Category: Daily Life

I had appropriated a good idea for a post today, but then I realized that it's too dark to take the photos I wanted to use. Thus, it'll have to wait for tomorrow or maybe even the weekend.

In other news, I was interviewed as part of the reader interview series at J-Walk Blog yesterday, which more than tripled my traffic for a day, so hooray!

If anyone is still wandering over from there, I recommend all of the recipes in my right-hand sidebar. Everything else here is just a potpourri of whatever I was thinking when I sat down at the computer that day – six years' worth, so it really adds up.

In an update to one of my weekend posts, TaraCuda and Imaginary_Mark brought home their new kittens last night! Now I just need to help Me distribute her six kittens. So if you're in the market for a nice, fresh kitteh, they're within a week or two of being ready to go. Just say the word and I'll get you in touch with her.

Oh, and don't forget to enter to win a $25 GiveCard gift card. Just comment on this post.

I've packed an amazing amount of activity into the last couple of days.

On Friday evening, I got the opportunity to see the new Andy Warhol exhibit at Kansas City's Union Station at no charge. It was organized as a blogger meetup/tweetup and attended by Spyder and her husband Kanga, Queen of Quirky, May and her fiance, A Librarian, (jeff)isageek and his wife MsGigglebox, XO, TaraCuda, ITChickie and I feel like I'm forgetting someone else. I'll add them if I remember later.

Unfortunately the "tweetup" portion of the activity was curtailed by the complete lack of cell phone signals in the bowels of the concrete building.

I'm not particularly knowledgeable about art, so I found the exhibit to be an eye-opening look at the breadth of Warhol's styles, media and subject matter. In other words, there was a lot more than just soup cans and Marilyn Monroe.

The exhibit runs through January 10th, so go see it if you get the chance. On Friday evenings after 5, admission includes a drink ticket – bonus!

After we had our drinks, most of the group headed out to dinner together and ended up at New Peking in Westport. We had a nice time sharing entrees and chatting about all kinds of deep subjects.

Once dinner was over, I stopped home to drop off my garlicky leftovers and went to a bar to meet up with my band's bass player and see my old rhythm guitarist play with his current band, Red Eyed Bob.

The late Friday night didn't slow me down on Saturday. At 8 a.m. I took Trillian to the vet for a round of shots since it has now been a year since we got her. After that I went and volunteered at an animal adoption event at Petco, and was thrilled that TaraCuda and Imaginary_Mark fell in love with two of the kittens and have applied to adopt them.

Later in the afternoon, I went to an introductory capoeira workshop put on by Grupo Axé Capoeira (including blogger Second Bill Thoughts) at The Zen Zone in Lee's Summit. Capoeira an amazing blend of dance and martial arts, and talk about a full-body workout! 

To say that I have a lot of problems with coordination is a vast understatement; I don't know if it's because I'm left-handed or for some other reason. So, I struggled with learning each basic move (and I wasn't the only one), although I learned I can still do a cartwheel, but I'm only good at them going right, not left. Once I got the hang of some of the moves, I could almost feel new neural pathways developing.

All in all, it was such satisfying exercise, both weight-bearing and aerobic, that I find myself very interested in getting involved in the discipline and starting regular classes. It would take some serious adjustments to my schedule, but I'm definitely going to consider it.

I spent the rest of evening at TaraCuda's birthday carbfest, where I had my very first experience playing Rock Band. I only sang this time, but I think that the drums looked fun and I'll definitely try them next time.

How's your weekend going so far?

It took me a while to get this through my head, but I have finally learned that I get a lot more done if I write down the "to-dos" first. I can keep short lists in my head, but I tend to forget things or randomly re-prioritize, which leads to forgotten grocery items, neglected household chores and unnecessary last-minute deadlines.

At the risk of boring you to death, I'm going to post my latest household to-do list, in part to pressure myself into hurrying up with all of the tasks. My goal is to have all of them taken care of before next Monday (or Thanksgiving at the absolute latest):

1. Find all of Trillian's adoption paperwork before her vet appointment on Saturday morning. It's somewhere in the piles of junk on or below my desk.
2. Dig up medical receipts from the past two months to prove to my flexible spending plan that they're legitimate.
3. Divide my band's current songs into three set lists.
4. Type up grant application paperwork from my Soroptimist Club and e-mail copies to non-profits I know that might want to apply.
5. Buy this year's Salvation Army kids' gifts for donation.
6. Get a different style of toilet paper holder for the guest bathroom and install it. Spackle the many holes in the wall created by my attempts to install the last one and finish with some touch-up painting.
7. Buy solar salt for the water softener and dump it in.
8. Install the new ceiling fan I bought for our bedroom a couple of months ago.

None of these things is going to be particularly difficult or time-consuming – they just need to be done and crossed off.

