skulls on children's clothing

This is just wrong. Skulls on young children's clothing?  This is in the girls section, too.  Not to generalize, but what kind of parents want their children in these clothes?  What statement are they making?  I know life isn't all puppie dogs and pig tails but skulls are not necessary nor are they tasteful at this age.  

one of these things is not like the other

So now we have two mailboxes to choose from.  One if your letter's destination is local to the island and one if it has to leave the island to get to its destination.  


For the past several years Canada Post has been ridiculed for sending all of our mail off-island to Vancouver to be sorted, thus taking local job away. This includes mail that has to come right back to the island to be delivered.  They said it made fiscal sense.  hmmm


Apparently they want to take even more local jobs away by making us sort the mail for them.  Does it really save that much money?  I'll bet you a good percentage* of the mail will end up in the wrong box and have to be shipped either off or back onto the island.  


We'll see how long this lasts.**  


--
* My guess is 20% 


** My guess is less than 1 year

well, that's one way to solve that problem, but seriously, I can't believe in this day & age we'd resort to banning bicycles to avoid traffic accidents.

Published on Friday, June 18, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

That's All, Spokes: Colorado Town Bans Cyclists
by Helen Pidd and Agencies

A town in the US has banned cyclists on most of its streets, punishing anyone who gets caught with a $68 fine. Black Hawk in Colorado, which has a population of just above 100, is thought to be the first town in the US to make cycling illegal after a change in civic law.

The curious decree has been introduced for "health and safety" reasons, said administrators of the former goldmining town, which in the 1990s decided to develop gambling to prevent the place vanishing altogether.

Michael Copp, Black Hawk's city manager, admitted there had not been any accidents to prompt the ban, just concern over potential collisions between motor vehicles and bicycles on 19th-century streets that were designed for horses and carriages.

The town started enforcing the ban on 5 June, five months after it passed the law requiring cyclists to dismount and wheel their bikes through the town. So far eight tickets have been issued, said Copp.

Copp, who does not cycle himself, said the council passed the ordinance after the town experienced a surge in traffic – buses, delivery trucks, and motorists – following a law that increased the maximum betting limits from $5 to $100 once it chose gambling as its raison d'etre.

The ban applies only to the narrow 19th century thoroughfares in a town that is lined with historic buildings and new casinos, not the few residential streets. Cyclists riding in on Colorado highway 279, a main route through the town, would have to dismount and walk about 400 metres, Copp said.

"This ordinance is necessary for the preservation of health and safety and for the protection of public convenience and welfare," says the law, which is set out on the Black Hawk website.

"The rules will allow bicycle traffic that originates locally to continue to operate with City Manager authorisation, while still assuring that such traffic can operate in a manner that is not incompatible with vehicular traffic," says another clause.

Cyclists' lobbies are gearing up to challenge the law, which they say is illegal.

"The danger here is the precedent," Dan Grunig of Bicycle Colorado, an advocacy group, said. "We don't believe it's right or legal and we want to make sure it's addressed before it's spread any further."

Grunig's group, which claims 7,000 members statewide, has appealed to national groups to help.

"An outright ban on being able to ride a bicycle through a community is unheard of in any other community in the country, said Charlie Zeeger, director of the Pedestrian and Bicycling Information Center at the University of North Carolina.

But Black Hawk seems proud to be first. "At this point the council has no intention of repealing the ban," Copp said. "They believe their actions are what's best for its citizens in Black Hawk, which are casinos and their patrons."

srsly?

52 minutes? That's the best you could do for a dollar?

Beware what lurks in the dairy case

I like to spend as little time as possible shopping but a weekly trip to the grocery store is unavoidable (online shopping isn't time-efficient enough for me either).


Unless I am getting special ingredients for a recipe I usually trod through the usual outside sections of the grocery store replenishing our produce, bread, meat & dairy. The odd time I'll throw in a treat for the teenboy like chocolate milk.


I don't tend to dilly-dally so once the chocolate milk caught my eye, it took me only a second to think "sure, he'll like that" and pop it into the shopping cart. I briefly noticed the dairy company had changed their carton design but that's as far as my noticing went.





The teenboy noticed the problem minute he opened the fridge.


"ORANGE CHOCOLATE MILK?!?!??!"


What? They can't possibly mean orange flavoured chocolate milk?


Sure enough, that's what they meant. We are both chocolate purists so putting fruit flavour with chocolate is just considered wrong. I had a taste and it reminds me of a "Terry's Chocolate Orange". If you like that then you'll probably like the milk.  This carton is good til June 6th if you'll take it off our hands.  heh


The orange strip on the package had caught my eye when I first saw it in the dairy case but the word "Orange" certainly had not (my fault for not paying enough attention - but they could have been a little more obvious about it).

