Month: February 2005

Went to the home show in Fitchburg today along with my sister’s family and my parents. What turned out to be funny is that all of us, without talking to each other, were there to look at the same thing. Man, if I only had tens of thousands of dollars lying around.

Actually, now that things have settled down around here, we have a list of things we want to do and need to do. One of those is to redo the deck and the back steps. I want to get that composite stuff for the back steps. It never gets the sun…ever. It’s just an ugly mess to have wooden steps. And parts of the deck look iffy to me. I think boards need to be replaced. Anyhoo…what I really want is to put a 3 or 4 season room in place of the deck. I say in place of because I think I’d want it to be bigger than the current 10×10 deck.

I talked at length to at least three companies who do these, and I liked the guy from one of them more than the others. I’m just not sure I like his product the best. Then there’s the whole “what style do we want” thing. I would definitely go for a 4 season room if I was going to go out and make that kind of investment. I would want something I could use ANY time I wanted. Plus, we could really use the extra living space on the first floor. When the kids are up for a visit, it’s a little close to have 5 people trying to do different things.

Anyway, anyone who wants to pay for such a beast, I’d be happy to dedicate it as the YOUR NAME HERE room, just like the Fleet Center. As long as your name doesn’t contain any swear words.

For the record, mom wasn’t all that impressed with the home show, but I pointed out that it was kind of nice to have all local vendors there. If you go to the home show in Boston, you aren’t going to have the guys who own the place up the street. Like here, I was able to tell the guy who actually owns Lakeview Nursery that it’s depressing to drive by there and not see any signs of life. He just laughed.

Dear Spammers,

I don’t need any.
Thanks but no thanks.
Please remove me from your lists

Thank you,
Me

My cyber pal Andrea was telling us how at work a joke with a fake nametag at some sort of event (they didn’t have one for her but had some for people who weren’t there) has ballooned to the point where the CEO-type person calls her by the fake name because she doesn’t know it’s *not* her name.

How great is that? I mean, it’s also bad because if someone says to the boss “we should give Andrea an award” the boss may say no because she doesn’t know who Andrea is…

Husband-person, who happens to be a muckity-muck web guy in the land of retail web sites, informed me last night that Google had instituted a new algorithm in their search engine (“And then, we wave a chicken head over the database…”) and some sites have seen traffic drop off significantly.

Sometimes I actually worry about stuff like this, because if my traffic drops off any more I will actually have negative traffic (what would that be…forcing people off the site?). My quest for world domination would grind to a halt and then where would we be? If I can’t make it as a big famous blogger, what hope is there for the next 40 years of my life?

But I digress. So I looked at my hits, and I think I’m actually benefiting a little bit. My numbers appear to be up from what I expect – given that I didn’t post/ping Blogrolling until late, I normally have lower hits because people who use Blogrolling as an indicator wouldn’t visit. I got 40 or 50 more hits that I would have expected yesterday, which is like 1/3 extra traffic.

I pulled up the Google page and did a search for “Dump Truck” (with a space) and I appear to have moved up to the number 2 position. Number two. In all of Googledom. So ya, that’s an improvement, I’d say. I should probably start selling stuff here. I mean, there’s gotta be some way for me to parlay a #2 spot into some cash, wouldn’t you think?

[I wrote this post on Sunday and just realized I hit “Save as Draft” instead of “Publish Post”. So I’ll just tweak it a bit and post it as a new post for today. Try to pretend you read this four days ago.]

Okay, I don’t shop at Walmart. I just don’t like Walmart that much. No offense to people who like shopping there. Really. But we went there because there was a rumor floating around town that they had ski/snow pants available. And we needed a pair or two, you see.

We ended up with a really random assortment of stuff. At least I thought so.

– 1 pair of men’s ski pants
– 1 small white sweatshirt (junior size)
– 3 bras
– 1 tube of Icey Hot (tm or r or whatever…I’ll look it up tomorrow)
– 8-pack of purse-sized tissue packs
– 1 cd of Galactic hits (you know, from sci-fi movies)

I can’t remember if there was anything else…but really, what is possibly missing?

I haven’t opened the CD yet. It was in the HUGE collection of $2.97 CDs. I mean, hundreds. We pawed through them – lots of stuff that had potential until you saw they were “performed by the Lobotomy Singers” or whoever. I want the original stars, thanks. I always look because for three bucks, you might find something you can give as a Secret Satan, er, Santa gift, or something that you can use as a soundtrack when editing video. You just always have to be ready in case your home movies involve a rocket launch.