Fitness, Nonsense

First World gripes & phony facial hair

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Assorted adhesive mustaches, for the girl who has everything.
Assorted adhesive mustaches, for the girl who has everything.

I received a shiny gadget for Christmas. Well, not so much shiny as nondescript and black and made to be worn on my wrist like a bracelet. It was moderately spendy, so when Mike and I agreed to get them for each other, we decided they would be our only gifts.

Oh, I should say “among our only gifts,” because there was also a tin of assorted adhesive mustaches in my stocking.

So, here we were with these new tracker gadgets – which were bound to have been popular for every uptight, OCD fitness fanatic you know (as well as for a couple of posers like us). They came with a little card, listing a website on which is presumably all the instructions for calibrating our new toys.

If you happen to work for a company that makes gadgets for a particularly uptight, OCD population, and all the functionality of your gadget depends upon your website, you really should (a) make sure your website can support a fairly significant uptick of traffic on Christmas morning, and that (b) the default error reading doesn’t say something about “planned maintenance,” when I’m pretty sure the website’s crashing wasn’t in the plan.

I’m pretty sure this company was actually just experiencing a North Korea kind of morning.

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Nonsense

The Weird, Obscure, or Slightly Silly: Thanksgiving Edition

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The second-tier-but-still-deserving-of-recognition stuff.

With all due respect to all the health, family, friends, roof-over-our-heads and a great meal before us conversation; here are a few things that don’t get the gratitude they deserve in normal Thanksgiving lists, but still deserve a little shout out:

The fact that neither kid has ever had head lice – Knock on wood, throw salt over my shoulder, and cross myself for good measure, none of these creepy crawlies has ever been borne over our threshold via any of our progeny. I’ve known people who sought family counseling after strenuous rounds of de-lousing. Nobody needs that stress around here.

My eyesight – I’m just really doggone glad to be able to see. My eyes have been deteriorating lately and while it might be funny to have a nickname like Magoo, it won’t be long before I’ve graduated from the grocery store readers and into something more legit. On my last visit, my eye doctor said I was near sighted and far-sighted and something in between, and that I needed different prescriptions for reading, driving, or staring at a screen. Things haven’t improved since then. I just got a postcard in the mail that said it was time for a check up.

Yes it was in big print, smarty clown. Yes, I’ll call.

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