February Top Droppers

Here are my top Entrecard droppers for February:

Lola's Diner

ThemeLib

All Blogspot Templates

The Junk Drawer

All Contests

Lilaphase

My Big World of Crap

Subjective Beauty

Mature Not Senile

Peek Tech Blog

Thanks to my top droppers and to all who have visited.

I Think My Dog Has IBS

I don't know if it's possible for dogs to suffer from irritable bowel syndrome, but if it is, I'm pretty sure Bella has it. The reason behind my belief: this morning's thunderstorm. It literally scared the crap out of her.

A loud clap of thunder woke me up this morning. The first thing that I did was to reach over and unplug the electric blanket before the accompanying lightening strike turned me into a human french fry. The second was to reach over and comfort Little Miss Canine Panic Attack, or should I say attempt to comfort her. Apparently, Bella had heard the thunder a lot earlier than me because she had already hauled her not-fat-just-fluffy backside off the bed and securely wedged it behind the toilet in the hall bathroom.

I felt for my glasses, put them on, and followed her in there to try to calm her down. My efforts were a little too late at that point. She was in full-fledged hyperventilation mode. I did manage to get her to come out from behind the toilet, but the next clap of thunder sent her right back to her hiding spot. After further coaching, I managed to convince her to follow me downstairs. She had just gotten over her last UTI. I didn't want her to get another one so I was going to try to get her to go out between claps.

Bella, however, could have cared less about her full bladder. All she cared about was getting behind the downstairs toilet. I had to essentially drag her out from behind it and force her outside. She quickly relieved herself and then ran back to the sliding glass door. About five seconds after I opened the door to let her and Bailey, the dog who refused to step off the porch, back in, she returned to the narrow space behind the toilet. I kept telling her that it was just a thunderstorm, that there were no tornadoes this time, and that Mommy wasn't going to let the big, bad storm get her, but she wasn't having any of it. All she wanted was the comforts of cold, white porcelain. After unsuccessfully begging her to go back upstairs with me for 10 minutes, I had to finally pick her up and carry her back to bed.

She cried and circled the bed for the next hour before she finally gave up and went to sleep. When I woke up the second time, I caught the distinctive whiff of poo. I don't know if was there the first time that I woke up or not. If it was, I was too tired to smell it. Regardless, I followed the odor to the front bedroom and found what it was emanating from--diarrhea. Both droplets and piles of the foul substance decorated the room's carpet. At that point, all I could do was sigh. The damage was already done, and I knew I had at least half an hour of steam cleaning ahead of me once the storms had passed.

As Bella hasn't had another poopy episode since, I'm pretty sure that this morning's defecation was anxiety related. She just can't handle the stress of thunder and lightening. If we continue to have storms like the one this morning or the tornado-related ones last week, I may just have to take her to the vet and get her a hefty dose of doggy Xanex or Valium.

Accounting and Financing Jobs Available

Believe it or not, even though the job market seems to be shrinking for most industries, there are still plenty of jobs available for those people with backgrounds in financing and accounting. FinancialJobBank.com currently has 12,803 available finance and accounting jobs posted on its web site. The type of jobs advertised range from auditors and investment banker jobs to account managers and sales directors. I don't know if there are any attorney positions buried amid the postings, but I may do some digging and find out. If nothing else, maybe I'll find out that my international relations degree qualifies me for some entry-level position in the financing and accounting field. I'll take anything that I can get at this point. I just won't tell any potential employers that Accounting for Lawyers was one of my worse grades in law school. Like it was my fault that an accounting exam didn't have the first bit of math on it.

I Miss Sleep

If kidney stones weren't enough to deal with this week, I have had to deal with sleep deprivation as well. I haven't slept much. Part of it has to do with the fact that, no matter how tired my body is, my mind hasn't wanted to shut down at night. I'll stay up working on blog designs so I can submit my blog design site to search engines with some designs actually on it (might make it a little easier to sell the designs, LOL). Then I lay awake thinking of how to fix certain padding and margin issues. (Why does it never fail that, if a design looks perfect in Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari, it looks like absolute crap in IE?)

The other big cause of my insomnia is my dogs. For the last week, they refuse to stay still at night. During the day, they'll sleep for hours on end without budging, but the minute it's time for Mommy to go to sleep, they suddenly get infected by wiggle worms. Bailey gets up and down all night long to bark at every cat's meow and every shutting car door outside. That would be fine if (a) he didn't bark and just got up and down and (b) he didn't nudge me every time he got back on the bed to let him under the covers.

Bella, in contrast, doesn't get up to bark. She gets up to drink water. However, she won't just get up and get it. No, first, she has to sit on the edge of the bed, stare at the floor, and cry. That's her cue for me to get up and bring her the water. If I don't do it, she will eventually circle the bed and cry some more. Finally, when Mommy pulls the covers over her head, she will use the doggy steps, get down, and drink for what seems like forever. Unlike Bailey, Bella won't go back up the stairs on her own. She has to wait until I say, "One, two, three, up." (Somehow I can train her to do that and to jump in the tub on command, but I can't train her to stop peeing inside.) Thus, she will either walk around to my side of the bed and cry when she's through or, if I'm asleep, just sleep on the floor or on her dog bed.

Last night, I took a Benadryl to try to knock me out, and it still took me forever to fall asleep. I would love to go back to bed now and sleep the rest of the day, but I doubt that I could. Even if could manage to fall asleep, my real estate agent would probably just call five minutes after I entered the REM stage and tell me another agent was standing on my front porch waiting to come in.

No More Michelina's

Here is a word of advice for those of you who are prone to kidney stones or kidney pain. Stay away from Michelina's frozen meals. Yes, they're a cheap alternative to Lean Cuisine's and Healthy Choice meals during a recession, but there is a reason they're cheap. Read the label, and you'll find that you get what you pay for.

