It's Getting to Critial Mass...

I'm going to call Lowes shortly and see what they have to say today. Maybe the slow boat from China has finally docked. I hate calling there. EVERY SINGLE TIME I call, I end up listening to a ringing phone forever, I get bounced back to the main operator, and they try again. Sometimes on the second try I get someone, but sometimes I get bounced back again. Then I use my angry voice and I usually get a person to pick up in appliances by the third time. I might go up and harass them in person instead. I harassed "Sal" yesterday. He wasn't very nice though. Maybe "Ted" will be in today. He's much nicer. I have to run up to Home Depot (again) today anyhow. Bought some paint for our kitchen/livingroom area, and I tested some on the wall but it's too orange. It's a nice color, I really like it, but it's too orange and won't match our sofa and curtains. I need something "browner". Hopefully I'll pick a winner, I'd like to get past they "buying the paint" stage and move onto the "actual painting" stage soon.

No Washing Machine Yet

I went up to Lowes today. I truly don't know if I'm any closer to getting my washing machine or not. The clothes are really piling up again. I am very mad. The End.

Because of the Hot Tamales pic Maybe??

When I first set up this blog, one of the many components that could be added was a Google AdSense Ad. My brother works for Google, so I though, what the hey, I'll put an ad on my blog to help Google. It's one of those types of ads where they try to match it up with the content on your page, probably by keyword scanning or something. For example, the first time I posted about my washing machine that I can't seem to get, I noticed the little ad for that day was for washing machines. Another time early on when I posted about my American Girl dolls, the little ad was an ad for doll clothing. The ad changes every day, I think. Anyway, I log on here a couple of days ago and the ad is for "Pretty Mexican Brides"! Whoa! Number one, I do NOT want to be selling "Pretty Mexican Brides" - that is just not right, and number two, why the HECK did it match that ad to my page?? There was nothing in my content that I could find that would relate to an ad like that! Except....the Hot Tamales pic???

Goodbye AdSense!

Ate My "Last Meal" Meal

Well I was at the Daily Planet diner today with my father for lunch, and with this crappy cold weather we're having today, I was in the mood for some comfort food. I decided to have their Open Faced Turkey Dinner, which some of you may remember was the correct answer to the poll asking what would I pick for my last meal if I was on death row. At first I was thinking, "Oh no, now that I've had my "Last Meal" meal, I hope I don't die today! And then I thought that actually, that at least if I did die today I could die happy knowing I got to have the last meal that I wanted. Well so far so good, I haven't died yet.

In other news, got a phone message today when I got home that DD had won the "Jellybean Challenge" at a local pharmacy's "Webkinz Extravaganza" that was held over the weekend (she had to guess the number of jellybeans in the jar). She got to pick any Webkinz they had in the whole store. She was SO excited. I won a "jelly bean" challenge when I was in second grade. I got to keep the jar of jellybeans. It's pretty exciting as a kid to win something. Heck, it's exciting as an adult to win something! One of my biggest "adult" wins was last year I entered a contest put on by Edy's and I won an ice cream party for my neighborhood (my street really)! I still have hopes of winning the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes. I still go through that whole packet of papers when it comes and I send in my entry. Gotta be in it to win it, right?

Family Feud with Richard Karn

Why am I watching this?!? WHY???!?!?

It's the Wierengas vs. the Smiths!

Wherefore Art Thou, GE Washing Machine?

Just called Lowes. The supposed, long-awaited truck that was supposed to come in on Friday filled with the elusive GE washing machines did not in fact ever come. That truck might show up tomorrow, or there's another truck supposedly coming on Tuesday. Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt! And of course for some reason it's not possible to find out what washers are even on these "trucks". The gentleman I spoke to is claiming that it's a problem with GE - that no one is getting GE washers, which seems to be true when I checked competitor websites, no one does seem to have this washer... However, at least he was very nice and apologetic and told me if I call tomorrow, he can call GE and see what he can find out. I'm SURE that will provide me with a wealth of information.

Seems to me, it shouldn't be this hard to buy the washer I want. Other brands are lookin' real good right now. Especially any brand that's IN STOCK.... I wanted to get the one Consumer Reports rated as their "Best Buy" but that's seeming less and less important.... If I make ANOTHER trip to the laundromat it's going to cost me ANOTHER $30-40 dollars! If it doesn't come in by Tuesday maybe I should start looking at other brands??

