10. "You're never feeling cheesy!" - Anne, irrationally upset at Jeff's lack of desire for cheesy scalloped potatoes.
9. "What do you want to do today?" "I dunno, what do you want to do today?" - Either of us on most weekends
8. "Meeoooowww" - self explanatory
. "Did you read my blog?" - Jeff, demanding attention again
7. "You stole all the blankets... again!" - Anne, who doesn't pull hard enough
6. "What do you want for dinner?" "I dunno, what do you want for dinner?" - Typical evening conversation
5. "Nobody is calling" - Answering machine notifying us of no caller id
4. "I gotta pick out my clothes" - Anne, who needs to announce this every night
3. "I'm going in the hot tub" - Anne, in another of her nightly rituals
2. "What are you doing, Jeff?" "Nothing" - Anytime Jeff is near a computer
1. MEEEEOOWW!!! MEOOOWWW!!
I just got a gift certificate from Amazon in the amount of $34 for doing just about nothing. A coworker mentioned a few months back about how he put up some links somewhere on a web page to Amazon under their referral program and he just gets money everytime someone clicks a link and buys something.
I decided to try it out and put one up on The Scrabble Rack, my Scrabble tool site that gets the most hits of anything on boulter.com. Based on people buying random things through there and a little bit of Christmas gift purchases on my own, I made $34 for doing just about nothing.
So I decided to blow it out and make it easy for people to give me money. If you're going be spending money at Amazon anyway, why not give me a cut of the action? Check out http://boulter.com/amazon/ for some nifty tools for you to use my amazon links.
One of the fun things about this program is that you get to see a report (without names) of the things purchased through your links. You would think that most of my stuff would be Scrabble-related, but that's far from the case. Here are some of the more interesting ones.
What would happen if you ate only at McDonalds for a month? Luckily, someone else has performed this stupid human trick for you.
What we need is solar paint. Something you can paint on your car, let it bake in the sun all day in a parking lot, and have at least enough power generated to toast a bagel or something. It would certainly be prettier than this.
It would have to be conductive, so you'd just plug in to a corner of it and out would come the juice. You could paint your house, car, pets, whatever in solar paint and there's be lots of clean, portable energy floating around.
OK, so solar power is expensive and very low-yield today. But someday, solar paint will be huge! You heard it here first, folks.
I've created yet another Geocaching utility.
This utility allows you to grab (or "scrape") GPS Coordinates from any web page, then download them as a LOC file into your mapping software and your GPS receiver.
Grabbing coordinates using this tool is faster and more accurate than entering them by hand.
Geocaching.com allows you to download coordinates, but only the primary coordinates for a cache. If there are other coordinates in the description such as coordinates for parking or more coordinates for multi-caches, then you probably have to enter them by hand.
Check it out at http://boulter.com/gps/grabber.
With Anne in CT, it's turned out to be an all-geocaching weekend. Yesterday we set out do Return of the King which took all day. Today I set out and attacked many of the caches on my nearest 20, finishing with 21 caches found.
It's funny that I spent both days doing nothing but caching and one day I found one cache and the other day 21.
I definitely did a lot of walking (and driving) this weekend, but it was a lot of fun. It seems that I now need to concentrate on Monte Bello and Skyline Boulevard for the next batch of caches. Those are going to be some killer hikes.
Yesterday we did some bushwacking based on my poor guidance. My legs are a bit itchy today and I fear I might have poison oak again. Oh boy.
Why do Ho-Ho's come wrapped in aluminum foil instead of shrinkwrapped plastic? I can't think of anything else that comes in aluminum foil.
Todd and I placed a new Geocache when he was up for a visit this week. It's an interesting puzzle and I'm anxious to see how easy or hard it is for people.
It's currently only available to paid members of geocaching.com, but we'll convert it to a regular cache after a while. (And we've had a chance to work out any problems with it!)
Yesterday we needed to make a Costco run. For what, I don't remember, but once you're there you end up spending at least a hundred dollars, in this case $122. This is always frustrating when you realize you've spent 2 hours to acquire about 10 items and your cart is only half-full.
Costco is a strange kind of place. I think of it as the opposite of a convenience store, like a 7-11. Instead of lots of them on every street corner, there's only one. The store is huge and all the items come in large quantities. It's a nightmare to get in and out of the place, people everywhere. On the good side, stuff is usually much cheaper than in a convenience store.
You have to go out of your way to go to Costco. You still have to go grocery shopping for some things, so it's yet another trip. In other words, it's an inconvenience store.
On this trip I realized when we got there that it was midafternoon and I forgot to have lunch (or breakfast) again. The line for the snacks outside was pretty long, so I forged in, intent on satisfying my grumbly stomach with what else, but the bounty of Costco samples.
Today was particularly insane at the Costco, but somehow that means that there's even more samples to be had. I had teryaki chicken, ham (twice), snapple meal replacement(!), animal crackers, whole grain bread with peanut butter, pumpkin cheesecake, and something I think was pork chops.
There's definitely an art to acquiring the best samples. If you want just bulk, uncooked foods are plentiful. Cooked foods take a while and go quickly, so timing your visit at the end of a cooking cycle is critical. There are certainly people who just camp out near the best cooked foods though. It's always seemed weird to be that they use desk scissors to cut up the samples.
Once I was at Costco just before it was about to close and the person giving out samples of beef jerky needed to dispose of leftover samples. She asked me if I wanted them. Who am I to turn down free beef jerky? The catch was that she didn't have anything to put these small slices of jerky in, so she just dumped them in my cupped hands. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do and that day, I had to chow down on beef jerky, trough-style out of my hands.
Inbetween all this sampling, we actually had to do some shopping. Anne recently heard that canned green beans aren't as good for you as fresh green beans and was warned that when our current stash runs dry there would be no more. My opinion is that if it's green and I like it, you better give me as much as you can because there's not a lot of vegetables that I go for. As we approached the bulk canned food aisle I made a lunge for the green beans but was quickly scorned. I recoiled, dejected, when a man walking the other way yelled "Be a man! Get it anyway!". Turns out that we still have plenty of green beans left, but maybe I should start building up a secret stash anyway.
After many samples yesterday I was feeling less urgent needs for food, but I was still hungry. On the way out the snack line was much shorter, so I grabbed the rest of my 'lunch' there - a cinammon pretzel (huge and yummy) along with a berry smoothie.
Total cost my of fine dining at Costco - $2.40. Plus $122.
We got back from Kauai on Sunday and lost two hours in the flight. Ever since then, I've felt like every day is two hours shorter. There's so much to do and bedtime seems to be coming faster. I'm wondering how I found time to do things last year. It usually takes a week for me to adjust back to a time zone and I'm right on track for that. I've been going to bed late and waking up late.
I've got a bunch of blogs I want to write, I haven't logged any of the caches from Kauai. Email is piling up and I haven't even unpacked my suitcase yet. Hopefully this weekend I'll catch up with things and feel like I'm in control of life again!