From Live Journal:
1. If your car/bike is wrecked (if your mass transit service goes belly-up), do you know what you would do to replace it, perhaps even have the car or bike you want already picked out?
Love the urban tilt to this question. If my truck were wrecked, I’d buy another truck, but with a bigger extended cab.
2. A client/friend gives you a lottery ticket, which wins you a prize worth (after taxes) ten times as much money as you earned/received last year. What will you do with it?
Buy a house outright, retire.
3. Fight or flee?
Depends: usually flee, sometimes fight.
4. Someone performs a random act of kindness that is exactly what you need on a bad day. If you wish to pay them back, would you write a poem, bake, buy something, or what?
Last time this happened, I got them a gift certificate to a restaurant. Everyone always appreciates those!
5. Your manager commands you to pick a charity to contribute to. Do you resist? If not, which charity would be your first choice?
What manager, I’m no one’s slave (or master). Leukemia/Lymphoma Society would be the first choice of charities worth donating to, Salvation Army as well.

Mr. Fluffles has taken a liking to an old teddy bear that I made when I was a kid. It’s knitted and stuffed with nylon stockings. He sleeps on it like a pillow.

It’s miserable outside, sleeting and windy.
Rain may arrive later, but in the meantime, travel has got to be horrendous. I’m grateful that by sheer luck, we did our running around yesterday when driving was easy.

I’ve been on the hunt for a new dehumidifier, and visited several stores yesterday to do some comparison shopping.
When I got to Walmart, a salesman named Lou asked me politely if I was sure I wanted a DEhumidifier: did I want to add water to the air, or take it out?
I thought that he was patronizing me and told him so – male salesperson in a hardware department thinking that his female customer was an idiot.
Turns out, he wasn’t trying to give me a hard time at all. He was extremely helpful and passed along 15 years worth of accumulated wisdom, including the comment that, indeed, some people don’t know the difference.
Turns out, he is absolutely right: I ended up buying my dehumidifer at Lowe’s for several reasons, among them a good warranty, but along the way, stopped in to see what Target had to offer.
A young male salesperson insisted on directing me, not once but twice, to two different displays of HUMIDIFIERS. I could not convince him, come hell or high water, that I was looking for a device to take water OUT of the air.
So, apologies to Lou: I am not an idiot, and neither are you, but they are certainly out there. Your customers are lucky, I hope they find their way to you from Target.

The Friday Five:
Chocolate
What tastes best covered in chocolate?
Fruit.
Why do you eat chocolate the way you do (or don’t)?
My granddaughter Emme and I prefer white chocolate but hot cocoa is good, too. My favorite way to eat it would be as curls on a cake with white frosting, any cake that doesn’t have pineapple.
Do you know how chocolate is made?
No….you’re scaring me!
If you knew you would live 5 years longer if you never ate any chocolate again, would you give it up?
I guess so. Quit smoking for that reason, even though I enjoyed it.
Have you ever had carob?
I think so, but again, I’m not a brown chocolate person, so it didn’t impress me much.

After yesterday’s Hall of Shame entry, I suppose it’s only fair to include a list of the great people I’ve had the pleasure to have met.
So, excluding my nearest and dearest who are a given, here’s a start:

Continue reading →

Someone recently told me that they thought I hated them. I don’t, not at all.
I’ve been wanting to publish a “Hall of Shame” for quite a while, and just to clear the record, maybe now’s a good time.
So, here goes:

Continue reading →

Mr. Fluffles is 72.
Here’s a handy cat age conversion chart.
Here’s another that works for either cats or dogs.

Having been to Hyannis for some errands before a planned tweetup, I noticed that it had started snowing lightly around 5:30 this evening.
Figuring it was a bad idea to be on the road tonight, I opted to come home. By the time I got to my neighborhood, I driving in a real snowstorm – not a blizzard, but more serious than it looked earlier.
Suffice it to say that I’m very happy to be home right now, especially since I’d picked up six pack of Monty Python’s Holy Grail over the weekend.

The academicians at Ohio State University say so.
According to an article by Kevin Hassett in bloomberg.com, psychologists at Ohio State University, led by Amy Brunell, studied the behavior of 153 MBA students and observed that “the students who had the strongest narcissistic traits were most likely to emerge as leaders.”
That in itself is certainly not a big surprise, nor is the article’s further conclusion that “the results of the study had large implications for real-world settings, because