Category Archives: Life

Lottery Lunacy

Posted on by
Reply

The Powerball lottery jackpot for this coming Wednesday is $425 million, cash value $278.3 million. Well, I don’t need all that money, but in case I win, I have a plan (Lottery Lunacy originally posted in September 2009).

We all have plans for when we win the big money, the lottery. Most what-to-do-with-the-money lists probably start out about the same: taking care of family, house, car, bills, charity, travel. You know, the usual stuff.

But what about after that? What about the interesting stuff? What do you have planned to do or buy that’s just plain fun, silly or both?

Here’s my idea of a silly waste of money, waiting only on the right combination of Quick Pick numbers to come my way (cash option, of course):

I’m going to buy a pair of Crocs for each professional football team. Then, when I’m watching the games on TV, I’ll wear one shoe from each team. For the team going left to right, I’ll wear their shoe on my left foot. For the team going right to left, their shoe will dangle off of my right foot. When the quarter ends and the teams change direction, I’ll swap shoes as well, right to left and left to right.

As a lottery winner, I’ll finally be able to afford the NFL Sunday Ticket and I’ll get to watch all the games. That means that on Sunday mornings I’ll move 30 pairs of shoes to the living room. (One game is on Monday night. Later in the season, Thursday night football on the NFL Network will take another game off of the Sunday line up.)

Each time I change the channel to watch a different game, I’ll get up and change shoes. I’ll count that as part of my daily physical activity. It’ll be fun, really.

Now, if I could just remember to buy a lottery ticket . . .

Black Friday Trifecta, Part 2

Posted on by
Reply

From November, 2009. It happens every year!

The Pod Husband season now starts when the advertisement for the Bass Pro Shop day-after-Thanksgiving sale comes in the mail. When my husband sorts through the mail and the flyer comes to rest in his hand, his eyes start to glow.

“Sweetie,” he calls to me in the other room, his voice wavering slightly, “want to go shopping the day after Thanksgiving?”

We can agree that this is not My Real Husband (MRH)?

No, indeed. My Pod Husband (MPH) has returned.

The Pod Husband season now covers Black Friday, Christmas Eve and the Day After Christmas. Resistance is futile.

On Black Friday, MPH is awake just after 4:00 a.m. to get dressed, feed the dogs and hit the road to northwest San Antonio, where the nearest Bass Pro Shop is, about 75 miles away.

He has several items in the Bass Pro Shop advertisement circled. He even lets me circle some items in the advertisement and he’ll buy them for me, so there is some benefit for me for having this Pod Husband. On Thanksgiving night, he moves the advertisement and the GPS into his truck, to make sure he doesn’t forget either of them on Friday morning.

He’s usually home from San Antonio by 9:00 a.m., when we pour over his purchases, a bit like kids on Christmas morning.

Oh, gotta go now. MPH is home and we’ll be leaving soon for Cabela’s. Got some items circled in that sales flyer, as well.

Black Friday Trifecta

Posted on by
Reply

The Black Friday Trifecta arrived: the sales flyers for Cabela’s. Bass Pro Shop, and Tractor Supply. Hubby is drooling. Here then, is how I discovered that my real husband disappears during the Christmas shopping season, from November 25, 2009. I’ll post the second part on Friday.

Several years ago, two days before Christmas, the man sitting across from me at the table — who I thought was My Real Husband (MRH) — said, “Let’s go shopping tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is Christmas Eve,” I reply, stating the obvious, while trying not to stare at him.

“Exactly!” he says, his pupils dilating. “Fry’s Electronics is opening at 8:00 a.m. We can be there when they open.”

“But tomorrow is Christmas Eve,” I repeat, wondering who to call for help. “Everyone else will be out shopping. It will be awful.”

“No, it won’t. We’ll be there when they open and be gone before the crowds show up.” He seemed so excited about the idea of shopping on Christmas Eve.

Are you kidding me? Why couldn’t he just drive down to the nearest gas station/convenience store combo like everyone else? I mean, they have t-shirts, gimme caps and koozies. Some of them are even open on Christmas Day, for Christ’s sake!

I’m done with my Christmas shopping by Thanksgiving. I’m also the one who stocks up on non-perishables just before Thanksgiving so that when I do have to go somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it’s only when in dire need of food and even then I can rush in and out of the grocery store. See? Grocery store. Not retail stores where throngs, crowds, hordes of people actually shop for Christmas presents.

We continued discussing this silly shopping idea and he made some vague reference to the phrase “for better or worse.”

It was then that I decided that this was not My Real Husband, but an alien replacement. A Pod Husband, so to speak. It’s the only logical explanation for him wanting to go shopping on the same day that almost everyone else on the planet will be shopping.

I don’t know how or when the switch was made, or where my real husband was, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.

Fine. I went shopping with My Pod Husband on Christmas Eve.

That was just the beginning.

Updates Are Fun!

Posted on by
2

Recently I broke my computer, hubby’s computer and my sewing machine all in one day. Turns out I had help:  updates.  The day before my technical difficulties, our computers downloaded the latest operating system updates.  My computer took exception to this and decided not to allow me to log on the next morning, no matter how many times I turned it off and on at the surge protector.  I managed to log on to hubby’s computer but then it wouldn’t shut down.  Turning it off and on at the surge protector took care of that problem and I managed to get it to reboot properly.

That left me with a finicky sewing machine and my computer with a bad hard drive error message. The sewing machine has since been serviced and calibrated, so it is good to go.

Hubby did some magic by attaching my hard drive to his computer and running it though a file checker. Result?  There is nothing wrong with my  hard drive.  He re-installed it.  It booted up fine.  He applied the service pack.  It crashed.  This is, as they say, a clue.  He backed out the updates and here I am, writing on my computer.

But updates lurk everywhere.  My smart phone has a shopping application that I use regularly.  It’s easy to take an item off the list:  just touch the item and a deletion line shows up over it.  To remove all the crossed out items, I just have to shake the phone a little. It vibrates and moves the items off of the current shopping list to the main list.

Or at least that’s the way it was before The Update.

I was at Whole Foods Market.  I put the apples in my cart.  I touched “apples” on my shopping list and the deletion line appeared.   After a few more items, I decided I wanted to see the whole list without scrolling.  I shook my phone, gently, to remove the deleted items.  Nothing.  I tried it again.  Still nothing.  I shook it purposefully.  Just as purposefully, those items stayed on my shopping list, crossed out.  I had downloaded an update to this app in the last week or so, but I didn’t consider this an improvement.  Surely, I thought, it must just be me.

With that in mind, I tried a few different approaches.  In the middle of the cereal aisle, I shook my phone up and down as if I were a bartender preparing a martini.  (That’s shaken, not stirred, right?)  I pretended I was a maraca musician and shook it rhythmically back and forth in a 180-degree arc from left to right with a little hip shimmy thrown in.

I meandered over to the refrigerated section, stood in front of the orange juice and then I got serious.  I choked my phone with both hands and growled at it, much like acting-Captain Spock did to acting-First Officer Kirk in the bridge fight scene in Star Trek 2009.  (Can we all say “emotionally compromised“?)

I could not get those deleted items to move off the main shopping list.

At home, I mentioned this to hubby. He had noticed the same thing when using that app on his smart phone.  He then showed me that the new version included a drop-down feature of “Clear marked items.”

Oh.  At this point I reminded myself that “update” is not the same as “upgrade.”