So, I finally bought a toaster. I can’t believe we’ve gone this long without one! Since we didn’t do the traditional wedding/showers/registry etc., we just never got a toaster and didn’t really miss it! I’ve been craving toast lately though, so I figured it was about time.
I got the toaster on the same fateful trip to Walmart that I discussed in my previous post. There were about a million toaster choices, so I decided to go with the $7 cheapie brand, Durabrand (ironic name!), because I didn’t think we’d be using it much.
David saw me as I was getting ready to checkout, so he came over to say hi. (He was at work at the time.) I told him the story about the purse incident, and he started looking at all the stuff I was buying (probably hoping to find meat in there somewhere, poor guy.)
David: Why are you buying a toaster?
Me: Because I want toast (this comment was devoid of sarcasm, by the way)
David: Why did you buy Durabrand? It’s awful!
Me: Because it was less than half as much as the next toaster Do you think we’re really going to eat toast enough to justify paying more than $7?
David: You’re going to hate Durabrand. I’m telling you, people return those pieces of junk every day and we don’t even question them on it because we know how awful they are!
Me: Oh, please, I don’t want to go back into the store. That purse lady might still be in here, and I don’t know how I avoided her this long. Let’s just try it and see what happens.
So, I get home with my toaster, and decide to have toast the following morning.
Attempt #1: Insert toast. Push down lever. Wait. Wait. Try to decide if toast is taking too long. Wait. Wait. Turn back for one second. SMOKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Try to get lever back up. Lever stuck! Briefly consider inserting fork. Finally remove charcoal bread.
(slight concern over the fact that this hugely smelly burning odor did not wake David.)
Attempt #2: Insert toast. Push down lever. Wait. Wait. Get nervous and eject toast myself.
Not bad!
Attempt #3: Insert toast. Push down lever. Push down lever. Push down lever. ARG! Finally get lever to stay down. Toast pops back up prematurely. Anemic toast.
A few minutes later, David got up. My first words of the day: “Sweetie? I need a new toaster.”
Footnote: David got me a new toaster – not another Durabrand! – and my last two mornings have been blissfully drama-free!
Let me preface today’s entry with this: I was running a fever all day and it apparently ate several brain cells.
So, today was Sunday, and I had been planning to go to Walmart all week. I had my list made out and everything, which is somewhat of an accomplishment to me. I got this cold and fever junk on Friday, but still decided to go ahead and go to Walmart today under the guise that if I had to get cold medicine, I might as well go ahead and buy the entire list. (Up until this point, I hadn’t taken anything except like one Advil on Saturday. I wanted to look at the cold medicine selection and decide what I wanted to try, and I didn’t want to have drugs in my system and then switch to something else.)
It took me a million years to get ready, but finally, I had my shoes on and was just about to go out the door when someone knocked. No one EVER knocks on our door, right, so I was pretty surprised. I answered the door and there were these two really well-dressed men, suits and stuff! I realized about a second too late that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, heehee, and I vaguely recalled David telling me when they came by several weeks ago and he also accidentally answered the door. So, the guy was like, “Hello. We came by here a month or two ago and talked to a very nice young man. We are Jehovah’s Witnesses. Is he here today by any chance?”
During his speech, I started smiling and shaking my head, as if I had no idea what they were even talking about. The guy goes, “Oh, does the young man not live here anymore?” I continued shaking my head and said, “No, he doesn’t. I’m sorry.” The guy looked momentarily confused, and then started to give his spiel to me! I cut him off, thanked him, and closed the door. Ooops. I lied to God, I think. I have no idea what possessed me to do that!
So, I left the house and went to go to the car. I kind of felt like I was plodding along and I knew for sure what I looked like, haha. Our neighbor was out in his yard, and from all the way across the yard goes, “WOW, are you okay?” *sigh!*
I get to Walmart, and the place was hopelessly crowded. I love grocery shopping, but I hate crowds. This next part can only be blamed on fever, I hope!
I needed bananas, and they were across the produce section from where I was. There were people and carts everywhere, but I had a pretty straight shot from where I was to where I needed to be. There was just one cart in my way, and no one anywhere around to attend to it. I got up to the cart and paused for a second. The cart had a purse just sitting in it! I thought to myself, “What idiot just leaves her purse sitting in the cart? Anybody could just take that purse and she’d never even know.”
