Recently I was catching up on my blog reading. I am perpetually behind and usually have 500+ unread items in my Google Reader – sometimes it gets up over 1000 unread items (in which case Google Reader doesn’t even tell you how many unread items you have, just “1000+”) and then I delete the Tastespotting posts without reading them all (I do glance through the titles before I mark them as “read”) and usually that makes it drop back down below 1,000. Apparently 1,000 is the number that drives me crazy when it comes to Google Reader – what really sucks is that I tend to work my way down the list alphabetically, so if your blog title starts with one of the first few letters of the alphabet, I’m generally up to date on reading you. If, on the other hand, you are XKCD then I hope I haven’t missed anything in the past six weeks or so.
Well – that’s an exaggeration, actually. Sometimes I go to the end of the list and work my way back up. If you’re in the middle of the alphabet, god knows when I last read you.
Anyway. What was I saying?
Oh, right. So I was laying in bed last night catching up on blog reading (I love my laptop!), and I read this entry of Melting Mama’s, and I got kind of confused. Is it just me? I never thought that the Easter Bunny actually LAID those eggs s/he left behind, I thought s/he… Well, I don’t know where the hell I thought the Easter Bunny got the eggs and the candy, but I never thought they came OUT OF the Bunny.
Am I alone in this belief, or am I the only one on earth who didn’t know that the Easter Bunny laid ten million eggs (and candy items) before delivering them to the bad little heathens of the world?
Okay, people, you gotta help me out – does anyone know if there’s going to be another season of Work Out on Bravo? I have Googled high and low and I can’t seem to find any kind of concrete answer. I can’t find ANYTHING on the Bravo site, and the Work Out section of their site doesn’t appear to be working any more, and I MUST KNOW. Will I get to see a bunch of pretty trainers prancing around, flirting and sleeping with each other, and putting their clients through their paces, OR NOT?
Anyone know anything? Help?
So on Friday I bitched about people who put up way too fucking many pictures of the recipe they’re creating and posting. I said something along the lines of “I don’t need to see a picture of what the salt looks like, then a picture of the salt being measured, then a picture of your face as you ponder the salt, then a picture of the salt being added to the mixing bowl. A picture of the ingredients, the finished product, and then the recipe is JUST FINE.”
On Saturday Pioneer Woman wrote about how badly she wants to have chickens.
You know what happened next, right?
To my horror, Ashleas (please report to me so I can beat you soundly with a kitten) posted in the comments (kudos for being only the 5th person to post in her comments – she gets like 300 comments in the first ten minutes after she posts!) that some crazy bitch in Alabama (me) and her equally crazy husband (him) have 120 chickens, I write about it, and she enjoys reading about their antics.
So hundreds of people read that comment, flocked to my site, and were greeted by a profanity-filled diatribe about how I hate it when people take picture after picture of the cooking/ baking process.
For the record, I actually wasn’t talking about Pioneer Woman when I wrote that. I mean, it does annoy me, the myriad pictures of the cooking/ baking process, but it’s not like I don’t KNOW she does that in every single post on her Cooking site, and I usually just scroll directly to the bottom of the page to see the difficulty of the recipe if I’m interested in it. I’m not going to say who it was that caused the annoyance, someone whose blog I read (who does not read me – it’s NOT YOU) though if you’re dying to know email me and I’ll tell you. Trust me, though, it ain’t that exciting.
It took me about 2.3 seconds to decide to delete that section of Friday’s entry, because Pioneer Woman drives some serious traffic, and I really didn’t want any of her readers deciding I was talking about her and coming after me. She has a lot of devoted readers and as badass as I (like to think I) am, I can’t really fight off thousands of pissed-off women.
Okay, well, I COULD. But that’d just be showing off.
Naturally, because I said yesterday that the kittens have shown no interest in climbing over the gate keeping them in their room and the bathroom, Fred was walking down the hall and found that a curious little kitten was wandering down the stairs.
(He might not have noticed, except that Sugarbutt walked by the bottom of the stairs, turned and stared at the kitten, hissed, and ran away.)
It was Caleb, and I picked him up and went upstairs to see what was going on, and as I approached the top of the stairs, Beulah came over to look at me. As it turned out, all the kittens had climbed over the gate and were wandering around the upstairs.
So yesterday morning I put up the baby gates at the bottom of the stairs and let the kittens have the run of the entire upstairs. They LOVED it, of course. Kittens always love having new territory to conquer. They spent most of their time playing in my room, raced back and forth, and then curled up on my bed with me to take a nap.
Every now and then everyone but Beulah would come to the bottom of the stairs (the stairs are still a little too much for Miss Beulah) to see what they could see, and I’d hear a sad little “Why can’t we come out THERE?” meow.
