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same_skyWe went to my parents for the weekend, and ended up staying an extra night so I could go with my mom for her MRI yesterday (back/hip pain) It was a good weekend, though I came home with some sort of illness that has yet to make itself fully at home, but has given me plenty of acheyness and misery already. Advil is a truly remarkable invention. I love it with a fiery devotion. It should make for a short week, though, unless the rest of them are also consumed by my plague. Our anniversary is on Friday and the kidlet is heading to my mom. We're going to have four! days! home alone. We were going to go somewhere for the weekend but I think we talked ourselves out of that last night. Knock on wood that we're all healthy again by Thursday.
Evie just told me a story about The Bad Pig's Christmas, where some bad pigs were going to celebrate Christmas the wrong way and they cut down some other pigs' Christmas tree! And those pigs were mad, and then they got another tree just like it and they were happy. hehe. I know I'm partial but I thought it was a cute story. It kind of gave me a David Shannon sort of vibe. As a book concept, it needs a little work but it's at least as sensible as some of the other junk we've read together over the years.
We have a bunch of large Walmart gift cards at the moment due to my current pastime of taking advantage of multiple credit card bonus offers* and we're coming up on the annual Sam's Club shopping spree that M's boss, S, sponsors every year. (I know I talk about this every year and I'm sure it makes people want to hit me since it's the coolest Christmas bonus I've personally ever heard of--and it's just PART of the Christmas bonus--but he gets a $500 gift card to spend at Sam's, with the restriction that it has to be within three hours on a certain Saturday--you go under, he keeps the remaining money, and if you don't finish up by eleven, you lose it. Theoretically. I doubt that's ever happened, but he does get gift cards back with cash still on them, which is INSANE to me because seriously, people, bring a calculator). While less practical than cash, it's awesome because how often do you get to spend $500 on something that someone else pays for? ANYWAY. It's all very festive and you see just about everyone from work while you're there. I was thinking tonight that we should totally go in and load a couple of carts with twice as much stuff as we need, because everyone else is always noticing what everyone else is buying. When we get to the register, we could casually pay with all of the extra gift cards (you can use Walmart cards at Sam's and vice versa), and then M could casually mention, when asked, that S is "doing a little something special for me this year." It would be HILARIOUS because the people he works with are largely middle-aged women who sit around and look for miniscule amounts of drama that they can freak out over. And, if [they think] M got twice as much Sam's money as they did???? OMG THE END OF THE WORLD. It would be the perfect prank to pull on his co-workers. Alas, we will not do this because... well, it'd be a fun prank but not exactly worth the price of admission. We have a difficult enough time trying to figure out what to spend $500 on at Sam's, much less $1000. (Note: couponing did not make it easier. Now I know what stuff should cost elsewhere and warehouse prices are not actually that good, most of the time.) Oh, spending the cash is easy but narrowing it down is harder. :)
*I'm referring to opening credit card accounts when they offer some promotional offer for free money. I don't open cards for less than $100 anymore--well, almost never. We had five or six going at once this fall, which really stretched the limits of what was feasible, since you have to spend a certain amount of money on each one and keep track. There's not usually that many available at the same time, but it all just sort of came together that way. We put everything on credit cards anyway--and pay off every month--but it was a pretty serious juggle with the varying limits and time frames. However, we came out $1,350 ahead, which was fun. I finally got them all finished up and all rewards redeemed this week--still waiting on a few to arrive. If you've never tried this and you decide to give it a whirl... start with one at a time. I'm about to start the next round... with any luck. Looks like they'd stop giving me credit cards at some point but I sure hope they don't. :) It's fun.
Spotify. Spotify is amazingly awesome. Pinterest is crack. And Evernote is bliss. I used to love finding new programs and internet stuff but I haven't made time for it in the last few years, I guess. These three things have dropped into my lap at around the same time and I feel evangelical about them all. It's nice. :) Evernote, if you haven't heard of it before, is a system for keeping all sorts of information together. You can put lots of stuff into it--text or pictures or anything. Recipes, lists, stories about your kids, book notes, whatever. I am currently using it for, among other things, a weekly schedule keeper. I have a page with recurring to-do checklists for every weekday. I have a separate list of crafty things I'd like to do. I'm planning on keeping my recipes in it--only have a few in there so far. You can keep entire web pages if you want. Then it does this little syncing magic and your most important stuff is available on the web, on a windows program and on your mobile device and.. I don't know. It's just cool. Anyone else love it like I do?
Evie just told me a story about The Bad Pig's Christmas, where some bad pigs were going to celebrate Christmas the wrong way and they cut down some other pigs' Christmas tree! And those pigs were mad, and then they got another tree just like it and they were happy. hehe. I know I'm partial but I thought it was a cute story. It kind of gave me a David Shannon sort of vibe. As a book concept, it needs a little work but it's at least as sensible as some of the other junk we've read together over the years.
