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Sales People

This weekend, Matt and I went to look for a bed. We have a mattress, but no bed frame because it was a piece of furniture we didn't really need in the beginning and so we decided to wait. But now, we're starting to want a bed frame for a few reasons (not important).

So we decided to make the rounds. The first shop we went to had really neat furniture and so we were looking around when a salesman came up to us and asked us if we were looking for anything in particular. Against my better judgement (I don't really like sales people, but I'll explain that in a moment) I said we were looking for bed frames. So he took us upstairs and showed us some of the ugliest bed frames I'd ever seen. We didn't enthuse with him as he pointed out the various styles and the he asked me what our price range was. I didn't specify a dollar value, but simply said, “fairly low.” So the he went into this diatribe about how he wouldn't have anything for us as we would be only interested in “fashion furniture” from over seas with “welds that would break.” And on and on for 15 minutes. Not exactly nasty, just condescending. And the really dumb part, was that he had a couple of beds in our “fairly low” price range. They were ugly and we wouldn't have bought them anyhow, but certainly not after he launched into condescension. After his rant, he left us abrubtly stating that we could “look around if you like.”

Now c'mon. Matt and I are 23. We don't have a ton of money. We have to start somewhere. Where the heck does this guy get off being rude to us? Why did he even bother talking to us if he was just going to cop an attitude. I'm sorry we weren't the quick sale he was looking for.

Which brings me to my point. I've gotten to the point where I don't even want a sales person helping us. It's especially bad at furniture stores. They're typically snooty or they hover and put in their “designer” opinion. I can't believe that sells stuff to anyone. It just makes me want to sprint out of there at top speed.

So here's a bit of advice to the sales people out there. You're more likely to get me to buy something if you just leave me alone. Sales pressure techniques and insinuations about my income (or lack there of)will not work on me. They will just piss me off.

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Hi Mom

Here's the exact quote from The Simpsons that we were talking about. It's from an episode called Burns, Baby Burns.

Burns: Well, did you meet Larry?
Man: Oh, yes. He made light of my weight problem, then suggested my motto be “semper fudge.” At that point, he told me to relax.
Burns: How were his test scores?
Woman: Let's just say this: he spelled “Yale” with a six.
Burns: I see. Well, I — ooh, you know, I just remembered, it's time for my annual donation. I wonder how much I should give.
Man: Well, frankly, test scores like Larry's would call for a very generous contribution. For example, a score of 400 would require a donation of new football uniforms, 300, a new dormitory, and in Larry's case, we would need an international airport.
Woman: Yale could use an international airport, Mr. Burns.

He he … I tell ya, there's a Simpsons quote for every situation. Really. It's true.

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Fighting the Forces of Evil

I'm the last (lost?) powerpuff girl, baby. I've spent my day fighting the forces of evil by way of discouraging hotlinking. Hotlinkers have been stealing bandwidth from my site by directly linking to images. Sadly, it takes up quite a bit of my bandwidth and I'm kinda pissy about it. Hehe

Anyhow … What else? Laundry has to be done. I like to keep on top of it, but it has begun to pile up and creep out of the hamper. That's bad.

Who knows what the rest of the day holds?

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SlamBall, Now That’s how Basketball Oughta be Played!

I don’t know how many of you out there have seen SlamBall yet, but should really watch it some time. It’s shown on Spike TV and is cross between basketball and Hokey with a few trampolines thrown in for good measure. The goal is of the game of the game is to get the ball in the basket. A slam is worth 3 points, shooting it in is worth 2. It appears that checking is allowed at all times and its just about impossible to foul.


It kinda reminds me of the full contact basketball games we used to play in middle school except we didn’t have the trampolines.

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Feel it HOT! HOT! HOT!

We live in Wisconsin, yet it is so hot in our apartment building that we almost never run the heat. In fact, quite the opposite, we almost always run the A/C. It's quite irritating, really … and expensive.

I found a couple of really cool photo sites … Image Cafe and istockphoto. I particularly like istockphoto because you can upload your own photographs in exchange for credits that you can either get cashed out or you can use towards getting stock photos from them. The only problem is that I don't have a digital camera that's good enough to produce pictures acceptable for the site. Boo hoo. You need 2 MP and I've only got 1.3 MP. Blah. Maybe later.

What else? Hmmm… I've got real work to do on Jesser and now I shall probably do that. Blah. Lots of icky programmy stuff. I hope I have the head for it today.

Oh yes! I got an excellent deal on headphones at amazon marketplace. They're very nice wireless headphones that are regularly almost $90 and I found them for $17 plus S&H. So I was quite jazzed. I really couldn't pass that sort of deal up. They're great too. They work flawlessly. Yea for amazon marketplace!!

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Work Work Work Work Work.

I'm busy working as usual. Right now I'm doing a bunch of stuff to this site … adding wishlists for Matt and I and working in some editing features that I should have done a loooong time ago.

Tonight, we've got to clean the house. It's icky-gross and can be put off no longer.

I found this incredibly cool thing yesterday. It's a blogging service that you can post images to remotely from your digital camera or camera phone. So you're out at the beach and you can take pictures which automatically post to your web page. That's prety dern cool. The place is called textamerica. They're free, but I would have to use their blogging system and I like mine. I wrote it. It's totally customized TO ME. No generic junk for this girl.

Alright. Now I've blogged before I mess anything up too bad.

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Apple Weekend


Matt was excited to learn that there are farms all around madison where you can go and pick your own apples. So that's what we did on Saturday. It was the perfect day for it too … about 70 degrees and very sunny.

We wondered out amongst the trees, looking at the beautiful scenery and picking a wide variety of apples. So of course, when we got home, we had to do something with all of them. We made apple butter (that took a WHOLE BUNCH) and an apple crisp that Matt has proclaimed is the best dessert he's ever had.

Yesterday, we went on a long bike ride and watched an ungodly amount of TV. Alias, was, as usual, awesome, and Discovery Channel was showing an interesting show on the engineering feats behind some of the world's greatest cities. So we watched all 3 hours of that.

Today, I'm catching up on plenty of work, and watching a Murder She Wrote marathon on A&E. How kind of them to provide me with good TV while I've got to work. Yea!

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Another Busy Day

When you're little, Christmas is so simple and fun. All you have to do is sit back and enjoy the ride and you really never realize how hard your parents work to make everything perfect for you. As you get older, you start to get an idea of just how much work it is. And even now that I'm married and on my own (and I've even hosted a Christmas) I don't think I'll realize how hard my parents (and grandparents) worked to make nice Christmases for us until I have kids.

But Christmas is what we're dealing with today. Matt and I are trying to manage two families in different places, work obligations, a dog
and oh so many schedules.

But even through the headaches, I'm very excited for Christmas. It's one of my favorite times of year, and lately, just about the only time I get to see family …

Now I'm done with that for now and I'm busy working … plus watching Dr. Phil. The Dr. Phil family is on every Thursday. I find them morbidly fascinating.

And boneless, skinless chicken breasts were on sale, so I'm making some stuff to freeze because we bought a ton. Mmmm… Chicken

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Indian Summer

After it got pretty cold pretty fast, we're getting our indian summer. It's been beautiful the past couple of days!

Tomorrow, they're opening a Michaels within walking distance of our apartment. That's awesome because there aren't really any good craft stores in Madison that I've found … mostly hit and miss or sewing stuff. So now I've got a place to get supplies.

GG was good last night. They've already had some really good one-liners this season. I'm looking for some interesting plot stuff to start happening soon. Rory's cut her hair, so there's the start of it.