Anonymous

It could be because I'd gotten an email reminder to purchase tickets for this year's Renaissance Faire, but I found myself in the mood for a medieval-themed movie. Shakespeare in Love is one of my frequent go-to's, but I was yearning for a different story.

As I was cruising the on-demand movie listing, I came across Anonymous. Starring Rhys Ifans, (remember Hugh Grant's bizarro room mate from Knotting Hill?), I couldn't resist.

The premise of the movie is that Shakespeare was a fraud and that all of the plays, prose and sonnets were actually written by the Earl of Oxford. During the time of Queen Elizabeth I, writing was frowned upon by the Puritans and plays were deemed sinful. He was forced to hide his writing and thereby paid a barely literate stage actor named William Shakespeare to take the credit for his work.

Produced and directed by Roland Emmerich of epic disaster movie fame, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had actually become engrossed in the movie. If you find yourself looking for something different to watch, I'd recommend giving this one a go.

Happy New Year!

All in all, I've had a nice set of holidays starting with Thanksgiving. Well, except for catching the creeping crud that resulted in losing my voice. I've been without the ability to speak above a whisper for about 4 days now. While I'm sure some will count this as a blessing, it makes it quite difficult to vocally discipline my puppy. She's having a field day.

Others within my circle of friends don't seem to be faring quite as well through the gathering of relatives as the image I received from one of them below indicates. Ahh, the holidays...


I no longer have any blood relatives - at least none that I will claim. The Almighty has decided that I [evidently] will fare better on my own. I'd really like to discuss that with Him when the time is appropriate. But I guess there is a blessing in that I no longer have the holiday relative frustration. Silver linings and all that rot.

So as I sit here on New Years Eve contemplating the past year, I am thankful for the friends that I have, the job that I [still] have, the family that I have adopted to be my new 'blood' relatives while I work on that list of people and appropriate tactics to remove them from my life (or at least squelch them into non-importance.)

I hope your year was as blessed and I wish you and yours all the best for 2012! See you on the flip side ;-)

The First Hobbit Trailer!

Non-Chocolate Halloween

I thought I was all set for Halloween until I read a post from Arthur Johnson at G+. It's so hard to be conscientious with all of the stuff going on in the world! To read his original post that describes how the major chocolate companies allow slave child labor to supply us with our chocolate, click on his name above and scroll down to October 14th.

The challenge was now on. After spending 3 days writing software requirements, I needed the diversion anyway :P So, off to the stores I went. I typically have 100+ kids each year, and because I have a tendency to overdo, I hold myself to a $1 per kid allowance up to $100 maximum. The ideas below definitely do not need to be at that level, so anyone should be able to replace chocolate regardless of the budget they have by only using one or two of the ideas. More ideas can be found here and here. I'm sure even more can be found on the net, just search using 'no candy Halloween' or other similar key words.

For my neighborhood kiddies, I picked up party favors at Michaels and Goldfish snack packs and fruit treats at the local Target. Since I was done shopping at that point, I didn't hit the local Dollar store which I'm sure would have produced some fun and inexpensive finds, but would have likely run me over my budget.

The Goldfish came in a bag of 30 snack pouches and the Fruit Snacks came in a box of 80 for $4.49 each. My Target purchase came to $29.01. I will likely have snacks left over, but that's OK as this stuff I might actually eat myself.

The party favors were $2.99 each and came in packages of 12, 18, 20 or 36 depending on the item. A real good find were Glo bracelets that came in a package of 15 for $1. The cute spider web treat bags were $1.99 for a package of 25. The total price tag was $70.89.

Grand Total: $99.90. I came in under budget by 10 cents! LOL

Next year I'll be better prepared as the stores were pretty well picked over at this point on the party favor front. I'll have to now add Halloween to my "after holiday shopping" routine to pick up deals for next year. I can also sew treat pouches from cute Halloween fabric much cheaper than buying pre-made pouches. It's all in the planning, isn't it?

WTF? Bank of America - Debit Card "Closure"

For the most part, today was the normal BS that the standard work day brings. But I did have a bit of an issue at the restaurant we chose to go to for lunch.

