...then this guy we saw in the grocery store, whose cart I asked Larry to surreptitiously photograph (well done, love!), clearly knows something you don't.
Showing posts with label consumer life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consumer life. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 01, 2014
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Here comes money trouble
So in the past few months, an occasional news story has said food prices would rise, last year's drought being a major factor. Lots of extreme weather and crop damage in 2013.
I read them and thought, yes, we'll be paying "more," a term that's a solvable problem when you're in the privileged class, and a crisis when you're trying to feed a family and make ends meet.
We have watched three different stores cut, and cut, and cut items we buy. It wasn't one chain in trouble, it's all of them around here. Fewer organics, fewer gluten free (purchased on a real MD's advice, so please, no lectures about how moronic the gluten-free "trend" is), less variety in general.
Today we hit our most-visited supermarket. I was flabbergasted at the start, AND at the finish.
I've bought these fruit juices, yes, organic and pricey, for several years for breakfast smoothies. They've crept up from the 3.99 range into the 4.99-ish rage, and when I read about crop failures I must have thought they'd jump a full dollar (or gosh! even more!). But...??! Not to nearly 10 dollars. Tack tax onto that.
Nearly 10 dollars.
The store knows that's not gonna fly, and they've just started stocking a new brand, also organic, back down at 5.89, and I did buy it.
On we shopped, with our usual list. Long ago we decided that healthier food was an investment that might keep us a little healthier, a little longer, as aging and higher disease risk started workin' their magic. So for stuff we use most, we have not bought the cheapest options for a very long time.
We also do plenty of of regular, normal Big Food Industry products. Each is a considered decision. Organics are more important when they're something we consume a lot of. I get organic juice in glass bottles, and not major non-organic brands in plastic bottles. We do organic milk.
This is all to point out that our shopping doesn't change much. So when we got to checkout and the total was
TWO HUNDRED FIFTY-NINE dollars, I was ...... I was......
I can't provide an item by item comparison. We got two containers of whey protein, not one, and two magazines, but they don't explain this being about $80 more than I was used to spending for similar -- again, not identical -- but similar carts full.
This is unsustainable. Partly for us, but we can adjust and comparison shop and work harder at it, but mostly for the economy.
Those brands in the photos can't stay in business if they have to charge close to 10 bucks for a bottle.
The substitute brand will supposedly have to raise its prices too, even if they manage to beat the competition. I don't think close-to-$8, or close-to-$9, will sell much better than close-to-$10 does, and more shoppers will be over in the Big Food juice aisle, dropping spending back down, but to the standard brands' also-rising prices.
Families with budgets are already there in the Big Food aisle, where those higher prices will hurt them, badly. Where will they get the extra money?
I'm liberal but I am not a progressive (whole 'nother topic), and Mother Jones magazine annoys me way too often, but it does have some good information, and one column in the March/April issue was enlightening about SNAP buyers and how they stretch their dollars.
Don't get me started on the writer's defense of using SNAP money for junk food, which made me say very bad words.
So. How much further can these buyers stretch it?
The crash of 2008 had analyses written about it ad nauseum. One article I recall from very early in the crash pointed out that the trigger was the gas price jump. Not that the mortgage debacle wasn't the root cause, not that the economy was healthy before that. It emphatically was not. But its plates could keep spinning in the air until those homeowners paying those absurd mortgages could no longer budget for them. And that was the extra 30, 50, 100 dollars they had to put in their gas tanks every month.
That's what the article said, and, again, it wasn't the root cause, and multiple other articles haven't mentioned it (though I could have missed some) but it had to be a major factor. The dollars of your income per month are the dollars of your income per month, even if filling your tank has jumped from $30 to $50. I remember emptying my account to fill a Honda Civic's tank, and I know for sure a whole population getting hit that hard was unsustainable.
Here we are again. Natural events may have jacked this basic budget item up, but how many families' budgets will tank this time, and can we do anything but batten down?
I read them and thought, yes, we'll be paying "more," a term that's a solvable problem when you're in the privileged class, and a crisis when you're trying to feed a family and make ends meet.
We have watched three different stores cut, and cut, and cut items we buy. It wasn't one chain in trouble, it's all of them around here. Fewer organics, fewer gluten free (purchased on a real MD's advice, so please, no lectures about how moronic the gluten-free "trend" is), less variety in general.
Today we hit our most-visited supermarket. I was flabbergasted at the start, AND at the finish.
 |
| You'll need to enlarge it to read the price tabs. I thought they were a mistake. Seriously. And they weren't. |
I've bought these fruit juices, yes, organic and pricey, for several years for breakfast smoothies. They've crept up from the 3.99 range into the 4.99-ish rage, and when I read about crop failures I must have thought they'd jump a full dollar (or gosh! even more!). But...??! Not to nearly 10 dollars. Tack tax onto that.
Nearly 10 dollars.
The store knows that's not gonna fly, and they've just started stocking a new brand, also organic, back down at 5.89, and I did buy it.
On we shopped, with our usual list. Long ago we decided that healthier food was an investment that might keep us a little healthier, a little longer, as aging and higher disease risk started workin' their magic. So for stuff we use most, we have not bought the cheapest options for a very long time.
We also do plenty of of regular, normal Big Food Industry products. Each is a considered decision. Organics are more important when they're something we consume a lot of. I get organic juice in glass bottles, and not major non-organic brands in plastic bottles. We do organic milk.
TWO HUNDRED FIFTY-NINE dollars, I was ...... I was......
I can't provide an item by item comparison. We got two containers of whey protein, not one, and two magazines, but they don't explain this being about $80 more than I was used to spending for similar -- again, not identical -- but similar carts full.
This is unsustainable. Partly for us, but we can adjust and comparison shop and work harder at it, but mostly for the economy.
Those brands in the photos can't stay in business if they have to charge close to 10 bucks for a bottle.
The substitute brand will supposedly have to raise its prices too, even if they manage to beat the competition. I don't think close-to-$8, or close-to-$9, will sell much better than close-to-$10 does, and more shoppers will be over in the Big Food juice aisle, dropping spending back down, but to the standard brands' also-rising prices.
Families with budgets are already there in the Big Food aisle, where those higher prices will hurt them, badly. Where will they get the extra money?
I'm liberal but I am not a progressive (whole 'nother topic), and Mother Jones magazine annoys me way too often, but it does have some good information, and one column in the March/April issue was enlightening about SNAP buyers and how they stretch their dollars.
Don't get me started on the writer's defense of using SNAP money for junk food, which made me say very bad words.
So. How much further can these buyers stretch it?