Then I'll be moving on to my Christmas shopping list. I don't usually do this, but I happen to have been purchasing gifts one at a time all year long, so I'm at least a third of the way through with my shopping already. I have ideas for everyone else (except my husband), so the rest should be easy.

But first I'll need to pick up some groceries on my way home tonight. Eh, I think I'll just wing it.

Because it's NaBloPoMo and I'm getting lots of new visitors, I thought I'd steal Mocha Momma's idea and write a post to introduce myself to anyone who hasn't been keeping up with my blog since 2004. Keith, you can probably skip this one.

I am the oldest of the two children in my family. My sister and I fought non-stop when we were growing up, but now we're best friends. I don't have any kids, but I love hanging out with my niece and nephew and watching them turn into very cool people.

My husband is a long-haired drummer dude who runs a recording studio and otherwise makes his living playing in bands. We'll have been married 15 years next month and we get along exceedingly well despite some differences in political and philosophical outlook.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've been crazy about cats. I have four of them right now, which is my "I don't want to turn into a crazy cat lady" limit. One lives in the recording studio and the rest live downstairs in the main part of our house. I get my additional cat fix by volunteering with an animal rescue group and at a low-cost spay and neuter clinic.

I love to cook and bake, but I'm not home to do so very often. I also keep the baking to a minimum because my husband is diabetic and it's best not to have sweets around the house too often. I still go all out during the holidays and you'll find a bunch of my favorite recipes in the sidebar to the right.

My go-to recipes when I need something quick for a party are the brownies and the cheese ball. I was happy to learn yesterday that pomegranates have arrived in the stores, so I'll be making pomegranate salsa as often as I can while the fruit is in season.

Ever since I was a teenager I've been singing in various rock bands. Most of them have been cover bands, but I was in an original alternative band in the early 1990s called Radio Sunday, and a hard rock original band called Dark Crucible a few years ago. I'm currently in a rock cover band called Rock Machine. We just finished recording our demo and it looks like our first gig will be December 12th.

One of the reasons I've taken to blogging and Twitter so enthusiastically is that I love meeting new people. I've attended the BlogHer Conference every year since it began and I'm already signed up for 2010. I often attend Kansas City area blogger meetups and tweetups, and I belong to our huge Kansas City Social Media Club. It's amazing how many wonderful friends I've gained, some right in my neighborhood and some on the other side of the globe.

Reading is one of my favorite activities that I don't have as much time for as I'd like (probably because I spend most of my book reading time surfing the 'net and reading blogs). I'm loosely attached to at least four different book clubs right now, so that gives me some extra incentive. Most of the books in my permanent collection have some kind of fantasy or science fiction element: Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter Series, the Oz books, etc., and yet I seem so down-to-earth!

I really enjoy doing yoga and my company offers classes at lunchtime on Mondays and Wednesdays, which I attend whenever I have time. My sister has a yoga studio, but I rarely take classes there because it's too far away. However, I will be going there on Saturday for a capoeira workshop because the instructor is one of my friends and I introduced them.

If you've read this far, you know that I can't write anything in brief. I'm working on it!

I had a very pleasant day yesterday. I woke up early and surfed a bit until it was time for me to go to my volunteer shift taking care of the adoptable kitties at a nearby Petco store. I let all of the cats run around together in the dog training area while I cleaned their cages, then trimmed all of the older kittens' claws and gave each of the five youngest cats a pill.

I try to choose animal volunteer positions with the least temptation, but one of the kittens is really starting to grow on me. When I opened his kennel, he leaped out and landed on my shoulder, purring lustily. How can you not love that? I keep telling myself that four cats is MORE than enough…

I didn't have anything else planned, so other than a quick lunch with my husband and a stop at the grocery store, I stayed home most of the day.

My band is recording our demo here tonight, so I used the Shop-Vac to sweep the stairs leading up to the studio, as well as remove probably a half pound of kitty litter from my office carpet. Trillian is in the habit of doing jazz hands as she leaps out of the box each time, so she scatters litter everywhere. Before I put away the vacuum, I tackled the kitten-sized clouds of cat hair on each step leading up from the basement. Much better.

I spent a good amount of time in the kitchen yesterday. I made a cheesecake for a brunch I'm attending later this morning and I also baked a loaf of banana bread using two overripe bananas from last week. Dinner was a plate of jasmine rice with butter and soy sauce because I couldn't think of anything else to make. I even washed all of the dishes and pots and pans before bedtime. I don't know what got into me.

Even with those little highlights of productivity, I still managed to spend a good portion of the day watching TV from last week. I caught up on "The Daily Show," "Ghost Whisperer," "V," "The Office," "Mythbusters" and "Community." 

I finished out the evening by reading the first couple of articles in the latest issue of Cabinet magazine. It's a great bedside magazine and I can make an issue last a week or more.

So what did you do yesterday? Doing anything fun today?

