live from sublurbia

Anyone read this? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7392072.stm

One of the concerns I’ve heard about over the years regarding water problems in the US West has been these invasive zebra mussels. It costs a lot of money to build new barriers and new pipes that bring water hundreds of miles to desert wastelands overpopulated with invasive subdivisions to have a fail over system while you clean the first set of pipes, but redundancy can’t hurt in the case of an emergency.

Even without that redundancy, I like how it is a non-chemical way to clear out this and other live animal/plant problems. It would have to be tuned and deployed to not hurt people (don’t leave an unattended “automatic” setup at any site people or wildlife that normally wouldn’t be a problem could get into) and larger animals, but the reduced costs of cleaning out these invasive, exotic mussels and other problems might make it worth it.

Of course they still need to study the effects and the ecosystems this is used on and near. You don’t want to kill everything in the area. There are good organisms as well as these invasive ones. But I hope that “nuking” them with microwaves rather than other longer-lasting radiation.

And we could stop invading the desert and live more locally, too. In the interim, at least this seems to be a less disruptive way of fitting in the spaces we’ve carved out. It’s hard to find a balance for myself to live within – much less the entire world. Sustainable and sensible economically. It’s a high cost we pay for convenience some times. And hard to measure the impact down the road.

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I know that retail is hurting. Small boutique shops closing around my neighborhoods, incredible sales online with discounts, free shipping, anything to get us into (or mostly back into) the stores and buying again. I do shop locally when I can or it makes sense – the local shoe store didn’t have anything wide enough for me the last three times I’ve checked. They’re still around, but a few other stores aren’t.

But when it comes to other things, it’s easier and more economical for me to click it and ship it. And continue doing so as I get online offers and reminders. Some of the offers are very targeted: they’re collecting data on me, and using it. My habits, my desires, my window shopping.

Amazon makes recommendations to me (Usually pretty dumb ones – if I bought a microfiber gym towel for a super duper discount, why am I going to care about a 5% discount on a smaller, similar one? I have a towel now, thanks!) and adjust what they offer based on what I’ve bought or looked at. They do this for all of their users, and I’ve found it useful enough that I don’t mind this creepy minimal spying anymore. The small privacy I’ve given up there has paid for itself in both discounts and time saved not driving out to a big store to get a case of wipes and then getting sucked into the “as long as I’m here” trap.

Other retailers do it, too, but less subtly than Amazon. I’ve been trying out backpacks and diaper bags and wallets and purses as I shift towards carrying a lighter load on the train riding with the kid every day. I may only work a few miles from the ocean, but I am slowly coming to the realization that I don’t need to carry a tsunami-ready jump pack at all times. I could use a smaller purse, too. The purse that replaced the evil bag (it killed my camera and ate my wallet last fall) is just too big for light, daily, commuter train use.

So imagine my surprise when this showed up in my inbox:

Dear [aunt mommy],

We noticed that you left items like the Travelon RFID Blocking Passport Case in your shopping cart at eBags. Come back and order this great product and we will take 15% off your eBags purchase*. Now that you’ve had a chance to think about it, why not buy it today!

See the items left in my cart now

If you’re still not sure, please take some time to browse eBags customer reviews for the Travelon RFID Blocking Passport Case or one of our other 30,000 products onsite.

Kind of funny that I’m shopping for privacy equipment and the shopping cart wants to know why I hesitated pulling the trigger on the purchase. I’m sure the NSA will be happy to know I went with a less secure plain leather wallet instead.

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Shopping online can be a huge time saver for me. If I buy in bulk enough, I can meet or beat local retail big-box store prices, and save myself the extra trips to the store because I forgot and ran out. Or at least minimize; if I’m out of wipes I can’t wait a week for “Free” Super Saver shipping to get me an item. And here in sublurbia, your choices are big-box stores, warehouse stores, or boutiques, each with their own problems.

I use online shopping mostly for purchases I can delay, do in bulk, or return easily if it’s not quite what I want (this is often the case with clothes or shoes when I’m limited by a brick-and-mortar store’s options). Disposable wipes, for example. While most of my daycares never had a problem with cloth diapers, they drew the line at cloth wipes. I tried CostCo and BJs a while, but I never could time my trips right to get the wipes. Or they’d change the brands they were offering, dropping my favored eco-friendly non-scented brand.

I ended up signing up with Amazon.com to buy my wipes in bulk with their (then new) subscribe and save program. Sign up, get a shipment boxed to qualify for both the discount and free shipping, then suspend my subscription until I was ready for more.

