56 thoughts on “Thursday Open Thread”

  1. Talk about weird weather- it’s like spring out there. The snow melted overnight (we must have had 6 inches on the ground), the wind is blowing, it’s warm…Crazy- and absolutely not helping my sinuses. Got abx but the doc said that my cough was just going to get worse and I should expect 4-6 weeks of hacking. Lovely.

    • I think I have a version of S.A.D. because even though I”m still under the same anxiety and pressure as I’ve been for weeks I walked out this morning and just wanted to sing that air felt SO good, and there was SUN.. oh lordy there was SUN…I know climate change yadda yadda.. but man did I need a day like this!

  2. At home this morning while our air ducts get cleaned. I bought a $49 voucher through groupon on whatever (a $149 value!!). Turns out, it didn’t cover everything and I still had to pay another $222. And they tried to sell me another $100 of services that I declined. Kind of feel scammed, but oh well. We needed it done very badly–it seems that it may never have once been cleaned since the house was built in the 40s. Ewwwww.

    • I am not sure ours have ever been done. Did you have dust coming out of your vents or some other indication that it needed to be done, or did you just feel like it must be time? Maybe I should schedule a cleaning, who knows, maybe it would help with my allergies, although probably the dust that collects here and there might be a bigger issue.

      • We all have allergies, and some people who come to the house seem to have them worse than usual (they say). We’ve always had a dusty house and I suspected the vents could be part of the problem. Mostly it was hearing other people talk about having it done ever so often, and knowing that we’ve lived here 8 years and never had it done. And knowing who owned the house before us, we doubted they ever did it. Our vents were painted on when we moved in, so who knows when they were last even removed? The worker had to use a knife to detach them all. Some don’t even have screws because they were held on with paint. LOL. So I feel like I am getting an extra little service added in–now we can remove the vents if we want!

          • Maybe–but is that just the placebo effect? Who can tell? I just did a massive vacuuming job since things were moved around to get to all the vents and returns. Yuck–it gets really gross behind beds and such, doesn’t it? This weekend I’ll dust things I often don’t bother with (ceiling fans and blinds, I’m looking at you!) and then we’ll see if I notice that it takes longer for everything to seem dusty again. The guy showed me pics and they looked noticeably different before, middle, and after. There were old pieces of paper floating around in some of the ducts downstairs. I checked, they were not old stock certificates or anything. Darn. And lots of small things like pencils that I’m sure the cat (or previous owners’ cats?) knocked into the returns.

    • Ugh. I’m looking forward to radiator heat in our new house…no ducts. (Flip side being no ac either). I actually had “duct cleaning” on my to do list for the house at first, lol. Glad I didn’t actually hire someone to come out before I made the connection!

        • I don’t know why I’m so drawn to these, but I’m relating to so many of them….like the lady with the germy kid in the doctor’s office.
          I know this makes me a terrible person, but I let my kids go in a ball pit play place once with no socks. I figured the other kids had just picked their noses, or worse (!) and weren’t wearing socks on their slimy hands. Some mom called me out, I asked her if she knew where her kid’s hands had just been (which caught her off guard- heh), then our friends got all up in each other’s gingerbread….good times, good times.
          I can laugh now, is what I’m saying.

  4. Thank you all so much again for the gift cards for F’a birth. I was able to buy all the trappings for a beautiful big girl princess room for my dd for the new house! F will inherit it when she starts bunking with her big sis in a year or two :)

    I’ll think of you every time I step into her cotton candy pink room!

  5. I don’t know what I did to deserve this, but today was the second time I’ve left my wallet in the shopping cart at the grocery store, only to discover it missing when I got home. The first time, it had been turned into the grocery store’s customer service counter, and today I went back and found it still in the cart in the cart corral outside. And another time I thought I left it in the cart and went all the way back (gas was on E, so I was so afraid I’d run out on the way back and have no way to get gas), and then found it in the trunk in a grocery bag.

    A) What the hell is wrong with me that I keep doing this, and B) what did I do to deserve getting it back safe and sound all 3 times? I thanked the baby Jesus out loud today, that’s for sure.

    • This happened to me, and restored my faith in humanity. I got a phone call from Fairway telling me they’d found my wallet. It was three days between when I left it and when I recovered it, and it was intact with nothing missing. Yay for People!

      In my experience, I lose things when either I have too many things to keep track of, or I do something that is out of the routine. In this case, I was in the process of putting things in the trunk when someone stopped to ask me a question and my phone rang.

      • I hear you about having too many things on the mind. The slightest distraction is enough for me to forget what I’m doing as I am doing it. As I was driving back to the store I almost started to cry. Not because I was worried I wouldn’t get my wallet back — it’s a pain, but it’s all replaceable — but because I’ve been feeling so overwhelmed. Between an insane work schedule, trying to get DD’s party organized and executed, my DS being home from school by 12:30 every day, driving 45 minutes into the city to meet clients multiple times per week, and the things that keep popping up on the social calendar (meaning, there is even less time to get my job done on weekends when I usually take advantage of DH being home so I can work for 10-12 hours uninterrupted)…I’m barely hanging on. Unfortunately, any solution requires money, and that is as tight as ever. So, it’s just one-foot-in-front-of-the-other for yet another year.

    • On Sunday, I was at the grocery store. Some guy left his wallet on the counter at the bakery, and I went charging through the store to return it to him. I felt like I did my good deed for the day in returning it.

        • What’s funny is that as I was sitting in the car getting ready to pull out of my parking space, the cart guy was AT the carts, and then a bagger ran out into the lot, and was looking for someone who’d left their feta cheese behind after paying for it. She was making a big effort with this cheese, and didn’t even have a coat on. I thought it was so nice of her.

          I don’t know if she distracted the cart guy, because when I came back the carts were still in the corral, and it’s odd he was standing at the corral and didn’t take them inside. So, bonus, I didn’t even have to take DS out of the car to go inside!

    • I am incredibly lucky when I do things like that (which is much more often than I care to admit!) I almost always get things back. Restores ones faith in humanity that is for sure!

        • Happiest Place on Earth, my fat fanny. It’s cost me well over a thousand dollars to replace everything (my green card and my daughter’s green card were in it) plus the stress of wondering if someone is pretending to be me. I read about the stories of people returning wallets and wonder why one of them couldn’t have found my stuff. I know that any one of us would have done our best to return it…

          anyway, people suck.

      • We probably stole your good karma last year. DS lost his cell phone there and not only did it get turned in, they mailed it home for him at no cost and it beat us back.

    • Just today, I left my debit card in a Kinkos. I freaked out and drove between the UPS and Kinkos for 1/2 hour, until someone found it. I knew I’d left or dropped it in one of those two places. I was just about to cancel it, when it was found. Thankthebabycheeses.
      I once did a giant grocery shop, which took forever, and came back out to my still running car. I think these things happen during periods of stress or when I just have bunches on your mind, kwim? That’s the story I’m sticking with.

  6. Hug your kids and spouses. Enjoy every sandwich [as Warren Zevon said]. An acquaintance of mine [we served on the same PTA board] died today at age 43, leaving behind a husband, a 10 year old and a 4 year old. She started having headaches in December, was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor over the holidays and died this morning.

    Sometimes life just sucks.

  7. So, I just registered for a half marathon in July. I want to smash my PB of 2h08 and go for a sub-2 hour half. I need to keep myself honest, so anybody else interested in me starting up the weekly fitness and training diary again? I know I’m being kind of self-interested, but anyone else up for it?

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