Back in the day when I was a stay-at-home mom, there were always goodies around the house (cookies, cakes, pies, etc.).  And they were ALWAYS made from scratch by moi.

I’m a very good baker but, as I get older and there are no kids around, I don’t ever want to do it.  Especially because when I get the craving, I just want one piece of cake or pie and then the rest of the stuff would get thrown out.  My time is worth more than that to me!

This past weekend, Buzz and I were grocery shopping.  We passed a display of cupcakes.  I’m a sucker for cupcakes but not for the ones they sell in the grocery store.  The height of the icing is the same height as the cupcake and that leads to only one thing - icing up your nose!  You know it, don’t you?  There is no way to eat those things delicately!  So I decided to make my own.

Only my time is worth more to me now and I ventured down the cake mix aisle.  For less than $3.00, I picked up a plain old Betty Crocker vanilla cake mix and a tub of whipped chocolate icing.

Folks - I will never bake from scratch again!  Cake mixes and pre-packaged icing have come a long way since the days when my kids were little and they’re really, really good now!  (You might have already known this - I’m a wee bit behind the times!)

P.S.  I didn’t make the cupcakes (because my time is worth more to me now, blah, blah, blah) - I made a 13x9 cake.  80% of it is still in the kitchen threatening to die a slow, painful death.  Does anyone want a piece of cake???  It’s really good!  And made from scratch!!  (heh heh)

Yesterday, I sat on the sofa in the living room and watched rubbish.  For a couple of hours.  I was doing laundry and my hands hurt so bad that I didn’t want to do anything else.  I heated up my Happy Mitts (no, that’s not slang) and turned on the TV.

The TV was tuned to VH1 and Kid Star Parents Exposed was on.  I secretly like watching this kind of thing so I watched a little of it (Buzz was exercising).  Before I knew it, my hands were being heated and soothed and my mind was turning to a bit of mush as I watched two episodes of Kid Star Parents Exposed, followed by an episode of Best Week Ever and finally Web Junk 20.

After that mind-numbing experience, I worked on my school work today and tried to feed my mind a bit, since I had abused it so badly yesterday!  I think I’ve had my fill of bad TV for a long, long time!!

OK, this story is just weird.  It’s a true tragedy that this baby ended up in a bag in the river and a real miracle that she’s still alive and healthy!  But it amazes me to read what the mother said…

Now there’s some logical thinking - you don’t have enough money to raise the child, so go find some people who don’t even have a home.  Surely they have the wherewithal to provide for her! 

Sheesh.

So many things are on my mind this morning!  Way too much for a Monday, that’s for sure!  Let’s see…

• Today is my niece’s birthday.  Happy birthday, Cindy!! I remember when she was born.  I was 10 at the time and what a weird thing for me to experience!  I was the baby of my family and my sister was living with us when Cindy was born, so what a shock to my system to relinquish the role of the baby.  I didn’t really understand what was going on, but right around the time she was born, Sesame Street aired for the first time.  If she hadn’t been living with us, I probably never would have seen Sesame Street until my kids were born, so that’s good, huh?

• Last night, my youngest came over to visit and do some laundry.  Along with the laundry, he brought the lip ring that was pierced through his lower lip.  It doesn’t look bad and I like it.  That’s not the reaction I would have expected from me.

• Starting two days ago and still going, my hands are wracked with pain.  Throbbing, shooting pains through both hands.  Severe pain.  It’s hard to use my hands at all.  What the heck do you think that is?  I hesitate to meditate on this because of all of the “House"-watching we’ve been doing.  It’s probably vasculitis or tularemia or some sort of parasite, right??  If I see those three younger doctors coming toward me, I’m running!!

I decided to put the guilt in the extended entry.  That’s the nature of guilt.  You want to hide it…

• For some reason, I’d been running a list of things through my head that I’ve done in my life that caused me a lot of guilt.  They won’t leave so I’ll list two of ‘em here and maybe they’ll vamoose:

1.  When I was eight months pregnant with my first son, we had my parents over for dinner.  My mom was helping to carve the chicken and the electric knife dropped.  She tried to catch it and sliced her thumb.  I found spots of my mother’s blood in my kitchen for a long time after that.  To this day - 23 years later - she still can’t use that thumb much.  I feel guilty about that because I should have been carving the chicken. 