Where is my GE Washing Machine?

(Yes, lucky you! It's a TWO post day!)
So after my washing machine broke (see my rant from April 4th) I promptly went to the Consumer Reports website and looked up their top pick for a top loading machine. Checked prices around town, then went up to Lowe's and ordered the machine I wanted. They told me it would be in in 10 days. Well it wasn't. And by that time I had about 2 weeks of dirty laundry saved up thinking the machine was coming. Ended up bringing 8 kitchen garbage bags of laundry to the laundromat which ended up costing to wash and dry......$40.00! I had so much clean laundry to bring home I didn't even have enough baskets - I ended up using some of my reusable supermarket grocery totes I have in my truck to carry some of it. Classy, I know. (Not as bad as the time we used shopping carts to move our stuff into one of our apartments, but that's another story.) Well "Ted" from Lowe's told me my machine was probably REALLY coming yesterday or today. Well I called yesterday and "Ted" wasn't there, and a somewhat less competent sounding person told me they are "getting a big delivery of GE washers and dryers" Friday and maybe my machine is on that truck. I said, "Can't you find out for sure if my washer is in that delivery?" But no, Mr. "Not Ted" claimed he couldn't possibly find out something like THAT. So we'll see if today is the end of the saga or not...

Dear Mr. Doomsday

Dear Mr. Doomsday,
(See comment from previous post)
You know it's really tough to say what's going to kill us first. So many choices. An asteroid from space? The eruption from the Yellowstone Caldera? Global warming? The chemicals released in plastic water drinking bottles? Cell phones? Bird flu?

Well here's one bright spot of hope I found while refreshing my memory on the Yellowstone Caldera.

From the Discovery Channel website:

"One way of looking at the power of volcanoes is what scientists call the Volcano Explosivity Index (VEI) — sort of a Richter scale for eruptions. And like the Richter scale used to measure earthquakes, the power of an eruption increases exponentially from number to number in the VEI index.
The VEI scale runs from zero to eight. The higher the VEI number, the bigger — and less frequent — the eruptions. The Yellowstone eruption of 2.1 million years ago, was described on the VEI as an eight: mega-colossal, with a towering ash cloud 10 miles high that pours out at least a thousand cubic miles of ash. That Yellowstone eruption had 10 times the ejected material as a VEI 7 volcano, which modern humans have never seen either.
In fact, the last VEI 7 eruption was in Toba, Indonesia, 74,000 years ago, and it caused such global cooling that some scientists think it nearly drove humans to extinction."
So fortunately, unlike the humans of 74,000 years ago, WE'VE got the global warming going on, so if there's a huge eruption it will cool down the earth and maybe it will balance everything out! Whew, lucky us!

I first found out about the whole super-volcano-under-Yellowstone from a Discovery channel show I watched. At like 11pm at night. Right when I was planning on falling asleep. Why oh WHY do they put things like this on late at night?? I can't sleep for goodness sake after watching a show like that!! On my island no doomsday shows will be allowed on tv after 9pm! The other thing I know I can't watch late at night is those TLC shows like "The 600lb Woman" or whatever. I don't know why, but those shows are fascinating to me. One night they had a whole string of those "Stories from the Weight Loss Clinic" or whatever on and I was up until like 3am watching. Maybe I should consider watching C-SPAN at bedtime. Nothing on that channel to keep me up.

New Madrid Fault

Did YOU know there's a huge fault line in the Mississippi Valley? I did hear about the earthquake they had in that region a short while ago, but I had NO idea there's a big fault running through that area.

From the USGS website:

The central Mississippi Valley has more earthquakes than any other part of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains.
The winter of 1811-12 was extremely difficult for the European settlers of the Mississippi Valley. While Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief and visionary, was attempting to unite the tribes of the valley in an effort to drive out the settlers, the region was struck by three of the most powerful earthquakes in United States history. These magnitude 8 quakes, centered near the town of New Madrid (Missouri), devastated the surrounding region and rang church bells 1,000 miles away in Boston. The scars that those great earthquakes made on the landscape remain -the quakes locally changed the course of the Mississippi River and created Reelfoot Lake, which covers an area of more than 10 square miles in northwestern Tennessee.