The last time I was ready for an order of wipes, I couldn’t find the items as part of their S&S program. I decided to place an order for the next cheapest set of wipes, but at the last moment hit a link that ended up taking me to my old subscribe and save list. Even though new users couldn’t add these items to the S&S program, I could still buy the items at my S&S discount.

I experimented with a few other items, and found if I clicked quickly enough, I could sign up for S&S items, cancel the first shipment, and then “suspend” my subscription. I could hang on to the price, free shipping, and discounts, buying the item(s) whenever I needed them. Or at least until Amazon is hurting enough to suspend their “free” shipping program and the Subscribe and Save program.

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P632. Yeesh. Very recently. Less than 15 minutes late most days. But I know when it is time to stand, leaving my shady perch, heading for the north side of the station. I can hear the rails singing ahead of the train. Between the wind, the late train announcements, and the crowd of riders that grows larger daily, I usually can’t see it or hear it coming save for the high-pitched singing of the rails until it is nearly upon us. I suppose the teenagers can hear it even better than I – they always seem to get up a step before anyone else as the train nears the station.

But it was hot and crowded on the train on a recent trip home. We had record temperatures outside, moe people than seats, and the A/C units in each car couldn’t compensate. We were crammed together inside, spilling onto the aisles and stairwells. Commuters wandered from car to car, looking for heat relief. Cell phones twittered and squawked back like adult voices in a Charlie Brown special. I listened, first from a stairwell, then half a corner seat, as everyone discussed the hot topics of the day: pending Tri-Rail funding cuts, gas prices and the various conspiracies surrounding their rise, lack of cool air on the train. The latter conversations were through the ubiquitous cell phones: a busy shift for the customer service agents, judging by the raised voices and sweaty frowns.

But a sound too rhythmic to be crossing bridge segments or switching tracks emerged among the ebb and flow of the conversation threads and road noises. Conversation died down as the bongo beat grew in complexity and volume increased, eventually dominating even the most earnest of gas-price-conspiracy theorists into quiet enjoyment. Continue Reading »

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Ah, I love the smell of baked mice in the morning. The ruthless chef and I have been mixing up the morality of eating animals and counting games lately, playing his current favorite game, Feed the Kitty. Mmmm. Roasted Rat. Yum. The family that bakes together …

We got this game when Wolfie was still new at counting, and he didn’t quite follow the whole “rules” and “turns” concept very well. He couldn’t quite handle rolling the dice, either, so we stole the dice cup helper from my misspent young years running a fixed-dice game on the back stoop of the school playing Yahtzee.

Aside from the fun of playing his game, we’ve been using it to stretch his math skills. Counting mice for each player, mice going in and out of the kitty bowl, using addition, subtraction, and measuring. Recently he added another level of difficulty, requiring we rescue mice using a large cooking spoon. This also turned the game from “catching mice who eat the grain to feed the kitty” through “cooking the mice up for the kitty” to “baking mouse-shaped cookies for the kitty”.

But even without helping him exercise his brain, it’s just plain fun gaming with the boy. And the girl, though she’s still a little limited in her concepts of “rules” and “turns”. It’s just nice to hang out like we did with our family and siblings. Just a quiet snuggly laughing time. Lets us reconnect, catch up, and have fun on screen-free nights.

How do you reconnect with your family and friends? Games? Stories? Movies? Plays? Oooh, plays. He’s already making up stories for story time … I can’t wait to see what our little playwrights come up with in a couple of years. :)

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I do not like to check the box,
I do not think they’ve had the pox.

I will not bus them here or there,
I will walk them everywhere.

I do not like green forms and spam,
I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.

One school year is winding down, another is spinning up. Tis the season of application packets. And we aren’t even applying for colleges yet. Old school exit forms. New school entrance forms. Allergy lists. Pink sheets, blue sheets, yellow sheets, food sheets. Continue Reading »

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The garbage trucks hit our street as early as five, or as late as six some mornings. I dress the kids and feed them as the hub finishes his shower. As the kids tuck into their first breakfast (a second is served at school), I head out the door, handing off the kids to the hub.

The last few mornings, the outdoors have smelled of a Junior Burger with cheese, sweet onions, and mustard. Since I live in the middle of sublurbia, at least four hours drive from a What-A-Burger (instead of a few blocks, as in a previous life), there’s only one reason I should be hallucinating the taste of a hot burger with a side of onion rings and a coke in my mouth, the scent of hot grease and pickles in my car, and the crinkle of paper as the meal sloshes around corners as we drive. I ate there a lot as a young adult.