All in time, little kittens. We’re going to keep them confined to the upstairs for a few more days, then see what it’s like to let them have the run of the house.
Like a circus, is what I expect it’ll be like!
More kitten pics over at L&H.
“Really? You’re going to kick me out of the upstairs so those rotten kittens can have room to run? I don’t think so.” (I did.)
Previously
2008: Places where the Feliway bottle is NOT
2007: No entry.
2006: God save me from the permed ‘fro.
2005: Why do I bother to make New Year’s resolutions, I ask you?
2004: Bastard.
2003: “That’s right, you LITTLE SHIT, get the hell out of here!” I yelled, stomping at him.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: Not much of an entry.
The tags in Google Reader are very helpful for categorizing each of the sites you read. Then you can mark a whole category as read and get rid of a bunch at a time. I have categories for food, pictures, tv, local stuff, misc blogs, blogs I don’t wanna miss, etc.
You can add tags if you click on Manage Subscriptions.
Reporting for Kitten Beating, Ma’am!
I’m sorry, Robyn. I didn’t even think about people flocking over to your site after that comment. After all.. I may have been 5th but who the hell would read what I had to say?
Also: Only reason I was 5th was because I was probably posting during class. I’m a Digital Artist so we work on computers. …. Yeah. Needless to say that we’re always on facebook and stuff.
Sorry for the hassle. ^^ I do love you and Pioneer Woman!
Pioneer Woman’s cooking posts remind me home cook meals. I’ve been living in a dorm room for four years… I haven’t eaten real food in years.
“The Seven”…really, isn’t it more like Six and a half? 😉 But that halfling sure is adorable.
I never thought the Easter Bunny actually *laid* the eggs, I thought he/she just delivered them. I think I thought the EB also did the dying of the eggs. That’s when I actually THOUGHT about any of this; usually I was too busy stuffing my fat maw with the chocolate and cursing the Eastroturf that was stuck on it!
ALSO, having grown up in a Very Catholic household, therefore not eating meat on Fridays, it never made sense to me to have a bunch of hardboiled eggs at the ready on Easter when I had had to eat egg salad for the past six Fridays (or whatever) already!
You know, the first thing I thought of was Pioneer Woman’s blog and the recipes she posts. I thought you might be in trouble. Not from her, but from readers who missed the point that you were not pointing a finger at PW. Lalalalalala, having fun yet??
So apparently jumping up on a hot burner on the cooktop and burning little pink jellybean toes does NOT stop a kitten from doing the very same thing again. Thanks goodness the cooktop was not hot this time. I think my new Miss Thang may be somewhat ‘challenged’ if you know what I mean. I guess we will never use the cooktop again. I will miss having warm food.
I thought the Easter Bunny was a fake. Of course, I never believed in Santa or the Tooth Fairy or the Stork.
But I think if there was an Easter Bunny and if he left colored eggs (that you know darn well you and Mom dyed the day before) he would have carried them in a nice basket and left them around the house/yard OR in your basket.
I’ve never heard or thought the Easter Bunny laid the Easter eggs. Since when can bunnies lay eggs anyway?? You’re not crazy, Robyn…at least not about this! 🙂 🙂
If memory serves (and trust me, sometimes it does NOT), even the cartoons about the Easter Bunny showed his (and it was always a “he”) troops of dedicated egg-laying hens that worked for him. The Bunny only decorated and hid them for good little girls and boys to find.
I never thought the Easter Bunny laid the eggs either. Bunnies don’t lay eggs. I never questioned the logic of a Giant Rabbit delivering colored contraband eggs. The candy involved was more important.
Can you ask your vast readership a question for me, please? Does anyone know of a cell phone you can get that doesn’t have an activation fee or monthly fees and has minutes that don’t expire? I am trying to find one for my grandmother who will maybe use the phone once every decade. I just want her to have one in case of an emergency when she’s out driving. The “disposable” phones I have tried thus far don’t have activation/monthly fees, but you can only purchase minutes that last for a certain length of time before they expire. & of course, the less you spend, the sooner the minutes expire. It’s so frustrating, especially because this kind of information isn’t listed on the packaging. Is there really no such thing as an “emergency only” cell phone?
I inquired about the ’emergency only’ cell phone when I upgraded last month. The TM0b1le guy told me that any cell phone, even one without a SIM chip, can dial 911. They can’t triangulate your location with an “inactivated” cell phone, but you can get emergency help. I wanted to give our old cell phone to some elderly neighbors who walk their dogs regularly (he’s got Parkinson’s) and I wanted to be sure it would be of use when I did. Hope this helps…
Awww don’t kitten-beat Ashleas. If she hadn’t posted about you on Pioneer Woman’s site then I never would have found you and fallen in love with all your kittehs! Your Joe Bob looks exactly like my Freeway. She was found a long time ago as a tiny kitten at the dump alongside the – you guessed it – freeway.
