No pictures please.

I'm a little confused at vendors who come to events and refuse to let you take pictures. For instance, I got one shot and this vendor shut me down. It always seems really random.

I always honor their requests... but it still always seems really lame. You can buy these butterfly shadow boxes in a bunch of catalogs.

Plus, they are at an event selling their items in front of a massive amount of people. Why don't they want the extra exposure?

Additionally, if they really don't want anyone taking photos - why not stick up a sign so people know up front?

Continuing with the Weekend.

When I was younger I always thought women were cleaner than men when it came to the bathroom department. As I get older - I realize women can be quite the pigs too. Take my example from the weekend.

Before getting into the Festival gates - I forced Mr S. to hunt down a proper restroom. There's no way on earth I was going to use a port-a-potty. That just wasn't going to happen my friend.

Even if it wasn't 90 degrees, and people were eating massive amount of garlic. I would rather leave an event than use one. So... we stopped at a Hilton Hotel.

I would have preferred a Starbucks so I could get coffee - but our one attempt at finding the one we saw from the freeway was a failure. We didn't want to get back on the freeway because it was gridlocked in traffic. So the hotel was sort of our last chance.

I go in and hunt down the restrooms. Walk straight to the handicap stall. Yeah.. that's right. Most people have a bunch of guilt about using them, but they are usually the cleanest.

So I flip open the door, and the seat looks like a man was just using it. Urine everywhere. Go to the next stall, and flip open the door. That seat was smeared with something "brown". And lets say, it didn't look like a defect of the seat. I go into stall #3 which looks clean.

I wasn't in that stall 5 seconds when I hear someone enter the stall I just rejected. The brown stall. There wasn't even a hesitation, and I hear her rip off a seat liner and start using the restroom.

Now.. maybe I'm making a lot of nothing. But there were 6 stalls, and two people. This person didn't even check any of the other stalls to rate their cleanliness.

If this were an isolated incident, it would be one thing. But I didn't become a bathroom germ-a-phobe on my own. It's because women often leave the restrooms in the most disgusting state. Whats is up with that?

Tell us how you really feel.

This is how Gilroy honors our troops. By sticking the latrines right next to their memorials.

It seemed especially odd since I thought Monterey ( one of the next towns over) has a pretty big military base.

Should say: Dedicated to those who have served. Those who are serving.







Says: Department of the Army. United States of America.



It just seemed like a really odd place to have a memorial. They weren't even taking care of it anyway. The flags were all faded out. I'm not sure anyone realised it was there.

I want to stop hating people. They just won't let me.

I just want to say - I feel enormously self conscience about how much I bitch about people. I often think " hey.. maybe that is something I should work on - that isn't really normal".

So, I start out my day trying to be calmer. More tolerant. But honestly.. by the end of the day I usually just hate people anyway. Take what happened today.

Mr S. and I decided to go down to the Central Valley and visit the Garlic Festival. Worst 24 bucks I've ever spent, but I'll talk about that later.

After our day was done, we decided to see if we could find some corn. There are tons of little fruit and vegetable stands around that area. Most of them only had fruit though. Finally, before we got on the freeway, we spotted a stand that was selling corn. 8 ears for a buck. Even if it sucks, your willing to take the chance. So of course we stopped.

I walk up, and at first I don't see the corn. Mr S. points out some bins. There were three of them, about 3x3 feet in size. There were probably about 10 people at the bins shucking corn as fast as they possibly could. Not in a leisurely fashion at all. You'd have thought it was their job to take all the leaves off, they were shucking so fast.

They were tossing all the debris from the corn husks back into the bins. So much in fact, I thought one bin was just for corn trash. It wasn't. So, I'm wading through the corn debris trying to find some ears of corn.

I'm just pulling the leaves back about an inch, because I know it might be a day or two until it gets cooked, and I want the ear to stay fresh. I'm also not paying much attention to other people - other than thinking what they were doing was kind of odd.

Suddenly, the owner comes out and yells "don't shuck the corn here - it makes it so customers don't want to buy the corn". Which seemed pretty obvious to me. You could barely tell there was any corn for sale, due to all the crap they had thrown back in the bins. You just thought it was trash, unless you dug down.