The crash of 2008 had analyses written about it ad nauseum. One article I recall from very early in the crash pointed out that the trigger was the gas price jump. Not that the mortgage debacle wasn't the root cause, not that the economy was healthy before that. It emphatically was not. But its plates could keep spinning in the air until those homeowners paying those absurd mortgages could no longer budget for them. And that was the extra 30, 50, 100 dollars they had to put in their gas tanks every month.
That's what the article said, and, again, it wasn't the root cause, and multiple other articles haven't mentioned it (though I could have missed some) but it had to be a major factor. The dollars of your income per month are the dollars of your income per month, even if filling your tank has jumped from $30 to $50. I remember emptying my account to fill a Honda Civic's tank, and I know for sure a whole population getting hit that hard was unsustainable.
Here we are again. Natural events may have jacked this basic budget item up, but how many families' budgets will tank this time, and can we do anything but batten down?
Monday, March 25, 2013
Dear Kroger - Thank you!
Dear Kroger Stores:
Thank you for Nutty Nuggets.
Original Grape Nuts is now the Late, Great. But you still offer a version of it. Nice and simple and soy free. And I am grateful.
Sincerely,
A Happy Customer.
Friday, February 22, 2013
Cupcake philosophizing
The phrase "C. S. Lewis said..." is almost as ubiquitous among the Believer crowd as "the Bible says..." and just about as annoying. Some quote him like he's practically posting from Patmos, and, come on, he's a Guy and as imperfect as the rest of us. But a lot of his stuff was quite cool, and this came to mind today.
This is from his Space Trilogy, specifically Perelandra, in which the protagonist of the series, Ransom, visits a yet-unspoiled Eden world. He encounters fruits ("gourds") of exquisite flavor, and many other plants of mystical properties.
And some berries. Here's the Berry passage:
Yeah, I have eaten one and its components were great, so I suspect the rest are too, but I think that they are so over-iced it ruins them.
But I'm probably in the minority. The cupcake trend (I'm told it's passé now) and designer pastry craze, when it involves icing, seems to make the cake a mere platform for icing, both for visual artistry, and for the more concentrated sugar-rush that, I guess, people want. To do the chef justice, the cake wasn't a bland shrug-off to carry the icing, it's excellent on its own merits. Just..... way too small. These things are HALF icing, and honestly, interesting, savory cake is what requires, and better demonstrates, more serious chef-y skills.
These are extremist overkill. And maybe it's just my continuing irritability - everything annoys me - but I feel constantly bombarded by extremist overkill.
Everything is ultra-loud, ultra-bright, and especially, ultra-simple. Yeah, you guys will rightly dispute my use of "everything." But I think it's the loud, simple movies full of cathartic explosions and chases and extreme highs and lows for the characters, that become the blockbusters, and drive more studios to want more of them.
Murder mysteries are boring the bleep out of me, with the extreme highs and lows of the detectives. So many stock detectives, on personal/emotional skids, utter relationship failures but utter invincible battlers against evil, staying low in emotional wastelands, or turing it totally around and Finding The One, yadda yadda.
And TV. And not just kiddie message-shows ("You vill have lesson pounded in with sledgehammer, jah!") and Disney Channel ("You vill have laffs and pathos..." see above).
I ran into a rerun of the 1980's sitcom Gimme a Break awhile ago and thought how much it showed its age, not from lack of talent or plot, but because of how quiet it was. At the time it originally ran, it seemed energetic and full of stagey exaggeration. Compared to now, it's subdued. Some audience laughs were just low ripples the actors talked right over. There were sometimes actual quiet beats between sentences. The pace was somehow more natural and that seemed languid. The set wasn't the kaleidoscope of riotous color and object clutter that I feel like I see everywhere, even in good shows.
There are some good house building/renovating shows on HGTV, but I have watched the Fake Conflict Factor rise and rise, every episode of some of these shows having to feature obviously coached people having obviously choreographed arguments, calling the project a disaster and the designer -- or each other -- a failure, so it can all finally come together with a gushing "Oh, I can't beLIEVE it, this is so-o-o great!"
All emotions are extreme. All experiences are overwhelmingly pain or pleasure. I think it's getting harder to train our brains to even perceive, much less appreciate, subtlety, nuance, or complex interplay of flavor, or character.
OK, OK, there's plenty left, and it's always been incumbent upon the consumer to seek out and support better craft. There are classics, there are great shows and books and cuisine, humane, life-affirming stuff.
I'm not saying it's died. I'm not even saying that it will die out, only that it's being crowded and marginalized by the need to outshout and outsell the competition by offering the more overwhelming sensory experience. This baker clearly can bake great cake, but she has to make a living, and customers want the towering pile of decorative goo. Money talks in a voice that can't be disobeyed.
And, sugar addict though I am, I don't like the cupcakes. I love cake. Bare cake, even, no icing at all, if it's excellent. These, at least, judging by my one, are buried under a stomach-acid-flaming load of pure butter and sugar, and while I'm free to scrape it off, there won't be much left when I do, not like the days when a cupcake was a cake with icing, not icing loaded on a disc of cake.
The market forces craftsmen to assault our senses and us to work harder to escape from it.
This is from his Space Trilogy, specifically Perelandra, in which the protagonist of the series, Ransom, visits a yet-unspoiled Eden world. He encounters fruits ("gourds") of exquisite flavor, and many other plants of mystical properties.
And some berries. Here's the Berry passage:
He made his way gingerly towards the coast, but before he reached it, he passed some bushes which carried a rich crop of oval green berries, about three times the size of almonds. ... It turned out to be good to eat. It did not give the rich orgiastic and almost alarming pleasure of the gourds, but rather the specific pleasure of plain food--the delight of munching and being nourished, a "Sober certainty of waking bliss." A man, or at least a man like Ransom, felt he ought to say grace over it; and so he presently did. The gourds would have required an oratorio or a mystical meditation.
But the meal had its unexpected high lights. Every now and then, one struck a berry which had a bright red centre; and these were so savoury, so memorable among a thousand tastes, that he would have begun to look for them and to feed on them only, but that he was once more forbidden by that same inner adviser which had already spoken to him twice since he came to Perelandra.
"Now on earth," thought Ransom, "they'd soon discover how to breed these redhearts, and they'd cost a great deal more than the others." Money, in fact, would provide the means of saying encore in a voice that could not be disobeyed.A friend brought us these cupcakes yesterday.
Yeah, I have eaten one and its components were great, so I suspect the rest are too, but I think that they are so over-iced it ruins them.
But I'm probably in the minority. The cupcake trend (I'm told it's passé now) and designer pastry craze, when it involves icing, seems to make the cake a mere platform for icing, both for visual artistry, and for the more concentrated sugar-rush that, I guess, people want. To do the chef justice, the cake wasn't a bland shrug-off to carry the icing, it's excellent on its own merits. Just..... way too small. These things are HALF icing, and honestly, interesting, savory cake is what requires, and better demonstrates, more serious chef-y skills.
These are extremist overkill. And maybe it's just my continuing irritability - everything annoys me - but I feel constantly bombarded by extremist overkill.
Everything is ultra-loud, ultra-bright, and especially, ultra-simple. Yeah, you guys will rightly dispute my use of "everything." But I think it's the loud, simple movies full of cathartic explosions and chases and extreme highs and lows for the characters, that become the blockbusters, and drive more studios to want more of them.
Murder mysteries are boring the bleep out of me, with the extreme highs and lows of the detectives. So many stock detectives, on personal/emotional skids, utter relationship failures but utter invincible battlers against evil, staying low in emotional wastelands, or turing it totally around and Finding The One, yadda yadda.
And TV. And not just kiddie message-shows ("You vill have lesson pounded in with sledgehammer, jah!") and Disney Channel ("You vill have laffs and pathos..." see above).
I ran into a rerun of the 1980's sitcom Gimme a Break awhile ago and thought how much it showed its age, not from lack of talent or plot, but because of how quiet it was. At the time it originally ran, it seemed energetic and full of stagey exaggeration. Compared to now, it's subdued. Some audience laughs were just low ripples the actors talked right over. There were sometimes actual quiet beats between sentences. The pace was somehow more natural and that seemed languid. The set wasn't the kaleidoscope of riotous color and object clutter that I feel like I see everywhere, even in good shows.
There are some good house building/renovating shows on HGTV, but I have watched the Fake Conflict Factor rise and rise, every episode of some of these shows having to feature obviously coached people having obviously choreographed arguments, calling the project a disaster and the designer -- or each other -- a failure, so it can all finally come together with a gushing "Oh, I can't beLIEVE it, this is so-o-o great!"
All emotions are extreme. All experiences are overwhelmingly pain or pleasure. I think it's getting harder to train our brains to even perceive, much less appreciate, subtlety, nuance, or complex interplay of flavor, or character.
OK, OK, there's plenty left, and it's always been incumbent upon the consumer to seek out and support better craft. There are classics, there are great shows and books and cuisine, humane, life-affirming stuff.
I'm not saying it's died. I'm not even saying that it will die out, only that it's being crowded and marginalized by the need to outshout and outsell the competition by offering the more overwhelming sensory experience. This baker clearly can bake great cake, but she has to make a living, and customers want the towering pile of decorative goo. Money talks in a voice that can't be disobeyed.
And, sugar addict though I am, I don't like the cupcakes. I love cake. Bare cake, even, no icing at all, if it's excellent. These, at least, judging by my one, are buried under a stomach-acid-flaming load of pure butter and sugar, and while I'm free to scrape it off, there won't be much left when I do, not like the days when a cupcake was a cake with icing, not icing loaded on a disc of cake.
The market forces craftsmen to assault our senses and us to work harder to escape from it.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
We'll call it a Learning Experience
The First Afghan is finished. It's the 4th one I ever attempted, but the first one I ever completed; in fact, it's the first one that ever got past 6 inches, before I abandoned them.
And it is beyond ridiculous. Here I've spread it across a double bed so you can see that it's the Babe The Blue Ox of Afghans.
I know yall won't think it's stupid-looking, and if I had intended it be be as big as a DOUBLE bedspread, then that would be cool. But I didn't. I intended it to be about 5x7 feet. But it somehow grew to double-bed size. It took forever. And never, ever again will I let that happen. I'm also not entirely pleased with the pattern, but it's OK. I'd like to have inserted a couple more green squares and broken up that big dull medium blue expanse, but it's pretty nice, plus it taught me some things.
Meanwhile, here's a cool thing. My grandmother's sewing cabinet, which was later my mother's sewing cabinet (even sewing-averse people have to put on a button or something at times) is over at Dad's/Mom's house, and in it I just discovered my great grandmother's crochet hook.
I'm making an assumption that it was hers, since my grandmother did knit and do needlepoint, but I'm not aware that she ever crocheted. Either way, it belonged to one of them.
Back home in my own venerable junk, I also turned up a bundle of my own crochet hooks from circa 1970. One of them, a "size 00" , is almost a duplicate of Gran-or-Granny's.
But not quite. And I will never get the two mixed up because thanks to inflation -- something I'll probably never again have occasion to say -- they are clearly from different decades:
And it is beyond ridiculous. Here I've spread it across a double bed so you can see that it's the Babe The Blue Ox of Afghans.
I know yall won't think it's stupid-looking, and if I had intended it be be as big as a DOUBLE bedspread, then that would be cool. But I didn't. I intended it to be about 5x7 feet. But it somehow grew to double-bed size. It took forever. And never, ever again will I let that happen. I'm also not entirely pleased with the pattern, but it's OK. I'd like to have inserted a couple more green squares and broken up that big dull medium blue expanse, but it's pretty nice, plus it taught me some things.
Meanwhile, here's a cool thing. My grandmother's sewing cabinet, which was later my mother's sewing cabinet (even sewing-averse people have to put on a button or something at times) is over at Dad's/Mom's house, and in it I just discovered my great grandmother's crochet hook.
I'm making an assumption that it was hers, since my grandmother did knit and do needlepoint, but I'm not aware that she ever crocheted. Either way, it belonged to one of them.
Back home in my own venerable junk, I also turned up a bundle of my own crochet hooks from circa 1970. One of them, a "size 00" , is almost a duplicate of Gran-or-Granny's.
But not quite. And I will never get the two mixed up because thanks to inflation -- something I'll probably never again have occasion to say -- they are clearly from different decades:
 |
| If you can't read the prices, the photo should enlarge enough for you to see them if you click and "view photo." |
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Everything old is...still old, but spruced up!
They're new bikes.....! Wait! No! They're old bikes, refurbished!
I won't pretend that I didn't look on the new ones with a little lust in my heart. To be more accurate, I lifted one of the new ones and its light weight sparked lust in my heart. The Trek Larry uses is 18 years old, and my Schwinn is 15, both very well built, but not exactly Space Age high tech metals. I figure I'll burn extra calories just propelling its poundage down the path.
It's OK. I love my old bike. I loved it when I bought it, and its association with our much-missed NJ house adds to that.
And my cycling has been sporadic, so until I figure out whether I'll actually get serious about it, refurbishment made sense.
But man, the search goes on for a form of exercise that I don't loathe!
Sunday, July 01, 2012
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Craving Christmas
Our tree 2002
It's August and the Christmas catalogs are starting to pour in. Most years, they irritate the bejesus outta me. Tacky, ridiculous stuff and besides, it's still summer, etc. etc.
This year, for the first time probably ever, I keep feasting my eyes on them, not so much on the giftable goods as the Christmas cards, with their images and their messages.