Yeah, I know. It's only Thursday and I've already run out of post ideas. I actually had to go in search of a meme I could glom onto and I chose this one, partly because who could resist the beautiful donuts?

1. It's early morning, about 2:00 AM, and you're driving home. You come
to a red light and sit there. There is no one in sight for miles
around. Do you wait it out or run the light?
I definitely run it, especially if it's a long red light.

2. If you had the chance to re-do the last 24 hours, would you change anything?
Hmmm, maybe I would limit myself to one giant piece of pizza for lunch rather than the two I actually had.

3. When you reply to someone's comment on your blog, do you reply in your comments or go to her blog and comment? (Or email her)
I try to e-mail a reply to everyone who comments. I also do my best to visit commenters' blogs and if I see them comment more than once, I'll usually add their blog to my feed reader.

4. Your favorite Disney movie is:
Probably "Fantasia."

5. Do you recycle?
Yes I do! We have curbside recycling and I am very strict about making sure that everything recyclable goes in the correct bin. I also save glass to take to the Ripple Glass bin near my grocery store. I even save batteries and take them to work to put in the battery recycling bins there.

6. Games of strategy or games of chance?
Games of knowledge and skill are my favorites.

7. Do you have any recurring dreams?
Yes, I have lots of them – both recurring scenarios and recurring settings.

8. What did you learn from your first real job?
At my first real job, someone taught me how to use desktop publishing software, even though it wasn't part of my duties. I think that the comfort level I developed with computers then has served me well ever since. Keep in mind that we're talking about the IBM 386 with DOS prompts at startup!

9. Do you buy or borrow most books?
I mostly buy books, but I borrow them on occasion. I'm just not very good about giving them back.

10. What fashion trend of the past did you say you'd never wear again but did?
I don't think the phrase "fashion trend" is part of my reality. Seriously, there is nothing I can think of that fits this description.

11. When do you start Christmas shopping?
This year I have been buying things and squirreling them away almost since last Christmas, but that's not my usual modus operandi. Generally I start shopping about a week after Thanksgiving or whenever there's a big store-emptying snowstorm, whichever comes first.

12. Have you ever been so happy that you literally jumped up and down for a few seconds? If so, what was the occasion?
Definitely! It happens all the time and it doesn't take much to prompt that reaction. Heck, just invite me to lunch and I'll probably jump up and down a couple of times.

I haven't talked much about the band with which I'm currently singing, but things are going quite well. It's a four-piece (guitar, bass, drums and vocals), and we all seem to be equally professional, mellow and serious about learning our own parts.

We're still finalizing a name and trying to decide which songs to record for our demo while we get our set list worked up to the minimum 40 songs we'll need to play an entire evening. The first gig we have on the books so far is Saturday, December 12th at an American Legion Hall. If you've been wanting to see us but can't quite psych yourself up for the American Legion experience, I'm sure we'll be booked into plenty of normal bars around that time period and beyond.

Here's our song list so far:

Free – All Right Now
Ted Nugent – Free For All
Black Sabbath – Paranoid
Billy Idol – Mony Mony
Doors – Roadhouse Blues
ZZ Top – Thank You
Red Hot Chili Peppers – Higher Ground
Jet – Cold Hard Bitch
Three Doors Down – Kryptonite
Judas Priest – You Got Another Thing Coming
Red Hot Chili Peppers – Dani California
Beastie Boys – Fight For Your Right (To Party)
Stone Temple Pilots – Sex Type Thing
Bryan Adams – Summer Of '69
Bad Company – Can't Get Enough
Poison – Talk Dirty To Me
Audioslave – Like A Stone
Mountain – Mississippi Queen
Lit – My Own Worst Enemy
Green Day – Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
Thin Lizzy – Jailbreak
Kiss – Lick It Up
Buckcherry – Lit Up
Audioslave – Original Fire
Green Day – Brain Stew/Jaded
Ozzy Osbourne – Crazy Train
No Doubt – I'm just a Girl
The Romantics – What I Like About You
Led Zeppelin – Rock and Roll
Jimi Hendrix – Purple Haze

So yes, it's a pretty random selection. A lot of the songs are the result of someone saying, "Hey, do you know this one?" which leads to a jam and consequently to another song being added to the list. I've been singing a lot of these songs since I was in high school.

Still, I'm having fun and l think the sets will go over well in bars. As soon as we've agreed on a name, I'll put up MySpace and Facebook pages and make sure to share them.

Last night I walked with my sister as she accompanied my niece and nephew around the neighborhood gathering copious quantities of candy. It was my first trick-or-treating experience since the 1970s when I was the one getting the candy.

Of course I forgot to bring my camera, but here's a Twitpic of the ghost and vampire:

My nephew wore the mask for about two stops and then fobbed it off on my sister for the rest of the outing. I tried it on and it was rather nose-squashing, so I could see why he didn't like it.