We have a bunch of large Walmart gift cards at the moment due to my current pastime of taking advantage of multiple credit card bonus offers* and we're coming up on the annual Sam's Club shopping spree that M's boss, S, sponsors every year. (I know I talk about this every year and I'm sure it makes people want to hit me since it's the coolest Christmas bonus I've personally ever heard of--and it's just PART of the Christmas bonus--but he gets a $500 gift card to spend at Sam's, with the restriction that it has to be within three hours on a certain Saturday--you go under, he keeps the remaining money, and if you don't finish up by eleven, you lose it. Theoretically. I doubt that's ever happened, but he does get gift cards back with cash still on them, which is INSANE to me because seriously, people, bring a calculator). While less practical than cash, it's awesome because how often do you get to spend $500 on something that someone else pays for? ANYWAY. It's all very festive and you see just about everyone from work while you're there. I was thinking tonight that we should totally go in and load a couple of carts with twice as much stuff as we need, because everyone else is always noticing what everyone else is buying. When we get to the register, we could casually pay with all of the extra gift cards (you can use Walmart cards at Sam's and vice versa), and then M could casually mention, when asked, that S is "doing a little something special for me this year." It would be HILARIOUS because the people he works with are largely middle-aged women who sit around and look for miniscule amounts of drama that they can freak out over. And, if [they think] M got twice as much Sam's money as they did???? OMG THE END OF THE WORLD. It would be the perfect prank to pull on his co-workers. Alas, we will not do this because... well, it'd be a fun prank but not exactly worth the price of admission. We have a difficult enough time trying to figure out what to spend $500 on at Sam's, much less $1000. (Note: couponing did not make it easier. Now I know what stuff should cost elsewhere and warehouse prices are not actually that good, most of the time.) Oh, spending the cash is easy but narrowing it down is harder. :)
*I'm referring to opening credit card accounts when they offer some promotional offer for free money. I don't open cards for less than $100 anymore--well, almost never. We had five or six going at once this fall, which really stretched the limits of what was feasible, since you have to spend a certain amount of money on each one and keep track. There's not usually that many available at the same time, but it all just sort of came together that way. We put everything on credit cards anyway--and pay off every month--but it was a pretty serious juggle with the varying limits and time frames. However, we came out $1,350 ahead, which was fun. I finally got them all finished up and all rewards redeemed this week--still waiting on a few to arrive. If you've never tried this and you decide to give it a whirl... start with one at a time. I'm about to start the next round... with any luck. Looks like they'd stop giving me credit cards at some point but I sure hope they don't. :) It's fun.
Spotify. Spotify is amazingly awesome. Pinterest is crack. And Evernote is bliss. I used to love finding new programs and internet stuff but I haven't made time for it in the last few years, I guess. These three things have dropped into my lap at around the same time and I feel evangelical about them all. It's nice. :) Evernote, if you haven't heard of it before, is a system for keeping all sorts of information together. You can put lots of stuff into it--text or pictures or anything. Recipes, lists, stories about your kids, book notes, whatever. I am currently using it for, among other things, a weekly schedule keeper. I have a page with recurring to-do checklists for every weekday. I have a separate list of crafty things I'd like to do. I'm planning on keeping my recipes in it--only have a few in there so far. You can keep entire web pages if you want. Then it does this little syncing magic and your most important stuff is available on the web, on a windows program and on your mobile device and.. I don't know. It's just cool. Anyone else love it like I do?
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no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 02:20 pm (UTC)Here are the things I love about it: you can listen to anything, even stuff you don't own, you can import your iTunes library and playlists for listening someplace else, you can (in theory) share those playlists. Other people make playlists that you can listen to.
Here are the things I don't love about it: unless you pay, your music listening is constantly interrupted by ads. Constantly. It has gotten much more frequent since it launched. At first you could make it through an album with only one ad, now it's at least three. Totally wrecks the vibe. You can only share those playlists if the people you want to have listen to them also have an account, which makes sense, and I've tried to get some other people on board but, didn't happen. Those other devices you could listen to your stuff on? Only if you pay or sync them with the version on your original machine. I do not want to sync all that stuff to my phone. That was the whole point of getting it into Spotify in the first place. I have synced it to the iPad but, eh, not really what I had in mind.
In short, if I were willing to pay, I would probably be a devotee. But I'm not willing to pay, especially since a lot of what I listen to is still stuff I DO own so why pay for it again? I am currently trying out Rdio.com as a possible alternate. So far, I can listen to whatever I want online without ads, but you have to pay if you want it on other devices. Unless/until I get a bluetooth thingy that will allow me to play stuff on my phone through the car stereo, I am holding off on making a decision about either one.
A friend of mine loves Wunderlist. I am not a list-keeper so I can't tell what might be great about it but it sounds good.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 02:59 pm (UTC)Something to add to the "do not love" list is that it does not know what "close window" means. Why won't it just live in my system tray if it insists on remaining on? I wouldn't care about that, but sometimes I just want it gone from the taskbar when I'm not listening to it.
I shall have to check out Rdio.com, too. :)
Wunderlist looks like it's more about to-do lists only.. it looks to do that better than Evernote, probably, but Evernote is less about lists (except I am just listy naturally) and more about organizing random bits of information from everywhere. One of my favorite features is the toolbar button that says "Add to Evernote", and it saves whatever page you're on to Evernote so you can always keep it. Great for recipes or tutorials or an idea for a good wine to try or band to search for on Spotify ;) so when you want to go back to that particular idea, it's stored in one convenient place and format. Wunderlist seems to have a project coming up that is similar to Evernote but with social networking added. That might be cool but I'm not using it for anything I would want people to comment on. :)
no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-17 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-17 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-17 08:21 am (UTC)I've been meaning to get into Evernote, thanks for the reminder.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-18 12:32 pm (UTC)