June 2012
10 posts
5 tags
Only use your car doing magic hours
A good friend of mine passed this advice along to me when I made the leap to funemployment: schedule all of your errands between 10AM and noon.
Although all of the hours in the day are theoretically free and clear, the only time to get anything done that requires a car are those two magic late morning hours. Beyond that: the day will fall victim to the traffic surrounding quick to-dos.
Every...
6 tags
If You are Kidnapped by an Eastern European Gang...
Admittedly, this advice is for one very specific (fictional) person: Kim Mills (as played by Maggie Grace in One of The Cinematic Achievements of Our Generation, Taken).
The Trailer for Taken 2 was just released this week, and I have to take a moment from my utter excitement to take a quick reality check here (on un-real people).
Kimmy, Kimmy, Kimmy. What are we going to do with you? First you...
5 tags
Get Your Car Washed
I don’t know where my aversion to getting my car washed came from. Maybe it was that I grew up in Upstate New York, and every time the car was washed (which only happened during the non-snowy months of May - September), it would rain. Perhaps it is the aggressive brushes. Maybe I just like the mystique of “there’s no way that girl can see out of her windshield: she must be one dangerous chick.”
...
4 tags
Give it a second chance. Just not a third.
This weekend, the restaurant debate began in earnest at my home. The kind that starts when you’re hungry, and can only think of the 5 places you go all the time, and not the 400 places you’ve been meaning to try and drive by when you are not hungry. Wanting to try somewhere that we don’t go every weekend (read: anywhere on 3rd Street), Red Medicine came up.
I went to the opening, and I...
5 tags
Send a card to your dad. Yesterday.
Oops.
Wasn’t it just Mother’s Day?
I have two sources to blame for my card arriving late: capitalism and my dad.
Capitalism really got me this year, in the form of a serious Father’s Day advertising push. The Father’s Day ads just started way earlier this year than in past years. I remember seeing the first one and thinking “oh is that coming up?”...
4 tags
Stop watering your sidewalk
It was like a scene from a romantic comedy. The kind where the quirky heroine (which I’ve been misspelling like “heroin” for the majority of my life) flits down the street happily, only to get caught in a sudden rainstorm. The perfect man who was watching in the background comes on screen, laughs with the heroine and offers her an umbrella (seems the rainstorm was not...
2 tags
Make us take a road test every 10 years
Anyone over the age of 25 living in an urban area needs to re-take the driving test.
At age 16, I was an outstanding driver. Really. Other than the second day of my permit, when I took a lefthand turn into oncoming traffic, panicked, went over a curb, popped a tire and came thisclose to a telephone pole, I was phenomenal. I learned all of the rules. I knew who yielded to whom on roundabouts,...
4 tags
Don't talk on behalf of your dog in public
This is obviously inspired by something I do on the regular. I’ve started to notice the looks.
I’ve developed a voice for Sammy. This voice is two-fold: voice as in personality and voice as in actual voice that I have assigned to him. The physical voice can best be described as Marge Simpson Junior, with the personality of a rambunctious five-year-old child.
The voice started...
3 tags
Join the National Bone Marrow Registry
Every now and then I try to be a good person. It’s rare, and it should be more often, so when I do I try to bring along as many other people in my efforts (to make up for the many missed opportunities I’ve had to be a good person).
One of the more recent times this happened was last year. Prompted by a friend in need of bone marrow, I joined the lot of my friends in signing up for the...
8 tags
Stop posting a hoax status
Finally…finally I figured out how to block Farmville and Mafia Wars status updates from my newsfeed. I am incredibly busy being unemployed, and do not have time to scroll through these updates each morning while I try to figure out which friends from elementary school that I haven’t spoken with in 20 years got engaged over the weekend.
But then there was this:
...