This craving has a bunch of reasons, one being the relentless heat and mosquitoes. I crave fall and winter. I'm even sick of thunderstorms, which I usually love. Our recent lightning strike shook my storm enjoyment. By the way, it fried every smoke detector in the house, necessitating a full set of replacements.
My grandmother's childhood ornament string, circa 1910
Another is that it's been so long since I really experienced Christmas that I miss it. Last year was something to get through, and actually, the year before wasn't much better. Dad's only brother died and we took a difficult trip in an ice storm to the funeral on December 17th 2009, with my very frail mom, so the next week was recovery and grieving. Christmas 2010 happened and happened well but it didn't happen in my heart, just in cars, shops and rooms. I'm feeling more ready to love Christmas as a way of sharing something with people in my past as well as my present. I need renewal. I feel like I'm running on empty, just over halfway through the year.
The cards in the National Wildlife catalog are a mental vacation. Quiet idealized woods and cottages in snow, little birds puffed against the cold, sparkling lights spattering out of windows at dusk, peace on earth, wishing you peace, let there be peace....
The pre-written lines on the cards ... Well, let's just say that they're exercising my brain. I have the leisure at this time of year to think about what they say and how I feel about it.
"Season's Greetings" is the one I hate. The only one. It's a venerable meaningless sentiment, having been around for business-networking-decades before the culture wars bled over into Christmas.
I'm OK with "Happy Holidays." To deny that there are other holidays is silly. The statistics as to how many more people celebrate "this" one over "that" one mean zilch. It's not a majority-win-all issue, and I fail to see how anyone could embrace the loving spirit of Christmas without liking the idea of wishing happiness for others who aren't interested in Christmas happiness.
"Happy Holidays" is a good thing to offer. "Season's Greetings" is emotionless, soulless, so robotic you can smell the machine oil of the "Don't really care if you're happy" thought that lubricates its dead gears.
But I do Christmas because I believe in it, and that means that the reason I send cards is Christmas. And the reason I'm glad others find something joyful in the turn of the year is that it, I certainly hope, gives them not just happy holidays, but renewal for the year. Strength for a full-year's journey.
So, I guess the next category of card-sentiments that I don't like are the ones that say only "I wish you a wonderful season." Just the season?
Honestly, just me, but I'd get a better holiday that provides a little soul-sustenance year-round.
I need to like both the art and the message. This one (below) has a good sentiment (which you need to click it, to read).
If only the art didn't look like somebody found a distant planet on which all life had been scorched off by a gamma-ray burst, and inexplicably planted a church there.
Last but maybe best is rediscovering a gift I got long ago.
Beyond Sing the Woods was given to me by my writer-grandmother, when I was about 16. I couldn't get into it then. I picked it up again a couple weeks ago and have been Wowed. Some gifts wait till the right time and this was the right time, most certainly.
Beyond Sing the Woods has rich, glorious Christmas scenes. The novel takes place in a vague era that's probably the late 1700's or early 1800's, and the goods and food are varied and opulent, but the power in the festival comes from something more nebulous than that opulence, and gift-giving is practically an afterthought. The feast renews an awareness of something higher, especially in the poorer residents too careworn most of the year to think long about the beliefs that they do hold.
The book is filled with visions of the new added to, or built onto, the old; the new 18th century house, attached to the older hall with its heavy leaded glass windows and its multiple generations of weapons and ironware piled back in the shadows, and, opening off of another room and still older, the house from antiquity with its hearth in the middle of the floor and smokehole in the roof. The past isn't gone, it's encompassed in the new. The rituals have tied past to present since memory began.
I'm craving cool weather and time outside, and the short days that ease into night. And gifts are good, I like gifts when they're in proportion to the purpose of the festival. There has to be a way to give, without gift-giving becoming the disproportionate thing it can become, like a bowling ball balancing on a straight pin. I want Christmas for the connection with people in my past, and connection with people who will remember our Christmases when we're gone.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Our power company is teh awesome!
At about 7:30 PM yesterday, a lightning bolt cooked our end of the neighborhood. It sounded like it hit our chimney -- the roof sounded like it was splitting, things sparked -- but there's no sign of a hit, and the bolt seems to have struck only outside, a few yards away.
It took out the transformer on our corner, and the absolutely awesome crew from Santee Cooper was out there replacing it by 10 PM. A slightly more cynical friend reminded me that they were probably loving the overtime, and I'm sure that's true, but it was a l-o-o-ong hard day for those guys, storms and similar strikes all over the place. It took 3 huge trucks, two with cherry-pickers. I took the picture at close to 11PM, from the front porch, where we stood and watched, having read with booklights for 3 hours and not wanting to run down any more batteries.
By the way, it made me decide to get more booklights that take ordinary AA batteries from now on. I have a charger for rechargeable batteries. Most booklights that they sell now use those expensive, non-rechargeable, little specialty disc batteries. I've got one light that's out of commission because I carefully opened it, got the battery number, bought one, got it home, and found that the little %@$-d needs TWO of the bleeping things.
We still had a fried modem and no cable, which took another day to fix. I spent the day reading and -- I amaze myself! -- sewing. I loathe needles and thread but it was an undeniable shoutout from God/The Universe/Opportunity, to do several annoying clothes-mending jobs that have sitting for years.
It could have been a lot worse.
Friday, July 22, 2011
How men solve clothing problems
So since we're moving furniture and boxing up stuff, finding one's belongings isn't an instant process right now.
Yesterday we worked up until 10 minutes before we had to leave for a lunch appointment. I had to find a shirt in a color that would not look poisonous with the capris I had on. NOTHING worked, minutes ticking away. "I can't find a shirt that will go with these!" I yelled.
Larry answered instantly: "Black! White!"
"Don't have either!" (Findable at that moment)
"Gray!"
"Yes! Got it!"
Men are great outfit-simplifiers. For every problem, one of three answers will work. Black. White. Gray.
Yesterday we worked up until 10 minutes before we had to leave for a lunch appointment. I had to find a shirt in a color that would not look poisonous with the capris I had on. NOTHING worked, minutes ticking away. "I can't find a shirt that will go with these!" I yelled.
Larry answered instantly: "Black! White!"
"Don't have either!" (Findable at that moment)
"Gray!"
"Yes! Got it!"
Men are great outfit-simplifiers. For every problem, one of three answers will work. Black. White. Gray.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Candy-coated goodness!
Over on facebook people are posting pictures of their dads for Father's Day weekend, and it was a good reason to fire up the PC (urgh!), which is the only computer my scanner will negotiate with, and scan this one in.
I love this photo. Dad is the little one, here with his big brother in their back yard. The photographer (my grandfather?) appears to have his camera on a tripod and to be standing to one side, probably snapping the photo with an extender cord hooked to the shutter, whatever those cord things are called.
