Stubbornness Averted

Well, I was trying to delay posting until I managed to find the aforementioned Capitol Collection in a store near me. Luckily for my readers, something happened in the meantime, and I received a new survival kit in the mail, which I'll tell you about in this post.

Many months ago, my parents went to test drive a car to get a gift card. They actually wanted to test drive the car, but the dealership was busy, so they got the gift card and were sent along their merry way. The gift card was for an outfitter that happens to sell a Deluxe Survival Kit unlike any I have ever seen before. Now it is in my collection of survival kits, and all it cost was like an hour of my parents' time, and $3.50 in RT fuel cost according to mapquest.com.

I will tell you what it includes. It includes a signaling mirror. A map compass (I have other compasses, but this one has a base that you can set down on your map for more accurate orienteering), and a magnesium firestarter because a girl can't have too many of those. But that's not all! It also includes 12 fire sticks. Well, I already have the best fire-starters ever, which I made myself with Miss Gokey, but I'm very glad I looked up the contents of the kit, because I very seriously believed the fire sticks were some kind of high-energy protein bar-type snack. I was mistaken. I'm glad I didn't bite into one.

Further, the kit includes one poncho, two towels that are shrunk to the size of quarters (once unleashed, those towels are NEVER going back into the bag), and one tiny roll of duct tape, presumably enough to tape you up if a branch rips a 1/2" gash all the way up your forearm.

The best parts of the kit are two things that I don't have in my previous kits: glow sticks (! YAY! I let glow bracelets from the dot spot suffice for my homemade kits) and...

drum roll please...

a bug net. Which my dad immediately put on his head. I didn't get a photo of him, but here's a photo of ME wearing it.

It's cammo! Perhaps you'll see me wearing it in the woods of Michigan some summer soon. Just for the bug net, the packet was totally worth the absolutely $0 and 0 effort that I personally put into it. Thanks, mom and dad! 

In other news, I have FINALLY finished reading 1491. You can find my rather abrupt review on goodreads here. I think. Now, since it's October (my favorite month), I'm reading Libba Bray's The Diviners. 

Official Entry

You will recognize some of the images below which I have previously uploaded onto past posts. Put together, they form my September contribution to the Artastic Challenge Blog here on blogger. The criteria were that the entries be happy, colorful, whimsical, and/or fun.

Much better than SAT practice questions. :)

What fun and happy experiences are you having this fall?

Rants and Reviews

I spent my morning joyriding around to every store in a ten-mile radius looking for some Cover Girl promotional nail polish for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. The movie will come out on November 22nd, and I'm very excited about it. After hitting 3 Walgreens stores in 2 different states and coming up empty-handed and bare fingernailed, I came home and googled the collection and saw this ad. Now I'm convinced that the collection has been released, that I saw it in the store and didn't know what I was looking for. It's called the Capitol Collection, and I don't care that Cover Girl is part of a big international corporate conglomerate. Now I know from the ad what to look for, so I'll hit the makeup trail again soon.

How do I know about Cover Girl's evil corporate status? My new previously-mentioned buycott app. I took advantage of my time in the stores to shop for some cruelty-free facial scrub for after my Neutrogena runs out. I absolutely love Neutrogena products, but according to buycott, Neutrogena contributes large amounts of money to Scott Walker. (Pay attention to the "transform education" priority.) I know this because I joined the "Boycott Scott Walker Contributors" campaign. I also joined one of the cruelty-free campaigns, one of the anti-GMO campaigns, and the "We Own You" campaign. In conclusion: I can't ever buy anything at any store ever again.

That's an impractical plan.

I will try to choose the lesser of the evils. I literally scanned EVERY brand of facial soap on the shelves. (Yes, I know Walgreens contributes to Scott Walker, too. Baby steps!)

Pictured below is the only cosmetic product that was cruelty-free and didn't give Scott Walker money.

Look at those prices! I have contacted my friend Chris to see if his wife Angie's company, YB Urban?, features facial cleanser. In the meantime, I found a web page that lists 6 recipes for how to wash your face with food. 

When you can't trust Walgreens, who can you trust? Pinterest. That's right. Inspired by Kristy Phipps's Pinterest Sunday photo, this was breakfast today:

Pumpkin french toast FTW! Frying apple slices covered in pancake batter wasn't half bad, either.
Ms. Whitaker will note that the taffy apples have appeared at the grocery store, as well.

Coming soon: the actual artastic challenge entry for September, and me expounding on my local hometown libraries.

Just another grocery trip

Autumn in the Midwest art challenge preview

I'm only calling this "art challenge preview" because as I downloaded the photos for it, I realized I want to use them in the September Artastic "whimsy" challenge. We'll see what happens. In the meantime...

One of the great causes for celebration in my life at the moment is the fact that it is fall. This past week, the "Adam @ Home" comic strip, run in the Northwest Indiana Times, has featured an Adam obsessed with all things pumpkin. I kind of feel like Adam.

Don't get me wrong. The desert has seasons. One of the things that used to bother me about non-desert-dwellers was their denial of the fact of seasons in the desert. In the fall in the desert, temperatures during the day and evening fall to the dry, comfortable 90s, and the nights cool off. They don't cool off enough to cause hoodies or hot chocolate at football games, but there IS a distinct change. It's not like fall in the Midwest, though. Not at all. Many was the year that I toyed with the idea of flying back home just for some fall foliage, and my friend Caryn once mailed me some leaves from Buffalo, NY, because she knew how much I liked them. Last fall, on Halloween weekend, I had the opportunity to fly home for Jodi's wedding shower, and I'm pretty sure that that trip had A LOT to do with my decision to ultimately move back to the east side of the Mississippi River for the foreseeable future.