As some of you know, I've been purging the house and a friend of my DLH has been clearing out the garage for me. So I ordered a dumpster to make things easier for him so he wouldn't have to make dump runs. While we were waiting for our food to come, I remembered that I neglected to contact my trash service to schedule a pick-up for the dumpster so I could fill it up again. This essentially constitutes a new dumpster scheduling and I had to provide a credit card number.

I gave him my debit card number as I did before and it came back declined. I didn't think much of it because I didn't have my reading glasses on when I rattled off the number and just figured I screwed up. So I grabbed my Chase card as it is easier to read and ended the phone call.

Then it was time to pay for lunch. I placed my debit card with the bill and again, it came back declined.

WTF?

After I got back to work, I checked my bank account just to make sure there wasn't something funky going on. No... all fine there. So I called the number on the back of my card to find out what was going on.

After I described my adventures to the individual that answered the call, he left to check on the debit card number and came back to the phone indicating that my card had been closed due to potential fraudulent activity and a new one had been issued. And "Yes, we did not notify you."

WTF?

So I asked him why I wasn't notified. A similar situation happened earlier this year and I received a call both at home and on my cell instructing me to stop by a local branch and replace my card. So I pushed again. His less than informative reply indicated that they felt it was best to not notify the card users and then asked if I checked my mail. Now I'm not the greatest at checking my mail, (I typically check it once a week), but in this case I had just checked it yesterday. I had not received anything from BofA. So I pushed again informing him that the banks so desperately want us to use the debit cards, so why would they take such a lame action? He danced around that question and finally indicated that he didn't know. I then asked to speak to someone that did know and he told me there was no one to talk to in all of BofA.

At that point I produced a gutteral growl (literally), thanked him for his "service" and promised that if this happened again that I would switch banks. He didn't care.

Needless to say, when I got home I checked the mail. Sure enough, there was an envelope from BofA with a new debit card inside accompanied by a letter:

Note the 2nd bullet. How stupid of a statement is that? How can they possibly know when I've received the letter? How can they possibly know that my mailman is less efficient than most? Secondly, notice that this letter is not even dated.

The letter doesn't state the form of fraudulent activity beyond "third party" issues. Also, if I cannot rely on them to contact me for this issue, how can I rely on them to contact me if they find any suspicious behavior during their monitoring period. Since they've closed my card, it wouldn't affect me anyway.

I do all of my banking and bill pay on line through the BofA site. They could have easily sent me a message there. In fact, it would have been cheaper than printing off a zillion letters to enclose with the new card.

WTF?

The card was labeled with the standard sticker. Since the card was assigned a new number, they could have easily cancelled the old card upon activation of the new one.

Blah, Blah, Blah.

And how was your Wednesday?

A Post!

Yep, it's been a while. Basically the old work machine has kept me sidetracked - that and house purging. Let me tell you, I'm so tired of yarn barfage all over my house that I'll be going on crochet haitus for quite a while!

So back to stitchery as flosses definitely take up less space than balls of yarn. I dug out the old stitching frame and dusted it off. Then off to eBay to see what's out there on the cheap. I picked up some Teresa Wentzler and Patricia Allison charts that I did not already have as I just love their designs. (You know me and fantasy!) I then took a trip to the local stitchery store and came across another designer that I fell thoroughly in love with.

She sponsors online project groups for her designs and I've signed up for one of them called Autumn Knotgarden Mandala:

(Click pic to access online project site)

This is just one of MANY awesome designs. The designer's name is Martina Rosenberg and she hails from Germany. Check out her design site to see all. I love the symmetry of her Mandala designs. It talks to the graphic artist in me big time. I'm just waiting for the official acceptance into the project group and then I'll be madly stitching. I'm thinking I'll stitch it on black to make the colors pop. It's been a while, so I've got a bit of rust to wipe off of those skills, but it will be fun nonetheless.