Monday night I cooked one of the meals, the Santa Fe Rice and Beans one. I have had to cut out most of the other Michelina meals because the white sauce that they use on the pasta tends to make my stomach do spasms for hours on end, no matter how many peppermint oil or digestive enzyme pills I take. However, the rice and beans didn't seem to hurt my stomach, and they were a tasty companion to the tequila lime marinade that I used on my grilled chicken.

Well, Tuesday morning I woke up feeling like a horse had kicked me in my right kidney. It gets that way after I eat something that's too salty, and within hours I usually feel the telltale signs that a kidney stone is making its way from my kidney to the Outer Banks of my urethra. Anyone who has ever experienced a kidney stone knows what I'm talking about when the pain starts migrating southwards. I felt that way all day Tuesday. Now I know why. I dug the Michelina box out of the garbage can and found that it had 710 mg of sodium. The marinade had another 400 mg. That means in one tiny little meal I consumed 1110 mg of salt, possibly more because I can't remember if I drank tea, water, or a Coke (Coke has another 50 mg) with dinner. I'm sorry, but that's an insane amount of salt.

My kidney hurt all day Wednesday as well, albeit not as much. Yesterday, the pain finally let up. I'm still a little sore in the physical sense this morning, but I'm more sore in the mental sense because I realize that I'm going to have to start reading my food labels. I've been reading and analyzing dog food ingredients for years, but I've mostly ignored my own labels. I tend to do a cursory check for fish or fish oil in order to avoid an allergic reaction, but that's about it. Now if I want to avoid stomach pains, I need to check for things like preservatives. If I want to avoid kidney pain, I need to check for salt.

The easiest solution is probably going to be cooking things from scratch. However, cooking from scratch costs more. Fresh food costs more than prepackaged foods. Organic food costs even more than that. Cooking from scratch is also a lot more time consuming, and, seeing as I'm culinarily challenged, it's more likely to lead to a kitchen fire. So what I'm I willing to risk, a smoke-filled kitchen or kidney stones? It's a toss up at the moment, but if this week's pain is any indicator, I'm more likely to risk the fire.

I'm So Over "Campbell's Hospital"

Now that it is the last weekday of the month, I hope that the month long rendition of "Campbell's Hospital"--what I have called General Hospital for the last month--is over. While I respect what Campbell's and TPTB at ABC are trying to do--raise awareness during Heart Health Month--I think that there was a better way to do it, and shoving V8 and Healthy Choice soup down our throats wasn't it. Why didn't they just have Maxie have an honest, heart felt discussion regarding her heart transplant with Spinelli or Bobbie? That scenario would have been more believable that the blatant, out-of-character or out-of-storyline advertisements.

Take the scene between Max and Diane, for instance. Diane just sat there with a smile on her face while Max basically told her she was fat. Granted, he didn't say the word fat. He rambled on and on about eating healthy, Campbell's related food and exercising, but the essence of the whole conversation was, "Diane, you're fat." Uh, first of all, Diane is not fat, and, to our knowledge, she has never had a physical problem with her heart. However, I'm sure that Max's whole speech gave her some emotional heart problems. Second of all, her reaction was so out of character. Diane, mob lawyer supreme, would have never just sat there with a smile on her face if it wasn't a Campbell's ad. She would have picked up her wine glass or her food and thrown it at Max. The only saving grace of that entire scene was the one afterwards, where Max walked in on Jax and Carly in bed and sat down next to them. If it wasn't for that scene, I would have thrown my food at Max as well.

Then there was the whole scene between Maxie and Spinelli after the fire. Yes, it was sweet that Maxinista was concerned for the Jackal's health, but telling him he had to replace his orange sodas with V8 was just wrong. Orange sodas are one of Spinelli's trademarks, one of the things that makes him unique. Taking away his orange soda is the equivalent of taking away Horatio Cane's sunglasses, House's cane, or Monk's antibacterial wipes. If you do it, you take away an essential part of the character.

Oh, and the Maxie dream sequence? That was just wrong on so many levels. Am I the only one who remembers that BJ was adopted and had brown hair, not some ridiculous red, Bobbie wannabe wig? Or that, had she lived, she would have still have been raised a Spencer and therefore probably wouldn't have been the angel Maxie made her out to be? Or that Mac was already the police commissioner back then or shortly thereafter (sorry, I can't remember if Sean and Tiffany had left town yet; I just remember Mac hunting down Frisco right before the transplant)? Anyway, those inconsistencies weren't the worst part. It was the fact that fake BJ wanted Mike to serve Campbell's soup at Kelly's. I'm sorry, but if I go to a restaurant and pay $10 for a meal, I want it to be home-cooked, not microwaved food from a can that would have only cost me $2 at Walmart. I'm sure the fictional residents of Port Charles feel the same.

I'm guessing that today General Hospital will still feel like an hour long advertisement. However, I hope that on Monday it will return the same old soap, tired story lines and all.

Another Heart Stopping Edition of Super Lawyers

Sometimes I think that I'm a little too sensitive about the whole job situation. I see a legal commercial on TV, and it doesn't matter whether the commercial is for motorcycle accident attorneys, workers' comp attorneys, or your garden variety, personal injury attorneys. I still want to throw my remote at it. Firms aren't hiring at the moment, or if they are, they aren't hiring me. They want to point to the recession as the reason, yet they're spending oodles of money on commercials that air every other commercial break. What happens when people start calling the numbers on those commercials, and the firms don't have enough associates to meet the demand? Will the firms refuse to take these people's cases, or will they take the cases and then never return their calls? The cynic in me says it's the latter.