I rarely boot up the PC. I wrote in 2009 about what a mess it was, and how I'd be doing a "system restore" on it when I no longer need the 9-year-old (now 11-year-old) word processor to work. That time ought to have long-since arrived but the typos and little errors in my novel ... that's a whole other story. Short version - it's only typos now, and I keep thinking I'm just hours away from publishing, but more errors show up.
Anyway, I resist using the PC, so when I do decide to scan something, I make a project of it and do a bunch of stuff that's been accumulating.
All of these should come up large if you click them individually.
I spotted this ad for the genuine original Downyflake baked goods, so I wanted to show yall where our sweet free-floating-anxiety-ridden golden cat gets his name.
That led me to all kinds of great ads in the rest of the magazine, which is the June 1954 issue of Woman's Day and a super time capsule!
This one, I thought of for my occasional posting of comic strip ads. Oddly, just a couple days ago we were in the pet store and I overheard the owner talking with another customer who makes his own dog food. She was saying that too many people who make homemade dog food use only muscle meats, but dogs need organ meats too. So this really is a poor little rich dog :
And oh, the good ole days of guilt-free sugary cereal! Hey, it may be candy-coated, but it's wholesome :
I copied the ad below, thinking, "Wow, lookit those toxic chemicals we used to use..."
Guess what. That stuff is relatively non-toxic (I always think, "relatively") and still used in foggers. It is worth posting just because I had no idea insecticide home-foggers were around that long ago. I sort of recall them from the '70's and used them in the 1980's, in my all-out war on roaches in an apartment complex, but they were available the year I was born.
Not all ads of the era were mockery material. Modess sanitary napkins had beautiful and classy ads, and are famous for not showing the product or using text that explained what it was. If you didn't know, you didn't need them anyway!
Last but far from least -- Mrs. Filbert was an actual person! I never knew that.
Oh all right. The guys wanna see some cheesecake. Fine. Here:
I love this photo. Dad is the little one, here with his big brother in their back yard. The photographer (my grandfather?) appears to have his camera on a tripod and to be standing to one side, probably snapping the photo with an extender cord hooked to the shutter, whatever those cord things are called.
I rarely boot up the PC. I wrote in 2009 about what a mess it was, and how I'd be doing a "system restore" on it when I no longer need the 9-year-old (now 11-year-old) word processor to work. That time ought to have long-since arrived but the typos and little errors in my novel ... that's a whole other story. Short version - it's only typos now, and I keep thinking I'm just hours away from publishing, but more errors show up.
Anyway, I resist using the PC, so when I do decide to scan something, I make a project of it and do a bunch of stuff that's been accumulating.
All of these should come up large if you click them individually.
I spotted this ad for the genuine original Downyflake baked goods, so I wanted to show yall where our sweet free-floating-anxiety-ridden golden cat gets his name.
That led me to all kinds of great ads in the rest of the magazine, which is the June 1954 issue of Woman's Day and a super time capsule!
This one, I thought of for my occasional posting of comic strip ads. Oddly, just a couple days ago we were in the pet store and I overheard the owner talking with another customer who makes his own dog food. She was saying that too many people who make homemade dog food use only muscle meats, but dogs need organ meats too. So this really is a poor little rich dog :
And oh, the good ole days of guilt-free sugary cereal! Hey, it may be candy-coated, but it's wholesome :
I copied the ad below, thinking, "Wow, lookit those toxic chemicals we used to use..."
Guess what. That stuff is relatively non-toxic (I always think, "relatively") and still used in foggers. It is worth posting just because I had no idea insecticide home-foggers were around that long ago. I sort of recall them from the '70's and used them in the 1980's, in my all-out war on roaches in an apartment complex, but they were available the year I was born.
Not all ads of the era were mockery material. Modess sanitary napkins had beautiful and classy ads, and are famous for not showing the product or using text that explained what it was. If you didn't know, you didn't need them anyway!
Last but far from least -- Mrs. Filbert was an actual person! I never knew that.
Oh all right. The guys wanna see some cheesecake. Fine. Here:
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Dear Borders - Here's why you're bankrupt.
Dear Borders Marketers Who Made D's in Biz School:
I love Borders bookstores but there isn't one anywhere NEAR me.
However, when I was visiting North Carolina a few years ago, I shopped in a Waldenbooks, and the clerk suggested I get the Borders Rewards card and I figured, Hey, why not? Once in awhile I'm in a town that has one. You get other deals too! he, smiling, said.
So via email, I have been getting "offers" for years. Great stuff. Jewelry (don't care), discounts on cruises! (do not care), wine (who the bleep cares?!), ski equipment (oh please), clothes, but never what I needed when I needed it.
Till today!
My dear light jacket bit the dust this week. I love it. In fact, I still fancy paying to replace the zipper and keeping it, but it's a little worn after about 7-8 years of 3-season wear, so I thought, OK, need a jacket.
All of my mother's clothes are still next door and Dad said recently that it's getting to be time to find them good homes. I would love to just adopt one of her jackets. Only, I went through everything, and she never wore light jackets. Sweatshirt jackets in the yard, and blazers when she went out, but nothing similar to my late lamented jacket.
Next : the shopping dread. I've been wearing a parka and putting off the shopping. Funny how I used to love clothes shopping and now it's a chore. And I have a LOT of things I both need to do and prefer to do these days.
Today, my Borders Rewards email popped up with -- at last! -- 25% off at L. L. Bean!
You complete and utter jerks.
When I went to the offer, I got a message that the offer was "locked" and that a complex set of interlocking rules and requirements sets the rules for actually using these great offers.
People: There is nothing more deeply stupid than complex sets of interlocking rules and requirements. Give a coupon, don't give a coupon, give a smaller coupon, I give not a damn, but when you play manipulative little games with me, I guarantee you I don't play.
In this case, you wanted me to earn 50,000 (yes, I typed that correctly) points in order to have this offer "unlocked" and I needed to spend the last several years accumulating those points by clicking "offers" similar to this one, hundreds of times. Spiked-heel boots, cruises, wine, nose rings, whatever crap has no relevance to my life, just to get (50? or so?) points each time, as I waited like Rapunzel for the point-accumulation to grow like hair, long enough for your stupid Reward to crawl up and reach me.
"Rewards" is an odd term for this.
Motivating buyers by helping them feel like they're working for an actual reward isn't a bad business strategy in itself. I just got two cool Cuisinart cookware thingies by saving stamps at my local Piggly Wiggly, and I did feel like I was doing something smart and thrifty and getting a payoff for the effort.
But the amount of "kiss our ass one more time for a few more crumbs of points" you require....
Let's just say that I kinda know why you just filed Chapter 11.
