You're Doing It Wrong

A couple of weeks ago I had a comment on one of my flickr photos. It’s my neighbor’s yard. She uses bowling balls for decoration.

The following is the conversation:

Him: is the one near the bottom right hand corner of the photo a red, white and blue ball by AMF, if so, would you consider selling the ball perhaps?

Me: Hi: You asked about a bowling ball in a photo. It’s not mine, it’s in a neighbor’s yard so I don’t know what kind it is. Sorry I can’t be more helpful.

Him: could you do me a favor, could you go to your neighbor and ask about the ball and maybe also ask to see if hey would consider selling the ball?, and where are you folks from?

Me: Sorry I can’t help you.

I don’t know this person I just said hi and commented on her yard. I don’t feel comfortable going over there and telling her someone on the Internet asked to buy a bowling ball.

Him: hi, can you ask your neighbor if its a ball by AMF Voit and red, white, and blue in color and see if they will sell the ball and maybe take a few more photos of it also? where are you guys from and is this your next door neighbor?

Now me commenting : Does this sound like a prank? Like I have nothing better to do than run around the neighborhood helping some guy with his bowling balls?

This spam thing is getting me down. Every time I log on I have a bazillion bounced messages. I hit check mail and then leave the room and empty the dishwasher and by the time I’m finished the MAILER-DAEMONS are all loaded up. Plus all the nice auto-responder notes from people who are on vacation but will get back to me as soon as they can. Sometimes these messages are in a foreign language but I’m guessing that’s what they say. Some messages inform me that the email user has a spam filter and I haven’t been approved so please reply to I can be approved. Or maybe even a scolding message that they don’t accept spam messages and I’m not approved.

Who thought that technology development was going to do anything? The spammers don’t even see the rejected messages.

I attempted to set up my own mail filtering but there were so many permutations, it didn’t help much. I’m trying to think of an evil punishment for spammers but my creativity is on the fritz and all I can think of is letting the victims throw things at him or her. I’d throw cartons of yogurt 3 months past date.

My domain has been used by spammers again. There should be a way to do something about this. Right now I’m getting about 100 mailer daemons a day. At first they all looked like they were from Germany but now looks like everything. argh.

Blogger is giving me fits. It won’t let me correct “To Distracted for Words” to “Too Distracted for Words.” I’ve even deleted the original post and then started all over with a new post. It’s like Blogger knows I don’t want to dick with the computer yet I wouldn’t want to walk away from it with an error like that so it won’t let me fix it. My other top annoying mistakes: its and it’s and there, their and they’re. Furk.

I have a few things here for a longer post but I’m distracted and trying to pull a few things together so this is it for today. The photo is the interstate bridge between Oregon and Washington at I-5. Bob and I took a walk along the river yesterday.

I’ll confess that I’ve just this week figured out how to use the tabs in my browser and now that I get it, I love it.

Last item: when I was a kid I was interested in Amelia Earhart and for awhile read anything I could find about here. Here’s a link to an alleged transcription of radio transmissions after the plane went down. A young girl was surfing the short wave radio — the page explains the story — makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

Look, my first tomato, yay. I’m going to have it in my dinner salad tonight.

Bob and I went to see The Simpsons Movie yesterday at the first showing. There hasn’t been one movie I was dying to see all summer except this one and when I mentioned it a month or two ago, he said he might be gone because it was a Cheese weekend. I indicated some disappointment with this and what do you know, he modified his plan.

We are huge Simpsons fans and rarely miss the show. Our favorite episode, I think the first episode we ever watched together is Bart the Daredevil which is the Springfield Gorge one. We have seen it at least 10 times and we clutch our bellies and squeeze tears out of our eyes in laughter every single time. We will stop anything we’re doing to watch the last 10 minutes of that episode. One of us could sever a limb and we’d be running out the door with the cooler and a bloody stump wrapped in a towel and if the TV was on with this episode we’d pause before we rushed to the hospital. You can imagine our delight when this episode is alluded to in the movie.

I’m surprised there wasn’t more Simpsons-mania. Yeah, sure the Oregonian had a cover story on the outrage that Springfield, Vermont got to host the premiere instead of Springfield, Oregon. Even Matt said he thought the Simpsons were from Springfield, Oregon. Or Beaverton. (Local humor.)