Then there's the nice, shiny magazine that I got in the mail today: Super Lawyers. My first thought when I saw it was, "What's so super about them?" The second was, "I wonder what that guy would look like in a cape." If I had had a pen downstairs, I would have drawn a cape and big S on the cover lawyer, along with some funky eyebrows and one of those curly mustaches. As all my pens were upstairs, I had to settle for saying, "Faster than a speeding ambulance. Able to leap slippery banana peels and search warrants in a single bound. It's a bill collector. It's a used car salesman. No, it's...duh, duh, dumb...Super Lawyer. "

Maybe Spider-Lawyer or the Litigious Hulk will hire me one of these days. Until then, I'm not using the Super Lawyer magazine for anything other than a heavy-duty fly swatter.

Your Heart Belongs to Me: Not the Dean Koontz of Old

I managed to get one thing accomplished this weekend. I finished Dean Koontz's Your Heart Belongs to Me. While it wasn't a bad book, it wasn't the kind of Dean Koontz fiction that kept me up at night in high school. Back then, there was always some supernatural being hiding in the shadows, ready to pounce on the story's protagonist at every turn of the page. I stayed up not because I was scared of the things that went bump in Dean Koontz's fictional night but because I had to finish just one more chapter to see if that being did, in fact, pounce. The boogie man and monster in the closet motif are now mostly gone from Dean Koontz's work. These days you would rarely classify his work as horror. Some of his newer books wouldn't even make the cut for suspense.

Take this book for instance. I don't want to give away any plot lines so I'll stick to the information on the jacket cover. According to the synopsis, Your Heart Belongs to Me is supposed to be about a man, Ryan Perry, who, one year after undergoing a heart transplant, is pursued by a woman who claims that the heart he received belongs to her. That jacket is correct up to a point. The book goes in that direction two-thirds into the story, but up until that part it's really just about Ryan pre-transplant. That part, despite the red herring (a brief, suspected poisoning) that Dean Koontz drops a third of the way in, is slow, not as slow as some of his other, more recent works, but slow nonetheless.

As for the big pursuit part, it, in contrast to the first part of the book, moves far too quickly. Ryan catches up to the antagonist in a couple of chapters, and the confrontation between the two and all the issues therein involved are resolved within a couple of more. I would have much rather the two had played cat and mouse throughout the book, as Ryan took several wrong turns trying to identify the woman and why she was after him, than have the entire pursuit wrapped up in a pretty little bow in a handful of chapters. That's the reason I buy books in the mystery and suspense genre. I like the whodunit. I like the chase. If I wanted to ponder the philosophical aspects of a heart transplant, which is essentially what the first two thirds of the book is about, I would have dug around in the garage for one of my old philosophy textbooks. I wouldn't have picked up a novel.

All in all, Your Heart Belongs to Me wasn't what I had expected. Still it was better than anything that was on TV this weekend.

Where Did All the Hours Go?

Have you ever had one of those days where you wonder where the hours went? I had one of those today. I had intended to get up and get some serious work done on the blog designs. That didn't happen. I had intended to vacuum and steam clean the carpet. That didn't happen either. I had intended to return all my Entrecard drops. That hasn't happened yet, although--fingers crossed--I'm going to try to get it done during the commercials for Monk and Psych.

I wish I had a great excuse as to why I have accomplished very little today, but I don't. I made the bed, but that only took a few minutes. I listened while my nephew told me about the Batman game he had rented for the Wii, but that only took about 30 minutes. I paid two bills and went to Arby's. Again, those things didn't take all day. What did? I have no idea.

Sometimes I wish I was like my chihuahua. He can go from mopey-dopey to acting like he is hyped up on diet pills in two seconds flat. All he needs is a bone or piece of cheese to motivate him. Meanwhile, you can wave all the diary products in the world in front of me, and I still won't have his energy. I guarantee you that, if I did, this house would stay spotless, I would write about 20 posts a day, I would have read every unread book in my house, and I would be training for the Boston Marathon. Okay, maybe I wouldn't do the last one, but that's only because I tend to get side stitches when I run. However, I would consider walking in a 5K or taking a kickboxing class.

Tomorrow I'm getting something accomplished. Seriously, I am.

Moving My Feedburner Account

As many of you are probably aware, Google has acquired Feedburner. As such, those of us with Feedburner accounts must move our feeds to Google. Supposedly, you aren't supposed to lose any subscribers in the move. However, I have visited quite a few blogs over the past few weeks that have lost their subscribers during the move. Some returned the next day. Others did not.

I'm in the process of transferring my account right now. For those of you who subscribe to my feed, I apologize ahead of time if you lose your feed or get some funky message over the next few hours. Hopefully, everything will be back to normal tomorrow.

HD Radio Now Offers iPod Tagging

In college I became addicted to the radio. I had loud roommates and even louder neighbors, but I wasn't a library kind of girl. Thus, the only way I could get any studying done was to put on the ear phones to my canary yellow Walkman and tune out the world.

I went to college in the mid 90's so iTunes and iPod had not even been invented yet. As a result, if I wanted to add a certain song to my music collection, I had to shell out money for the entire cassette tape or CD or stand guard by my boom box for hours on end, hoping that the radio station that I first heard the song on would play it again and that I would be able to hit "record" on the cassette player in time.

Now I have replaced my Walkman addiction with an iPod one. I love that I no longer have to depend on my not-so-quick fingers to record a song. I can simply go to iTunes and download it. I still have one little problem though. When I hear a song on the radio that I like, I don't always hear enough of it to figure out the title or the artist. That makes it significantly harder to find the song on iTunes. Sometimes I can type what I remember of the lyrics into Google and find the title that way. Sometimes I cannot.

Luckily, one company has come up with a solution to my problem: HD Radio. HD Radio now offers song tagging for people who own an iTunes Tagging enabled HD Radio receiver. While I don't own one of these receivers quite yet, I'm definitely thinking of adding one to this year's Christmas list just so I can take advantage of the iTunes Tagging feature. If I had a receiver in my home or car and heard a song that I liked, I would no longer have to rely on my memory or an easily misplaced Post It to remember the song. Instead, all that I would have to do is hit the "tag" button on the receiver. The receiver would then save the title and artist to a "Tagged" playlist in iTunes. The next time that I synced my iPod with iTunes, I would be able to access that playlist and download the song.