I know all you (two) readers out there in the desert are missing me, but I see daily in your facebook updates that life is going on just fine. Please see below still more justification for my transcontinental relocation.

I'm anticipating having gainful and meaningful, if only part time, employment any day now. One of those opportunities required a pre-employment drug test. After the drug test, I decided to hunt for some geocaches on the nearby bike path, and this is what I found. This photo, at least, is legit. It's very near Hammond, where I live. The remainder of the photos are from southern Michigan, where there are, like, farms and stuff. So the rest of them don't really reflect where I live, just like my photos of Zion NP back in the day didn't reflect WHERE I lived, but I believe they capture the spirit of the season here in the Midwest pretty well. 

Yesterday was my dad's birthday, so we went apple picking with Uncle Michael and Aunt Ruth.

The apple trees

The barn at Shafer Orchards. 

I call this guy "jack-o-head," and I'm pretty sure that you'll definitely see him on my challenge blog entry. 

squashes

The resident farm dog, Ivy.

Perhaps a future blog post can celebrate autumn HERE in Hammond and the surrounding towns. In the meantime, this begins a season of apple-and-green-tomato-based diet for me. Please feel free to send me links to your own blogs, where you have posted photos of what fall is like where you are. 

Bon appetit. 

Beware the Internet!

This brief post is a warning against all things online.

Please understand that I would NEVER discourage you from using the internet, because if you use the internet less, you are less likely to read my blog!

Speaking of reading my blog, I noticed that I had a phenomenal number of hits on Tuesday after posting my Opportunity Cost post. Surprised at my newfound popularity, I examined the traffic sources and found that the majority of hits were from vampirestat. Notice it's not hyperlinked.

Guess what else exists? Zombiestat. That's right. There's a bot site with "zombie" in its name that seeks to give your blog a virus if you click on the traffic source.

So, I am here to perform the valuable public service of warning my fellow bloggers: DO NOT CLICK ON THE TRAFFIC SOURCE FOR ZOMBIESTAT! Or vampirestat.

I learned this intel from a google search that led me to a blog right here on the Blogger platform, Spam Spoiler.  Sadly, Spam Spoiler's most recent post went live the Monday after the supposed apocalypse during December 2012.

Poor lonely zombie bot.


The "Happiness is Fleeting" zombie by Kerry Callen illustrates the "lonely zombie bot" point.

What else happens on the internet?

Buzzfeed. iOS7 causes the apocalypse.

In other news, I have a new app for my ancient android. It's called Buycott. I'm obsessed with it. I now know how many of the ingredients in my lunch of Green tomato + fakin bacon BLT were produced by companies that use GMOs.

You can choose whatever causes you want. But if Buycott tries to get you to click onto Zombiestat. Don't. I'm off to the store now, to scan barcodes with my phone.

Opportunity Cost

"The word 'opportunity' in 'opportunity cost' is actually redundant. The cost of using something is already the value of the highest-valued alternative use. But as contract lawyers and airplane pilots know, redundancy can be a virtue. In this case, its virtue is to remind us that the cost of using a resource arises from the value of what it could be used for instead."

David R. Henderson

Opportunity Cost

The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

Library of Economics and Liberty

2008

This will be a post about my cousins, and about opportunity cost. 

If you are a loyal reader, you already know that 1.5 weeks ago, I spent the weekend with my BFF and her family down Indianapolis way, for the purpose of celebrating Alex's birthday with him for the first time in his life. He turned 11. While I was walking out the door, I got a text message from a cousin inviting my family to a barbeque. I declined for myself (obviously), but my parents attended the barbeque and came home with this:

This is a disaster clean-up kit. It's so official that it says "gift" in two languages. Besides an unfamiliar-to-me bottle of surface cleaner and degreaser, the contents are a hard-bristled scrub brush, a bottle of bleach, rubber gloves, and some plastic bags. It came with a box with the same logo on it, which contained a broom and a mop. 

I would not trade playing Fruit Ninja on a larger-than-life screen, geocaching with Alex, or grading papers with my BFF for anything. Even for this bucket. That's not to say that I don't wish that the barbeque (which I keep misspelling, but now I'm attached to my own special spelling of barbeque) had happened on a different weekend. I can assemble my own bucket, albeit without the super official logo. 

In case you don't remember your basic Wealth of Nations (free for Kindle!), the official bucket and the time spent with my cousins is the opportunity cost for my miniature road trip to Indy. 

A different cousin of mine recently posted the following wisdom on facebook:
"The reason why nothing ever happens is because people are too worried about what might be better." Pasting his quote from his facebook timeline totally messed up my font, but is legal because it is less than 10% of his facebook timeline, and I am also going to encourage you to support his photography business by inviting you to like his facebook page. 

As I try to find gainful employment, this concept haunts me because I may be passing up the opportunity of a lifetime and substitute teaching hoping for a call from elsewhere that may or may not ever come. I have the sudden urge to watch Sliding Doors and read Gut Symmetries.

However, as you know, I still have upwards of 200 pages left in 1491. 

What are the opportunity costs in your own life?