Why can’t credit card statements put the charges on the back of the front page, and put all the terms & conditions, etc, on the following pages, since I’m just going to toss those? I hate filing double the amount of pages I need to, and I also hate going online to download and print it myself just to put all on one sheet of paper.
Maybe they figure that people who want to buy “all-natural” shampoo aren’t prioritizing how it makes them look. Maybe hair that looks unnaturally good is even counterproductive. (I’m sure they do market research and run focus groups for their target audience.)
Thursday my Uverse TV stopped working. The internet was still working however, so it wasn’t an outage. I called AT&T and after some diagnostics it was determined that the cable box had died. The rep said he would send a new one and I should have it by Friday at noon. Or Saturday. Well, it’s Saturday night and according to the tracking it’s been in town since 1 a.m. but not out for delivery. Damn it. I hope they haven’t misplaced it. I want my TV back.
Microwave conked out very suddenly this evening, which of course threw DH into utter horror. We’re also 9 days past the “exchange defective item” period at Home Depot, where we bought it, and will not have funds in checking to replace it until about Thursday or Friday. (grumble)
I saw a guy wearing a red hoodie with MAGA printed on the arm. On the front of the hoodie was “DOGE - Department of Government Efficiency.”
He was wearing a red ball cap with “DOGE” printed on it as well.
I’m sorry. That’s terrifying!
That sucks, but is it covered by a manufacturer warranty?
One thing to check for is to make sure the voltage at the outlet is 120 volts. I had a microwave die when the voltage went haywire due to a wiring issue.
I recently was shopping for a new gas cooktop and found the one I wanted at Home Depot. They had a display model, which was good because I used it to take some actual dimension measurements, and found out that I would need to trim about 1/2" off my granite countertop to make it fit (and yes, the actual dimensions were not the same as the published dimensions). But Home Depot doesn’t actually stock these items, you need to order them online. The earliest shipping date was three weeks out, and of course Home Depot has a NO RETURNS policy on these items. Lowe’s had the same item, with a three day return policy, and about the same shipping time.
I ended up ordering it directly from the manufacturer, Whirlpool, for 10% less, a two week shipping date, and a fifteen day return policy. Sold. Since I needed time to make the modifications to the granite (with the possibility that there may be issues) the return policy was important to me. Luckily, I was able to install it without issues. Works beautifully.
Well, just one issue, and that can be my rant: Cutting granite inside the kitchen makes one hell of a mess.
Yes, and DH plans to take it to a Panasonic-approved repair shop tomorrow. He’s still distraught about not having one until this one’s fixed, though, and I admit I’m finding it a bit inconvenient.
I’ll have DH address that when he gets home (he’s working this afternoon/evening), since he is an electrician. 
Well then, my actual issue was that it was a loose shared neutral. The other leg fed the refrigerator - I actually lost two appliances that day. And ended up with a new main panel. Good times.
We’ve lived in this apartment for 12 years and have used the same outlet for the microwave all along, if that’s of any use.
My worry is that if a microwave died in that outlet, its ghost may haunt it going forward.
I pulled a new deodorant out from under the sink. It was a gel. I guess I had it down there too long as it’s more like a liquid & therefore, unusable. So much for saving $ by buying it when it was on sale.
Well, that was fun. Mr. brown and I walked on a favorite trail of ours this morning before breakfast. At one point, we could smell a strong skunk smell, more intense than any we had ever smelled. We stopped and looked around us carefully, and we could see a long ways around us under the bushes, but there was no skunk anywhere.
So we proceeded and then eventually walked back to our car, but we could still smell skunk. We got in the car and the stink was still with us. Once we got home, we examined our clothes and eventually found the source: the bottoms of my shoes had sticky patches on them and they were intensely skunk-stinky. So were the hems of my pants. We figure that a skunk was killed on the path by a predator last night, and squirted out his stink onto the path, and I stepped in it.
All the clothing that we wore went into the wash with a good dose of baking soda, and I scoured the bottoms of my and Mr. brown’s shoes with baking soda solution, and the shoes are sitting soles up in the sun in the backyard. The floor mats where our shoes rested after the walk are, we think, beyond saving. Mr. brown just left for the dealer to see if he can’t buy some new floor mats, and we’ll chuck the stinky ones. Before he left, Mr. brown sprayed “Ozium”, a kind of car deodorizer, into our car and closed the doors. Hopefully it works.