The iTunes Tagging enabled HD Radio receivers are reasonably priced. Take the Jensen JiMS 525i, for instance. It's only $149.99 when purchased from HDRadio.com. In addition to song tagging, it features a dual alarm clock, an iPod docking station, the ability to playback mp3 songs, a remote control, and a compact design.

What's even better than HD Radio's iTunes Tagging feature is its sound. HD Radio allows you to listen to local radio stations without any of the static associated with analog signals. That means your favorite radio stations will now be as clear as the songs on your CDs and your iPod. Even AM stations that are broadcast in high definition will come in clear on a HD radio receiver. Unlike satellite radio, you won't have to pay a monthly fee for this clarity. HD Radio is completely free. The only thing that costs is the receiver. For music addicts, the receiver is a worthwhile investment.

The Bird with the Runs was Actually Hail

I thought that I had managed to avoid damage from the storms Wednesday night. However, I just found out that the hail ripped holes in my upstairs window screens on the front side of the house. I was getting in my car to go get lunch, looked up, and saw what I initially thought was bird poo on the screens. However, the longer that I stared at the screens, the more I began to question whether it was, in fact, excrement. For a bird to leave that much of a mess, he had to either have irritable bowel syndrome or eaten some Ex-Lax laced bird seed.

More curious than hungry, I got out of the car and went back inside to inspect the screens. Sure enough, the white spots that I saw weren't bird poo but holes in the screen. While I'm worried that potential buyers will be turned off by the holes, that the couple who put in the offer will now want me to replace the screens on top of giving them my shower curtains, and that the homeowners' association will threaten to fine me if I don't buy new ones (they'll have to threaten everyone else on my street as well), I'm not going to complain. At least the hail didn't break the house's windows or my car's windshield. My house is also still intact. The same can't be said for a lot of homes in the Atlanta area. Ten tornadoes have been confirmed so far--the one in Coweta County was a mile wide--and entire neighborhoods have been flattened. The picture above is all that remains of a church in Hancock County. The man who lived across the road was killed when the tornado picked up him and his mobile home. That makes me one of the lucky ones.

On the Prowl Again for Eyeglasses

My glasses are a mess. They're so scratched up that I can't even call them a hot mess. They're more like a cold mess at this point. I had every intention at Christmas to use the money my grandmother gave me to get a new pair, but I ended up having to use it to get Bella medicine instead. I thought that I could live with the scratches and the worn out arms awhile longer, but that feat is proving a little harder than I thought. Every time I see someone with a cute pair of glasses, I stare a little longer than I should and think, "I wonder what those glasses would look like on me. More important, I wonder what they cost." I'm sure that I'm coming off a little creepy as a result. That's why I have tried to limit most of my eyeglass browsing to the Internet.

The first place that I always look is ZenniOptical.com, a site that has become well-known for its $8 eyeglasses. For instance, on January 23, reporter Lesley Alderman mentioned Zenni Optical in her New York Times article, "Seeing Straight Without Breaking the Bank," as a great place to purchase backup glasses. Having viewed Zenni Optical's selection and prices, I believe that it's a great place to purchase your primary pair of glasses as well, especially if you don't have hundreds of dollars to buy a pair at a retail store.

I like the above-pictured pair. They're only $9.95 and come with thin,1.57 index lenses; an anti-scratch coating; polished, beveled edges; UV protection; a microfiber cleansing cloth; and a hard glass case. For only $4.95 extra I can add an anti-reflective coating to the lenses, which is recommended for people like me who use their computers frequently, and ship it for another $4.95. That's only $19.95 total. I have paid more than that for a pair of sunglasses from Walmart.

I'm just a little nervous about the style of the frames. They're more trendy than classic, and I have worn the same "safe" wire frames since college. Before that pair, I had a pair of tortoiseshell 1980's monstrosities, but we won't talk about them. It's best to leave them with the mullets, the side ponytails, and the acid wash jeans where they belong. I'm not sure if I can pull off trendy. At least with Zenni Optical's low prices, it won't cost me much to find out.

It's Time to Get Over Octomom

Dr. Phil is on right now, and once again he's talking about "Octomom." I think today's episode is his third, fourth, or hundredth special on the woman. Enough already. The woman has 14 kids. Whether you agree with her decision to have them or not, the kids are already here. Deal with it. People need to stop going after the woman, threatening to kill her and her former publicist, and discussing ways to cure whatever is wrong with her mentally--that seems to be what Dr. Phil is trying to do without having even spoken to her, that or he's hoping for an exclusive once the kids go home--and find something more productive to worry about.

Guess what, people. This isn't the first time an unemployed person has had multiples. Jon & Kate Gosslin didn't have jobs either when their sextuplets were born. Jon had just gotten fired, and Kate had quit her job as a nurse. Like Octomom, they could have chosen selective reduction and reduced their number down to two or three. (Jon & Kate Plus Four doesn't have the same ring, does it?) According to their book, they were even advised to do so, but they chose not to. Nevertheless, no one is going after them for their choices. Instead, thanks to TLC, the country is embracing them as America's favorite reality family. (Or do the Roloffs from Little People, Big World hold that title? I forget.)

And what about those freaks, the Duggars? They've got 18 kids and counting, not to mention badly styled hair. If people want to go after someone for having too many children, they should go after Mrs. Duggar, preferably with a hair brush. That way, they can do something with her bangs while teaching her that it's her uterus, her choice. She doesn't have to keep popping them out every nine months because Jim Bob says so. Why doesn't Dr. Phil have her on the show? Why doesn't he try to psychoanalyze her? Why doesn't he try to do a feminist intervention?