It was fun see all of the parents and kids mobbing the neighborhood. My sister would yell etiquette reminders to my nephew in particular (he's four), and we'd still hear his voice above the other kids' "Trick or treats" starting, "I want…I want…I want…" Sometimes he remembered to say "Thank you" at the door, but usually he shouted it over his shoulder from halfway back through the yard.

Once we got home, the kids were allowed to eat pretty much all the candy they wanted, which always ends up being less than you'd think. My nephew spent a good twenty minutes of his sugar high spinning around in a circle.

After both kids went to bed, my sister and I watched a movie, ate selected candy from both kids' stashes, and drank Kasteel Rouge. A very pleasant evening, I must say.

I'm doing NaBloPoMo this month – year four! – so expect to see a post every day in November. I'm not guaranteeing anything in the way of fascinating content, but I'll do my best.

I consider credit cards a necessary evil. Really, if I didn't need one for traveling, I might not have one at all.

Thus, I make a special point of paying off my entire balance every month. My latest Mastercard provider clearly was not on board with that plan because they recently sent me a letter to tell me that they were raising my interest rate to 29.99%. Say it with me: "Uh, hell no!"

They obviously know that I don't carry a balance, but were evidently hoping I'd forget to make a payment sometime so they could score a nice bonus. I actually timed a payment wrong once last spring and I was forced to pay a ridiculous fee, plus interest, plus some kind of extra charge to make an emergency electronic payment while I was on my way out of town. So we were already at Strike One, and I wasn't intending to take the count up to three.

Naturally I paid off my balance and called to close the account as soon as the payment went through. Their lame attempt to retain me as a customer was to offer to drop the interest rate to 24.99%. Pshaw. Then I did what I should have done in the first place, which was apply for a credit card through my trusty credit union. 8.99%, y'all.

I cannot say enough good things about my credit union. If you have any possible eligibility to join one, you should immediately walk away from all of the nonsense that most banks are putting their customers through these days.

I've belonged to my credit union since they loaned me the money to buy my first car, which I believe was about 20 years ago. They loaned me the money for my first computer (a used Mac SE/30) and laser printer. They even refund the fees if I have to use a non-network ATM a couple of times per month. 

I almost never actually set foot in my credit union because my paychecks are transferred electronically and I pay my bills online. However, when I dropped by last week to deposit a check and apply for their Visa card, they were grilling hot dogs and hamburgers to give to their customers. How nice is that?

So that's my recommendation to make your life a little less stressful. Feel free to use the comments to praise or complain about your financial service providers!

The other day I was driving down a block that used to have two businesses that both represented bad customer service examples for me. I say "used to" because one of them is now out of business.

The first was a pretty good restaurant that was across the street from both its own parking lot and another more popular restaurant. A man (the manager? owner?) used to stand by the restaurant door specifically to watch for people who might park in his restaurant's lot and go to the other restaurant instead. His Three Billy Goats Gruff approach to parking lot guarding obviously didn't help because the restaurant is now closed.

It occurred to me that instead of balefully glaring at people parking in the restaurant lot, what if the same guy had stood at the entrance to the lot every weekday at lunchtime with a handful of flyers listing the daily specials? He could have been the outdoor greeter, meeting each group and welcoming them to his restaurant with helpful recommendations for a tasty lunch. If that had been his approach, maybe the restaurant might still be in business today.

The other business is a coffee shop that's adjacent to several office buildings. Someone I know once walked to the coffee shop from his office, trailed by a co-worker who didn't wish to break off the conversation they'd been having. The first guy purchased a coffee and sat down, joined by his co-worker who had absentmindedly brought in the bottle of soda he'd been drinking at work. A coffee shop employee proceeded to loudly berate the guy with the soda for his gall at bringing in an outside drink. The whole experience was horrible and awkward, and not only have both customers stopped going there, they've told many friends (including me) who have also stopped patronizing the coffee shop. (To be honest, I didn't like them anyway because their coffee was pretty terrible.)

Here's a thought: what if the woman at the coffee shop had instead said, "That bottle has to be getting warm. Here's a cup of ice." No upsell, no bitterness at not making a sale. Just a thoughtful gesture that might have changed the story from "I'll never go there again" to "I'm definitely coming back tomorrow."

You'll notice that neither of my suggestions involved much in the way of cost. The primary change was in attitude.

I imagine both negative experiences resulted from desperation on the part of the businesses in question. That's why customer service needs to be an integral part of a company's philosophy and culture from day one. I'm not saying that's an easy thing to achieve, but it's certainly a worthy goal to strive for.

Service is one of my primary considerations when it comes to patronizing a particular business. Bad service has caused me to permanently remove certain places from my consideration list and great service has caused me to follow my favorite business owners, managers and waiters all over town.

What do you think?