Shoppy Madness

I am all for discounts, free gifts, and stackable coupons.

With the holidays coming up and Black Friday today, I went around and did a lot of Christmas shopping, as well as apartment shopping and new computer shopping.

I'm not an impulsive buyer, but there was just so much stuff I needed enough that whatever discounts were available today pushed me over the edge.  So I have a new computer coming, as well as some furniture and kitchen stuff, teas and mugs (some for me, some for gifts) and a few other random little things I figured I might as well pile into the cart.

I took advantage of a lot of 50% off type deals, my computer came with a free $150 gift card (which will eventually get me a brand new iPad, methinks), and Amazon is always claiming you're getting a discount.  Plus I had a lot of no-interest stuff going on with both Apple and Amazon, so the $2000 I spent won't overwhelm me.  Ha ha ha ... oh dear.

That's about what I make in a month.  It'll be okay.

And I still have stuff in my "saved for later" cart.  Maybe that'll be stuff I get for my birthday?  Once my current Amazon purchase is all paid off.

Happy Thanksgiving

Today I am thankful that I get a 4-day weekend instead of having to work Black Friday or worse, work Black Friday AND Saturday (and possibly Sunday too).

And I am thankful that I get paid for today and tomorrow.

Yep.

Famous on the Internet

I'm not really famous on the Internet.  That's a title reserved for  the likes of Jenna Marbles and the Numa Numa Guy.  But I've been in situations where people I met in real life for the first time who knew who I was already.  It was like ...

"Hi, I'm Bunny."
"Yeah, I know."

So that was weird.

I've also had this weird problem with a fanfiction I wrote ages ago.  People turn up wanting a copy of it.  Five, ten years after I wrote it.  I once had a reader send me fanart from my fanfiction.

That was weird too.

Part of the problem (okay, the WHOLE problem) was that ff.net took down their "adult" section some years back (before, I guess, restoring it and blessing the world with 50 Shades of Porno).  My story was "adult" and so it disappeared with the category.  I tried to censor it to an "R" version, but it was just so hard because it was SO FUCKING LONG OH MY GOD HOW DID I WRITE THAT MUCH ABOUT STREET FIGHTER CHARACTERS?  So it disappeared into the ether.  Someone had requested to host it on their site with Street Fighter fanfictions, and that too disappeared at some point.  2001 was a long time ago.  I feel old.  Etc.

Often I think about restarting it.  I remember some bits and elements of the plot, and I wonder if I shouldn't just try again.  It could be a fun distraction from my own novel, and I love me some Street Fighter.  And there are people on the internet who might appreciate it.

It's just a thought.

Dear Capcom,

All I want is a Street Fighter lunchbox.  Why is this so hard?  You have a Zazzle store.  Zazzle has lunchboxes.  Why can't I get a design on a lunchbox?  Why does this violate Street Fighter law?

I also can't get a case for my iPhone or iPad.  It's like you don't care or something.  Just update the thingy!  It's not that hard!

Okay, I'm done complaining.

I do (otherwise) like the setup they have.  I like all the customizations you can do to certain items.  Changing the image or the colors or whatever.

Like this one.  Black and red?  Pfffft.  Amateurish.  I think pink and green really go with the BRIGHT Street Fighter Alpha color palette.

In other stupid news ...

I must be the last person on the planet to get an iPhone, but it's sooooo pretttttty.  I fucking love it.

It's pink.  (Of course it is.)  And it has battery life.  My old phone was giving me about 8 hours on standby and 30 minutes of use.  So ... being able to use a phone (THAT HAS MAPS RUNNING ALL DAY LONG<----AMAZING) and having it not die is pretty cool.

I had my android for 3 years almost exactly.  (I bought it on the 9th of December or so.)  It was time.


My other funny news is that I still have that darn macrocytosis.

Doctors have been telling me this for YEARS.  YEAARRRRRRRS.  Must have been almost ten years ago that the first doctor told me my red blood cells were big.  And now about half a dozen have told me this.

I know.  Yes.  They're fat.  You keep up talking like this and my erythrocytes are going to get some kind of disorder.

(No one really talks about my poor leukocytes, which is why I have to get these stupid CBCs in the first place.  Apparently that means they're doing fine.  But I imagine they'll start to develop a complex too.  I mean, they're already lashing out.  It could get worse.)