Great. Now Nancy Grace is on passing judgment and pretending to cry. Blah. I swear I'm getting mad just watching the episode. I guess that's a clue that I need to stop watching Dr. Phil. Maybe I should have never started.

Small Business Loans: The Little Guy's Bail Out?

I don't know if it's just me, but the evening news seems just as depressing now as it did before President Obama signed the new economic stimulus plan. People are still getting laid off right and left, and businesses that have been opened for years or even decades are shutting their doors for the last time because they can no longer afford to keep them open. I don't know what I was expecting. I guess I was hoping that the economy would be like a Disney movie and the minute Obama signed the bill, pixie dust would rise from his pen, causing the sun to burn brighter, the birds to sing, money trees to sprout in everyone's backyard, and hundreds of new jobs to open up.

Obviously, that hasn't happened yet. While certain big names may be getting bail out money, the little guy probably won't be. As such, he's going to have to turn to other sources to finance his business's day-to-day operations or face the same demise as companies like Circuit City, Sharper Image, and Goody's. Merchant Advisors offers one source of finance for the little guy, small business loans. What differentiates Merchant Advisors' loans from other small business loans is that you don't have to have perfect credit to get them, even in today's economy. That's because Merchant Advisors' requirements aren't as stringent as traditional lenders. In fact, approximately 90 percent of applicants are approved for one of their loans. Furthermore, the turnaround on one of Merchant Advisors' small business loans is quick. The loans tend to be approved within 48 hours of application, while funds from the loans can be deposited in the applicant's bank account within five to seven days. Merchant Advisors come with one additional plus when money is tight--no application fee or closing costs.

For the financially strapped, Merchant Advisors also offers a cash advance based on a business's expected future credit card sales that can be paid back over 12 months, as well as the ability to accept credit card payments in your store and online. The ability to accept credit card payments is something that I have given some thought to as I've been setting up my blog design site, as more and more people are using credit these days. They might be more inclined to purchase a design if I accepted something other than PayPal. Of course, before payment forms even become an issue, I have to get some designs up for people to buy. Right now, I'm so busy drawing and redrawing the girl's head in that site's header that I haven't gotten to that step yet. Assuming that I don't get another 10 a.m. call from my real estate agent, I plan on working on the other designs tomorrow. I know. I know. I probably just jinxed myself, but that is the plan nonetheless.

Not My Week for Dog Food

Last Friday, I told you about how I had gotten a moth-eaten bag of dog food from Petsmart. Well, as it turns out, it is just not my week for dog food of any sort. While I was at Kroger Tuesday, I decided to get my dogs a box of dental biscuits. Bailey's breath has been a little rank lately, and I thought that the biscuits would help. Plus, they were corn-free, dye-free, gluten-free, and by product-free so Bella could eat them without having to take a healthy dose of Benadryl beforehand.

They sound too good to be true, right? They were. As I was still spooked by the Bugsmart incident--I still expect to be accosted by a drove of killer bugs every time I open the dog food bag--I examined the box before opening it and found that the biscuits had expired in October 2007, 16 months ago. I was not going to give something that old to my dogs so back to Kroger I went.

As it turns out, every box of those biscuits on the shelf went out in 2007. Maybe it was a typo, and the manufacturer meant to stamp 2009 on the side. Maybe it wasn't. Either way, I wasn't taking the chance of finding something worse than moths inside the box this time. I ended up buying Blue Dog Bakery biscuits instead. They were slightly more expensive, but at that point I didn't care. I just wanted to go home and be done with shopping. (I think it was Senior Citizen Discount Day because Kroger was packed.) Now I do, as the dogs aren't eating them. They're just carrying them around the house.

Yeah, it's definitely not my week for dog food. That's why I'm staying away from canned, bagged, boxed, and all other packaged forms of dog kibble. With the way my luck is going, I'm liable to find a snake or a black widow inside.

I Want to Be a Slob

Just when I thought it was safe to leave my dirty clothes on the floor, my real estate agent called again. It's becoming the story of my life. I clean. No one comes. I'm a slob, and they're beating down the door.

Anyway, as I was saying, my agent called around 10 a.m. this morning to say that she had a real estate agent who wanted to show my house in 10 minutes. My response was simple, if not grammatically incorrect: "It ain't gonna happen." I was in my pajamas. I had dirty clothes and dishes everywhere. I still had not put up the futon or the linens from when my family had visited. Thanks to last night's storm, there were leaves scattered all over the floor downstairs, not to mention stinky, golden droplets upstairs. (I can't blame the dogs for not urinating outside during six hours worth of tornado warnings, thunder, hail, and lightening. If I was them, I wouldn't have done it either.)

My agent got snippy with me. "Well, how long are you going to need?" she snapped. "More than 10 minutes," I replied. She got me another hour and a half. Those extra 90 minutes didn't do me a whole lot of good. I made the bed, picked up the trash, shoved what dishes I could in the dishwasher, swept the kitchen floor, shoved everything else into closets and drawers, sprayed the pee spots, and showered. I didn't get to vacuum, steam clean, dust, or spray the house down with Febreeze. The entire time I kept thinking, "It's not going to matter if there is urine on the floor. It's not like they're going to show anyway."

Guess what. They did show, and early at that. Lovely. How much do you want to bet that the agent calls my agent and tells her that my house reeked of dirty dog and urine? Whatever. It's just one more reason for my agent to get snippy with me.

I plan on vacuuming and steam cleaning later. Of course, by doing so, I'm pretty much guaranteeing that no one will want to see the house all weekend long. At least I don't have to worry about freshening up the outside of my house as well. While my front porch could use a few hanging baskets, thanks to the wonders of vinyl siding and shutters, I don't have to worry about touching up peeling paint. If I did, I'd probably be even more stressed out than I already am.