Meanwhile, a couple years after I got that Borders card, my friend Catherine (Hi, Cath!) forwarded me a better sale-stuff source.
Shop-It-To-Me is quick, it's easy, you tailor to your own detailed preferences the email offers you'll receive, and the frequency with which you receive them.
Via today's email, they had a nice little Eddie Bauer jacket, not only a third off, but with a free shipping offer.
And they didn't make me do anything more than put it in my basket, type the free shipping coupon code in and pay 'em.
So Borders Folks, I hope you keep going, but I really hope you do better, and fire that section of your marketing department.
Thanks awfully (because it was awful),
RGS
I love Borders bookstores but there isn't one anywhere NEAR me.
However, when I was visiting North Carolina a few years ago, I shopped in a Waldenbooks, and the clerk suggested I get the Borders Rewards card and I figured, Hey, why not? Once in awhile I'm in a town that has one. You get other deals too! he, smiling, said.
So via email, I have been getting "offers" for years. Great stuff. Jewelry (don't care), discounts on cruises! (do not care), wine (who the bleep cares?!), ski equipment (oh please), clothes, but never what I needed when I needed it.
Till today!
My dear light jacket bit the dust this week. I love it. In fact, I still fancy paying to replace the zipper and keeping it, but it's a little worn after about 7-8 years of 3-season wear, so I thought, OK, need a jacket.
All of my mother's clothes are still next door and Dad said recently that it's getting to be time to find them good homes. I would love to just adopt one of her jackets. Only, I went through everything, and she never wore light jackets. Sweatshirt jackets in the yard, and blazers when she went out, but nothing similar to my late lamented jacket.
Next : the shopping dread. I've been wearing a parka and putting off the shopping. Funny how I used to love clothes shopping and now it's a chore. And I have a LOT of things I both need to do and prefer to do these days.
Today, my Borders Rewards email popped up with -- at last! -- 25% off at L. L. Bean!
You complete and utter jerks.
When I went to the offer, I got a message that the offer was "locked" and that a complex set of interlocking rules and requirements sets the rules for actually using these great offers.
People: There is nothing more deeply stupid than complex sets of interlocking rules and requirements. Give a coupon, don't give a coupon, give a smaller coupon, I give not a damn, but when you play manipulative little games with me, I guarantee you I don't play.
In this case, you wanted me to earn 50,000 (yes, I typed that correctly) points in order to have this offer "unlocked" and I needed to spend the last several years accumulating those points by clicking "offers" similar to this one, hundreds of times. Spiked-heel boots, cruises, wine, nose rings, whatever crap has no relevance to my life, just to get (50? or so?) points each time, as I waited like Rapunzel for the point-accumulation to grow like hair, long enough for your stupid Reward to crawl up and reach me.
"Rewards" is an odd term for this.
Motivating buyers by helping them feel like they're working for an actual reward isn't a bad business strategy in itself. I just got two cool Cuisinart cookware thingies by saving stamps at my local Piggly Wiggly, and I did feel like I was doing something smart and thrifty and getting a payoff for the effort.
But the amount of "kiss our ass one more time for a few more crumbs of points" you require....
Let's just say that I kinda know why you just filed Chapter 11.
Meanwhile, a couple years after I got that Borders card, my friend Catherine (Hi, Cath!) forwarded me a better sale-stuff source.
Shop-It-To-Me is quick, it's easy, you tailor to your own detailed preferences the email offers you'll receive, and the frequency with which you receive them.
Via today's email, they had a nice little Eddie Bauer jacket, not only a third off, but with a free shipping offer.
And they didn't make me do anything more than put it in my basket, type the free shipping coupon code in and pay 'em.
So Borders Folks, I hope you keep going, but I really hope you do better, and fire that section of your marketing department.
Thanks awfully (because it was awful),
RGS
Monday, January 10, 2011
No, actually I loathe the open floorplan.
Awhile back, Larry and I started watching HGTV at lunchtime, when there wasn't anything cool on the History/Discovery/Nat Geo channels -- or at least, when those had reruns of reruns.
It was a nice escape and it sort of fed my home-voyeurism. I love glimpsing other peoples' houses. Another show on Discovery called It Takes a Thief -- where real former thieves broke into real peoples' homes, with the owners' consent, to show their security weaknesses -- was a lot of fun for the same reason.
So we'd chill with our sandwiches in front of Househunters. On this show, they take real people who are househunting and show us 3 of the places they consider, then follow them through on their final choice.
I figured from the start that home product-purveyors are heavily invested in the network and have an agenda : "Make the viewer want to remodel, redecorate, buy stuff!" That's above-board enough to be OK by me.
But I, really, innocently, thought that this message would be subtly imbedded in a wide variety of home styles. You know, the something-for-everyone thing.
At some point, the dreary sameness of the houses, of the hunters, and of the whole blasted thing began to show. Not long after that, it became distressingly obvious that the show exists not to push products, but to push standardized styles and samey products.
There's alleged variety -- lofts, condos, houses, older and newer developments. But the same sentiments are voiced the same way repeatedly.
The buyers are so coached that watching it is kind of like being one of those Rocky Horror Picture Show nuts who's seen it 4000 times and can recite the scripted lines right along with them. If one more dimwit says the precise phrase "I love the high ceilings and the open floorplan!" my brain will melt.
I won't say that real people never want open floorplans, Like anything else, some like them, some don't. But if you judged by this show, you'd think that caves were all anybody wanted, ever.
Because builders love open floorplans. They can sell you a lot more square footage without forking out to build "outdated" things like full second floors, when a partial second floor "open to below" will let you display Michelangelo's David or the Buckingham Palace Christmas tree, and says trés elégante to potential buyers who've turned their brains off. Or interior walls, with all those tedious things you have to put into a wall, like framework and drywall and paint and outlets and wires and wage-hours and stuff.
Hunters seem unconcerned about the Grand Central cacophony of noise as every downstairs activity -- laundry machines, TV, kitchen clangs and clatters, phone calls -- resonates together. And we mustn't even think about watching our heating dollars waft up into the 18-foot ceiling of our massive Great Room.
HGTV is paid well to try to convince you that this is what you want. When househunters see older houses that still have those terribly outmoded features, like rooms, or, God Forbid, white kitchen appliances, they wrinkle their noses.
And if they see the ubiquitous high ceilings, guhrayuhnit countertops (that's "granite" countertops; they all worship granite and they all pronounce it like that), and stainless steel appliances, they brightly approve these things not as mere preferences, but as necessities.
HGTV has got it down, man, but honestly, when they get a 30-ish-year-old guy to walk into a nice, well-planned, color-coordinated kitchen, look at synthetic countertops, and say, "Those countertops will need updating," it takes implausibility to new heights.
