Merry Christmas!

In my stocking was a Burt's Bees outdoor survival kit. One of the items inside that kit was a bottle of "The Defender" Herbal Insect Repellent. On the side of the bottle label it says, "Burt's Bees Herbal Insect Repellent is safe enough to apply with confidence to children and pets." The very next line says, "Not tested on animals."

Baby Moses

I bought a Moses basket from Wal Mart for $25 plus shipping to use instead of a bassinette, since we don't really have the room for one.

I am very disappointed to say that the instructions tell me to "Keep basket away from running or standing water."

HELLO! It's a MOSES basket! Do they not know the story?

More instructions for dummies...

My South Beach Diet frozen dinner included the following directions on the box.
"DO NOT EAT PRODUCT WITHOUT COOKING."

Who does that?! Here, honey, suck on a frozen piece of chicken breast!


And "CAUTION: PRODUCT AND PACKAGING WILL BE HOT!"

Well no kidding, I just took it out of the HOT microwave!


I'm sad because I know there really are some people in the world that are THAT DUMB.

Chopped and Screwed!

I'm officially old. I had never heard this term until today. I downloaded a beautiful version of O Come, O Come Emmanuel from iTunes. It's by The Martins and is on their Light of the World album. And I went to play it, when it started skipping! It's digital, why is it skipping?! So I started searching the iTunes site for troubleshooting help and found this:

"A purchased song sounds bad.
If a specific song purchased from the iTunes Store sounds bad, please follow the steps below to submit the problem directly to Apple. Hip-Hop lovers: Make sure your song is not a "chopped and screwed" version. If there is an issue at a certain point in the song, to expedite your request, please tell us the time code where the problem appears."

I'm thankful they had the link to Wikipedia for the definition!

"Chopped and screwed (also known as screwed and chopped, slowed and throwed, Houston music, H-Town music, screw music, and screw) all refer to a technique of remixing hip hop music by slowing the tempo and applying various DJ techniques such as skipping beats, record scratching, stop-time, and sending portions of the music through stand-alone effects to make a "chopped-up" version of the original."

It did make me laugh that they had to put the Hip Hop disclaimer in their "song sounds bad" troubleshooting section.

Lost in Transit...

'Tis the season for online shopping, fa la la la la.....
When you're 8 months pregnant, the idea of dealing with hordes of people at the mall, or just walking through the mall is enough to make you crazy. So this year I've resorted to a lot of gift cards and online shopping.

Today, I received one of the many things I've ordered. Inside the box that contained the goods I ordered was a catalog, and inside the catalog was a slip of paper that held this customer service information.

"UPS Claims and Lost Packages:

If your package is lost in transit, please call us and we will track your package for you. If the package cannot be found, we can file a claim for the cost of the contents and send you a replacement."

I'm pretty sure that if my package were to be lost in transit, that helpful little slip of paper would have been lost right along with it.

Did you know that round things roll?!

I have a new exercise ball. I was reading the instructions last night and cracked up at the following instruction.

Mount, dismount, and change position on the ball slowly. Due to the round shape of the ball, it could roll out from under the user and cause injury.

Dangit...I expected this ball to be stationary at all times! I DEMAND A REFUND!

Impulses

I was in the 99 cent store at lunch today. As I was standing in line, I was looking at the various items they had hanging in the impulse aisle. Would you believe there was a box of condoms there?!

I can't decide which is better, the fact that the 99 cent store sells condoms, or the fact that they were in the impulse aisle.

Nothing says impulsive like buying condoms from the 99 cent store!!!

Check Your Labels!

Brad was getting an evening snack of Double Stuf Oreo cookies and was looking for milk in which to dip them. I told him there was a small container of whole milk somewhere in the fridge. He found it and brought it to me asking, "Is this frozen or just bad?" I looked at it and smelled it and it was fine, but it was unusually thick. It wasn't frozen, and it also wasn't milk. It was heavy whipping cream!!!

Let's Throw Money in the TRASH!

I just got an email from one of the many online photo publishing places. The email was advertising postage stamps that you can customize with your very own photo! Ooh. While it may seem like a good idea at first, I personally think you might as well take the $17.99 (the cost for 20 $0.39 stamps) and throw it directly in the trash can. That's where those cute photo stamps end up anyway - I mean, who wants to keep a tiny photo that has been marred by the stamp cancellation machine? Oh, look honey, Junior looks just like Grandpa with the inked mustache under his nose!

$17.99 for 20 stamps is nearly 90 cents per stamp! If you want to spend extra money on postage, why not buy the breast cancer stamps or another fundraising stamp where the extra cash goes toward a good cause?

\rant off

Bubba Gump Shrimp

Brad called me at work today and said, "Whatever you make for dinner should probably..."
and I finished his sentence off in my head, "...not require the use of the stovetop."

Nope. Glad I let him finish, because what he said next cracked me up. "...require the use of several large tomatoes."

I had a craving for garden-fresh tomatoes on Sunday, so I drove 15 minutes across town to buy some. I got six giant beefsteak tomatoes from the farmers' market. Four days later I am down to one not-very-ripe tomato. Hey, I'm getting my lycopene. I mentioned last night that the last tomato wasn't ripe, so my darling husband went to a different farmers' market where they tantalized his taste buds with already-sliced tomatoes in salt mixed with onions. It turns out that he purchased twelve very large tomatoes from the farmer. Smart marketing on their part!

