utenzi

A sure sign you need to mow your yard is when rabbits can hide in the grass, This rabbit is doing a half way decent job of staying under cover. I'm going out right now to take away all that lovely grass. He can always go to the back yard and have a meal there. It's too damn hot to mow the entire yard so I'll settle for the front third.

In the "good advice" column in the May 2010 issue of Good Housekeeping Geneen Roth advises us to live life. The title of the column is "Wisdom to Go" and it's subtitled "When Time is Short, What Really Matters?" The column is well written (and Roth is cute as the dickens---not that that is germane, of course) but in my opinion lazy. Roth starts off by referring to a friend who's a surgeon and has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. The friend's reaction to the devastating news? "Wow, now I can stay home from work for a few months." Roth uses that shocker to transition into how, were we to find out that we don't have long to live, we would change our priorities and live life differently. My reaction? No shit. Sure, we'd all like to indulge ourselves in activities that we enjoy most. But we don't know our future so we have to plan as if we're going to live a long time and so we scrimp and save. It's like the...

I was reading an article on ZD net the other day--that's the website for the Ziff Davis publishing house--about how Amazon is currently fighting the state of North Carolina over the state's desire to access Amazon's database of customer's and their purchases. Amazon has filed a lawsuit against North Carolina’s Department of Revenue to prevent the state from getting the names of every resident that bought anything from the retailer since 2003. The ramifications could be huge. As you may recall, Amazon has been dueling with a few states over taxation issues. States, which are struggling to balance bloated budgets, are mulling over taxing out-of-state Internet retailers. Since I live in NC I take a large interest in this fight. Should Amazon lose, any resident of NC that bought anything from Amazon in the past 8 years could be forced to pay state sales tax on their purchases, if they hadn't already done so. That can add up to big bucks for some people. Take the typical...

I've been on a diet the past 2 months. My doctor insisted; she was quite adamant, in fact. For the most part I've been behaving myself and as a result I've gone down from 228 to 194. However I still love sweets and now that my weight is approaching normal (I actually need to hit 183 before my BMI is officially normal) I want to add some candy back into my diet. I still want to avoid fructose as much as I can, ie high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) which complicates things a mite since HFCS is in so much candy. So when I noticed that Amazon is running a 20% off coupon code special on YummyEarth lollipops ("YUMET924") I had to pick up a 5 lb bag. YummyEarth is a small company that makes organic candy that is free of corn syrup as well as being gluten-free, GMO-free, egg-free, soy-free, nut-free, casein-free, and dairy-free. *whew* But despite that word "free" occurring so often they're not free-free. On the YummyEarth website a 5 lb bag of assorted flavo...

While hiking today in Duke Forest I came upon a total of 4 snakes. The two small ones were happy to see me and wanted to make friends but the big ones quickly scooted away to hide. Wouldn't you think it would work the other way around?

I finally filed my taxes so 2009 is officially over and out the door. *whew* There was some last minute anxiety because one of the stock sales I made in 2009 was of a stock that hadn't been bought in 2009---and so the brokerage year end report didn't include the buy price. I usually only hold on to stocks for a few weeks to a few months so this was unusual for me. And unfortunately that stock was bought in a year that I couldn't immediately find the buy records for. There was some frantic searching but it turned out that I bought the stock in 2007 and lost a lot of money on the damn thing. I think it was something like $4,400. Ouch. That was probably why I held onto the stock for so long---I was hoping that it'd come back. It never did. :-(

The weather yesterday was just wonderful. The sun was magnificent and yet the temperatures topped out in the low 70s. Perfect conditions for being outside hiking in the woods. Even the tadpoles were enjoying themselves in their odd wiggly way.