Don’t Buy This

I bought this pseudo potato chip @ Costco because I thought it was similar to Baked Lay’s.  It wasn’t.  The freeze-dried stuff is really disgusting and it tasted just like raw potatoes, nothing like a potato chip. The individual bags don’t have that many chips but after eating 1 crisp/chip, I threw the rest away.  Luckily, I got the full refund.

Spending $$$

After I did my taxes and saw the refund number pop up instead of payment number this year, I went on a mini on-line spending spree.   I bought purses (3 to get free s/h) and bought a ticket to see the World Figure Skating  Championship.  Men’s figure skating is apparently not that popular as the final was scheduled on a weeknight and the tickets were heavily discounted to the point that the whole trip (event ticket + metro day pass) cost less than $20. (And it was nice that there were plenty of empty seats as I did not have to deal with arm rest hogs.)

Cameras with telephoto lens were not allowed so the camera function on my phone was perfect for the event. (I don’t have a camera so it’s a moot point but I saw plenty of folks in the audience with their big-ass SLR cameras/lenses and people using the video function on their cameras so maybe the whole camera policy can be ignored.)

ice rink before the free skate

Yup, I was in the nose-bleed section but since it was my first time inside the Staples Center, I didn’t really care.  Incidentally, I sat next to a figure skating fanatic on the bus ride home and she could not stop complaining about the fact that she spent $1000 on her tickets and the person next to her got her ticket for free.  So if you’re working in the downtown LA area, there are free skating event tickets to be had @ Starbucks near the Staples Center/convention center.

And as an early birthday gift (to beat the sales tax hike), I received a mountain bike last weekend.  I haven’t been on a bike in over 10 years and I am not altogether that confident that I won’t be hit by a car but it’s been fun riding my bike around during the daytime.  I have no stamina when it comes to cycling so the rides have been relatively short & I’m learning to shift gears, which is a first for me.  I commented to my dad that I tried shifting gears to slow down the bike when going downhill and that the speed never changed.   He laughed and said do I see a transmission on the bike?  I never said I was a mechanical engineer.

Go Shopping

If you’re in CA, sales tax goes up in less than 2 weeks so buy your taxable goods before April.   I’ve been doing my part by buying a ton of paper goods (paper plates, cups, towels, TP) and think the economists are misinterpreting the uptick in retail sales data since I won’t be buying taxable items for a while.

African Trivia

Another one for the ‘SC folks.  And if you couldn’t tell, I wasn’t too sure about #6.

Good Boyfriend

Here’s a picture of a good boyfriend.

Purses can get heavy so help out your significant other and carry their purses.

Dental Hygiene

Just want to give a quick reminder to everyone that is is very important to floss daily.  Not to toot my own horn but since I floss daily, I thought all adults over the age of 21 floss daily.  So imagine my surprise when my sister declared that it’s been a long time since she flossed and my father’s dental emergencies emerged recently.  I’ve been going to the dentist with my father the last couple of weeks because he had an abcessed tooth along with cavities under an old filling.  His abcess was under an old root canal and he had to have the tooth extracted*.  He didn’t realize the tooth had cracked and the abcess was there long enough to cause the jaw bone to degrade to the point that dental implant would probably not be an option for him.  So take a lesson from my father’s travails: go to a (good) dentist regularly and maintain good dental hygiene so that even if you need dental implants, you can at least have enough jaw bone to get implants.

* My father was adamant that he did not want to have his abcessed tooth extracted and claimed that after the initial diagnosis, his gums no longer bled, pain was gone and that the dentist wasn’t 100% sure it was an abcess to begin with.   I was insistent that he get his tooth extracted, which might have been influenced by my recent viewing of Ghost Town. Obviously, it was all psychosomatic since after getting a second opinion and the extraction, the true damage done by the abcess was greater than initially thought.

Math Illiteracy

I went to the mall today to return stuff and get money out of the gift cards with ridiculously low balances and wandered into Bath and Body Works because there was a sign that screamed 90% clearance sale.  Turned out the selection for the 90% off stuff wasn’t much but I rummaged through the make-up pile because it was 90% off.  Two teenagers appeared next to me and they squealed about the 90% off.  They then proceeded to have this conversation.

Teen 1:  “The blush is 90% off!  I could get tons!  How much is 90% off of $42.50?  You do the math.”

Teen 2: “I think it’s $8.00, no, $9.00.  This stuff is really cheap!”

I kept quiet for about 10 seconds before I gave them a tutorial on math.  I told them since it was 90% off, you’re paying 10%, and the only calculation you have to do is move the decimal point once to the left.  They thanked me when they realized the stuff was $4.25 but I don’t think they realized how horrified I was that American teens can barely do math.

New Year

I just logged on and didn’t realize WordPress added so many new features that I  stumbled around trying to write a post.  Price to pay for laying off the blog.  So here’s my purge of stuff I almost wrote in 2008 but didn’t.

• Urban Wildlife, no picture. I actually wanted to post a picture of a person riding horseback in Compton but I was on the Blue Line to Long Beach for a test and the test specified no electronic devices so I did not have my phone with me.  Incidentally,  if anyone else takes an exam with the city of Long Beach, you can take electronic devices with you because they will hold your electronic crap during the test.
• Lead in Baby Alpaca stuff.  My sister gave me a shawl/scarf from her trip to Peru and after trolling around the net, specifically overstock.com, I discovered a warning to CA residents that these items contain lead.  I’m totally not using the item…my sister, on the other hand, is still happily using the alpaca stuff she bought. Go figure.
• Ants.  The cold weather drove ants into my car so there’s another reason I don’t like my car.  I don’t eat or drink in cars but the few crumbs from granola bars that my dad ate were enough to entice them in.  But what really pissed me off was that in the garage, my dad’s much dirtier/messier Sienna went untouched by the damn ants.  The ants would have found way more crumbs and candy to boot in his car so I’m gonna deduce that the fit of Hondas suck compared to Toyotas.

I’m not doing NYR’s for ‘09.  I kept maybe 1 from ‘08.  I actually made progress on actually finishing books but really, it wasn’t worth it.  I found Dan Brown’s books to be incredibly boring and finishing Angels & Demons did not change my opinion.  (I saw the Da Vinci Code, and borrowed both the audio book and print edition to figure out what the hype was all about.  SNOOZE!)  I’m sure the books I didn’t finish before sucked and that’s why I didn’t bother to finish them.  Lesson learned.

And in case anyone is wondering why I’m single, this might be a clue why.

10 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Poor (Failure) Take the test!

(I just imagined how I would be if I were married and I thought I was cheating a bit with few of the choices but obviously, it was for naught.)

More taxes…

While I’m glad the election is over, I can’t believe people here in LA passed Measure R.  I voted against this because even though I’m all for public transportation and better urban planning, LA already devotes 1 cent out of 8.25 cents of sales tax to transportation and I doubt the increase in sales tax would actually go towards better traffic/public transportation.  And on top of this stupid increase, Schwarzenegger wants to raise the state sales tax another 1.5%.  Then the sales tax rate here in LA will be 10.25%!  I will definitely be shopping in Ventura County for non-grocery items.

Cold-War

The circulation pump motor died @ my parents’ house so I endured cold showers for the last few days.  Check out the capacitor on the now dead unit:

West Germany

It was made in West Germany!

The new pump looks pretty much like the old unit, including the capacitor. (no picture of the new unit because I’m lazy and it looks exactly like the old one, except that I can’t tell the origin of the capacitor) I guess there’s only so much innovation that’s possible for residential plumbing or plumbing in general.  You can’t tell that there’s a 20+ year difference between the 2 units.