While standing there getting annoyed at this unknow person’s stupidity, I decided that I just needed to move that cart out of my way. So, I walked up to her cart and started moving it! I was walking very slowly, trying to decide where to put it. I realized as I did this that no one even looked around or cared that I could have just totally hijacked this woman’s purse. As fuzzy as I was, that was a weird feeling. It almost felt like the noises of the world faded and it was just me and the purse.
Suddenly, I hear someone screaming, “MA’AM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Excuse me!!!!!!!!!” and someone grabs my hip very roughly. My brain thought that maybe a friend was trying to say hi, so I turned around with a half-grin. Yeah, it was the owner of the purse. She goes, “Ma’am, this is MY cart and MY purse is in there!!!!” I looked at her with this total blank stare and plodded slowly back to my own cart. I think she was still glaring at me, but you know what, she got out of my way. As I went past her, she yells out, “I can’t believe you just did that!!!!” and the whole entire produce section turned around and stared at me. I said absolutely nothing to her, but I was thinking to myself, “Hmmmmm, I can’t believe I just did that either!”
I don’t know how I didn’t run into her again as I finished my shopping, but the whole situation started to become funny to me later. 
I obviously had no intention of stealing her stupid stuff!!!
I’m on DayQuil now, so I’m expecting lucidity to return shortly.
1. One book that changed your life.
Probably “Tuck Everlasting” by Natalie Babbitt. It made me think about the cycle of life, and how every life needs an ending. (The movie version was nice too, but, as usual, not as good as the book.)
2. One book that you have read more than once.
“Driving Lessons” by William Kritlow
3. One book you would want on a desert island.
“The Know-It-All: One Man’s Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World” by A. J. Jacobs (the guy read an entire set of encyclopedias and filled this book with useful and useless knowledge he learned. It was great. I would need to be stranded on an island to have enough time to absorb al that information!)
4. Two books that made you laugh.
“Letters from a Nut” by Ted L. Nancy (An anonymous guy who writes various companies asking about random stuff.) (David said the entire premise of the book reminded him of me!)
“Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found” by Bill Keaggy. I actually have only looked at this book in a bookstore, but I was cracking up. I totally love spying on other people’s grocery lists too!
5. One book that made you cry.
“Bridge to Terabithia” by Katherine Paterson. I loved it, but it was terribly sad.
Or, “Tilly” by Frank Peretti
6. One book you wish you’d written.
Anything by Jan Karon!!! I adore any of “The Mitford Years” series. Everything about them is great. They are funny, interesting, engaging, and inspirational all at the same time!
7. One book you wish had never been written.
“The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold. I have no idea what made me read it in the first place, but it was just weird. I can’t believe they’re making a movie version.
8. Two books you are currently reading.
“The Princess Bride” by William Goldman. (I’m just past the part where they had the contest over who would get the “poisoned cup”)
Um…..that’s all I have going at the second. I’m also reading “US Weekly”!
My next book up is: “Home to Holly Springs” by Jan Karon. This is the next part of the Mitford books as a “spinoff” series.
9. One book you’ve been meaning to read.
“Condoleeza Rice: An American Life: A Biography” by Elisabeth Bumiller. hm, yes, this is totally out of my typical genre, but it looks really interesting! I might actually grow some brain cells too, teehee.
10. Honorable Mentions:
“Nickeled and Dimed: On NOT Getting By in America” by Barbara Ehrenreich. (Interesting commentary. I found it pretty interesting; David dismissed it as totally left-winged…)
“Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser. NOTHING like the movie! The book is much better.
“Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think” by Brian Wansink. I totally need to be applying these principles to my daily life! hehe.
So, there you have it. I’m laughing at my choices because they look so well-rounded.
PS- Yay for my grandparents! Today is their 62nd wedding anniversary! That’s just so cool to me.
We have finally lost every shred of patience we had with Dish Network and their wacky DVRs! I know I’ve posted on here before about the dvr losing our information. Not only is it really annoying, but it’s also very time consuming because David has to get on the phone with Dish, they never know what they’re doing, they send another dvr, David has to hook that one up, re-program it, send back the old one…..and for what? The new one dies just as often and with as much flair as the old one! I think it waits until we actually have several things on there that we really want to watch, and then the dvr kills off everything.
