Eavesdropping

Overheard as Chad was putting Lucy in her crate last night for bed:

I know, Lucy, you don't really want to go in here, but Ellen says you have to. Don't take it personally. Sometimes she's just plain crazy. But we love her anyway.

I'm counting on you to be more sane than she is. Even though you're a girl, you don't have all of those weird hormones to make you nuts. Then there will be two of us.

Snacking at 6 a.m.

I was at the grocery store this morning at 6:30 buying donuts to celebrate that a colleague had her master's thesis accepted yesterday. Ahead of me in line was a woman buying Sunny Delight and a few other things. With her was a little boy, maybe two years old, in a stroller.

Whoa, I thought, she's really got herself together to be at the store with a kid at this hour of the morning. I had a hard enough time getting myself dressed!

I was pretty darned impressed until I saw her hand the cashier an open bag of BBQ potato chips to scan. When they were paid for, she handed the bag back to her child. Gee, what a nutritious breakfast.

I would wager that even my donuts were more healthy than that!

Snapshots

Don't expect to see any pictures of Lucy anytime soon. (Or Chad or me, for that matter.)

My good friend Sara, who works close to our house and checks on Lucy over lunch, tells me that today she got ahold of my camera and camera cord and absolutely went to town. This is partially my fault as I know she can reach the kitchen table but had a lapse in judgement this morning and didn't move it. Drat!

On the plus side, I really did hate that camera and I've wanted to buy a new one for awhile, even though it's less than a year old. On the downside, for starters, I'm frustrated that she did this. And I'm not really in the financial position to throw down a few hundred bucks for a new camera at the moment.

But I am taking suggestions on the best brands or models to buy, so please pass them along.

They kind of listened

Three years ago I spoke at a National Confectioners Association conference about consumer trends. One of the trends I talked about was the "retro" trend--Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony...shoot, even the Slo-Poke has made a comeback! But I did make one small request in case anyone was out there to hear it. I asked them to bring back the Tootsie Pop Drop, my favorite Halloween candy of all time.

They must have listened. Rachel found me a package of my very own Tootsie Pop Drops this weekend at a gas station on the way to our wine festival. Eureka!

I waited until today to open the package, barely able to contain my excitement. I am sad to say that they aren't as good as the original (though what is?). For starters, they aren't individually wrapped. I don't want to eat 24 pop drops at a time, people! And they are missing the best color of them all: pink, which I think was strawberry. But it is a step in the right direction.

Tootsie folks, if you're out there, you are very close to perfection. But, call me. There are still a few things that you don't have quite right.

Here we go again...

My history of losing things and then finding them is no secret. In fact, it's sometimes comical.

I have been looking for the Michael Clayton DVD we got from Netflix for, oh, about three weeks. After operating under the assumption that I would find it, I have come to the conclusion that I don't know where the stupid thing is and perhaps I even threw it away.

I have already written about how impressed I have been with Netflix--I love them. In marketing terms, one might say I'm a "brand advocate." At any rate, I figured this has certainly happened to people before, so I went to their website and figured out what to do if I lost a DVD. You can report it online and pay $20 (for them to replace it) and then they send you out another movie in your queue the same day. Easy enough. But I thought about it for five days in the hopes that I found the dumb movie.

This afternoon, I bit the bullet and admitted I lost it. I paid the $20, knowing full well that I would find it, but figured that was the price I'd pay for misplacing things. Besides, I've been paying to have three movies at a time when I've only had two at a time cause I can't find one!

Imagine my pleasant surprise: It turns out, their policy is, if you find the DVD within a year, return it for a full refund! Is that great service or what? Perhaps their CEO has an unfortunate habit of losing things, too.

The dog ate my homework

When I was a kid, I never used the excuse that the dog ate my homework. I mean, come on, like that actually happens.

Turns out, it does. This is a permit that I had filled out to send to the City of Alexandria.


Do you think they'll believe my excuse when I ask for a new one?

Blonde joke

Last year I replaced all the windows in my house with that expensive double-pane energy efficient kind and today I got a call from the contractor who installed them. He was complaining that the work had been completed a whole year ago and I still hadn't paid for them.

Hellloooo just because I'm blonde doesn't mean that I am automatically stupid.

So I told him just what his fast-talking sales guy had told ME last year, namely that in ONE YEAR these windows would pay for themselves! Helllooooo? It's been a year! (I told him.)

There was only silence at the other end of the line so I finally just hung up.... He never called back.

Guess I won that stupid argument. I bet he felt like an idiot!