Anyway, we get in the car to leave. The traffic was pretty bad due to the Garlic Festival, and the Grand Prix. So, if you were lucky, there was maybe a gap of 1 or two cars. Mr S. is sure he's going to have to punch it. The traffic is just really heavy, and there aren't really any gaps to get into without kicking in the hemi.

Since the roadside was gravel, and there were about 6 cars parked at the stand - Mr S. decides to edge up about 15 feet from the other cars who were parked at the roadside stand. So - if he does have to punch it, he has a reasonable enough distance from them and doesn't kick up gravel onto their cars.

So we edge up, and this guy with a fairly new truck pulls about a car length in back of us. Fuck.. now we really can't punch it. We have to wait for a larger hole in the traffic. But, that isn't good enough for the guy in the truck. He drives around us, and forces himself into traffic.

I swear to you readers, like I said - you were lucky if there was a two car gap. Same thing with one of the other cars exiting the roadside stand. Our car could have easily left both of them in the dust. Did I mention it has a HEMI? We were just fucking trying to be courteous.

The thing is, everyone at the Garlic Festival was super courteous. Thousands of people all being really nice. I wasn't hating people at all. Throw in a little roadside stand of tards, and I hate people again.

Hanging out.

I often see this property from the freeway, and it always intrigues me. I can't figure out what the hell this building is for. It doesn't seem to have a particularly good view. But, that must be what it is for.

I've been trying to get shots of it for months. I have two seconds at a stop light to take the shot before traffic forces you to move. Which doesn't do the building justice.

I just love the architectural style.

Sabotage?

No... stabotage. What is that anyway?

Today

I'm sure a lot of my readers think I'm just one giant ball of bitchiness. And maybe that's true. You saw the name of the blog.. right?

I think with my sleep problems - a little bit of people goes a long way. But while I'm often hugely frustrated with people, for some reason they still feel comfortable telling me really intimate details about their lives. Stuff that I would be horribly embarrassed to tell people. I can never figure out why.

Don't they know I'm anti-social and neurotic? I'm trying my hardest to make it obvious.

So - today Mr S. and I pulled an all day thing at the dentist. Did you know teeth bleaching is a form of torture? It is.

Besides having to sit for an hour and a half without moving - if you happen to fidget like I do, you screw up the protective coating on your gums that keep the lasers from burning you. And its kind of painful. I guess gums hate lasers or something. Lame!

At any rate.. I'm at the dentist in panic mode. I have this baby tooth I'm totally neurotic about. Baby teeth don't last forever you know. I'm nervous what they might say about it. Plus, I'm totally afraid my record of only having one cavity might fall. So my brain is not really focusing on much of the conversation the dentist tech is having with me.

Until she proceeds on telling me her whole life story.

I'm a little surprised. I thought we were in the small talk phase. But she goes on to tell me she is caught in a whole variable rate mortgage nightmare and is probably going to loose her house. How her credit cards are totally maxed out.. and some days she can't even afford gas to get to work.

So - all of a sudden I'm trying to give her advise.. as if I'm qualified to do that. I'm so totally not. I'm trying to not get sucked into her situation, and trying to not freak out about the dentist. I have enough of my own neurotic stuff.. I'm fine without anyone else's.

So then.. get this. We are paying the bill to leave. And the dentist hits my husband up for tech support! Mr S. is extremely nice and did what he could to try to help. Which is really sort of awkward. What if you make things worse than before? He didn't.. but it is something you always worry about when giving random tech support. Plus.. we'd never seen this dentist before.

Mr S. and I get to the car and I ask him - "did you tell them you worked in computers, because I didn't".

It just seemed to be a strange thing for Mr S. to bring up. He normally likes to keep it on the down- low. People are always hitting him up to fix stuff. And wouldn't you know it.. he hadn't even mentioned he worked in computers.

Somehow they recognized the company he worked for from the patient paperwork we filled out. Which is kind of funny. Your average person probably couldn't describe what his company does. Little lone identify it was a computer company.

Anyway.. we always have the funniest stuff happen to us. But - I got away with my one cavity record still intact. My baby-tooth too. Now I just have to figure out how to drink coffee without f-ing up my teeth for the next couple of days.

I'm just being picky -right?

Okay, so maybe I'm a little off due to sleep deprivation... but it is still customary to acknowledge a customers presence. Right?