The word, trained into the potential buyers with painful obviousness, is "need." They clearly are told to say, not that they want to update the kitchen, but that they will "need" to. Like a white stove won't cook and a fridge that's not steel won't keep the milk from spoiling.
And we must love open floorplans. Living, kitchen, dining rooms all have to flow into each other like one big Dark Ages Great Hall.
Not.
Give me walls. No matter how much building material and effort you have to grudgingly expend to do it. Got that?
Friday, December 24, 2010
Monday, November 29, 2010
Quit being so subtle
I think we're all supposed to get with the program and hop on board with....with some kind of name for today. What was that again?
Wait! I'll think of it. Just give me a minute.....
Sunday, November 21, 2010
As video rental stores sink slowly in the west...
There's kind of a downside to having a home-based business.
Not that I'm real big on social conversing -- it's low on my list of enjoyable activities, below washing dishes. Honest. But when you work at home, you really don't want to use the 'net for everything. It's nice to see a human being on occasion, in, you know, actual stores. It's nice to know our shopkeepers and have them know us, and it's nice to have a town of active businesses, instead of a town of empty storefronts and jobless locals.
So we make our weekly rounds. We've become friends with the people who work at the post office. They know us at the grocery store, and do nice things like honoring my discount coupon, good only on an order of $75 or more, even though my total came up $1.73 short of eligibility. And they know us at the diner and bring me a diet cola as soon as they see me come through the door. Yes, at breakfast.
And we rent videos the prehistoric way. We've been regulars at the nearest walk-in stores.
That's "stores," plural, because they keep folding. We make video rentals part of our regular errand run, and the store closes. I mean, with no notice; we show up and it's an empty room with several dvds lying under the return slot on carpeting imprinted with vanished fixtures, a Chik-Fil-A cup abandoned on an empty shelf, and a Dear John letter on the door.
So we feed our dvds into the return slot to join the forlorn pile on the floor, drive to the next nearest place and become regulars there. Then that one tanks. We're on our third one.
It's weird to get nostalgic about a company like Blockbuster, but we've enjoyed it. I like the staff, and get some good ideas and suggestions from them, and yak with them about our cats and their car trouble and so on.
Blockbuster used to give us one-week rentals. That was nice. Then they cut it to 5 days. That's a pain, but basically still means a once-a-week trip, so we adjusted.
Today, we got there to discover that they've switched to 3-day rentals.
Not that 8 miles is an arduous drive, or that much of a fuel economy burden. But we NEVER go that route for any other reason, and there are a bunch of [%$@#!]ing traffic lights to wait at, and that just tore it. The new 99-cent rentals are swell for somebody, but little in that category appealed to us, and engineering our own 5-day rental period by incurring dollar-a-day "late fees" means a [%$@#!]ing automated "reminder" phone call each day, and adds up too fast if you take home more than one.
So. It looks like I'll be following the rest of the human herd to Netflix. I wrote BB to tell them so. Their stores are "competing" with the convenience of the internet/mail order providers by making store use as INconvenient as possible, which makes no sense. I told them that, too. Likely, they want to stop serving through stores and ferry us all into their own net service, but why keep spending money to make the stores less competitive??
Anyway, I guess my BB card will now join my collection of defunct cards.
Saturday, September 04, 2010
My unillustrated "I LOVE The History Channel" post
Wish I could provide a picture for you. You'll have to settle for my description.
So, at lunchtime, a few minutes before noon, we turn on the TV and surf around till we stumble on The History Channel.
HC's morning program was almost over, so we watched its last few minutes. According to HC's online schedule, the show was "Countdown to Armageddon," about the end of the world, including the Book of Revelation and all the weird symbolism in it. As most of these channels do, History Channel ran promos at the screen bottom for other shows.
One interviewee -- we tuned in too late to catch his name -- described the Antichrist and the infamous "666" mark: "He will require that everyone have The Mark of The Beast on either his right hand or his forehead. Without this mark, no one will be able to buy or sell."
As he spoke, a promo for "Pawn Stars Marathon" appeared at screen bottom.
I just love The History Channel.
So, at lunchtime, a few minutes before noon, we turn on the TV and surf around till we stumble on The History Channel.
HC's morning program was almost over, so we watched its last few minutes. According to HC's online schedule, the show was "Countdown to Armageddon," about the end of the world, including the Book of Revelation and all the weird symbolism in it. As most of these channels do, History Channel ran promos at the screen bottom for other shows.
One interviewee -- we tuned in too late to catch his name -- described the Antichrist and the infamous "666" mark: "He will require that everyone have The Mark of The Beast on either his right hand or his forehead. Without this mark, no one will be able to buy or sell."
As he spoke, a promo for "Pawn Stars Marathon" appeared at screen bottom.
I just love The History Channel.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
I'm going away on a train
Not literally. It's something I say.
There's a wonderful 1950 movie called So Young, So Bad, about girl juvenile delinquents. A very very young Rita Moreno (she's billed as Rosita Moreno) plays a shy, sensitive girl who got left holding the bag for some crime (a robbery? Can't remember) committed by her creepo boyfriend. She's too emotionally delicate, cannot endure the rough life in the reformatory, and constantly says that the creepo boyfriend is surely going to come and break her out. I mean, he's so-o-o grateful that he got away and so-o-o sorry she got caught, and he lo-o-oves her with A Love That's True, so he'd never leave her in this awful place!
As the movie nears its end, young Rosita is driven over the edge of insanity. Clearly Creepo isn't coming but she dissociates and babbles: "I'm going away! I'm going away on a train! He's coming for me and we're going away! We're going away on a train!"
I've used it as an expression of Mental Breakdown, ever since.
A month ago ebay quintupled its fees to list a book for sale in stores. From 3 cents to 20 cents each. Making it nearly impossible to leave listings on for months until their buyer appears.
Only we got a break. We paid less. We got this break for being a Top-Rated Seller with outstandingly good ratings from buyers.
Today, we lost that rating, based on getting a 3rd poor mark for "Communication".
These marks are simple "click-the stars to rate." Anonymously. There is no way for us to know what we did or to whom we did it.
A week ago, a buyer wrote us a very frustrated email saying: "This is my THIRD attempt to get you to answer my question! I will leave appropriate ratings for this!"
Only we had never received the two previous emails. Everybody says that, but the messages, swear-on-the-Bible, never came. I checked every place a note or message could be left. I told her that, and she was nicely mollified, said "I understand, these things happen." I'm pretty sure the bad communication rating didn't come from her.
But that means that a lost message might have happened to someone else. Someone who did not try again. Who just decided we didn't give a rat's...
Or maybe not. Maybe it was something else. We aren't allowed to know, and can't dispute the particulars. It will -- or, it would -- cost us literally hundreds of dollars in higher fees and there is no appeal. Yes, I will contact them to dispute it, but if we get a break, it will be strictly because they took our word. That's because the system creates no details or evidence whatsoever.
