My heart is with two of my friends today, both undergoing medical procedures - one her first chemo treatment, the other surgery. I hope they're doing well, and managing better than they expected. If anyone reading has any positive thoughts to spare, I bet they could use them.

To the person at Nature's Food Patch with the gold Lexus - just because I drive a compact car, that doesn't mean you can take both your space and half of mine. You have power steering - use it!

"Your" Pizza Shop on Missouri in Clearwater - Shawn and I met there for lunch today. The sauce is a little sweet, but still good, and very cheap, with a large, varied menu. They have a Monday & Tuesday special advertised: 1 topping large for $7.50.

Method's omop - excellent for regular cleaning. Still needed to get out the scrub brush for a few things, but that's more a messy husband than a deficient mop.

Coupon trains = love.

First - I upgraded my Gallery a couple days ago and didn't upgrade my modules and didn't notice my Image Block was broken. Oops. It's all better now.

Now - a tip I posted this on the INFP list, but forgot to post it here --

For casual coupon clippers - don't throw away (or recycle) unused coupons, even expired ones -- send them to overseas military bases where the commissaries accept coupons up to six months expired. For the more serious clippers, find deals and coupons on non-perishables (especially water) you won't use and stock them up for canned food drives.

Speaking of - in the past week I've saved $141 from couponing and watching sales - or $264 if you take into account that I spent $69 for $190 worth of goodies at Jo-Ann. We spent $2 for enough shampoo to last Shawn at least 6 months. I got myself a nifty new SkinVitalizer for $6 (or, really, free once you figure that we had $75 in CVS gift cards from prescription transfer coupons). Which, by the way, is really nice - my skin looked pretty all day, though I wouldn't try the thing in the morning before work - even using the non-exfoliating side of the pad, I'm blotchy for about 20 minutes after using it. On average we're saving about 30% on groceries. We can do better.

I also really am lusting after a sewing machine these days - pretty clothes for cheap! I've started buying patterns while they're on sale. Part of my Jo-Ann shopping spree was their sale on McCall's - all of their patterns were $1.99. They have the same deal on Simplicity patterns this weekend, and I'm pondering whether or not to spend the $14 for the 7 patterns I want of theirs. I'll have to start keeping an eye on fabric sales now that I have patterns to tell me how much fabric I need. By the time I get a sewing machine (maybe for my birthday?) I'll have everything I need to make a new wardrobe.

Yay!

When I originally taught myself to knit, it was the English (or Throw) method, and tonight I tried the Continental method after reading tons saying that it's much faster. Ouch! My left hand just starts hurting way too fast (also a problem for me in crochet, where the left hand controls as well). Continental casting on, on the other hand, is wonderful. The slowest part of knitting for me was casting on, now it's easy and quick.

I've been doing a lot of craftsy stuff again - last night I finished a WUA square and started the next one. I also finished my bath puff and started in on a back scrubber. Hopefully I'll finish another square and the scrubber tonight while Shawn's at work.

I also made a new hair garland (using dogwood stems) to replace my old one that's looking a little ratty. It's just going to sit on a shelf until the next Ren Faire, but it was fun to make.

My next project will probably be a plastic bag keeper. We recycle them, but they tend to build up all around the table before recycling trips. Or maybe I'll just make a bunch of bags and take my own. I wonder what Wal-Mart would do with that? I'd be happy to pack them myself but the way it's set up with those spinning bag holders, I'm not sure how that would work.

The past couple days I've been working on a crochet bag. It was my first experience with crochet decreasing, and it didn't turn out so well. I'm still not quite sure what went wrong, only that one side is, well, bigger, than the other. It's also more circular and not as deep as I expected. It'll be a mixed media recycling bag, and is fine for that, but I'm still puzzled.

I'll just have to make the pattern again and see if I can figure out what went wrong. Practice, eh?

It looks like Blockbuster Online might be raising prices.... again. At least for those of us who want Total Access. And really, I'd be fine with that, if the service was good. It used to be good. These days not so much

For example, if you've seen the advertising for Total Access, you've seen that it says if you turn your DVD in to the store, the next in your queue [hahaha, we'll get to that later] ships out the next business day. Not so! Ours usually ship 2-3 business days, which is actually slower than returning them through the mail. This is something else I'd be fine with, provided they wouldn't lie about it.

Their website, even after the revamp, is still awful. Their customer service is worse.