Now I'm not so brilliant that I found out about this on my own. I listen to some podcasts by a guy by the name of Cliff Ravenscraft (GSPN - Generally Speaking Podcast Network) and he lives in Kentucky and he just recently left his job as an insurance agent to podcast full time and since he was in insurance, he knew ALL about the risk of earthquakes in that area. After listening to a very interesting My Crazy Life podcast from April 18th where he explained all about this fault line, and also explained some very interesting (and surprising) info about earthquake insurance, I went and looked up the fault line on the internet to learn more about it. If you are likewise interested, you can just Google the New Madrid Fault, or here's an interesting link I found from the Arkansas Center for Earthquake Education and Technology Transfer.

Maybe I don't learn something new EVERY day, but today I did! Thanks Cliff.

Yes, You're At the Right Blog

Sorry to switch all the colors on ya, but that green was getting to me and I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to change it without changing the whole thing to a new template.

A new template that is not all green.

What was I thinking picking that other template in the first place??

Historic Poptart

Taught DD over the weekend how to use the toaster. Being the good girl that she is, knowing that her Mom is a scrapbooker, she took a pic of the first poptart she made on her own so I can scrapbook this amazing milestone. Not a bad pic, either!

On My Island, All Fruit Will Be Ripe

I hate it when you buy fruit, then you have to take it home and wait for it to ripen. Do you know how many times I've bought pears and then missed the 12 hour window when they were perfect and ended up throwing away rotten pears? Can't they hold those pears back until they're ready to be eaten and then sell them? Geez, the strawberries are always 2 hours away from going moldy when you buy them at the store, can't the pears be a little closer to being ripe? I now have a pineapple on my windowsill. Waiting to ripen. I don't like having to plan DAYS ahead to eat my fruit! Or why can't all fruit be like the bananas? With bananas you can pick if you want ripe bananas to eat now, or green ones you can pencil into your day planner to eat later.

On my island all fruit sold will be ripe and ready to be eaten!

"Make A Difference Every Day!"

That's what this bookmark in front of me says. In church on Sunday the pastor told us a story about a boy on a beach that was full of starfish that had been left by the tide. The sun was out and if the starfish didn't get back in the water, they would die. The boy was one by one throwing them back into the ocean. A man came up and said, "Boy, you'll never get all these starfish back into the water before they bake in the sun. Why bother? The few you're able to throw back in the ocean won't make a difference." The boy picked up another starfish, looked at it for a long moment, then threw it into the ocean. Then he said, "It made a difference to THAT starfish." The point was that don't get overwhelmed trying to save the world - if you can at least do one thing, even a small thing, each day, to make a difference in someone else's life, that's where we can start. After church at the coffee hour, our pastor came over to chat and gave his bookmark to DD, and so this morning, here it is on my kitchen table and I'm thinking about how I can "make a difference" today.

New Poll....

New poll ready to go!

Google Analytics

Google has this great tool for looking at every conceivable statistic about your blog you could ever want to know, it's called Google Analytics. It's really impressive.

Too bad I don't understand any of it.

(Ok, that's a SLIGHT exaggeration - the ONE thing I can figure out is how many visitors I have each day, but everything else is pretty much Greek (or should I say geek) to me!)

Top of the Rock

For my birthday this year, I asked to go on a trip to NYC. I wanted to take the train to Grand Central, eat lunch in Bryant Park, go to the "Top of the Rock", then shopping and dinner at American Girl Place. My dear DH and dear father were so kind as to oblige my whim (DD also, but it's not like she had a choice). We were blessed with a beautiful warm, sunny day yesterday for our trip. Lunch in Bryant Park was beautiful. Then we walked up to Rockefeller Plaza. Now, I've been to Manhattan countless times in my life, and seen many of the attractions NYC has to offer, but I have to say, "Top of the Rock" blew me away. "Top of the Rock" is the observation decks on top of the GE building in Rockefeller Plaza. It's kind of expensive - $20 per person (and thanks again Dad for treating us to this) but I think it's definitely worth it. They have a few different levels at the top so there's plenty of room (although it was surprisingly quite busy for a Thursday in April - it must be crazy crowded in the summertime), and the best part is that it's enclosed at the top by large square glass partitions (rather than fencing), so you basically get an unobstructed, 360 degree view of NYC. The partitions seem to be good wind breaks too, it wasn't overly windy at the top which was a surprise to me (so anotherwords, no need to use a half a bottle of hairspray before you go like I did). It was just STUNNING. I'd been to the top of the Empire State building and the Twin Towers before, but this view is 100 times better. It was so amazing to see the city laid out in each direction. In particular I thought it was really cool to see all of Central Park from up there. Awesome view of the Empire State building and how it towers over the rest of the city too. Another cool thing of note is that if you've ever watched the weather on WNBC, you may be familiar with their "Doppler 4000 radar" - well THE actual Doppler 4000 radar is on top of the GE building, and it's big! Very cool! If you go to NYC on a nice day, I highly recommend this as a must-do!