Actually, if this house had had wood shutters when I bought it, I would have probably gone to a home improvement store or a web site like LarsonShutter.com and bought vinyl ones a long time ago. Larson Shutter Company makes it easy to do so, as it carries a wide assortment of vinyl, wood, and composite shutters at affordable prices. It also carries the hardware needed to hang the shutters, gable vents, and cupolas. Right now the site is having a 10 percent off sale on Dura Prene custom-sized shutters and offering free shipping on all orders over $99. That's a great deal!

What isn't a great deal? Try having your house on the market in this economy. I'm so over it. Apparently, so is my real estate agent because, after everything else this morning, I found out from Chase that my agent did not fax the short sale info to them until Friday the 13th, a good week or more after she told me that she was going to. In case you didn't read my previous post on the subject, Chase has anywhere from a 30 to a 90 day wait period for getting short sales approved. By dragging her feet, Little Miss Snippy Pants just put me even further down that waiting list. Thanks, Miss Snippy Pants. Remind me to recommend you to all my friends...or not.

A Quick Post Between Storms

I'm sorry that I haven't posted anything since Saturday. I thought that I would give the whole Blogger design idea a go so I've been working on setting up and designing that site. If I had just used an iStockphoto or Stockxpert picture to design it, I would be done by now, but I tried to draw my own header. That took a whole day and then some because I just wasn't satisfied with it. I'm still not. Shading with a pencil and charcoal and shading with a mouse pen and tablet are two different things. I still can't get it right, but I guess what I have will do for now. (Famous last words, right? The perfectionist in me will probably be tinkering with it for the next week.)

Yesterday I thought I was through with the easy, non-header parts of the design site, but then I realized that I could vaguely see the purple edges of the images that I was using in place of the traditional archives, about, search, and other sidebar titles. I had used the dropper tool to pull the color from the header and used that number to establish the color of the columns in the html code. Like an idiot, I then used the dropper instead of the color number to make all the images. As it turns out, there must have been more than one shade of purple in the header, and I must have been pulling from different parts because, in the end, every single title image was a slightly different shade. Obviously, I had to fix the discrepancies. I can't exactly say, "Hey, let me design your site," when my own site is sporting 20 shades of violet.

Then tonight I had planned on writing something brilliant--what I don't know, but I was hoping that the muses would come to me--but we're having super storm cells all night. One already hit about 30 minutes ago. First, the tornado sirens went off. Then the Atlanta news was telling me to get to a safe room, because the cell was forming a hook right over my town. (The news just played a video of the tornado that touched the ground in my town. Guess they were right about the hook.) A minute later the hail hit. Having lived through one tornado, you don't have to tell me twice to take cover. The dogs and I shut ourselves in the half bath downstairs. Luckily, we didn't get any damage this time, but it looks like another line is on its way. Consequently, I'm about to turn off the computer and go back downstairs.

Anyway, hopefully I'll have something much more entertaining for you to read tomorrow. Thanks for stopping by.

I'm Getting Better at MagNext Virtual

Thanks to the real estate agent who never showed but wasted half of my Saturday last weekend, my nephew and I didn't get to play as many computer games as we normally do. I had wanted to set him up on the MagNext Virtual web site so that we could play each other in the MagNext Arena after he went back home, assuming that he could get my mother's computer to work long enough to do so. Unfortunately, I never got to do that.

The only game we really got to play was Marine Park Empire. For those of you who are unfamiliar with that game, it's one of those simulation games. You have to basically build your own Sea World or Busch Gardens and then keep all the guests, animals, and employees happy. Apparently, you also have to watch out for homicidal veterinarians. One of Chandler's elephants got sick so he had to add a veterinarian to the park. Well, after the vet treated the elephant, he walked over to the penguin cage and began shooting all the penguins, one by one. Chandler couldn't figure out how to stop him from killing the cast of Happy Feet so he wanted me to build my own park this weekend and see if I could figure out how.

His request reminded me that we never got around to playing MagNext Virtual like I had wanted us to. It also got me wondering, "Has my MagNext avatar withered and died the way my online Neopet probably has?" The good news is it hasn't. I logged onto the game today and found out that my avatar, which in MagNext Virtual is called a sphere, is alive and well. As you can see from the screenshot, her wings haven't even wilted. It's a good thing, too. My fumble fingers need all the advantages that they can get when playing video games, and I wouldn't exactly call wilted wings and a half-dead sphere an advantage.


I still haven't worked up enough nerve to play anyone in the Arena other than my nephew so I headed to the back of the map, where the single player games, the Spheron Speed Challenge and iCoaster Madness, reside. My first go at the Spheron Speed Challenge was shabby at best. I didn't time the gauge just right so my MagNext car, which looks like it is built out of actual MagNext magnet pieces, crawled down the raceway. It was so slow that if a virtual Keanu Reeves had suddenly jumped on the side of the car and told me that there was a bomb on my MagNext car, we would have both blown up. My second attempt was a lot better. I actually made it 47,556 meters, the farthest that I've gone yet. I'm sure that there are a lot of better MagNext racers out there, but I was proud of the score nonetheless.


Next I went to the iCoaster Room, where I had to replace missing track pieces before my spheres fell off the coaster. I managed to get through the game on the first go around with only one man down. I lost one on the second round as well, but I blame that casualty on Jon and Kate Plus Eight. I can only watch so many things at once.

With my newly acquired MagNext currency called Magz burning a hole in my sphere's pocket, I then headed to the MagNext Virtual Store to "pimp" my sphere. I bought a new look--pink with a white butterfly. Check it out:


The game seemed to be a lot easier to me this time around. That's one of the things that I like about it. It's a game that the whole family can play, no matter how skilled you are. Plus, the more people that you get to sign up in your family, the more Magz you will earn, and the more bling you will be able to buy for your sphere. If you're looking for an online game that you can enjoy with your kids, nieces, or nephews, Magnext Virtual is definitely one to try. Who knows. Maybe one of these days, I'll work up enough nerve and skill to challenge you to a duel in the Arena.