Week 1 - Sleep Deprivation Level: 4

My first week at the new job is finished.

I can now go into the system and change an address.

An awful lot of my "training" right now involves me sitting and watching people do stuff.  Which would be even better if my brain would stop going into "sleep mode" all the time.  I've tried coffee, I've tried TWO teabags, I've tried sugar ... really there's nothing that can keep me awake except moving around and doing something.

It would make more sense to me if I were getting an insanely tiny amount of sleep, but I'm not.  The latest I've gone to bed is 11:00.  Mostly it's been anywhere from 9-10:30.  One day I woke up at 7 due to an alarm mishap, so I even got an extra half hour of sleep that day.  And yet ... every single day I am sooooo sleepy.  All day.

I keep hoping my brain and body will get used to it, but I remember that summer where I had two summer classes in a row (that is, two sessions one after the other) that were both early.  I had to get up at 7 allllll summer to do Hawaiian Studies and then Pre-modern Japanese Literature.  My body never got used to it, and once that summer was over my circadian rhythms went right back to their preferred "wake up at 10:30" cycle.  And the weird thing is that I can go to bed at 2 in the morning and wake up at 10:30, but if I go to bed at 10 in the evening and try to wake up at 6:30?  NOT THE SAME THING.

Ugh.

So this weekend is dedicated to sleep.

Sleep!  That's where I'm a viking!

That's probably not good.

I went on Amazon and bought a case of soup.  It arrived, I went home for the weekend, came back and opened up my box.  Almost all of the cans were crushed to some degree, with a few merely dented.  Two were in good condition.

Amazon is pretty good about resolving this stuff, so they sent me a new case right away.

Five cans were undamaged.  Out of twelve.

They gave me a refund.

Nothing was really wrong with the box that I could tell, and after the second case showed up in poor condition I went through and tried to figure out which cans might still be safe.  Everything I read online said that if you could move the top, bottom or sides of the can then it had lost pressure and was no longer safe to eat.  But except for a few cans with small dents, all of the cans could be pressed in and out.  Even the ones with no dents.

A few--about eight--were in pretty bad shape and the seal had obviously been compromised.  But when I pressed on the sides of the totally "fine" cans, they had some flexibility to them.  I went in my closet and pressed on a few cans to see what was the issue, if those were also flexible, but they weren't.

So I shot an email to the company asking if this is a thing or if any of this soup is safe to eat.  I can only imagine that somehow the cans had some space in them and then that's how they were able to be dented so easily in their original cases.  Maybe from the weight on top of them.  Seems weird though.  I see this soup in the store all the time and there's nothing wrong with it (aside from being obscenely expensive).  I can't have just gotten the only two bad batches.  


I hate having to do all this stirring up a fuss.  I just wanted some soup.  At a slight discount.  (Seriously, this stuff is expensive at the store.  I hate having to return things or email customer service.  But at least Amazon is pretty quick and efficient about this stuff.

Maintaining Music

Recently because I've been cooking so much, I've been listening to a lot of the music I've had on my computer for however many bazillion years.

Making goulash, I listened to Dir en grey.  (And not because goulash seems like something Kyo would vomit up in a music video.)

I still maintain that the opening to Increase Blue sounds like "YOUR BROTHER JOE!"  I refuse to look and see what it really is or believe anything else.

Baking pumpkin bread I turned on my Schwarz Stein/Kaya playlist.  (Because I guess ... pumpkin bread warrants a more "gay techno" ambiance?  Pecans are drag queenish?  FFS, I don't know why.  I got tired of Deg after listening to it for an hour the day before?)

Anyway, it struck me how much Epicurean STILL sounds like Mortal Kombat music to me.


That's all.

I guess Kaya is releasing a new album in a bit.  I used to be really up on all this.  When I got sick of the fandom/people it really pulled me out of the loop.  Unless you're going to the concerts you really don't know when shit's gonna be released.  Ah well.  Nothing as of late has really moved me all that much, and I imagine Gackt is still just releasing rereleases of rereleases.  

Today I made pumpkin bread.

I tried to make some weird paleo blueberry bread recipe yesterday, but the texture was gritty, it didn't want to bake all the way through, and the blueberries gave off a lot of liquid that basically ruined the bottom of it.  Nice idea in theory, but just didn't work out.