And the Winner Is....

Although each of the meals listed in my death row poll ARE favorite meals of mine, the meal I would choose if it were my last meal is the Turkey Dinner from the Daily Planet. Two of you guessed it right!

New poll in a few days. Don't want to overload you with excitement.

Only 3 Hours Left!

Only 3 hours left to vote on my choice of death row meal!

Just what you wanted! A little more about Ham Radio!

From Wikipedia, here's a bit about what Ham Radio is:

"Amateur radio, often called ham radio, is both a hobby and a service in which participants, called "hams", use various types of radio communications equipment to communicate with other radio amateurs for public service, recreation and self-training. Amateur radio operators enjoy personal (and often worldwide) wireless communication with each other and are able to support their communities with emergency and disaster communications if necessary, while increasing their personal knowledge of electronics and radio theory. An estimated 6 million people throughout the world are regularly involved with amateur radio. The term "amateur" is not a reflection on the skills of the participants, which are often quite advanced; rather "amateur" indicates that amateur radio communications are not allowed to be made for commercial or money-making purposes."

Even in this age of cell phones and the internet, in a disaster, when there is no power and the telephones systems are tied up, ham radio is still a totally viable means of communicating, which makes amateur radio operations a very valuable service. A good friend of ours provided emergency communication during 911 among government emergency services. I don't necessarily have plans to get involved in that, but who knows.

I'm a Ham!

Not too many people can say they took (and PASSED) the Technician Amateur Radio License Exam for their birthday, but that's what I did. DH took it too and also passed with flying colors. In fact, we each only missed one question. The test is made up of 35 questions randomly selected from a pool of 300. DH and I had different sets of questions, so we couldn't even cheat off each other, ha ha! Once our names appear in the FCC database, we will then legally be allowed to communicate on certain bands on a ham radio (probably 3 or 4 days from now). We will also find out our call signs at that time.

If you think you know anything about Amateur (Ham) radio, go to this site and try taking a test or two: Ham Radio Practice Tests . I learned some of the material, but memorized a LOT of it. If you discover that you don't know too much about ham radio, but are interested, I found these Ham Radio Podclass Podcasts really helpful, and surprisingly interesting as well. I also read the book Ham Radio for Dummies (request it through your local library if you don't want to buy it).

This is all assuming of course you have some interest in this. Otherwise this is probably the most boring blog entry you've ever read.

Contact Me

If you are interested in a display advertisement on my blog (or any other type of advertising), please contact me at cksstuff222 at gmail dot com for rates and information.  Thanks for your interest!

Yo Plus with Optibalance

I'm a "coupon clipper" and I had a coupon for $2.00 off Yo Plus Yogurt with Optibalance - Helps Naturally Regulate Digestive Health. I was intrigued. What's up with that? So looked at the package. It says, "Try it for 10 days and see how different you feel!" Hmmm. How do I know if I want to feel different? Different good, or different bad? Horns growing out of my head different, or I can suddenly run a marathon different? I decided to live dangerously and use my coupon and try it. If nothing else it does taste really good (I got the blackberry pomegranite flavor). So anyway, if you see me and I seem "different", it's the yogurt.

(I may or may not report back on "how different I feel" if it involves TMI. I have a feeling that's why they don't tell you about what's going to happen to you that's "different".)