Well, I managed to make it to age 68 without getting skunked, but my winning streak is officially over.
Just because a lot of (mostly print ads) featured men in white coats portrayed as doctors praising cigarettes, doesn’t mean they were necessarily actual physicians.
The medical profession can be blamed for not picking up on the tobacco-disease connection sooner, but it was at the forefront of spreading the alarm. Note that the A.M.A. banned tobacco ads in its journal in 1953; it took until 1970 for Congress to act to ban smoking ads on TV.
You know how you (by which I mean “I”) are always picking up stuff at the grocery store that you think you need, but don’t, and fail to get the stuff you actually do need, but didn’t know it?
Yeah, well I’m just here to say that salad dressing is the ultimate exemplar of that phenomenon. I generally have three types on the go at any given time. If I buy one, it’s guaranteed that I’ll have at least one new unopened one of that type already in the fridge, maybe two. If I don’t buy one, because I know I have some in the fridge that I just bought recently, the stuff in the fridge will have expired at least a month ago and may be growing an alien-looking mold.
It’s called “the law of grocery shopping”, and for some reason it’s immune to grocery lists or other conventional defenses.
That is all.
Speaking of salad dressing, here’s why salad dressing can go fuck itself.
While cleaning I recently threw out a whole bunch of expired bottled dressing, using the date on the bottle as a guide.
Then I noticed something unusual, something I checked the next time I went to the store. What I had noticed was I had tossed all the name brand dressing and I now had a bunch of store brand dressing.
Across the board, the store brand was labeled as being good until a date 9-12 months in the future.
Across the board, the Kraft and Thousand Island brands were labeled as being good 3-4 months in the future.
So fuck them, what’s going on? Is Food Lion using some additive, for better or worse, in their $1.19 dressings that makes it last 3 times as long?
Or is Big Salad conspiring to instill fear and make us throw out perfectly good Thousand Island dressing just so we’ll buy more, just like sheep?
Cause it worked I threw out a bunch what was probably good salad dressing.
Or is Food Lion engaging in a conspiracy to warehouse the name brand stuff for 6 months so their knock-offs will be way fresher?
Cause it worked, that’s all I buy now.
Anyway. I don’t like devoting brain cells to salad dressing conspiracies, so fuck them.
I know that with dairy products, all of the items that come from local producers around here have an expiration date much farther in the future than other dairy products on the shelves. I assume that it’s because they get to the stores faster and aren’t sitting in some distribution center for months before going to the stores.
Maybe that’s also the case for store brand stuff; they have a more direct manufacturer-to-store supply chain and so you get them fresher, and they will last longer.
Just a WAG, I am not a salad dressingologist.
My WAG, which I have no evidence for, is that the name brands care more about their reputation for quality, so they don’t want you to keep using it past the point where it doesn’t taste as good as it used to.
But @Atamasama’s theory seems plausible, too.
If I remember, I’ll check the dates next time I’m at the store, and see if they match your experience.
One issue is that there are three different kinds of dates: best by date, sell by date and use by date. I work at a food pantry and we deal with this every day when we are date-checking the food which is donated. We have guidelines from the USDA we have to follow about how long after the date on the package we can keep stuff on our shelves.
Most of the commercially packaged food has a best by date on it for the reasons mentioned: they want you to get their product when it tastes its best and they want to move lots of product. The actual dates we use vary widely by product. We can only keep milk for 7 days after the best by date. Canned vegetables are good for 5 years after the best by date.
The store packaged foods like deli items or baked goods have much shorter dates - usually two or three days.
The best thing is to just google how long past the best by date is “product” good for.
So, I did that.
Some sources say 1-4 months past the printed date, some sources say 12-18 months past the printed date and one source says that if I keep it unopened in the fridge it will NEVER go bad, it will last until the heat death of the universe.
Actually, that last source just used the word “indefinitely”, but if they think that means some amount of time shorter than forever they’ve never seen what’s been pushed to the back of my fridge.