2.  When my first child (the same one who wasn’t quite born during my first guilt trip) was a baby, I went swimming with him and thought I could handle him in the deep end.  He went under and started to sink but I couldn’t reach to the bottom and it could have been the end.  But my niece (whose birthday it is today) was in the pool at the same time and she was near me and as I started to go under again, I thrust my son into her arms and nothing bad happened.  Just a big giant scare.  But it could have been the worst thing ever and it would have been my fault.  Me - the child’s mother. 

Those are the biggies that have been on my mind.  Why would I be thinking about them now when these things happened 22-23 years ago??  Just the lovely way my mind works, I suppose!

So, how was your weekend?

I wasn’t going to post this (I’ve had it drafted for about two months) but what the heck?  It’s an honest-to-goodness, real-life story of what happened to me.  And it frustrated me all over again when I re-read it.  Harumph!

Oh, and happy weekend everyone!! 

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Remember my rant about the order I placed with shop.mlb.com?  Here’s how that all came to an end.

I called three more times, trying to get in touch with a real person.  I finally did it by just confusing the heck out of their automated menu system.  I kept hitting invalid keys.  The first time I tried that, it just told me that it didn’t understand me, contact them through the website, and it hung up on me!  But I persevered and finally got through.  Naturally, by the time I talked to the person, I was completely peeved and I don’t think I was very nice but I cancelled the order.  He told me he wasn’t sure it would go through since it might have shipped.  I told him I didn’t think so and, no, he couldn’t do anything else for me, they’d done quite enough already!

Then I got home and got an e-mail from Customer Service.  The rest of the story is in the extended entry, if you care to read it.

Here’s what the e-mail said:

Dear My-Real-Name:

Customer Service
shop.mlb.com

See that line that says “If you have any questions
about your order, please reply to this email or call Customer Service
at 888 6527467.”?  I replied to the e-mail.  This is what I said:

I was greatly dissatisfied with the service.  I got no satisfaction until I forcefully made my way to a customer service representative by phone today and cancelled the order.  This was the most frustrating online purchase transaction I’ve ever experienced.  Your customer service response to my e-mail query was totally unsatisfactory, as it told me the same things that were on your FAQs, which did not apply to my situation.  And it stated that if the response did not answer my question to call Customer Service.  The e-mail did not even supply a phone number!  I had to log back into the site and search for that - which was not easy to find.  Your phone menu service was completely unsatisafactory, as it told me only the same status as your online service, with no estimate for delivery.  You also make it completely difficult - almost impossible - to reach a live person via phone.  I actually had to confuse your menu system (after calling back three times) before it would transfer me to a person - there is no menu option to be transferred to a representative.  I can’t express to you my level of frustration over this transaction.  You wasted my time and failed to deliver something that I was told for 13 business days was available.  I will NEVER shop at this site again.  I expected something much more professional from something associated with Major League Baseball.

This is the reply I got back:

Dear Valued Customer,

Best Regards,
Customer Support at www.shop.mlb.com

You have got to be kidding me!  They TOLD ME I COULD RESPOND TO THE E-MAIL!  And I know what would happen if I called the Customer Service line - I couldn’t talk to anyone and, as I already know, there is no option for registering a complaint!!  Now I ask you, are these people the absolute best at frustrating customers or what??  I want to take out an ad in a newspaper and announce how awful their service was!  I have probably taken 2 years off my life from the level of frustration and stress I’ve gotten over this transaction!  I want some sort of satisfaction!  I just want them to know how truly terrible my experience was and all I can do is to suffer in silence! 

If any of you know anyone associated with shop.mlb.com, please let them know that there is one truly dissatisfied customer out there who has been stymied by their rebuffs and not happy about it!

This article reminds me:  once when I was very young, I had a rescued baby robin that I named Filibuster.  He fell out of a tree, I rescued him and put him in a shoe box full of soft things.  I fed him little tiny balls of bread and then he died.

That’s my experience with filibusters.  I’ll be watching this one a bit more closely.

(P.S.  When I was very young, I learned the word “filibuster” from the game, Careers, I think.)

Several things.

• I must start bringing my own bottled water to work.  I don’t like the filtered water here and $1.00 a pop for the bottled water from the vending machine will send me to the poor house soon.

• I had a Thai noodle, basil and steak salad for lunch.  It was very yummy!  I think I really like Thai food.

• It was an “All Kate, All Day” iTunes day today.  Spectacular!!  I can’t get enough of Kate Bush and sometimes I forget that.  Days like this remind me of what I’m missing!