I mean, maybe glance their way and tell them you are busy, but you will get to them in a certain time frame. I mean.. right?

Especially when there are only two customers in a store. And one is standing three feet from you patiently waiting for you to make eye contact.

Not keep typing. Not even glance their way. Or walk out out of the room without at least saying "I'll be right back". Or maybe tell the customer someone will be out to help them? Right?

Oh - come on!

I know that me and 4 other people on the planet care about this....but crap, I fucking hate this trend. It is so much worse than having to peel those tiny stickers from every single tomato. I'm feeling a little like Chef Ramsay at this point.

It's the middle of fucking summer.. and I'm getting tomatoes in plastic containers in California? How is this possible?

A week ago, when I was complaining about the produce isle (here), they still had tomato's in the bin. They were disgusting, and rotting - but now it's a toss up to gauge which ones are worse. Look at these things. They are just rotting in plastic containers.





I just don't even get it. Is anyone even buying anything fresh anymore, because I seem to be the only one I see actually having a fit about it. Never in my life do I remember walking into the produce isle to see almost half of what is being sold bagged up, or in plastic containers.

Am I the only one who waits all winter long to get some produce that isn't shipped in from another country?

Doesn't it have to be costing farmers a fortune to pick this stuff, ship it, plus the labor of sticking them into these plastic containers which trap the air and cause this stuff to spoil twice as fast.

Under the martian sky.

I'm not sure how many pictures of sunsets you post before your readers get bored out of their minds.. but bear with me. We don't get to see this kind of stuff here often. Back in the Midwest, you are probably saying "meh".

When Californians walk out the door to rainbows in July, this is kind of novel for us.

It's hard to see because the sky was just so red last night, but in the middle of the frame is a rainbow.

The smallest things amuse me.

Look what I got in the mail today. A You Are Here doormat.

Diary of a paint Addict.

I've decided the best way to distract myself from "stuff" today is some physical labor. Namely painting.



Mr S. has successfully convinced me the previous owners husband died on the only segment of carpet which wasn't new in this house when we moved in. The carpet always smelled a little funky... but all of a sudden its really bothering me.

I know if I don't paint, when I get the carpet replaced, I'm gonna get a hair up my ass and think the room looks like it needs painting. So - I might as well just get it out of the way.

Plus..I have a giant addiction to paint. Much like factory air.. it just has that new smell.

Should I be admitting to this?

I feel dirty... I feel dirty. And sad.. but mostly dirty right now.

If you somehow missed that I am a reality show whore.. you must know this now. I don't know what that says about me. Most likely nothing good.

Okay... have any of you seen this Rock of Love with Brett Michael's? It is a Flavor of Love Knockoff. Yeah.. I didn't like Poison either. As a matter of a fact I try to block the whole hair band era out of my mind.

I don't know why we plugged it into Tivo.. its the off season. But readers... this show makes girls poo'ing on the floor, downright classy.

Just when I think they can't cast a bigger train wreck.. somehow they manage to find a new league of classless drunken whores. How is that even possible?

Second guessing.

I don't think I've made any secret that owning bunnies is about the height of lunacy. You can wake up on morning and everything is fine, and within hours things can drastically change.

So, on Friday when one of our oldest bunnies lost the use of his front arms in the space of 6 hours - I knew the outcome wouldn't be good. Making things harder though, is that it isn't uncommon for bunnies to turn dramatically better.

It is basically a coin toss. If they are still eating...half your battle is won.

And ... this is where we were at. Throw in a little narcotic pain killers, and you've just made things a very difficult situation. You have a pet who is essentially comfortable.

A few years back your choices were relatively simple. Now, with accessibility to advanced medicine it makes figuring out if you've reached the point where quality of life is irreversible so much harder. And it just sucks.

Because of those damn pain killers I will always wonder if I kept him comfortable longer he could have miraculously gotten better.

Make your own caption.

I don't know why.. but there is just something that rubs me the wrong way about Apple sitting right next to a Tiffany's.



Shouldn't they be putting those iPhones right inside those little blue boxes?

Holy Crap!

This site made my little green photography monster completely trip a fuse.

Hat tip Dean's World.

Christmas...... already?

Correct me if I'm wrong. It is still July. Right? I didn't fall asleep for 3 months and loose some time? Although.. that would really be fantastic. You know.. the insomnia and all.

