Odds and Ends October 2013

It is cold and damp as I write this post, which means winter draws ever closer. It has been a time of painful sleep that's slowed me down more than I expected, so every time I get a post up it feels like a minor victory. The weekend was a loss thanks to this.

For some reason Google has failed to fix a rather massive bug that appeared in their Blogspot code within the last month. Actually, it had appeared for some earlier, but now is getting widespread. What's the bug, you wonder?

They broke the ability to edit text widgets in the sidebars. For two weeks I've been struggling to edit the ones on the right of this post to no avail. Finally somebody came up with a workaround that I didn't want to use, but now am.So now I'm able to update what movies I've recently watched.

How Google can ignore this bug is beyond me, but so is most of their behavior in regards to support. I'm too tired to trash them at the moment.



Speaking of trash, we had a dumpster delivered for a month so that we could do a thorough house and garage cleaning. My back going out and my father rolling the car interrupted that project so nothing got done until Monday. Hardly got anything into it, but at least we won't be spending money on nothing disposed of.

Meanwhile, I feel like the lord of the flies. Actually, that should be Lord of the Fruit Flies if properly rendered. Many people in the area had complained of them this summer, but we never got any. Well, it is our turn for the little pests have overrun the kitchen the past week and it is all I can do to keep them from spreading. A tip I found somewhere on the Web has helped control their expansion: apple cider vinegar traps.

You take a container, fill partially with apple cider vinegar (regular vinegar won't work), add some dish washing soap, then top it off with water to make foam. Fruit flies come for the smell and end up drowning. It works and isn't toxic.

Sometimes thing in life go right, but they are always small things in my case. Lately it involves finding bargains rather than anything of spiritual or emotional value. I'd rather have the latter; alas beggars cannot be choosers.

A need for new jeans led me to reluctantly stop at the local Alco discount store in Caledonia. For you city folk, Alco is a rural franchise of small discount stores. Think micro Wal-Mart.

I'd expected to spend around $20 for a pair of jeans. Speaking of that designation, why are pants (aka trousers for you Brits) referred to as a pair for a single unit? Did the legs get sold individually back in the day? Is there a point to my useless wondering?

Anyway, I walked in and found a clearance sale with a brand being sold for $5 a pair. Checking the material and original price, they were no different than the other jeans being sold. So I spent half of what was projected and got twice what I wanted: two pairs, or four legs!

Earlier in the month, a trip to Wal-Mart netted me another clearance item, a pair of shoes. At least these are definitely two individual items, so pair doesn't worry me here. They were a blast from my past in the form of a revived brand I used to have back in the 1980's.

KangaRoos were my favorite shoes of the time and combined durability with the ability to carry change for emergency phone calls in the days before cell phones. Yes, these were the shoes with pockets. I wore mine out completely but they lasted for years at a time.

So running into a clearance display of various brands, I grabbed one of the few around my shoe size as a blind buy for $13. There wasn't time to try them on and no others that didn't have neon green. Green is my favorite color, but neon is awful. Lucky for me, they fit perfectly and have put a bounce in my step.