Sauerbraten

As a kid my Mom would occasionally make sauerbraten (a traditional german meat dish marinated in red wine vinegar), which I absolutely hated. I haven't had it since I was a teenager. But for my Dad's birthday this year, one of his gifts was a homemade dinner from me, and it was decided I would make a sauerbraten dinner. Luckily we had Mom's recipe, and she had even written what to serve with it - red cabbage, applesauce, and Panni potato balls with (homemade) bread crumbs. You actually have to start 2 days ahead to marinate the meat. So I cooked the sauerbraten for the first time last night, and also made potato balls for the first time (from a mix). Luckily everything turned out how it was supposed to, other than the gravy being too thick. Surprisingly, I even LIKED it, and so did DH. Even more surprisingly, my picky DD LIKED it. To add to the ambiance I played Oktoberfest music during dinner. What's fun about that is every time Ein Prosit comes on, we stop what we're talking about and sing Ein Prosit and toast each other! Gotta love being German!

Part 3: Waymarking

While Geocaching is our primary hobby, Waymarking has now become a close second. The Waymarking website (www.waymarking.com) has hundreds of categories and each category has it's own posting requirements (however all involve marking the location using readings from your gps). One of our favorite categories is NYS historical signs. I seem to have a special talent for spotting these blue signs even at 55 mph or in the dark. DH's talent is pulling the car over at 55mph to waymark the sign! Together, we make a good team! After Hubie's we had a banner day/evening finding these interesting signs and exceeded our previous best day of waymarking by finding 30 signs! We ended up driving many miles and we didn't get home until 11:30 at night, but we had so much fun and saw a lot of interesting signs.

The waymarking site is fun to peruse. A category I find really interesting is "Out of Place Graves" such as this one for Stonewall Jackson's arm. Or this one Pioneer Woman's Grave. There's tons of other interesting categories such as vintage gas pumps, time capsules, barber poles, Starbucks, pedestrian suspension bridges, U.S. Post Offices, plane crash sites, U.S. benchmarks, natural sinkholes, ginormous everyday objects, Route 66 the Mother Road, and waaaaay more....

Part 2: Hubie's

So after Howe Caverns we were really hungry, and I had done a little research before we left so I knew there were some places to eat in the nearby town of Schoharie. We rolled into town and were looking around at places to eat, but nothing was catching our eye. DH pulled into a Stewarts to get gas and he said the guy inside didn't seem scary - did I want to go in and ask him where is good to eat? I said sure. So I went in and asked the nice young man and he suggested Hubie's. Which was actually really funny because on the way up that morning when DH asked me if I'd found a place to eat after Howe Caverns, I mentioned that Schoharie should have places to eat, but that I thought "that place our brother-in-law told us about years ago, near the hunting cabin he stays at is around there - was it Hubies??". So of all places this young man could suggest, it's the ONE place for 100 miles around that we actually knew of! Not wanting to go against fate, we made our way to Hubie's, which was actually in the next town over in Middleburgh, NY. (So brother-in-law, if you ever read this - we ate at your favorite place!) Hubie's as you can see from the pic is a pizzeria on one side, but on the right side it is a nice restaurant, and that's where we decided to eat. I had lasagna, which was delicious, and DH had hot wings which were actually HOT! It's not often I see him eat wings that give him a run for his money. There was even a small bead of sweat by his forehead! Then he had stromboli, which he proclaimed as delicious as well. DD had a slice of pizza and about 15 pieces of their homemade bread with butter. After totally sating ourselves, we headed on to what would be our personal record-breaking waymarking trip. I will delight you with all the details of that in my next post.