I Think That I'm Allergic to Georgia

I have had a sinus headache for going on two weeks now. Nothing seems to phase it. I've tried Benadryl, but it just makes me drowsy. I've tried Zyrtec D. It gets rid of the nasal congestion but not much else. I've taken Tylenol and Advil, but the only thing that they do is make my stomach hurt. I've rubbed peppermint oil all over my face. It offers temporary relief, but I'm starting to think that my skin is building up a tolerance to it, as the amount of time the cooling sensation lasts is getting smaller and smaller.

I just wish that I knew what was causing it. I know that I'm allergic to a lot of stuff, but most of those things, with the exception of dust and mold, tend to be outdoor allergens. Maybe I'm developing new allergies. I'm allergic to fish. Maybe once you're allergic to one type of food, you're more prone to be allergic to another type. With my luck it will be bread, ice cream, or Coke. Maybe I'm allergic to cleaning. Seriously, I come from a long line of messy people. Maybe my genetic makeup just can't take a clean house anymore. I'm probably also allergic to my neighbors, my sister, the Redneck Mobile, Stubby the One Finned Fish, the Bissell Pro Heat, the dirty dishes in the sink, my real estate agent, and the entire state of Georgia.

Okay, those are more stress triggers, but can you be allergic to stress? I don't really care what the answer is to that question at this point. All I care about is how to make the headache go away. I want to be able to touch my cheekbones again. I want to be able to lean over and shave my legs again without the world spinning. I want to be able to hear without everything sounding like it's underwater. I want to be able to breathe without feeling like spikes have been shoved up my nose.

Maybe I should try a nelly pot. That's one of those ceramic pots that looks kind of like an "I Dream of Genie" lamp. You use it to pour saline solution in one nostril and out the other. It's supposed to flush out the bacteria that can lead to a sinus infection. I saw it on The Doctors and Oprah last year. In theory, it could work. However, in reality, I'd probably just drown myself. I guess I'll just have to take another Benadryl instead.

While I'm on the Subject of Houses

One of these days, I'm going to have a house with several wall fountains that are strategically located throughout the house and directly connected to a water line, the way my ice maker is in the kitchen. That way, I don't have to spend half of my day refilling water bowls for my dogs.

I have never in my life seen a dog that drinks as much water as Bella. I swear she could out drink a St. Bernard or a Great Dane. Instead of drinking little sips throughout the day, she'll wait until she is parched (at least, I assume that's what she's doing) and then drink nearly the whole bowl. Usually, she times her "dying dog in the desert finally finds water" moments to coincide with bathroom breaks so Bailey and I have to wait on her. If we go to the door without her, she'll forget where we are and start howling the minute she swallows her last drop. It kind of makes me miss the old days, back before I bought my first doggy water fountain, when Bella would rather drink out of the toilet than the bowl. All I had to do to refill it back then was flush the toilet. Now it's pick up the bowl. Clean the bowl. Refill the bowl. Check the other bowl. Repeat process.

Forget the wall fountain. Maybe I should just keep a chair in front of the freezer and train the dogs to take their bowls to the chair, jump up, push them against the water dispenser, and refill them themselves. That might even get us an appearance on Pet Star.

Forgive Me While I Vent

Okay, so today might just be one of those days where I throw the lemons instead of making lemonade. I just went outside to see if the mail had come and noticed that my next door neighbor still had the third row seats from his minivan on the front porch. They have been there for at least a week. Now, in my opinion, having automotive upholstery on your front porch is a just a hop, skip, and a jump away from having a ratty old couch in the same place. Nevertheless, no one, and by no one I mean the homeowners' association, is making him move it. Can someone please explain that to me? Why is decorating your front porch with the third row of your minivan not a violation of the covenants, but having a for sale sign in your front yard is? Are you seriously going to tell me that my for sale sign is uglier and brings the value of the houses in this neighborhood down more than that pseudo-couch? Yeah, I didn't think so.

You know, if I wanted to be a narc, I'd report the eyesore right now, but I'm not going to. They're the only neighbors who occasionally speak. Nevertheless, my blood pressure is still going to rise every time I see it because it just reminds me of the type of double standards my homeowners' association has. Some people can break all the rules they want and never even get a slap on the wrist. Other people like myself can't even think of breaking the rules without being threatened with a $150 fine, and yet I wonder why potential buyers never make it past my driveway. It's as if the sign in the front of the subdivision says "Warning: Double Standards Crossing." It should. It would be a lot more fitting than the current name on the sign.

Junk Mail Begone!

Do you ever get tired of junk mail? I know that I do, both the paper variety and the electronic version alike. Unfortunately, I have this bad habit of waiting until I have several grocery bags of junk mail piled up in the wicker chair in my home office before I go through it and shred what needs to be shredded. As a result, it usually takes me an hour to process it all instead of only a few minutes. As for spam emails, don't even get me started. If I get one more email from some poor business person that wants me to deposit a check for them or from some company promising to enlarge a body part that, as a female, I do not have, I'm going to start screaming and never stop.

My neighbors should be happy that they won't be hearing my shrill shrieks anytime soon--at least not due to an unwanted onslaught of junk mail anyway--because the Privacy Council has found a way to End Junk Mail. If you sign up for the company's services on its web site, PrivacyCouncil.org, it will submit your phone number to the National Do Not Call List and remove your address from multiple mailing lists, including the Direct Marketing Association and Penny Saver's list. The company will also remove you from spam email lists and online reverse number directories.

Ordinarily, the Privacy Council charges an upfront fee of $9 for its services, plus a $6 per month fee if you want the company to continuously monitor your name and address and remove them from the junk mail lists should they appear on them again. However, right now the company is giving away free memberships to the first 500 people who sign up for its services. That means you can get rid of all those colon cleansing, pharmacy peddling, make millions with Google junk emails, not to mention the unsolicited credit card and insurance offers that fill your snail mail box, at no cost to you.