It’s only 300 miles or so to get my fix, though. I could call in for a day off, drive out, drive back, and have a “me” day, listening to music, touring the state, spend the last few hours of my day on the beach before I leap back to responsible old me… Continue Reading »

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One of my favorite and convenient shopping sites is Amazon.com. I used them first in 1997 to help me find a book I’d been trying to find for a handful of years. Their search expired, but I found it a few years later, likely on Half.com. I kept an eye on the site, though, finally placing my first book order in late 1999 for a book about the internet. My orders picked up in 2000; I’d just gotten a new job and wanted a few specialized technology books to help me on my learning curve for new software.

After that, I mostly bought baby gifts for friends, or household goods. As the kids came along, discounted toys and baby stuff, more household goods, and baby wipes. I’ve always been more comfortable in a “real” book store or library, and while I appreciated the expanded selection of Amazon, it was and is more useful to me as a list-maker and gizmo site. I’ll build a list of books – and look for them at thrift stores or borrow them from the library or trade among friends.

But I noticed a couple of years back that you could leave stuff in your “shopping cart” for longer than the amount of time they say items will stay in the shopping cart. And if the price has changed since the last time you looked at your shopping cart while logged in, the site will post a message for a moment, informing you of the change.

So I started buying my items, then immediately putting them back in the shopping cart. If the price changed within 30 days to a lower price, I called Amazon and they honored their 30 day pricing guarantee, giving me a price adjustment. But I had to remember to keep the item in there, and I had to remember to check the price … it made sure I logged in daily; kind of a hassle. Plus some sellers would adjust their prices minutely. Up or down a couple of pennies, which was useless to me for price matching purposes, but served as an annoying reminder that I hadn’t gotten around to buying or reading the biography I’d wanted after hearing an interview with an actor a few months ago.

Then I found refundplease.com. They’ll track the 30 day window on prices for you, and send you an email. I’ve been using it for a few months to track prices (along with my old method of keeping it in the shopping cart and logging in daily) and it’s caught the price changes every time. I’ve heard of a few other sites, but this one has worked well enough for me. I’ve never been spammed as a result of adding my address there, but I wonder just what they do with that immense database of information. Or could do. Can you imagine trending prices and discounts on Amazon? Seeing what’s hot and what’s not? Cool beans.

Keep things in my basket to watch for price changes before I buy, using refundplease to keep an eye on it after I buy it, I usually can keep my purchased priced reasonably. Or convince myself the items will never go on sale, so I should find another way or do without. I use another method for buying bulk repeat items online through Amazon, but I’ll touch on that another day.

For more WFMW ideas, head over to the mothership at http://www.rocksinmydryer.net!

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I was thinking about learning the other day. I think about it quite a lot, watching my kids explore and figure out the world. I can see Wolfie and Helvi’s “tells”; when they’re fibbing, when they’re going to go into spaghetti/slippery eel mode, when they’re being stubborn only because they don’t want to be “pushed around”.

We had to teach Wolfie a phone number and address to pass into kindergarten. The phone number was the easier of the two; I co-opted Tom Bodett’s Motel 6 jingle and the kiddo picked it up rather quickly. Our address was harder; we have several numbers he knows, but “out of order” for a counting order. But with a lot of practice and roleplay he nailed it after a while.

I’m not sure how I learn. I know I learn by doing. Usually doing it wrong, then figuring out how to do it right. :) Sometimes when I’m shown how to do something, I’ll have to do it over and over, even if it is the harder way. Learning the “new” or easier way can be more difficult. Just ask my poor youngest brother, who kept telling me there were lots of other ways to get from point A to point B, and I really didn’t need to go an extra half mile the other way simply because it was the way I was “used to”.

The hub seems to learn with good visuals and examples. I can describe an idea to him, but it’s better if I show him. A drawing, a mockup, or a short series of clips. But how do you turn what you do into something so visual? I tried for a while with Weight Watchers and cooking in general, but that doesn’t always go well for his visual learning. But give him a copy of “Eat This, Not That” and it rocks his brain. Much better than Calorie King or other big books of charts that suit my learning.

So what works for your kids and yourself? Hands on? Memorization tricks? Experimentation?

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We’re off on the traveling play date to spend it with some mothers near and dear to us.

Thanks, mom(s). MWAH!

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