I have enjoyed browsing your site. Actually clicked over here to just take a quick look and spent the entire day here – those kitties just draw you in! We had chickens when I was growing up. Never cared much for them (tho when they were little baby chickies they were adorable) but it could also be the trauma I experienced when my Dad…um…how shall I say this… thinned the coop? I was severely traumatized so yeah that tainted my experience.
See?! I brought you a reader! I DEMAND MORE KITTEN – BEATING. …that is.. beating me with a kitten.. Not beating a kitten..
I heard that Workout is returning for another season of the crazy – maybe I saw Jackie on Oprah and she said it? Or maybe she called me herself and told me? Whichever, they will return.
Shelly, try a tracfone. It’s only $20 every three months. It’s the only reason I have a cell phone as I hate phones and need one just randomly. Depending on the phone you purchase (I got mine for $29 – Motorola) depends on what it does. Photos, text etc. (wow I sound like a lazy ass pitchman! LOL)http://www.tracfone.com/
Shelly, I agree with Debra, check out the Tracfone. I bought mine on the net, got double minutes for life and no monthly charges. I know they sell them at Wal-Mart, too.
This is an article about the new Jackie Warner show on Bravo
http://www.afterellen.com/blog/jamiemurnane/jackie-warner-might-lose-work-out-for-jackies-gym-takeover
I thought it was just the Cadbury bunny that laid eggs. All the other designated Easter bunnies just delivered the goodies.
This post cracked me up. Robyn, you so funny.
Shelly, I hear you on the non-expiring, non-renewing-every-X-days minutes thing. Until recently, my mom used a prepaid phone that required a minimum of $5 a month, I think, and at the end of every month she’d be furious because she’d only used $0.50 in calls.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there is such a thing as what you’re looking for – which is a shame because it’d certainly be helpful for *lots* of people on limited incomes. There is the option of giving her an unactivated but charged phone, as Jean mentioned, but then there’s always the situation where someone needs help, but it’s not *quite* an emergency… you know, you ran out of gas or the car broke down – that’s certainly not something you want to call 911 for, but you’d want to be able to reach *someone.*
The closest thing to “never expires” I could find was with T-Mobile –
http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/plans/Prepaid-Plans.aspx
under which IF you buy 1000 minutes ($100) up front, those minutes do not expire for a year. Which sounds good, at first, BUT by comparison, if I’m reading it right, it’s $10 for 30 minutes that last for 90 days, so that plan would work out to only $40 a year if she never or only rarely uses the phone and needs more than those 120 minutes.
They also have a basic phone for as little as $20:
http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/phones/prepaid.aspx
You have to buy an “activation card” so I suppose that’s a fee, but it’s $7 on the web, $10 in stores, so it’s not too bad – I’ve seen some places that want a $50 charge.
The catch is that T-Mobile seems to be a love-hate kind of company… most of the reviews I’ve seen in various places throughout the web are either “OMG They’re AMAZING I’m so HAPPY!” or some variation on “They charged me wrong, set my house on fire, and kidnapped my kittens.” FWIW, I had a regular T-Mobile account for about 4 years and never had any complaints; the very few problems I did have were handled quickly and appropriately. But I’ve seen some commentors say that there are basically two “tiers” of customer service – one tier for the regular monthly plan folks, and another, much lower, tier for the PAYG folks.
On the one hand, if your grandma never uses the phone, there won’t be much opportunity for complaint about customer service… on the other hand, “in an emergency” would be a terrible time to discover that they accidentally closed your account a week ago for no reason, or something.
Virgin Mobile (which is what my mom used, and was satisfied with, although again she hardly ever used the phone) requires a larger and monthly (instead of every three months) expenditure on minutes,
http://www.virginmobileusa.com/rates/minute.do
but the minutes CAN “roll forward” so whatever you don’t use, you don’t necessarily have to lose (up to 5000 minutes). But yeah, you’re still stuck looking at a bunch of prepaid time that no one’s probably ever going to use.
In short, I couldn’t find anything that’s exactly what you’re looking for – everything does seem to have expiration dates – but the T-Mobile plan seems reasonable enough (about half what Debra says the TracPhone plan is)* even though it’s still short of the goal.
*OMG. I started getting the weirdest, strongest, most surreal sense of deja vu as I typed that parenthetical comment… so powerful it actually made me *dizzy*, accompanied by a very strong “impression” of a woman with longish, straight blonde hair.
That really freaked me out.