Picture from inside Howe Caverns

Howe Caverns, Hubie's and Waymarking - Part 1

This weekend we went for a trip to Howe Caverns. Both myself and DH had already been to Howe Caverns many years ago, but we thought DD was old enough to really enjoy this trip, and since it's pretty pricey, we'd been holding off until she was older. It was pretty much as hokey as we both remember. It's kinda like the whole area never left the fifties. The huge "lodge" seems actually quite run down, however, we found out the whole place is under new ownership, and there did seem to be evidence that they are spending money to fix it up. The restaurant is currently closed, but that seemed to be under renovation. The main lobby inside was nice enough though, and the elevators and the caverns themselves seemed to have been maintained just fine and felt safe. There was a nice gift shop and a small snack bar, and decent restrooms. We picked a good day to go - this is definitely not their big tourism season, yet there were still I thought a somewhat surprising number of people there to visit the caverns. So we got our tickets and didn't have to wait too long until our "tour group" number was called. Then we all got into two elevators and descended 150 ft (about 15 stories) to the cavern. It is a constant 52 degrees year round, so this is a nice attraction to visit whether it's hot out, cold out, raining - whatever! If you go, remember to bring a sweatshirt or jacket though, it gets damp and chilly. The gift shop must make a fortune on sweatshirts. Anyway, there is a brick walkway and our tour guide led us through the cave, stopping at interesting formations to tell us about them. There are three major types of rock formations in the cave that have formed over millions of years from rain water that filters it's way down through the soil, picking up carbon dioxide and a very tiny amount of dissolved limestone. As this water drips down from the roof of the cave, it leaves behind tiny amounts of calcite. Depending on the dripping of the water you get stalagmites, stalactites and flowstone. Absolutely beautiful and amazing! (I'll put a pic in another post.) There's also a boat ride that you get to take along "The River Styx" to the end of the portion of the cavern that is accessible to the public. At the far end, they turn off the lights for a moment and wow, if you looked up "pitch black" in the dictionary, that'd be it! You can see beyond where the boat stops (which incidentally seems fairly precarious, with just a few old chains blocking the boats from going over the edge - if I were in charge of Howe Caverns, I'd shore that up a little more!) and the tour guide explained that bats live in that area. He also said that the new owners have plans to extend the tour all the way through the rest of the cavern to the other end where the original natural opening is. We took the boat ride back and got to see the "Bridal Altar" area where they occasionally perform marriages and then at the end of the tour was one of our favorite parts - "Winding Way". It's a narrow winding pathway that winds about 560ft through solid limestone. The width ranges from 7ft down to 20 inches! Very cool. This brought us back to the vestibule near the elevators. There is another portion of the cave in this area - in 2005 they began offering an "Adventure Tour" for $100 you can explore this "raw" portion of the caverns. You have to wear a hard hat and knee pads and stuff, and you have to be over 18 to do that tour. I bet that's pretty cool. Anyway, we took the elevator back up and hit the gift shop and the "Gem Mining" area. You can buy a bag of dirt and then bring it to an area where you pour it into a "sifter" where you can swish it in running water and see what gem stones you've "mined". DD LOVED this and there was a decent amount of gemstones in there for the price (large bag o' dirt for $8.10). I forgot to mention they take your picture in the cave and of course that's for sale when you leave. DH knows I'm a BIG sucker for those kind of pics, and he lovingly went and bought it without even a whimper. It *is* a cool pic, though! See, we don't go to boring places like JC Penney or Sears for OUR family pictures - we have them taken at places like Howe's Caverns, the Lake George Steamboat Company, etc.
The story of how the cave was first discovered and explored and opened to tourists is very interesting. I won't go into the whole story here, but I will tell you how Lester Howe first discovered the cave. In the early 1800s local settlers noticed that even on the hottest summer day, a cool breeze could be felt coming from a rocky ledge. They were too scared to investigate, but they called the ledge "Blowing Rock". In 1842 newcomer Lester Howe's curiosity got the better of him when he noticed his cows would congregate in this area on hot days, rather than stand under shady trees, and tying a rope around his waist he went in to explore. We bought a little book for 4 bucks that tells the whole story of the caverns from their formation millions of years ago, to how they came to be a tourist attraction. Well worth the $4.
If you live close enough to this attraction I highly recommend it. It's pretty kid friendly and a lot of fun, and very interesting and educational. The tour was about 80 minutes. They also have some interesting memorabilia on display. Between all that and the gem mining and the gift shop, we ended up spending a good few hours there in total. But this wasn't the end of our fun-filled day, but I'll have to save that for tomorrow, this is long enough!

