutrients, so there’s nothing tasty left in their poop, so they leave it alone.  None of the other stuff worked for Cricket - not Forbid, not hot sauce, not meat tenderizer, and not gagging, begging, and pleading for her to stop it, stop it right now.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

evening

What I’ve Learned from/About My iPod Touch (won at the CLIQ booth at BlogWorld) - Part I

The inside of my left ear is apparently malformed (I’d always been so proud of my cute little ears - my best feature, I thought), as the earbuds that come with iPods brutally push (er, read: lightly touch)  against the cartilage and it hurts.  A LOT!  I knew that the ear canal in my left ear wasn’t as straight as the one in my right ear because I can’t get foam earplugs to stay in my left ear properly.  They don’t expand nicely to block out the noise of you people who live in a daytime world, while I slumber.  The silicone putty works just dandy though, just in case you were worried unnecessarily about my deformed ear canal issues.  I did not know that I had a weird inner ear left ear design.  Intelligent design, my behind!  Anyway, I had to buy new earphones and I was shocked, SHOCKED!, to learn that they can cost as much as $500.  Can you imagine?  Leigh-Ann helped me do lots of research on earbuds/earphones from a variety of companies, from fancy Shure and Sennheiser to JVC, Bose, Etymotic, Philips, Koss, JBuds, V-MODA, and then my head exploded, so I didn’t need earphones anymore.  Actually, I found these Coby Super Bass earbuds and they had pretty terrific reviews for the price.  I figured that $5 earbuds with good reviews were an excellent place to start.  I should be getting them tomorrow.  If they’re good, I’ll buy another pair in case something unforeseen happens to them.  We have cats.  I don’t think I need to elaborate.

Monday, November 19, 2007

evening

Check out the new Kindle (and floating hand) at Amazon (the blog selection is sports-centric!)

And the biggest blog category in the Kindle store?  Sports.  By over 100%.  Sports and Amalah.  Go Amy!  Very impressive.  Okay, not that she’s a whole category, but it’s just cool that there’s a mommyblogger in the Kindle list of blogs on the launch day.  I think that speaks volumes for mommyblogs.