Today I was determined to not be discouraged by my blueberry disaster, and I set off to make another pumpkin-flavored thing.  Because you can't go wrong with pumpkin-flavored things.

It took me forever to find a recipe to use, since I had certain ingredients but not others.  I took a simple recipe for pumpkin bread and added vanilla, pecans, and a bit more pumpkin pie spice than called for.  I also subbed out the oil for butter, since I don't keep vegetable oil, but I had a stick of butter left over.  Unsalted, of course.

The result was pretty good.  I also cut back on the sugar so it would be more of a bread and less of a cake, so it's not sweet-sweet, but sweet enough.  And it was my first time taking a non-gf recipe and subbing in flour + xanthan gum.  I've made mixes of course that use xanthan, but I'd never just done it on my own.  It's amazing how springy and spongy the bread gets when you add the xantham gum.  It's almost weird, like I made something gluteny.  I'm used to things crumbling and falling apart.

After my goulash episode yesterday I was left with a spatula that smelled like beef and onions, so I bought a new one today.  I like having new kitchen things.  I find myself wanting MORE and MORE new kitchen things.  A stand mixer, a waffle iron (or something with plates you can swap out), some more mixing bowls ... all sorts of stuff.  The stuff you usually get because you're getting married or some BS.

I moved across the ocean three times.  That's why I don't have this stuff.  But I need this stuff.

But I also need a new phone and a new computer, so kitchen appliances will have to wait.

Wait, what?

Who the fuck cares that your turkey is gluten free when it's on a fucking bread roll?

In other stupid gluten free news, I bought a thing of garlic today.  It literally contains garlic.  Like ... garlic.  Just garlic.  But on the back it says "gluten free."  I have a theory that any company that prints the words "gluten free" on the label just wants to charge extra for it.  Don't get me wrong, I like seeing the "certified GF" logo or "gluten free" on a package.

But it's fucking garlic.  If it has more than one ingredient, and one of those ingredients is something ambiguous like "natural flavor" or "modified food starch," then perhaps I will say, "Thank you Company People!  Now I don't have to put this product down in sadness!"

Next thing you know fruit in the produce section will all have "gluten free" stamped on it.  And all the plain, raw meat in the meat department.

Changing Jobs

I've only held four jobs in my lifetime.  So far two of them have been very short-term.  I'm going to be embarking on a fifth here in a week or so, and I hope it will be much, much more long-term.  Once again I'm going to be doing something I've never really done before, so I'm hoping to find myself well-suited to it, and less discouraged/anxious about going to work in the morning.

Oh shit.  "In the morning."  Yeah, I'm screwed.  I've never had an actual morning job.  I can get up and go to school in the A.M. like a champ, so I'm hoping I'll be the same with work.


The first time I changed jobs I gave my two weeks and my manager asked if I wanted to just not be on the schedule for the second week.  I thought that was a great idea, and it helped when I wanted to start my training in that second week.  Otherwise I would have had to put it off and start later and all that jazz.  It was, all-in-all, a very smooth transition.  Except for the part where I had to get my final paycheck and had no idea that they would hold onto it until I picked it up.  ("What method did you select during hiring?"  Holy crap, guy.  I don't remember what we did during hiring.  That was almost four months ago and I filled out a lot of forms at that time.)

This is a similar situation, where I had a job for a short period of time and managed to find a better one while still at the old job.  The transition has been ... much less smooth.

This is just a reminder.

When you call a phone number--any number, really, but especially one for a business or entity--try not to be pissed off.

I know it's tough.  You ARE pissed off.  You want to yell at someone.  But yelling at some peon who works on the phones is going to accomplish exactly nothing.  Let me give you some scenarios:

CSR hangs up on you-->  Nothing accomplished
CSR engages and yells back at you-->  Nothing accomplished
CSR meekly takes your abuse, but is now totally disinterested in helping you-->  Nothing accomplished
CSR has no power to address your issue-->  Nothing accomplished

Either you are just pissing someone off who might have been able to help you, or else you're wasting your breath on someone who can't do a damn thing.

I think we get spoiled by the idea that "the customer is always right."  And sometimes we take that to mean that we can heap abuse on whomever we like and we'll get a coupon or get our situation taken care of faster than it would be otherwise.  And we forget that thing someone once said some thing about honey and flies.