PSA about Front Loading Washers

Six years ago when we bought our house we had to buy a washer and dryer. After hearing all the wonderful things about front loaders, and how much money they save, we were convinced it was worth spending the extra money to get the front loader, being the economical sort that we are. I think we paid around $1,000 for it. About 6 months ago it shorted, the fuse blew and failed and toasted the motherboard on it. We called in a repairman (NOT a SEARS repairman - that's another post entirely!) and after diagnosing the problem he asked how old the machine was (5 years old). Then he asked did it still sound ok on the spin cycle? We said yes, and asked why was he asking that? He said a lot of these machines only last 5-7 years - what happens is the bearings in the drum wear out and you can hear it when it starts to happen, and it is very expensive to repair at that point. He just wanted to warn us against replacing the motherboard if the bearings were starting to go. Well the machine still sounded just fine, so crossing our fingers we paid $200 and had him replace the motherboard. Well good ol' Murphy's law kicked in and but a few months later we started hearing the "death knell". Last night after quite an amazing cacophony of clunks and bangs, the machine gave up the ghost and died. So after looking in Consumer Reports', I am off to Lowe's today to buy Consumer Reports' "Best Buy" in TOP LOADERS. Just for kicks, on the Consumer Reports website I looked at their "Best Buy" for front loaders and here is the VERY FIRST CUSTOMER REVIEW on their pick of front loaders:

By Want to see longevity as a CR category from Minneapolis, MN

Pros: Adjustable Settings, Clean Clothes Well, Energy Efficient, Enough, Large Capacity, Quiet, Worked well just not long

Cons: Breaks Down, Only lasted 7 years

Bottom Line: No, I would not recommend this to a friend

The bearing that runs the machine and that the drum hangs from is shot after 7 years. The bearing is molded into the drum, so basically most of the machine needs to be replaced to the tune of [$] Call me old-fashioned, but I thought major appliances ought to last 10-15-20 years. Why create more trash?? Let's make'em so we can fix'em.

When you consider that the best rated front loaders can cost as much as $1,300, $1,600 and $1,900 they're going to have to be awfully energy efficient in their short life span (ours didn't even last 6 years) to end up a better value than the $500 top loader I'm buyin' today! GAH!

Iditarod

We recently finished following this year's Iditarod dogsled race. This year some of the mushers carried GPS transmitters and you could even see where they were in between checkpoints via the iditarod.com website, very cool and exciting. Here's a pic of some beautiful sled dogs. I love their faces!

Ivory Soap

I can only use Dove or Camay soap otherwise I get this bumpy rash-like thing on my arms. In my life I've tried many different soaps and there are the only two that are ok for my skin. I remember being especially surprised that Ivory soap, which is advertised to be "99 44/100% pure formula" was actually one of the worst soaps for my skin. Have you ever wondered what the other 56/100ths are in Ivory that are not pure? They don't say on the website - I looked. *I* think the other 56/100ths are radioactive isotopes. That's probably what irritated my skin.

If you would like to see what people with too much time of their hands do with Ivory soap, check this out: http://www.ivory.com/PureFun_IvoryProjects_AmazingSoapCarvings.htm

Weird Presidential Maladies

I have a page-a-day calendar called Wacky Websites and one of them was this website that had a database of all the presidents and their ailments.
It's: http://www.doctorzebra.com/Prez/t_roster.htm
At first glance it doesn't look that remarkable, but if you start clicking on some of the earliest presidents, there's some weird stuff.
For example, did you know this about Thomas Jefferson?
From age 19 on, Jefferson had a tendency to develop prolonged incapacitating headaches, usually at 7-8 year intervals, usually correlated with stress or grief, complicated by indecision and deeply buried rage:

• Violent headache for two days after behaving awkwardly in front of a girl he fancied (March 1764, age 20);
• Six week headache after his mother's death on March 31, 1776;
• Six weeks of headache soon after arriving, unhappy and homesick, as minister to France in 1785;
• While overburdened as Secretary of State, headaches recurred when he learned that a friend had become ill, but recovered (April 1790);
• About this time he had a second set of headaches, lasting from sunrise to sunset each day for 6 weeks.

There is also this section of the website: http://www.physical-lincoln.com/ where they tout "The last great Lincoln mystery - solved!"

"He was tall, homely, and gaunt. He had long limbs, big feet, a high voice... and was constipated. Three of his four sons died before age 20. Why?"

Well, I wasn't sure I really wanted to know about one of our greatest presidents being constipated, but if you want to find out a little more, there's some info here: http://www.doctorzebra.com/Prez/t16.htm I thought it was interesting, but I won't bore you with the details here.

I'll leave you with one last thought from the Presidential Health website about founding father George Washington:

Was known as "The Potomac Stallion"