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December 30, 2005

Merry Christmas, Mom

As a Christmas present to my mother, we bought and installed new vinyl tile in her kitchen. I wish I'd thought to take a before picture - we did a lot of work: First, we pulled up two layers of existing floor, which took about a day and a half, bringing us to before my lifetime. We had to mop it around 20 times to remove the grime and adhesive. On the last day, we laid the new tile.

I'm hoping it holds up well over time. It was a big project and despite my claims otherwise, I really didn't know what I was getting myself into, or what I was really doing. But it would be nice if it stayed nice for a while. I'd like to do some other fix-up projects for my mom on other visits. I'd like to iradicate evidence of the 1970's wherever possible. Sadly, there's still a lot of it.

Posted by Janice Ryan at 10:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 28, 2005

Breathe Right strips really work!

It seems like every time I travel somewhere, I come home and get sick immediately thereafter. Thankfully, this time it was only a mild cold, but it was enough to make me tired and grumpy while going to my mom's for Christmas.

Because I was stuffy and having trouble sleeping, I tried wearing a Breathe Right nose strip to sleep before we left. I still didn't sleep great, but I woke up and was able to get ready to leave and felt okay. Before we left, I took off the strip, though. About two hours later, in the car, I was terribly grumpy and tired. I realized that I had been feeling progressively worse since removing the strip from my nose that morning. I went into my bag in the car and got another, and presto!, I felt better almost immediately.

As the weekend wore on, I progressively got over wearing the things in public, because the difference in how I felt was so extreme. I was able to work almost constantly on replacing my mom's kitchen floor this weekend, despite having a cold. I didn't have to remember to take medicine. I wasn't drowsy from decongestants. I could breathe. I'm totally sold - these will be the first thing I reach for to treat a stuffy nose from now on!

Posted by Janice Ryan at 4:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 23, 2005

Santa's body language

I got this as a newsletter via email this week and thought it was cute/funny/interesting enough to share.

http://pattiwood.net/article.asp?PageID=3284

Posted by Janice Ryan at 10:15 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 6, 2005

The three worst commercials on TV

1) The whole series of Radio Shack commercials, featuring people who should only get coal (and not the candy kind) begging for expensive gadgets with the vague notion that if they got them, they might behave like slightly less useless human beings. You know the ones I mean...they're lined up on the side, waiting to sit in the red chair, and prove that yes, people really can get worse. How is this good for Radio Shack? I hate these people, and I never want to be where they go to shop.

2) The Nokia breakup lady - "I toss his pictures, and the ticket stubs, and then I delete him from my phone and it's sooo great." Thank goodness for TiVo. If I see this commercial and I don't have future to catch up with, I pause, so I don't have to listen to her.

3) The Capital One people vacationing out of season. Once again, I hate these people. Everyone knows that if you go to a ski resort in the summer, you take mountain bikes. And the dad is sooo annoying. I understand that he's not real, but seriously, is that body cast from hurling yourself down a mountain really worth being a moron for? I think I'll start fast-forwarding/pause-then-skipping these commercials too. They only got on my nerves this week. I've been waiting for something to tip the scales so I could have "three worst" for a week or so.

Note to network execs: I wouldn't be so focused on being able to fly through commercials with my TiVo if you didn't let such annoying commercials on your stations. I tend to forget to fast forward until something annoys me, and then I skip all the commercials in that break. Your revenue model is only as secure as the weakest link in the chain, ie, the firms that created, sold, and show commercials like the ones mentioned here.

Posted by Janice Ryan at 12:53 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Note to self

Should I add a computer at my desk, or rename an existing one, it will be called "Penny" after the little girl on Inspector Gadget.

Interesting from a computing perspective...what kind of gadgets would she have today? I mean, if she basically had a video phone the size of a watch, and a tablet PC in 1983, what would 22 more years mean? Nanotech?

Okay, that last little bit was for those of you who ignored the "note to self" where I was trying not to forget Penny again, as I did today at lunch.

Posted by Janice Ryan at 12:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack