Year: 2014

An open letter to Caleb Reynolds from Big Brother 16.

I never really talk about my Big Brother obsession because not many of my friends actually watch the show but I just have to say something here because WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, MAN.

1st of all, Amber told you within a few days of entering the house that she liked you as a friend. Period. She flat out said that she didn’t think of you the way you think of her. That should have been the end of your made up “relationship” but somehow in your mind that registered as “she just doesn’t want to talk about it in front of cameras but she actually likes me”. No.

All the live feeders watched in disgust as you basically tricked her into going on a “date”. The level of uncomfortable from her for that hour was so horrible I actually had to stop watching after about 15 minutes and wasn’t able to come back to it for almost a full day because it made ME uncomfortable. PROTIP: When a girl tells you she doesn’t see you in a romantic light, don’t talk about how excited you are for your parents to meet, then talk about your wedding, then insist she go on a week long cruise with you after she’s just been forced to spend 90 days in a house locked up with your obsessive behavior.

The thing that finally prompted me to write this letter was your recent “game move”. Let me be clear. That “game move” was a classic case of mental/emotional ABUSE. Yes, ABUSE.

After 50+ days of putting up with your ridiculous obsession with her (seriously, taking her clothes to wear around the house and stealing her crap to sleep with at night is BEYOND creep, man) and she stopped talking to you altogether, you decided that you needed to “teach her a lesson”. So you told Frankie to put her on the block so she’d be “so scared she’d be forced to come running back to you”.

SERIOUSLY? If you ever manage to get a girl to go out with you outside that house I will be flabbergasted. Also, understand that FORCING a girl to do ANYTHING is pretty much the epitome of a fucking douchebag. If a girl stops talking to you then just LEAVE HER THE FUCK ALONE. Don’t play games and mentally screw with her to FORCE her to be nice to you again.

But thank you, I guess? My almost 16 year old daughter loves to watch the show with me and I’ve been able to use your behavior as a great example of the kind of guy you NEVER want to date EVER.

Friday of last week Ben called and asked me if I’d be interested in staying at the Presidential Suite of the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco for a night while he had to be there for company business. I agreed immediately as long as I didn’t have to call him Mr. President. Originally we were only supposed to stay on Tuesday night but last minute they needed him there a day early so we got to stay Monday and Tuesday night and OMG YOU GUYS! PRESIDENTIAL SUITE!

This was pretty much a once in a life time opportunity. The cost of this room PER NIGHT was almost TWICE our MONTHLY mortgage. It flabbergasts me that there are people that have that kind of money to spend and I certainly didn’t mind getting to pretend to be one for a few nights.

I didn’t get great shots of most of the suite because they were showing product in the downstairs portion that I couldn’t photograph but I got some the second night after they had cleaned all that up. I had SUCH a great time getting to explore San Francisco all on my own for the day but will save that for another post. For now, take a look at how the 1% live.

This is just inside the front door looking right. It’s one of two sitting rooms and farther back is the dining room.

Here is the same room standing across from the front door. The door on the right is a half bath and the door on the left is kind of a “butlers kitchen”. Seriously.

The bag on the table contains a piece of pecan pie and a gigantic chocolate chip cookie. Just saying.

Here’s the dining room which was kind of a mess because Ben’s coworkers and a bunch of reviewers had been in and out all day long. That window on the left had a great view of The Metreon where we are always going to see IMAX movies and the Moscone Center where Apple likes to announce all it’s fun new toys!

This is the living room, bar, and front door. Behind me is the stairs to the only bedroom.

Here are the stairs and the massive window that I spent HOURS staring out.

And here is the bedroom. It was FABULOUS! We spent quite a bit of time laying in bed and staring out the window not quite believing that we were actually there in that room.

And lastly, the bathroom. THE BATHROOM. Apparently the 1% like warm butt showers.

So there ya go! I still can’t believe we had the opportunity to stay there for FREE and I’m glad that I’ve been better lately about not WORRYING (work, dogs, Cassidy) and saying YES to things that I’d normally pass by because of all those silly things that will totally work themselves out. Work isn’t going anywhere (I have 180 HOURS of PTO!) and Cassidy is more than capable at 15 (almost 16 OMG) of taking care of the dogs for two days while we are gone. When I was her age I was staying home for longer times alone with a dog, cats, AND a 6 year old little brother to take care of!

I’ve dropped about 12,039,429,348 hints to Ben to try and get more chances to do demos and go to trade shows so that I can tag along more. There is one in Spain that I’d LOOOOOOOOOOOOVE if he were able to go because work would pay for his ticket and hotel room and all we’d have to pay for is my ticket! YES PLEASE! Fingers crossed!

So I’ve been meaning to start doing reviews of things I love and don’t love here for awhile to get the juices flowing but I haven’t come across anything that I love or hate so much that I feel like I need to write about it RIGHT NOW.

Until now.

For awhile I had been seeing ads on my Facebook feed for the site sammydress.com but for whatever crazy reason didn’t look at the comments or read any of the reviews before ordering from them.

I pretty much fell in love with this top so told Cassidy to find a few tops she liked and I’d order them all at once. She found two tops, I added one more and I placed the order on 6/5/2014 at 6:20AM. The time comes into play later!

Then I forgot about it till 11 days later when Cassidy asked me if they had shown up yet. I checked the status of my order and it said it hadn’t even shipped yet. So finally, I started to google them and read the HORRIBLE REVIEWS (much like this one!) and realized that the chances of my actually ever getting my order were slim to none and that most people didn’t get any response from their customer service so I opened a ticket on their site and also headed straight to Paypal and started a ticket to get my money refunded.

6/16/2014 06:27 PDT – Buyer: I ordered these clothes 11 days ago and they haven’t even shipped them out yet. I want to cancel my order and have opened at ticket with Sammydress

6/16/2014 20:49 PDT – Seller: Dear friend,Thank you very much for your purchase.I am so sorry to tell you that your order has not been shipped out yet. Because of the item YM4281802 is out of stock now. Would you mind we send the rest items which are in stock and refund the difference to you? If so, could you please kindly help me to cancel this dispute? I will arrange the shipment for you. If you don’t cancel this dispute, your order couldn’t be shipped out. Hope you could understand.Thank you very much for your support.Any questions please feel free to let me know, I will be glad to help you.Have a nice dayBest Regards

This actually made my blood BOIL because when I was looking back to see if I had somehow missed an “Out of Stock” notification I realized that RIGHT THERE ON THEIR SITE somebody had asked THE SAME DAY I ORDERED the top, 6 hours AFTER I ordered it in fact, that the shirt was in stock!

How was it that a shirt I ordered six hours BEFORE that comment saying it was in stock, suddenly out of stock!?

6/23/2014 18:44 PDT – Buyer: No, I want all my money back. I placed my order on June 5th and right on the product page for item YMH4281802 somebody asked if it was in stock and you said it was available in the size I ordered. I wanted these clothes for a specific event which has passed. Please refund me the full amount immediately. Thank you.

No response so I escelated my dispute to a claim.

6/28/2014 15:16 PDT – Buyer: I still have not received my items even though the day that I purchased them they clearly said on their website that they were available (I have a screen shot) they are saying now that they are unavailable. It has been almost a month. I just want my money back.

I finally got my money back on 6/28/2014. I can’t even believe a company like this manages to stay in business! When you click on the ads on Facebook it is HUNDREDS of people talking about what a rip off they are. The people that do, RARELY, actually get the clothes say they are either very cheap (which I get, they are CHEAP) but sometimes people get completely different things than were actually listed on the site.

Final word, don’t buy from them EVER. NEVER EVER. Crap. Complete an total waste of time and energy.

The other day Cassidy was calling a business where she has a job interview. She held the phone away from her face, looked at it puzzled, then listened again, then hung up and redialed. Then she repeated the entire process again.

Cassidy: Are you sure this is the right number?
Me: Yep, I read it back to her. Why?
Cassidy: It’s not ringing and the phone is making a weird noise.
Me: Like what?
Cassidy: *puts phone on speaker*
Me: That’s a busy signal.
Cassidy: *looks puzzled*
Me: She’s on the phone with somebody else. Hang up and keep trying till you get through.
Cassidy: Can’t she tell that I’ve been calling her over and over?!
Me: It’s a land line!
Cassidy: Who even does that anymore?

I had to think back to the last time that we had an actual land line. We got rid of it when we moved out of the first apartment we shared together and into our rental house in September 2005. So that was almost 9 years ago and Cassidy was just 6 at the time! SIX! So she has NEVER heard a busy signal! In her life! Before last Thursday!

Other things she finds odd but has never really experienced:

1) Pagers
2) TVs without remotes
3) Dialing a rotary phone
4) Mix tapes
5) Answering machines
6) Cameras that spit the photo out at you that you have to then shake to see
7) Machines that only exist to rewind your VHS tape
8) Drive in movie theaters
9) The scratch of a record player
10) Having to roll down the window in the car

And also, I am really old.

1: When did you start your blog?
According to my archive page, I started blogging on March 22nd, 2003. Aflux was not my first site and I transferred all of my posts from my first personal domain here. I used other platforms before that but I’m going to go with that as my official start date.

2: Have you had anyone online presence before? Another blog, YouTube etc?
I started blogging two years before YouTube was even a thing that existed. I used sites like geocities and stuff but as soon as buying personal domains caught on I jumped on that bandwagon and never looked back.

3: Why did you start your blog?
Originally I started because I wanted a way to document my life. I was just getting over my divorce being finalized, starting a brand new relationship, was a single mom. I had a lot going on and I saw blogging as a way for a really niche community of girls I loved to connect and support each other. This was LONG before blogging was a source of income or as wildly popular as it is today. It really was just a small group of people because you had to actually know what you were doing and code your own sites.

4: When did you become serious about blogging?
I’m not sure I’ve ever really taken it “seriously”. I think that when people start to do that is when their writing starts to suffer.

5: What was your first post?
This is my first official real post: http://www.aflux.net/introduction/

6: What has been your biggest challenge about blogging?
Probably staying motivated to get it done. At some point I started writing more for the audience than for myself and, like I stated above, my writing started to suffer.

7: Where do you see your blog in one year?
Hopefully just like it is now only more active!

8: What is the most rewarding thing to you about blogging?
Finding and keeping in touch with some extraordinarily awesome girls. Also, being able to look back 10 years and see where I was and what was going on in my life.

9: What is the most discouraging thing that happens to you?
I haven’t really had much. Some hate mail here and there. Some mean comments. I really don’t let that stuff get to me though. I can’t make everybody happy all the time and sometimes they’ve even caused me to take a better look at the person I am verse the person that I want to be.

10: What is your lasting motivation?
I don’t really have one as you can tell by my once a month posting! I’m really trying to change that though!

Found at the website of one of those extraordinarily awesome girls I mentioned: Dez @ She’s Slothy

I miss you all. Seriously.

Some days after my counseling appointments I feel refreshed and new. Some days I walk out and feel like I’ve been punched in the gut by a freight train. Today was the latter of the two. I’m supposed to be writing more so here I am.

Also, I REALLY do miss you all.

About 73 people told me before my colonoscopy that the prep was the worst part and I could just not wrap my head around the fact that PREP could be worse than having a probe stuck 5 feet up your butt. MAN WAS I WRONG.

The prep is the worst part of a colonoscopy! Quite a few people told me to drink the prep with a straw to “get it past the tongue” but I found that taking a breath out then chugging the 8 ounces was FAR better. Then it’s over in a few seconds and you don’t smell it (which greatly affects taste). I also squeezed some of those water flavoring drops into it which helped some. The prep kicked in about the third 8 ounces. I’d say I was in the bathroom every 15 minutes for about two hour then it slowed down but lasted a total of about 4 hour. The dose the second day was the same but I hated it because I had to get up SO EARLY to take it. Also, I was really starting to fade mentally from the lack of food.

I ate my last full meal late Wednesday night, had nothing to eat Thursday (jello and broth do not count as food!) and then nothing till after the procedure. So I finally ate again Friday at around 4:30PM. I opted for a pretty mild meal of pasta from an Italian place that I love. It’s just angel hair pasta, tomatoes, spinach, olive oil, and garlic. No heavy sauce!

The procedure itself was really nothing. Ben had been trying to convince me for awhile to JUST SLEEP through it but I figured that if I was able to stay awake that I’d want to do that because I really wanted to watch the screen! They gave me one dose of the Feel Really Good and Don’t Care About Anything medication and it worked but I was still pretty awake so the doctor had the nurse give me a second dose. I was still awake but completely in a state of not giving a shit about a single thing. I was able watch him cut out small pieces of my colon to biopsy and absolutely no fucks were given! At one point when turning a corner I could feel the probe and jumped a bit but when the nurse asked me if I wanted more meds I turned it down because it wasn’t really painful, just a REALLY odd feeling.

It was over so fast I was actually a little disappointed because I find that kind of stuff fascinating and how often do you get to see the inside of your body in high rez on a 40″ TV screen?

The good news is that my colon is super healthy. There were no polyps, no inflammation and even nothing in the part of my small intestine where I had the colitis inflammation a month ago. So nothing in there is what’s causing my bowel issues. It still give me piece of mind though knowing that with my family history of colon cancer that mine is in really good shape!

And now, for those of you that are interested in seeing it, here are really fascinating photos of this inside of my body taken on a scope that’s inside my butthole.

These are all of my colon:

This one is the very beginning of my small intestine where the infection was a month ago. Looking perfectly healthy! And I love that you can see the little villi.

In busy areas in California we have carpool lanes, specific lanes designated to vehicles with more than one person created to decrease congestion and coax people into ride sharing. Depending on the area, the laws for the lanes differ. In LA they are designated carpool lanes 24 hours a day and often once you get in one, you have to wait till specific spots to get out or back in. Here in the Bay Area there are areas where you have to have 3 or more people but mostly they are 2 or more. But pretty much everywhere in the Bay Area, they are only carpool lanes 5:00AM to 9:00AM and then 3:00PM till 7:00PM Monday through Friday only. You know, high traffic times. The rest of the time anybody who wants can be in the lane.

No matter where you are in the state, the far left lane, the fast lane, is always the carpool lane. It doesn’t stop becoming a fast lane at 3:00PM, it just becomes a fast lane that cars with more than one person are allowed to be in.

I get really, really, REALLY annoyed when at 2:30PM there is a car with two people doing 68 MPH in the carpool lane with cars flying by them and passing them on the right. Many times it’s old people that probably shouldn’t be driving anyway since they haven’t been able to figure out that it’s NOT A CARPOOL LANE AT 2:30PM EVEN THOUGH THERE IS A SIGN EVERY 50 GODDAMN FEET TELLING YOU THIS IS THE CASE.

The rest of them are just inconsiderate and/or illiterate assholes that think having that extra butt in a seat means they get to drive in the fast lane at 3 MPH over the speed limit blocking traffic and causing cars to play lane tag to get around them. Really, this just slows traffic down and often times leads to rear end accidents that FURTHER slow traffic down and this is exactly why I’ve decided that Carpool Lane Abusers are on my Worst Kind of Human List.

I haven’t exactly compiled a complete list so it’s very short at this point but I plan to add to is as I go along in life. Feel free to offer suggestions! This is what I have so far:

1. Crack addicts
2. Carpool Lane Abusers
3. People that don’t pick up their dog’s poop at the dog park.
4. People that touch me for any reason unless you are somebody I don’t hate (and even then don’t touch me).

OH HI INTERNET FRIENDS!

I’m here! I’m alive! I’m a blogging slacker. I keep meaning to start logging my life here again. I always tell people that the biggest reason I blog is to be able to look back in 40 years and remember what happened.

I was going to make a The Notebook/Ryan Gosling joke here but instead I got lost in a sea of HEY GIRL images. STOP SIDETRACKING ME, GOOGLE!

So, Christmas! It happened! And so did New Years! So here, past self, is how we spent the 2013 holiday. I’ve also included pictures to remind you what you looked like before you ROCKED those stunning gray locks.

This was the year that you plugged in the tree to find that several of the strands of white lights had stopped working leaving dark patches on the tree. This was completely unacceptable for you for Control Freak reasons so you decided to remove the lights from the pre-strung tree. You never really liked white lights on the tree and no matter how hard Ben tries to convince you that you were using this as an excuse to get rid of them, it really wasn’t that. It really did just keep you up at night and instead of sleeping you were thinking about all the lights that were out and how are you supposed to sleep when this drama is happening right downstairs and threatening to ruin Christmas for everybody!?

It only took three and a half hours to completely remove them from the tree and then three and a half days for the feeling to come back to your finger tips.

The new color lights looked great though! Plus, LED! This was when LED had just started to become really popular. Cars didn’t drive themselves yet and Hoverounds didn’t actually hover!

You got a few new ornaments this year to add to your now extensive geeky ornament collection. The highlight was the Yoda tree topper. The very one you are still using to this day because OMG YODA TREE TOPPER THAT WILL NEVER GET OLD.

You know that adorable sweater you wear to the retirement home’s Christmas party every year? At one point people didn’t appreciate your artistic genius and this is the year that it won your work’s Ugly Christmas Sweater Contest!

You got some pretty awesome gifts! Including an iPad Mini that Ben “wrapped” in pretzels and cheeseballs!

Cassidy got a guitar and then we didn’t see her for a month straight but we were always able to hear that she was at home!

Ben got some cool gifts too! Including a ride in the Millenium Falcon!

All in all it was a fantastic holiday and you really enjoyed yourself! It wasn’t as good as that year that Ben bought you a Ferrari but it was close!

You spent New Years Eve with the always awesome Julie, Chris, Kim and Melanie. I’m not sure how you managed to get together with Julie and only get two pictures. I know, it’s UNTHINKABLE. But there are only two.

This one would have been MUCH cuter if you hadn’t gorged yourself on a 10 ounce filet mignon at dinner at Shadowbrook in Capitola. Then you wouldn’t have immediately ran upstairs to change out of your jeans and into your fat pants as soon as you got home.

You only made one resolution this year and it was to blog more. Hopefully you stuck to it and have a lot more memories documents for Ryan Gosling to read back to you from his little notebook!

PS – Ben, don’t make this entire blog post a lie. Buy your wife a Ferrari!