I looked at my “fortune” today and it scared the bejeezy out of me!

Just thought I’d share…

*Click to enlarge*

Found at tessatoons.com

Everything, simply EVERYTHING is bothering me today!  I mean, right down to the clothes I’m wearing, the length of my hair and the length of my nails.  Bugging the shit out of me!

So I did what any sensible person would do.  I went and got my nails chopped down and I stopped at home and changed my clothes.  I need to try and keep my mind off my hair, though.  There will be no chopping off of my hair! 

Maybe I need to find a barrette…

I get these “health” tips delivered to my e-mail once in a while.  One of the tips I got gives this advice:

Cracking your car window before hitting the open road may protect your health.

Research suggests that air quality inside vehicles could sometimes be as poor inside the car as it is outside because of unhealthy organic compounds released by car components.

Now, I ask you - if the air quality is as poor outside as it is inside the car, why would cracking your car window help with your health?  Do people proof this stuff before they send it out?  There may be a reason why this works but it sure sounds dumb!

I had the most wonderful weekend!  And as I tell you about it, you will wonder why it was so wonderful but, if you were me, you’d understand.  Here are the highlights:

Friday - comfy clothes, a couple of drinks, Donato’s, awesome music while we waited for the food, “Beyond the Sea” (which was great, by the way), drank and drank and drank some more, and then finished up the night with some blasting music in the basement!  (I totally love music nights but they lead to trouble the next day...)

Saturday - aspirin, greasy breakfast food (Sausage McGriddles, Statia - no eggs, no cheese - just sausage and griddle cakes - come on!  There’s nothing wrong with them!!), nap, Wendy’s for the final cure - cheeseburgers, hot bath (complete with bubbles and candles), Flyers game and then we went to bed early.

Sunday - donuts!  (We NEVER do that!!), bills - paid off both cars and one credit card (this is going to make quite a difference in our monthly lives!), found an amazing Mexican restaurant (we took half the food home for dinner) and then made our annual, let’s-buy-a-lot-of-booze trip to the liquor store, where we bought a lot of booze.  We’re well stocked and we now own both of our cars!  Yippee!!  After only seven years of car payments!!!  (It’s about damn time!)

So, yeah, that’s what I call a perfect weekend.  How was yours?

Go, Pittsburgh!

I knew all along but now you all know…

Courtesy of my amazing husband.  I thought I’d be embarrassed by this and I am to a certain extent.  (That list of songs most played is odd and I don’t think it’s correct.) But here it is - the iTunes meme.

Total number of tracks: 6962

Sort by song title:
* First Song: ‘39 - Queen
* Last Song: π - Kate Bush

Sort by time:
* Shortest Song: Station Break - John Hartford (0:14)
* Longest Song: Atom Heart Mother - Pink Floyd (23:44)

Sort by album:
* First Song: One More Time from ‘¡Viva el Amor!’ - The Pretenders
* Last Song: Across the Universe from ‘Young Americans’ - David Bowie

Top 10 Most Played Songs:
1. The Bells of St. Mary’s - Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans
2. Somewhere Only We Know - Keane
3. Break Your Heart - Barenaked Ladies
4. One Big Line to the Top of the Sky - Darcie Miner Band
5. December Will Be Magic Again - Kate Bush
6. Another White Dash - Butterfly Boucher
7. So Damn Lucky - Dave Matthews
8. Mad World - Roland Orzabal
9. Don’t Drink the Water - Dave Matthews Band
10. Ah! Leah - Donnie Iris

First five songs that come up on Party Shuffle:
1. While My Guitar Gently Weeps - Beatles
2. Flinty Kind of Woman - Dar Williams
3. Aladdin Sane - David Bowie
4. Ex-Girlfriend - No Doubt
5. Collection of Goods - Collective Soul

Search for:
“sex”, how many songs come up?: 5
“love”, how many songs come up?: 496
“you”, how many songs come up?: 763
“death”, how many songs come up?: 6
“hate”, how many songs come up?: 17
“wish” how many songs come up? 20

I swear this is not representative.  Let’s see - how many Kate Bush songs?  148.  How many Dave Matthews songs?  102.  How many Burl Ives?  1.  Oh, wait - how did he get in there?  Anyway - stats is stats.  That’s what my iTunes wants you all to believe about me.  Who am I to argue?