Other than that, it's pretty much the same old routine. My DDH's friend has been coming by to help me clear out the garage so I can actually park both vehicles in it. We're not yet done, but close. That should cut down on the amount money I've been spending on car washes! It's incredible the amount of dirt that floats around in the air just waiting (and looking) to land on my cars! Then, of course, the neighborhood cats walk all over them before the dew dries in the morning to leave their special signature. Maybe what I ought to do is hang out on the porch with a slingshot and drench them with water balloons. Yes, I'm turning into that kind of an old crusty lady!

And for those that are following the making of The Hobbit, I'm starting up a newsletter for those that don't have the time to surf for tidbits. First installment below, more to follow!

Well, ciao for now and I'll post pics of my stitching progress for you to critique on how well I'm doing compared to the pic above :)

Single on a Holiday

Happy Easter everyone!

If you're reading this on Facebook, click here so you can easily read the whole post. If you're on the blog, stay put ;-)

When you are married - or live with a mate - you have a filter. The filter that says 'shouldn't you be cleaning the house?' and other assorted sanity checks. When you are single, that filter does not exist.

So fast-forward to today. It's Easter Sunday. I've done all of the housework I intend on doing, I've been off work this past week so I've done the visits and fun things and now I'm bored. No relatives to visit, (that I would care to visit anyway), and my closest friends live miles away - far enough that I don't feel like getting into the car and onto the freeways. So now what?

Let's check email and surf the net. I get a vehicle maintenance reminder and go to the website to schedule the appointment. (What did we do before the internet?) From there, I start to look at used cars. I do need something with a hatchback for hauling larger items. Maybe a PT Cruiser. Let's see what they have.

I find one and it's dirt cheap. Just a 4-banger, but for what I'd be using it for that would be fine. So, as I wave good-bye to Paco and his sad eyes, (you're going somewhere without me?), I hop in the car and drive to the dealer.

The Cruiser was indeed a good deal, but it was Snowblind White. I'm not kidding - I've never seen a brighter white in my life on a car. Too bad I hate white cars. The posting said 'Sandstone White', so I imagined a creamy white. I could have lived with that, but not Snowblind White. No way.

So I look around the lot. I looked at Jeeps - those looked fun. I looked at mini-vans. Nah, not my thing. Then I saw the Dodge Nitro. Bigger than what I was originally looking for, but it's kinda cool. I test drove it and it was all over. It is now sitting in the driveway.

This is the pic from the website. It's a 2010 with 17,000 (+ change) miles. It was one of their weekend specials. Of course, I checked out Car Fax and Edmunds before I test drove. Good reports and reviews and the price was way below what Kelly Blue Book indicated for that year-model-options. So, I think I made a good deal. If not, I'll just live in denial.

I didn't trade in my Sebring - I love that car! I don't know if I could ever live without a convertible ever again. This will be my utility vehicle.

And that is what one can do without the 'mate filter'. How was your Easter?

The Work Week in Summary

Shades of Farting Poodles

Remember the Farting Poodle? We all had a good chuckle on that one. In fact, I've recently made two of them for fellow fartiers at work. They're quite a hoot to make even if finding a can of air freshener with a flat cap is a pain in the arse.

Well, Lion Brand strikes again with a 'what the hell were they thinking' pattern that will only top my list of things to make for people I don't like:

Anybody want to venture a guess as to what drugs the pattern designer was on for this one?! And to add insult to injury, are those pink dotted stockings she has on? Where does one even buy those?

I passed this photo around at work and one of the guys stated it must be a diversion to keep men from looking up her skirt. I agree ~ who could look at anything else? Might be a cheap replacement for chastity rings...

So my question to you is, if all you had available for patterns were this and the farting poodle pattern, which one would you make? :D

I Went to the Sideshow Website

I've avoided that site for the past couple of years because it's dangerous for me. I have more LOTR figures than I have room for. But something made me go there. Something powerful. Something sinister...

And I found this 'Last Chance to Own':

and this (the upper bodies are interchangeable):

and these unframed lithographs that they're taking preorders on:

Help meee...!

Update: Too late. I ordered the lithographs :P