But the worst part, the part that makes me want to go running for Netflix, is that they don't ship movies in queue order, presumably because they send the movies at the closest distribution center "first" so your wait time is as short as possible. But no, it's not only that... if they don't keep a copy of the movie you want at your local distribution center they just don't send it to you at all. I've found this out in the past couple days. The "out of order" order has always bothered me, but I didn't realize until a couple days ago that they just refuse to ship the films they're skipping, period. If you reduce your queue to just the title you want in hopes that they will send it to you regardless of your wait time, you just won't get any movies at all. I actually haven't received any since we turned in at the store on the 11th. When I emailed customer service about this I received the following:

The "Available" status indicates that these movies are available in one or more of our distribution centers. If the distribution center that the movie is available at isn't within a 1-3 day shipping zone from your house, we will go on to the next movie so as not to interrupt your service. When the movie becomes available at a distribution center that is within 1-3 days shipping zone of your house, it will be sent out.

In other words, if it's not there, you can't have it. And you can't search their site by distribution center, so you have no idea what you actually can and can't get.

I don't suppose that it helps that I followed the Rep's directions and rebumped my queue to over 30 titles, none of which are what I really want to watch right now, and still nothing's shipped.

At least with Total Access being free you could take the crap you ordered from the site (just to get something - anything - actually shipped) and maybe exchange it in store for what you want that they won't ship, but now they're going to charge extra so you can exchange the half of the movies you receive that you don't really want.

Uh, yeah. No. Just... no.

The screen is dead, or at least unviewable. You can almost see the white things, but really, it's so dim you can't see much. I've got it hooked up to our old 13 inch monitor at the moment to back up things to Shawn's computer so we can send it in. It's a slow, slow process over wireless. Luckily it's still under warranty. I thought it wasn't when we bought our cord, and now I'm kicking myself for that $80 we didn't need to spend. Ugh.

Anyway, the problem seems to be with the button that works not unlike the refrigerator door - it dims the screen when you close the laptop. Originally when it started intermittently dimming, if I pressed that button several times it'd flicker and come back on. Since I still have power issues (where it's plugged in but I still have to plug and unplug to get it to recognize the fact), and both the cord and the button are in the same area, I'm betting it's the same motherboard issue the computer's had since we bought it. We'll see. Thank goodness for warranties.

I have a new shiny laptop. It's refurbished, cheap, with no extended warranty. It's sporting an integrated chipset, and its "256MB" of video memory is half "Hypermemory" making my 1GB of RAM somewhat less than 1GB. I'm glad I didn't go cheaper and make it 512GB.

Still, it seems to run WoW better, at least as far as I could tell from a quick run through Shattrath City to check for lag, and to see that pretty much all my mail's been returned. Yeah, I need to play more than once a month.

It's also Vista. Which I'm not quite sure about. It seems much less stable than XP. Firefox crashes frequently (twice during this entry). I'm used to that happening almost-never. The Control Panel seems to bite it a lot, too. The "Windows Defender" is every bit as annoying as the Mac commercial makes it out to be. And coming back from hibernation takes twice as long as on the old HP. The sidebar was neat but when I saw the amount of resources it used, I opted out of it pretty quickly.

Setting up the network was a hassle. I had to set my router to broadcast our SSID long enough to get it on the list. Before I did that, it took me on an endless loop of clicking to use the existing SSID and ending back on the choose a network screen.

The control-alt-delete screen is nice in principle, but stupid in layout. Shouldn't reboot or Task Manager be the top options? Not bottom of the list or hidden in a corner?

On the other hand, it's pretty. The preview-in-window is nifty. The folder handling is really good (other than "Group By", "Sort By", and "Stack By" needing to be in the "Organize" menu and not right-click only). Nicer built-in screensavers, too.

For the computer itself, the display is a lot nicer, and I have a ton of pretty wallpapers. I've been changing it every day. I uninstalled Google Desktop but I might reinstall it and see if the gadgets from that work better for me than Vista's sidebar.

If I remember to bring the camera up tonight, I'll take a few pictures. The laptop itself is pretty, too, and much lighter. And it doesn't overheat (so far) - a big, big plus, and probably accounts for the performance boost with WoW.

Our old laptop gets dropped at FedEx to be shipped for repair tonight. It'll be Shawn's when it comes back. Snuggle while playing - YAY.

One of my "quotes of the day" was the following by Rita Mae Brown:

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.

...Oops.