Yesterday, I got my first Christmas Catalog. WTF?

Makes me shudder. You can't imagine the mountain of mail I get normally.

During Christmas...well fuck. It drives you to insanity, and I'm sure my postal service will sue me for undue stress for having to carry all my mail. I don't even know how I get on all these mailing lists.

So... when did they start trying to get you to buy Christmas stuff in July? Really.. when?

Update - Oh.. you just have to go see the high quality classy stuff they are selling.

Dog bowl shaped like a toilet. Nice.

Cute... or Creepy?

Who is buying this crap?

No one.. that's who!

Alright.. I've had it. Is it too much to ask to get some f-ing grapes? That aren't in a bag? I live in California for gods sake. Aren't we all about the grape? It's the middle of f-ing summer. Some cherries not in a bag would be nice too. But I'm not trying to be greedy.



As a matter of a fact.. you can't get anything with the colors green, or any shade of red that doesn't look like it's been in a hailstorm. Look at these limes.



And thanks a f-ing lot hippies for making it impossible to get any fucking corn. All summer long I've tried and tried to get corn. Most of it you open up, and its 3/4's undeveloped cornstalk.

Thankfully my ethanol powered car is right out front. Oh wait.. not so much. And who's bright idea was it to make a fuel that could be taken out with one La Nina year?

Look at these size of this corn next to my cell phone case. My cell phone is 4 inches long BTW.



I don't know why farmers are even trucking this stuff in. I see customer after customer go to buy something in the produce isle and just walk away.

I understand the middle part of the country has been screwed with rain.. but I should be able to get something from my own f-ing state. Like grapes. We've had like - 180 days of sunshine this year.

Anyone want to make bets on how soon the Farm Aid concerts pop up?

It's not that hard people!

Is it just me, or has everyone suddenly forgotten the rules on how to 4 way stop? I mean... not just a few people. Everyone.

This is the scenario. Person reaches the stop sign about 10 feet before I do. Then lingers until I stop. Because I'm usually to the right of them, they just wait watching me - waiting for me to go. WTF? It isn't like we were close to stopping at the same time. I finally have to wave them on, because who knows if they are going to get a hair up their ass and just bolt through the intersection.

Seems like everyone has forgotten the whole "whoever gets to the stop sign first - has priority" system.

This is just another example of how everyone is conspiring to be in my way. I just know it.

What next? Hell freezing over.. because I'd love that.

Alright.. so you know I was super excited today - when it rained!

Someone told me it was the first time it rained in here in July since they have been keeping records. But, I'm too lazy to fact check it. And mostly because I don't care. Did I mention it rained?

Well.. mostly. It was sort of heavy fog style rain. But the ground was wet, and that all I care about.

Yeah.. it's the simple things that make me happy.

5 things that might be interesting about me.

Or.... maybe not.

1. I once used to be quite the beach bum. One night I just had to shave my legs, and since it's pretty much always cold at the beach at night - I wound up shaving all the goosebumps off my legs.

2. My mom is only slightly less than 15 years older than I am.

3. I used to live with a narcoleptic psychoanalyst. I'd often come home from work to find him sleeping in his car in the driveway. Somehow he always managed to drive home before he fell asleep.

4. I grew up welfare poor.

5. My full name is in the credits of the Lord of the Rings video game.

Why can't XM get this right yet?

I'm sure a lot of people read this blog and think I'm an incorrigible harpie.

But - I can't be that bad when a customer support rep actually thanks me for being nice. Right?

Especially when I start out a conversation with the following.

Support rep - gives me a standard XM customer support greeting.

Me- " I just want you to know - I'm going to yell at you. I want you to know that it's not you. It's the company, but I want to give you a choice to either listen to me or transfer me to a manager".

Support rep - Giggles then says "I get yelled at all day, and I've never had anyone so nicely warn me". When we were done with the call she thanked me again for being so nice. Which I didn't really think I was being.

Now the problem. This morning I hop into the car to run an errand, and find out XM is dead. I'm immediately pissed, because I thought XM and I had covered this problem in August. Oh yeah.. we did. Look here at this blog entry.

"All I want from them is to link our credit card to this radio so when the trial period is over - 3 months or 12 months, whatever- they will start charging us. Did I mention how long we have been customers with the same credit card number on file? Oh yeah.. I covered that.