We bought our tickets in advance and arrived early and quickly found a seat in the almost empty theater. We sat through a half hour of commercials, mostly for TV shows. I hate to say it because I am desperate to cut back on my shows, but that new Bionic Woman show looks like it’s going to be good. Also they had a bunch of shows that look like shows we already have. Someone with powers has to stop evil from ending the world. Some plucky woman overcomes some setback to make a new start. Is it because I’m old and have already see it all? Or is it because there are 10 trillion channels and the creative forces in the TV industry only have so many ideas?

By the time the movie started more people arrived. Mostly guys in the 20-40 range and I don’t want to use the word nerdy, but let’s say the kind of guys who can write computer code and watch Battlestar Galactica rather than the kind of guys who work in finance and use hair product. There were two other women in the room, both accompanying people too young to drive. Ladies, take note.

It’s hard to have hope for America after sitting through a half dozen trailers for what have to be the dumbest movies ever. Daddy Day Camp? Some sort of underground ping pong movie that looked like a spoof of a spoof. A Santa Claus movie with Vince Vaughn that you could tell the trailer had the only good parts in the movie. Plus an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie that Bob was excited about. (Generational thing, no doubt.) And Horton Hears a Who which I love as a book but the trailer was not even a tiny bit appealing.

We loved the Simpsons movie. There were a very few moments where I felt my attention drifting but otherwise, they kept the energy and the laughs coming. I don’t think it was a magical life-changing Simpsons, just a really long good TV episode — but I love the show so why not a big episode on the big screen? Plus you get to see Bart’s doodle and Otto with his bong. When are you going to see that on TV? Two thumbs up from this household.

In other film news, I watched Howl’s Moving Castle on DVD last night and it is fantastic. I also watched the first Fantastic Four movie on cable recently and it was dreadful.

[Isn’t the first rule of blogging: don’t write about what you had for breakfast?]

I tend to eat the same thing for breakfast over and over and over. For years. This means the stuff I eat on work days. Weekend eating is a whole different story. I eat the same thing until I am sick and tired of it and have to come up with some new thing to eat until I hate it. Not a great system, I’ll admit, but this is how I’m doing it.

One of my first major breakfasts, back in the 80’s, was a bran muffin, an apple, and a Tiger’s Milk bar. This was a time in my life when the size of my butt was an ongoing issue (well, you know, my size all over) and I eventually gave up the Tiger bar.

When I moved up here my breakfast was a bagel and a banana for eons. Then I graduated to variations of cereal and smoothie. When I was a vegetarian I made smoothies with tofu and protein powders and fruit and my favorite cereal was Grape-nuts. At some point I developed the notion that I was eating too many wheat products so I switched to muesli. Also yogurt was easier to deal with than smoothie making. So I had muesli and yogurt and fruit. Recently I changed the muesli to granola.

I’ve been getting sick of this breakfast for awhile now. I’m finished with bananas. I don’t want to even see bananas and yogurt mingling in the same grocery bag.

Not last weekend but the weekend before we had tons of fresh berries in the house so I unwisely ate berries, yogurt and granola every day for about 10-12 days in a row which has pushed me to the edge. I have no idea what to switch to next. Maybe an Egg McMuffin. HA!.

Do you ever have those mornings where you’re driving to work and you wonder if you finished getting ready? You vaguely remember brushing your teeth or putting on your underwear but you feel like you need to check.

Invention #1 – If a car or truck’s turn signal remains on for more than 60 seconds the car or truck will start saying in an annoying robotic voice: “Turn indicator time frame has exceeded maximum. Manual shut off now.”

I used to have a folder that I carried with me everywhere that had all my “to do” stuff in it. I haven’t been able to find it for a couple weeks now. When I first noticed it was gone I kept thinking, it’ll turn up. It just got stuck somewhere. But now I’m not so sure. Maybe someone stole it. I hope he or she is getting all that stuff done.

Invention #2 – An teleportation device so when someone’s pet poops in your yard the poop will instantly reappear on their lawn. If they don’t have a lawn, on their kitchen table.

What are the bases these days? Like when I was a girl, first base was kissing and second base was getting felt up above the waist and so on. Have the bases changed? Who’s in charge of that?

I barely read the comics any more. The only ones I read on any sort of regular basis are For Better or Worse and Get Fuzzy. This weekend I sent my mom and sister an email with the subject line: Elizabeth and Anthony Hooked Up. (RE: FBOFW) You could see this coming for awhile but I was really rooting for hot helicopter pilot.

Invention #3 – a freeway merger. Sort of like when you go to the car wash, your car would click in and the cars already on the freeway would be clicked in and the merger would quickly, smoothly and efficiently merge everyone so that the on-ramp didn’t get all backed up.