I, The Buyer, can do this to a seller because they said something rude, or because they said, "I'm really sorry but we can't send you a diamond watch with your book for a dollar" or because they gave me a kind caring answer and perfect satisfaction, but closed the email with "Have a nice day!" and the phrase annoyed me. Or for no reason at all, OR by clicking the wrong star by freakin mistake.
Anonymous ratings are clicked by the buyer with the following instructions: "These are anonymous so don't be afraid to rate honestly!"
There's no reason to give anyone, ever, complete unfettered freedom to give unfair, unwarranted or erroneous ratings that will never be questioned. Sellers can only leave them positive feedback now.
There's also no reason why ebay can't require the buyer to give reason or details to them, to the ebay Powers ... and then simply keep the identifying info from us, so we can at least ask ebay to look at it again.
But there's no information, no appeal, and we can be accused without any method of defense. And it can cost us reams of money.
It will not cost us all that extra money, because we're dumping listings. Each would cost us if we let it renew. Those 20 centses would be a mountain of dimes in no time.
Instead, we'll have to constantly add and delete active listings. It will become time intensive. Meanwhile, we live here to act as my parents' assisted living, and recent health issues -- fortunately things that allow at least partial recovery -- are causing them to need a lot of our help these days. We were just on the brink of configuring our work, writing, and family activities into some kind of manageable routine, but that, because of losing our seller status, has now gone up in smoke.
The display on my camera is burning out.
Out-of-town guests are coming.
Just for today, I will not drink.
I'm online so much anyway that it won't really change my online presence, except that I will not be fine-tuning blog posts. Blogging is a great escape, swell way to vent, and general line to the world, so I really can't see giving it up. I may post a little less but it actually may not be noticeable. What's more likely to be noticeable is that I'll post off the top of my head. I'll sound more scattered, less thoughtful, and somewhat weirder. Thought I'd issue my disclaimer now.
Though I may be so strange already that that won't be perceptible either.
Friday, April 23, 2010
How Not To Get Any Work Done, part 832
He was beginning to regret terminating his psychotherapy. The white discs were back.
~~~
No, I did not make up that funny caption. The creator of this hilarious website called Unhappy Hipsters gives his own delightfully snide captions to the --- well, if you like it, you like it, to each his own, but --- to the minimalist modern architecture photos found in several design magazines.
He also runs a caption contest on occasion (not, I don't think, at the moment), so you'll sometimes see duplicate postings of the same photo with various reader-supplied captions, but there are more new ones as you page back.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Take this pillow and...
Pillows, however great, eventually go flat and limp, not to mention yukky. The only thing to do with worn out pillows is toss them into the guest roo-- I mean, dispose of them in an environmentally responsible manner, and get new ones.
In the department store, I get that sense of foreboding that we all get when we see some version of the dreaded phrase "New and Improved!"
It's Bigger! It's Better! It's Today's Luxuriously Oversized Pillow!
On Pavlovian cue, I am expected to lust after this extravaganza of polyester batting. My brain effectively disabled by the hypnotic code-word, "luxurious," I am now supposedly unquestioning about a few ... questionable things.
One is that: unless the human neck has elongated since standard pillows were invented, having more pillow acreage causes at best no enhancement of one's sleeping experience.
This improves my life how, exactly?
When I try to force the new wider pillows into the old pillowcases, the reason for this innovation becomes clear.
I cram. I jam.
It's now an enormous cylinder. I'm not done yet. It's mostly in, but off-the-round. I must rotate the pillow in one direction and the case in the opposite by repeated yanking, until the corners finally line up.
Cool. Now, if I can make it a shape on which a person's head could rest without rolling off, I'll be all set.
For a moment, I toy with the idea that they've worked hard to plant in my mind. That is, to dash back to
Bed, Bath and Be Bankrupt, credit card in hand, and replace all of our too-small pillowcases.
Store employees are watching the parking lot for me and checking their watches. They were told at Inservice Training never to say anything like "Oh, won't you need some wider pillowcases too?" as they ring up the initial sale. That could as easily tank the sale as it could close it for bigger bucks. Hooking the customer isn't enough. Business wisdom dictates that if they get me to take those pillows all the way home, they've landed me for pillows and cases too. I'll be back within days. Hey, maybe (they pray) I'll go wild and get whole new sheet sets...! No no, mustn't ask for the moon when we have the stars.....
Our crack investigative dumpster-diving team has salvaged a disc from the critical board meeting of J. P. SpringFade, Inc., at which this plot was hatched. We now go public with the secret Powerpoint presentation behind this bedding debacle.
Lights, please.
But what they have failed to predict is my ability to predict the lifespan of my new oversized pillows. These initially-lush pillows are cheaply made in China and will deflate enough to fit in the old cases. Soon. Very soon.
In the department store, I get that sense of foreboding that we all get when we see some version of the dreaded phrase "New and Improved!"
It's Bigger! It's Better! It's Today's Luxuriously Oversized Pillow!
One is that: unless the human neck has elongated since standard pillows were invented, having more pillow acreage causes at best no enhancement of one's sleeping experience.
This improves my life how, exactly?When I try to force the new wider pillows into the old pillowcases, the reason for this innovation becomes clear.
I cram. I jam.
It's now an enormous cylinder. I'm not done yet. It's mostly in, but off-the-round. I must rotate the pillow in one direction and the case in the opposite by repeated yanking, until the corners finally line up.Cool. Now, if I can make it a shape on which a person's head could rest without rolling off, I'll be all set.
For a moment, I toy with the idea that they've worked hard to plant in my mind. That is, to dash back to
Bed, Bath and Be Bankrupt, credit card in hand, and replace all of our too-small pillowcases.
Store employees are watching the parking lot for me and checking their watches. They were told at Inservice Training never to say anything like "Oh, won't you need some wider pillowcases too?" as they ring up the initial sale. That could as easily tank the sale as it could close it for bigger bucks. Hooking the customer isn't enough. Business wisdom dictates that if they get me to take those pillows all the way home, they've landed me for pillows and cases too. I'll be back within days. Hey, maybe (they pray) I'll go wild and get whole new sheet sets...! No no, mustn't ask for the moon when we have the stars.....
Our crack investigative dumpster-diving team has salvaged a disc from the critical board meeting of J. P. SpringFade, Inc., at which this plot was hatched. We now go public with the secret Powerpoint presentation behind this bedding debacle.
Lights, please.
But what they have failed to predict is my ability to predict the lifespan of my new oversized pillows. These initially-lush pillows are cheaply made in China and will deflate enough to fit in the old cases. Soon. Very soon.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)