Apparently... customer service can not do this until a few weeks before our trial period expires. So I have to call them back. But how the F am I going to know when that is, because they are sending me notices every two weeks. By this time my husband is talking to them, due to my accelerating sarcasm. I'm not nasty... and I do laugh while I am telling him to tell them - that if our service gets cut off, I am going to call them back and completely wig out. She claims she stuck this in the notes.. I'm sure it just says difficult. "

Now, I realise it was my responsibility to call back. Because I have nothing better to do than check every week trying figure out if I'm in that 3 week window in which I need to call customer support to have them link my credit card. I'm just sitting around eating bon bons. My life isn't complicated and busy.

I just don't understand why a new technology company doesn't just make it so when I manage my account from their website - I can tell them to continue a service after the trial period is up. It's just a button!

Or for that matter, when I specifically call customer support and tell them I want them to automatically start billing me after my trial is up.

Listen XM... you can see we have a history together. Look at your database. And why after paying them for 4 years am I still having to call customer support for issues that could be managed by their website anyway?

Will work for food.

This weekend Mr S. and I were driving though a parking lot, and encountered a homeless man who had one of those "will work for food" signs.

So, I turned to Mr S., and say "you know, sometimes I want to take them up on their offer - but if they aren't working now chances are they wouldn't do a good job, and it would just wind up driving me nuts".

Mr S. replies " if he wanted to work for food, you'd think he would be at the Home Depot".

Which was super funny, because he's right. Undocumented laborers have found a way to work for food. It's called hanging out at the Home Depot and getting day labor jobs.

Building for the future.

In the early days of my career, it was pretty common for me to work in a computer lab. I always sort of loved the lab. It gave you sort of this futuristic feeling. Giant rows of computer servers sitting on elevated air-conditioned floors. Everything was so clean and uncluttered. The computer cabling was all tucked away under the floor. And if you needed to work on the cabling you had these suction cup devices that allowed you to pull out one of the floor tiles so you could access them.

I always thought it would be great to have a similar system for your home, but aside from hiding the cables that ran from your televisions and lamps, it wasn't that logical to have in a residence. But, these days, it would be nice if companies started thinking of ways to accommodate our new world full of power cords, and cable systems.

Most weeks it feels like a giant effort to keep your house from looking like this.



It isn't enough you have to put into an massive effort to keep cabling tucked away from view. But in our case, you have to make it so when things break you don't have to rewire everything. And there are no easy solutions to that problem despite an arsenal of different types wire-ties. But I digress.

Add to that - the ginormous stash of extra cables you have to keep around. Everyone wants to have unique cable type. Which is deeply annoying. Everything from television video cables to cell phones to chargers of every kind imaginable. You can't imagine how much effort it takes to keep all this stuff organised. Or for that matter to find which cable you need in the box 'o' cables that is almost mandatory these days.

So - this weekend was devoted to getting rid of obsolete hardware and organising our cable stash. Basically it was just a huge effort to stop our house from starting to look like hacker Johns basement.

Listen technology companies - we want to buy your stuff. We'd just like to have a nice living environment too. Don't you understand how much it sucks for the average consumer to need a million different types of cables because you can't play nice with other technology companies and develop some universal cable/power system?

Stupid neighbor wars.

I've completely figured out why the older you get, the more you want to move to the country.

While maybe its nice to have a slower pace. I'm guessing the main reason is, you just want more space between you and your neighbors.

It's really stupid what causes neighbors to get all territorial. For instance.. I just want to be able to park my cars on the street in front of my house. I have just enough room on my property to do so. If its trash day - like today. I'd really like to be able to put my cans out so the trash truck can access them easily.

My neighbor however, who almost always has 5 cars - feels our house is an extension of their property. So, they park in front of our house about 70% of the time. When they could actually fit all their cars on their side of the street.

I'm not sure who isn't aware neighbors get all crotchety about this kind of thing.

Even when I have a million contractors at my house, I'll walk over and ask if the neighbor minds if we park in front of their house for a few hours. Just to let them know we aren't making a habit of using their space. Its just a nice thing to do.

Sometimes I think I'm the only one who makes an effort not to piss off the neighbors.

