The Big DumpTruck

I was looking at my page stats a few minutes ago, and realized that since I started using that tracking service in 1998, I’ve had over 200,000 page hits. Actually, it hit 200,000 over the weekend. That’s a lot of page hits. I mean, some folks get that many a day. My highest day ever was 2727 hits. I’d like to do that again. I should try to remember what was going on back in May 2002. I’m guessing Linky & Dinky mentioned me. I think the time I was mentioned in the Sunday Newspaper supplement Access Magazine happened prior to 2002. Yup, just double-checked…it was Linky & Dinky.

So anyway, I’m thinking of doing some low level redesign on the site, but I don’t necessarily want to do it over the weekend. This weekend is supposed to be barbecues, 24/7. Sun and fun and parties until you bleed A1 sauce and beer. Swimming until you closely resemble one of those California Raisins. That’s what you’re supposed to do on the Fourth of July weekend.

I don’t know that I’ll be doing any of that. Mr. Dump just switched to a low fat diet and he’s still in the being really good phase and isn’t keen on rustling up a mess ‘o ribs. Or burgers and dogs. Potato and macaroni salad are right out. You see the problem?

Plus, we’ve got something coming up that will probably keep us busy this weekend. More on that later this week. (See, now you have to keep coming back. I’m sneaky, huh?)

At CVS, I mean. Maybe they are so busy miss-filling prescriptions that they just don’t have time to stock the shelves.

The local paper said a Leominster woman was given double the dose of her thyroid medication. Another local person was one of the 20 or so who have come forward to say they got the wrong medicine or wrong dose.

Personally, I got ‘old’ medicine from Brooks once and that was the last prescription I brought there. The packaging for the drug said it was past the expiration date. I’m just lucky that it wasn’t something you get in a prescription bottle…you have no clue how old that stuff is, I suppose.

The double the dose thing will probably be an issue when drug companies start pushing people to cut pills in half to save money. 30 100mg pills costs the same as 30 200mg pills, but if you cut them in half they last twice as long. But how many people will forget to cut them in half?

We ran out of soap in the shower. Around the house, we use pump bottles of Dial Complete. But in the shower, we use Coast. I think because the commercials claimed it would help us open our eyes in the morning. I have to tell you, after a couple of years of using Coast, it has yet to wake me up. I think that maybe, just maybe, the commercials were exaggerating. A little. Those people would enter the shower half asleep, take one sniff of the lather, and practically prance around the wet tub. A lawsuit waiting to happen, really.

So anyway, we ran out, and I couldn’t find any at CVS or Target. Please, do not tell me that they have discontinued Coast. I will be VERY VERY UNHAPPY if yet another of my regular products has been discontinued. We’ve discussed this before, so I don’t need to rant about it again. I will take deep breaths and assume there was a big sale and I just missed out on it and they sold out. So there.

We have this Coast body wash stuff that we bought thinking it would be similar enough to the bar soap that we could use it as a replacement. No. It is very thick – I think it’s hard to rinse off. And it has a strong, flowery kind of smell. And for some reason, when I use it, my Secret Solid doesn’t work as well as it should. Too much information? Maybe. But there you go, I’m a sharer.

Full disclosure: The Dial company didn’t pay me one thin dime to hawk their soap products. Not a single five dollar bill. Can you believe it?

I’ve been maintaining this website for almost 10 years now. Not once in that whole time has anyone offered me $5 for hawk a product on my site, as was mentioned in an article in the Globe. Where is my $5?

Sure, I have Google ads that I’m not allowed to talk about (but I can tell you that I have yet to see any $$ from those) and the Amazon.com referrals have dropped so much in recent years that I haven’t made the threshold to get a payment since Christmas. So ya, when I signed up for a referrer link in case anybody else wanted to try their hand at selling stock photography, because if I can get an extra penny, why not.

But darn if nobody’s offered me five bucks. Or the 8 figures John Daley mentions of a friend’s site in his take on this. Sheesh. And last year, when I said I’d rename the blog after whatever company was willing to put a pool in my backyard or build me a garage? No takers. Not one. Now I’m all depressed. Thanks a lot, Boston Globe.

Here is Jody’s Top Three Tips for Dealing with Yucky Hot Humid Weather.

1. Eat a lot of popcicles. Humidity bad, popcicles good.
2. Hand your son a high-powered water gun. Chase each other in the back yard. This has the added bonus of letting you pound on your kid mercilessly all in the name of good clean fun.
3. Sit very, very still. Arrange for someone else to fan you.

I did two of the three this weekend. I can tell you that Toys R Us has a package with two water guns in it for only $8, and we had a total blast. He’s got better aim than he used to have, the little bugger. But it felt REALLY good.

Now the boys are playing a baseball game on the GameCube (MVP Baseball 2005), and they are seeing how many out-of-control plays they can make. As in, they’ve got the catchers literally running all over the field and making all the plays themselves. Jason Veritek keeps tagging out guys running between 2nd and third. One double play took about 5 minutes to complete.

Oh, and another thing is that I set myself up as a seller of stock photos on Shutterstock.com. If someone downloads one of my images, I get 20 cents. And the way they are set up is for $140, a user can download 750 images a month, encouraging people to download stuff even if they don’t actually specifically need an image, just because they can. I know someone who signed up last week and has had two of her images downloaded already. Anyway, you own the rights to your images, and you can sell them simultaneously elsewhere. shutterstock just acts like a consignment shop. And if you are more a designer, you can also upload clip-art, backgrounds, and other vector graphics.

So, thinking you’d like in? Use me as a referral so I can get an extra penny or two, wouldja?