I wonder if when all the junk mail stops, I'll get any mail and email at all? I guess there will be always be bills to fall back on. Yippee. You know how I love getting them.

I Will Never Buy Another Bag of Harvest Baked Dog Food

Have you ever been shopping and something happened that made you want to come home and shower? That happened to me yesterday. I'm still searching for a dog food that reduces my cocker spaniel's constant itching. Like I said in previous posts, I'm convinced that she's allergic to chicken on top of a slew of other ingredients. However, because of her history with pancreatitis, I can't just buy any old, non-chicken based food. I have to buy low fat food as well.

I went to Petsmart around lunch yesterday to get a small bag of Lamb & Rice dog food. After about 10 minutes, I had my choices narrowed down to three--Blue Buffalo Lamb & Rice, Science Diet Naturals Lamb & Rice, and Authority Harvest Baked Lamb & Rice. The last choice had slightly less fat than the other two and was $3 less so stupidly enough I grabbed it instead of my normal standby Blue Buffalo. (I usually buy the Chicken Weight Control version, however.)

Now I noticed when I picked up the bag that there was something on the outside of the bag that looked like a spiderweb with some trash on it. I just assumed that it was what it looked like--a web--and brushed it off. I wasn't that concerned because I couldn't find a single hole in the bag. I also noticed that the bag smelled, but the ingredients listed salmon meal, in addition to lamb and lamb meal. From experience, I know that salmon based dog foods can often smell through the bag so once again I wasn't that concerned. I just wanted to get home before the Valentine shopping crowd got any worse.

When I got home, the dogs were jumping up and down because they saw that I had a new bag of food in hand so I went ahead and opened it. I then looked into the bag to see how big the kibble was, as Bailey, my Chihuahua, tends to have problems chewing the bigger pieces. Well, let's just say that he wouldn't have a problem chewing this kibble because I wasn't going to let him anywhere near it. The entire bag was swarming with huge gray bugs.

I let out this little yelp and closed the bag quickly. Whatever those things were, I did not want them in my house. Needless to say, I went straight back to Petsmart and asked to exchange the infested bag for the more expensive Blue Buffalo. The cashier apologized--"sometimes you just get a bag like that"--and allowed me to exchange it, but her assurances that it was just a one-time thing didn't stop me from checking the new bag in my car. Luckily, it was bug-free and didn't smell funky.

When I got home, I looked up "big gray bug in dog food" on the Internet. I think, based on what I read, that the bug was an Indian Meal Moth like the ones pictured above or some other kind of "pantry moth" and that the "spiderwebs" on the outside of that bag and the other Harvest Baked bags around it were the silk threads that the moths leave behind or the remnants of a cocoon. The bugs were definitely full grown. Since my bag didn't have any holes, I think the ones in my bag had to come from the manufacturer. Now here's the gross part. Those moths lay between 60 and 300 eggs at a time, and the life cycle of the adult--what was in my food--can be up to 300 days, so basically there could have been up to 300 moths in that bag for nearly a year!

No matter how many times I washed my hands and arms yesterday, I still felt dirty, and I kept checking and double checking the Blue Buffalo food for bugs, larvae, and eggs. I still haven't found any, but I'm still innately paranoid that I'm going to go open the bag one morning and have a drove of moths fly out a me. (Yes, I've seen too many SciFi creature features, but that's what I'm picturing nonetheless.) I've learned one thing from this experience. When it comes to dog food, I won't ever try to save $3 again, and I will never, ever buy anything from Authority or Harvest Baked.

Hoping that the Next Leap Will Be the Leap Back to My Old Lost

Does anyone else feel like Lost has become Quantum Leap on crack? For those of you who are too young to remember that show, it was about this physicist, Dr. Sam Beckett, who traveled through time to right what once went wrong, hoping that his next leap would be the leap back home. Throughout the show, he was followed around by this hologram, Al, who would tell him what year it was, who he was (Sam would leap into someone else's body, not just into another time period), and what wrong he had to right. I loved the show initially. I used to get a real kick out of the episodes in which Sam would wake up in nightgowns, frilly dresses, or sexy corsets, walk into the bathroom, and realize that, once again, he was a woman. However, after awhile, both the joke and the idea got old. At that point, I wanted Sam to leap home more than he did.

I'm starting to get the same feeling with Lost. I want to write TPTB and say, "Enough with the flashing lights. Enough with the headaches. Enough with the nosebleeds. Enough with Locke playing the roll of Sam and Ben the roll of Al. Enough with the quantum leaps, skips, and bounds. Just get back to the story already." Like Lost wasn't hard enough to follow when it was just flash-forwards, flashbacks, and a million and one connections between the characters. Now I have to figure out what year they're in every five minutes. Enough. Enough. Enough.

I would also like to advise them that, if they're going to continue the quantum leap thing, they really need to think it through a little bit better. I guess TPTB think that, by having Locke tell everyone that they can't change anything in the past, that the butterfly or domino effect won't occur. What a crock! The very fact that they are traveling through time and interacting with people who they didn't interact with before (for instance, Rousseau seeing Jin or Penny's father seeing the survivors long before Penny was even a dot on the horizon) ought to send the butterflies and dominoes flying. In theory, this could mean that some of them never even made it onto Ocean Flight 815 or survived the crash.

Of course, I'm not going to write that letter. It wouldn't do any good so instead I'm just going to be happy that we got a hug between Sawyer and Jin--aw, they're friends and a family now--sad that the geek won't get the girl this time, and hope that the Oceanic Six, Ben, and Desmond make it back to the island before the last five minutes of the last season of the show. Otherwise, we're going to have several seasons of Sawyer and Jin running around the island with Dharma-issue toilet paper shoved up their noses to stem the blood flow, and that's definitely going to downgrade their hotness factor quite a bit.