Well... maybe that is a little bit too extreme. The neighbor with the dog has been making a very nice effort to not piss us off lately. Which I really appreciate. Even thought I still would have liked him to have made the effort before I got annoyed in the first place.

It doesn't even take that much extra effort to prevent a neighbor problem before it happens. Most of the time they feel happy you considered their feelings.

Stay tuned for the other reasons this neighbor is driving me nuts.

Forgotten.

Coldstone creams Baskin Robbins?

I have to admit - ice cream was the last thing on my mind this afternoon.

We were busy getting supplies for the project of the day. Mr S. and I were discusing how the check-out times at stores never seem to be proportionate to the number of items you buy. Buying fewer things almost never seems to get you out of a store quicker.

When we got to the car, I noticed that a Baskin Robbins store had a big "out of business" sign in front of it. This surprised me since this store had been active the whole time we lived in this city. But it got me to to thinking. Had Cold Stone Creamery finally caused a tipping point for Baskin Robbins?

So when I got home, I started poking around the Internet to see if other stores were closing. The first thing I found interesting was... Baskin Robbins stops giving franchise growth after the year 2005. That is never good. Right?


Source baskinrobbins.com.

The other thing that was pretty interesting is that epinions.com has reviews for both Baskin Robbins and Cold Stone Creamery.

By far the biggest complaint against Cold Stone is the price. Even so, it seems like Cold Stone is causing enough competition to start putting Baskin Robbins franchises out of business. Even worse - Baskin Robbins has tried to undergo a face lift that will probably spell doom for a lot of franchises.

The Arizona Republic.
"Franchisees foot most of the remodeling bill, paying $50,000 to $100,000 or more to upgrade their stores, said John Carlson, Baskin-Robbins' director of franchise services for the Southwest. The company assists with advertising and also kicks in some cash, he added."

That's a lot of ice cream.

Oddly enough, when Cold Stone first came to my city - I refused to go for months and months. My theory was "ice cream is ice cream - you can't do that much to improve it". Over time I relented. But mainly because it got annoying dealing with teenage staff who would rather talk on the phone or to the other workers in the store, than serve customers. The lines may be longer at Cold Stone, but the time it takes to get in and out is about the same.

I've never been back to Baskin Robbins since. Just goes to show that when customers have a choice...maybe business isn't as good as you thought it was.

A little bit of security everyone needs.

The crazy things companies do.

I'm actually not sure how to start this post. On one hand - I want to congratulate a company for fulfilling the warranty plan on a product I purchased.

On the flip side, I'm not sure I can tell you what company it is.

What I'm going to tell you next is a system fraught with potential abuse. You never know who will pick up a post and start spreading it.

This is what happened:

A several weeks ago my monitor went limp. See how the monitor on the right is able to be pointed upward? The one on the left had lost its ability to do anything but point down giving the illusion it might actually topple forward.



Something in this mechanism gave out.



This is probably an easy fix. But I'm not going to do it, because it might void my warranty. And - if it isn't easy to fix, I've just hosed myself.

Since the monitor is still under warranty, I wanted it fixed. It's only two years old, and it's still a pretty fantastic monitor.

So, Mr S. calls the big box electronic store and explains the problem. Customer support seemed to indicate it wasn't common for this to happen, but agree to send a new monitor. Usually people are upset their pixels are screwed up. All my pixels are perfect.

A week goes by, and Mr S. was checking the online status of the monitor when he noticed the trouble ticket had been closed. Causing him to have talk to customer support again.

This is what he found out. The big box electronic store turns these matters over to a third party company who finds an equivalent product. Then sends a replacement. Not that interesting. Right?

Okay - this is the interesting part. When Mr S. asks about an RMA#, the customer support guy tells him they probably won't want our somewhat broken monitor back. He said if there was an RMA slip in the box, we should return it. If there wasn't one - the company has 30 days to request the monitor back. If they don't, we get to keep it. The new monitor was around 600 bucks. Even if they refurb'ed my old monitor they should be able to recoup half that.

Now, while I'm super happy they fixed my problem easily. I'm also generally uncomfortable with anything a company does that makes you more than whole. When you get stuff for free, it just makes things more expensive for everyone.

I'm guessing neither of the companies involved are capable of fixing these types of things and its just easier for them to let the customer keep the faulty item. But hell, it still seems like it is an expensive way to handle a problem.