We just got (another) dvr last week. I know they’re just “refurbishing” them (they say) and are sending them out to other people, but the last few units we have had have been awful. We had this one for less than a week, and I went to view the scheduled recording for the day: BLANK! Then it just started recording stuff at random, and for huge blocks of time!
So, that was the end of the Dish Network saga. We are going to switch over to Direc TV. We’ve had Dish for several years, but it’s getting to the point where it’s too much work to watch tv with them, hehehe, not to mention that we haven’t had ABC in nearly a month because they’re in a price war. With the writers’ strike, this hasn’t much mattered, but one day…..someday….that strike will end and we’ll want ABC back! (Thank goodness for ABC’s website so we can watch the last few “Ugly Betty” episodes!)
Then, we also finally took a deep breath and cancelled our XM radio subscription! When we got Dish, we also got Sirius channels through the tv, so I pretty much stopped even turning on XM. David still listened to it from time to time, but finally we just decided it wasn’t worth it to continue paying for it. Yay us! The ironic thing, of course, is that Direc TV will have XM channels, so we’re not really missing anything!
And, of course, none of this will matter as the XM/Sirius merger continues to take place. I looked at the music packages that should be available post-merger, and they’re really weird. If you’re into the satellite radio thing, I encourage you to see what you think.
Oh well. On to bigger and better things!
Did you hear that Clorox has released a new line of “green” cleaning products? That’s really fascinating to me! I have been using Seventh Generation’s natural cleaning products for several months now, and I really love them. I love the way our apartment doesn’t have that “chemical” smell when I finish cleaning. I actually switched to Seventh Generation because most cleaners contain bleach, and it was getting to the point where I felt sick every time I used them — and usually had a sore throat for a week after cleaning with them. Now that I’ve switched, I don’t have that problem at all! There’s hardly any odor, and everything seems just as clean as before!
I’m glad that Clorox is making natural cleaning products more “mainstream”, but I hope they don’t hurt the smaller companies in the process. I haven’t seen their prices yet, but Seventh Generation is not much more expensive than their cleaning counterparts. Of course, you have to go to Target, Walgreens, or a natural foods store to find Seventh Generation, and I’m sure the entire retail planet with carry Clorox’s line! So, we’ll see.
I’m not any kind of envronmentalist, but I really have concerns with the levels of chemicals that we force upon our bodies!
Hope all is well. Besides re-programming our dvr(s), we’ve also been spending huge amounts of time playing the Wii!!!!! I’m quite addicted! hehehe. My most recent addiction is Super Mario Galaxy, even though it makes me dizzy.
A few weeks ago when I was complaining that our DVR was empty, my friend Bob (not her real name) recommended that I try the show “How to Look Good Naked” with Carson Kressley. I didn’t set it up to record at the time, but this past weekend, I was about to get on the treadmill and was looking for something to watch while I was on there. I saw that this show was about to start, so I was like, “Okay, I’ll give it a try.”
It was really good!! I’m kind of on this thing right now (in my own mind, at least) about the importance of achieving and maintaining a healthy body image, and this show was just really neat in how they go about making each person feel comfortable as who they already are – not who they’ll be 10 pounds from now! It’s really worth a try, if you haven’t already seen it!
Of course, I watched Paula Deen’s cooking show right afterwards, hehehe, so I don’t know what that says about me. Man, I just love her obsession with butter.
I finally started doing Pilates! I LOVE IT! I normally use the treadmill a few times a week, and then do some other type of exercise the other days. I got a Pilates DVD because I was curious, and it’s really a nice workout. It’s kind of the antithesis of the treadmill because you move rather slowly and spend a lot of time stretching. I can tell already that it’s improving my posture! hehehe.
Hope all is well! I know I’ve been slow in posting! I am still here!
YIIPPPEEEE!!!!! Our Pizza Hut is FINALLY carrying Pizza Mia!!! I am SO excited. We’ve already gotten it twice, and we’re totally hooked. I don’t know what it is about that pizza that is so good. It just has a completely different taste from just about any other pizza.
Good job Marshall, for finally catching up with everyone else, even if it took a couple of months!