I'm starting to feel like Bubba Gump and his shrimp rhetoric, though...so far I've had sliced tomatoes with salt, sliced tomatoes marinated in balsamic vinegar and topped with mozzarella cheese, chopped tomatoes in fresh home-made guacamole, diced tomatoes marinated with garlic & olive oil and then tossed into angel-hair pasta, sliced tomatoes on a BLT sandwich, sliced tomatoes on a scrambled egg sandwich...I'm not sure what tomato dish or dishes I will concoct tonight, but I am sure they will be delicious...and rich in lycopene.

Do NOT Attempt This at Home

You'd think that if my Best Loved Slow Cooker Recipes cook book said you could cook meatloaf in a crock pot, then you could.

Ha. Dinner is now a charred mess lying in the bottom of the trashcan and the apartment smells like burned beef.

Mmm yummy.

Here's the Sushi pic

I never got around to adding the picture to the sushi post, so here it is. Please ignore my shadow in the photo - I took the pic with my camera phone and was rather limited in my creative ability.

Worth a Thousand Words...

I learned a very important lesson last weekend over the value of visual images in communication.

I threw a baby shower for a dear friend last Saturday afternoon. I ordered a cake from my favorite bakery and described over the phone what I wanted. A couple of weeks prior to ordering this cake, the same bakery had made the cake below for a coworker/friend of mine and I mentioned that. The man taking my order said he remembered the cake and they could do it again, no problem.

Here was my friend/coworker's cake -
















and here is what I ended up with -















Yes, ladies & gents, that is a giant baby head growing out of the lower right-hand corner of the cake. YIKES! I lied when I picked it up and the baker showed it to me, "OH, that's cute!" I hope my facial expression did not give away the fact that I was, indeed, horrified.

Fortunately, I know a little bit about fashioning 3-D babies from fondant (though I swear I could have used Fimo clay and no one would have known, as the baby I made ended up in the trash can after the shower...I mean, who really LIKES to eat fondant?!), so I was able to rescue the cake and restore it to a likeness of my original vision.



Oh, and in case you're wondering...yes, I did eat the baby head. But by the time I managed to remove it from the cake, it no longer resembled a head. No, as I was removing it, it fell apart (could have had something to do with the not-so-strategic places I had stuck two forks to try and lift the head off the cake), so by the time it made it to the plate, it was a heap of cake and frosting in no recognizable form. However, I am still quite thankful that the head was not made from red velvet cake.

It's Not a Holiday for the Grammar Police

So B & I went to Cici's Pizza for lunch (do not ask me why because I'll just blame it on hormones). This Cici's is located in a strip mall. There is a hair salon a couple of doors down from the restaurant. The sign claimed that it was "Ken's Salon's." I turned to B and asked, "Ken's Salon's WHAT?"

And then later this afternoon, I was in the grocery store and spotted a man wearing a t-shirt that stated the following, "You'd better buy me another beer because your still ugly." Your still ugly WHAT? Dude, you'd better have another beer because you're still stupid!!!

Why do they do that?

I was on my way to shoot a wedding last night and drove through Burger King for my requisite hamburger to tide me over until I could grab a bite at the reception. The order box addressed me and a woman's voice said, "Welcome to Burger King! May I take your order?" So I placed my order, and then a man's voice confirmed what I had requested. Why do fast food companies feel the need to have a recording greet the person at the order box? Surely it can't be a labor cost issue. How much more trouble is it for a real person, the person actually taking my order, to greet me?

Olfactory nerves

I think one of the most clever marketing schemes of restaurant companies is to enable potential customers to smell their food from miles away. Subway fans their freshly baked bread scent outside the store. You can smell an Auntie Anne's Pretzels or a Cinnabon location from across the mall. And steak places have that great grilled smell emanating from the kitchen into the parking lot, making your mouth water before you ever set foot into the restaurant.

So you can imagine my horror when I pulled up to the drive-thru speaker at Taco Bell and got a whiff of the COW MANURE FERTILIZER that had just been placed on the plants below the order box. The smell was so strong it made me gag and I thought I was going to lose my afternoon snack right there. Ooof. I know Taco Bell isn't known for its great-smelling food, but cow manure is carrying it a touch too far.

The good news is that my burrito didn't taste anything like the fertilizer.

New Management

Just thought everyone should know that the sushi located at the United grocery store in Abilene, Texas on Buffalo Gap Road is under new management.

Picture to follow this evening, hopefully. Sadly, Sprint PCS picture mail is currently down for routine maintenance (shouldn't that be done at some early morning hour when most of their users are sleeping?!). I am supposed to try again later.

Useless instructions

My Tangerine Sours Altoids tin has the following sentence on it, "Replace lid between use."

Word Cloud

My word cloud from this blog, courtesy of www.snapshirts.com .

Instructions for Morons

I was cleaning out the crisper drawer in our refrigerator. This drawer is the width of the inside of the fridge and maybe 6" shy of the depth of the fridge. Printed on the bottom of the drawer was the following, "Hand wash with warm water and mild soap only. Do not put in dishwasher." Um, ok, well, the drawer wouldn't FIT into most dishwashers!