Keyboard potpourri
Regularly scheduled blog post interrupted due to keyboard groping
This was not supposed to be my next post. Oh bother.
I just spent some serious time working on my “pay it forward” post regarding some awards I’ve received where the rules state I have to pass on awards to se7en other bloggers and reveal se7en things about myself.
Spoiler alert: Victoria’s Secret. That’s all I’m sayin’.
It turned out to be a lot more work than I was expecting to do that sort of post. I had to think and stuff and everything! So, rather than try to push the post out before its time, I’m switching to keyboard-monkey-mode so I can get something out tonight while I’m still awake.
Here are some random things from my brain. Whatever.
Bear Jamboree
My wife and I ran into another bear today. That’s two bear encounters in three days. Pretty good, huh? I was able to grab this photo.
Television Graveyard?
We parted ways with our Panasonic television today. To recap: We paid $2,400 for the thing over three years ago. It worked about 14 months before it died. When waited over a year and finally took it into the shop earlier this week while on our vacation. The repair estimate came back at $550 which is more than it would cost to buy a new one, so I guess the darn thing is a disposable item. It is pretty sad when repair costs exceed the replacement cost for a completely new item. The repair shop said they’d “recycle” the TV for us so we didn’t even bother to pick it up. I’m sure that means they’ll fix it cheaply and sell it for a profit. I couldn’t help but notice they had used sets for sale in their lobby.
Chef, control thy ingredients!
Lastly, we had lunch today and we’ve finally learned an important lesson about being vegetarians. When placing an order in a restaurant, it is not good enough to simply say “no bacon” or “no ham.” I say this because my wife’s omelette the other day contained some small bits of bacon which is kinda sorta a no-no for vegetarians. Then today her salad had pieces of chicken in it.
My wife picked out several pieces of chicken and showed them to our waitress and boy, did she really care about that. She even said, “Will you be wanting any dessert?” My wife says that place is on her list now. 🙂
You’d think that restaurants would control their ingredients better. No mandarin oranges in the clam chowder, no anchovies in the ice cream, etc. Alas, that seems to be too hard.
So from now on in addition to saying “no bacon” we’re going to add: “We are vegetarians. It must be a vegetarian preparation.” No more confusion and no more accepting anything less than what we order. Dammit.
Fancy Bakery / Four on the Floor
On our recent trip to the big city we visited a special kind of bakery. It is called a patisserie which, of course, is Francais for “fancy bakery.” And at that bakery they served something called petit fours which, of course, is Francais for “cake at $1 a bite.”
Klingon Spring Rolls
Also in the big city we visited a P.F. Changs. For those unfamiliar it’s a “China bistro.” Part of the shtick is that they mix your sauce table-side. Ooooh. I ordered the spring rolls that had the little vegetarian symbol on the menu. My wife, who knows these kinds of things, noticed the outside of the spring rolls were barely warm and the insides were completely without heat. I had to flag down our waitress and ask if the spring rolls were Klingon? She didn’t grok so I elaborated, “You know. A dish best served cold?” Unlike the other restaurant, however, they cared about what we said and brought us hot ones and when we received the bill, they’d taken them off which they certainly didn’t have to do.
Bearly surviving vacation
The images in this post are less than 24 hours old and one-hundred percent original. We took them on Tuesday. Yes, we encountered a bear cub in the wild.
He looked right at us
I apologize for the image quality. It was not a planned meeting and we did the best we could. I have enhanced the images as best as I possibly can but these still represent the cream of the crop. (Another deliberate pun.) No, the image at the left wasn’t taken at night but this particular enhancement seemed to be the best possible view I could extract. In the original image the bear was barely discernible.
We were about 100 yards away when my wife first noticed the bear cub. I quickly scanned for momma bear as my wife tried to snap a few shots. Unfortunately the bear no doubt heard us first and wasted no time in scampering away. It was only a few short moments before he was up a hill and disappeared out of sight.
We quickly got the hell out of there as we were not particularly interesting in finding out if mom wanted to meet Cubby’s new friends.
For the first time since 2001 when I moved to this small little town on a quest for “voluntary simplicity” I am enjoying a vacation with actual paid days off work. Yes, these are my first paid days off work since the year 2000. My wife, who has a real job, scheduled hers at the same time. That’s nine glorious days without work that we get to spend together.
This wasn’t the best time to vacate but when my boss told me I’d somehow earned a week off I decided to take it because I hope to dump that job soon and don’t want to take the chance of being screwed out of it while it still exists.
In other news…
Every once in a while I’ll have a positive thought in a fit of what can only be described as naivete. I’m going to dub these rare moments P.O.P.T.A.R.T. which stands for the Power Of Positivity in The Abyss with Reality Transference. In other words, no positive thought goes unpunished.
After waiting for over a year since it broke, Monday we took our Panasonic Viera 42″ flat screen plasma TV to the local electronics shop to get a repair estimate.
I had done a bit of troubleshooting research and had pretty much come to the conclusion that the problem must be the power supply. I was optimistic that was the diagnosis we’d hear, and that it would be affordable to fix and that my wife and I would be enjoying movies on the thing – in our actual living room – before this week was out.
Boy, was I wrong.
We carted the thing out to the car, hauled it across town and paid a non-refundable fee of $40 for the luxury of having them take a look. Over three years years ago we bought the thing new from Sears for $2,400. (The money we used was a gift.) It was nice to watch movies on while it lasted, which turned out to be about 14 months. For those of you with calculators, yes, that works out to be about $171 a month for the privilege of using their product. And yes again, that’s about two months after the warranty expired. The cost to fix? Five hundred and fifty dollars! Apparently that is for the power supply and one other part. Yep, $550 is just about the cost of a new 42″ television these days. Fuck PANASONIC. I will never the rest of my life buy anything with the name Panasonic on it. E-V-A-R.
Based on a bit of research on the net, it seems I’m not the only one to have a problem with a Panasonic tv. I can find lots of similar stories. Panasonic is now the newest entry on the long list known as “eat my ass.”
In conclusion…
I’m still trying to blog daily from vacation land and I apologize for the quality of my posts of late and my lack of comments on your blogs. Things will return to normal soon and then it will be another decade before my next paid day off work, I’m sure. Miss you all, hugs and kisses, XOXOXO. Yuck!
🙂
And now a home movie from my vacation so far:
Shouts from the Abyss 
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