I have no idea how popular this flavour will be but I'm thinking they'll sell maybe 1% of the of the amount they sell of the pure chocolate milk --- so why bother making it would be my question. Time will tell how long it survives on the dairy shelf....or if they decide to come out with other combined chocolate flavours.

docked marks

The teenboy came home with a near-perfect grade 8 math quiz.  19 out of 22  =  86% is nothing to sneeze at.

However, he was a little choked at the reason for the loss of 3 points and I can understand why.


He got one question wrong, the one shown below.  He got the math correct but he didn't specify the unit of measurement (cm2).   For this he drops from 100% to 86% which is a significant drop.  All of the questions were based in the same unit of measurement, so it somehow makes it even less significant.  argh

If I were the teacher I would have docked him a point for missing the unit of measure, two at the outside max. But this teacher gave him no points whatsoever for this question.


I do not agree but I'm not one of these parents to go running to the teacher to cry foul against my child on every single thing I hear about.



I'd love to hear your thoughts on this - especially if you are a teacher  :D

c'mon Telus, you're smarter than that

So, I've been paying my bills online for years.  Telus still insist on sending me a monthly paper bill telling me not to pay it because the money will be electronically removed from my account.

The real kicker?  They send a self-addressed envelope for me to include my non-payment back to them.

I suppose there is a way to log into Telus' website and let them know the obvious, that I don't require a paper confirmation not to send them any money, but, c'mon Telus, you can do better than that.

how often do you change your bath towel?

Gotta ask you something. 

How often do you wash your bath towel?

You're presumably clean when you dry off with it so how dirty can it get?  I understand about molds or mildew but if you have a little heat on in the winter months it will dry out fairly quickly.  

My teenage son insists on a brand new towel each time he showers.

I am thrilled he's finally at the stage where he showers everyday without any reminders but a new bath towel every day?  It just seems wasteful to me, both water wise & detergent.  Not to mention the fact that I use a coin operated laundrymat.

Personally I use mine an average of 3 times before grabbing a new one.  

Maybe I should suggest he uses a smaller hand towel to dry off instead of the large beach-sized towels if he insists on a clean one every time.

16 month calendar

Is it just me, or does a "16 month calendar" start on the wrong month?

I think its a great idea to have a calendar that would carry you at least one month into the New Year until you're set up with new calendars in the home & office.

But every single 16 month calendar I ever see has the 4 extra months at the end of the previous year. And they usually have the 4 months squished onto one page.  How silly and useless is that? 

By September we've already got calendars hanging everywhere.  Why would we need to put up a calendar that goes from Sept of one year through to December of the following year?

Wouldn't it make a whole lot more sense to have the new calendar start January (I'm even ok if they thrown in a December) and carry it through an extra month or two into the following new year?

I think this every year and think the calendar companies will eventualy catch onto this idea.  But its been decades and I'm still seeing calendars in this format.

Am I really the only one who finds this utterly silly and useless?  Calendar should go from Jan-Jan.

skin tag remover

ohhh.  ewwww.  ick

This reminds me of the mole I had visciously removed at the doctor's office recently.  It was mercilessly removed from the exact same location in the picture.

I can't imagine buying a kit to remove extra pieces of whatnot from my body.

ewww

Leave it to the merciless, viscious professionals.

allergies that shall remain undisclosed?

 

At first I laughed out loud at the boy's honesty. But a moment later, it struck me. Could I go to jail if I let my son turn this into his school?!

Its a little difficult to read, so here's what my son wrote on a permission slip when he was asked to disclose any allergies: "champagne, I get all red in the face and look like a lobster".

Props to him for spelling champagne correctly...but I know someone's going to ask "just how does this minor know the effects of alcohol on his body?" It was on New Year's eve, that he learned this, after consuming a small, tiny, swig of champagne (under the supervision of both his parents).

Should I really be posting this to a blog? I know people have been hunted down & fired over an anonymous blog posting. Do I dare take the chance of social services coming after me? If this blog goes for a long, extended absence, you won't know if I was taken away or just got lazy again.

pen refills

I was given a really nice pen the other day.  

One problem: the ink had all dried up.  My friends found the pen and thought I'd like it and not want to see it end up in the garbage.  Right, they were.

So, off to the stationary store I go to find refills for the pen.  Found refills, ok, but the problem is, they are packaged as a set of two.  

Why would you need to buy two pen refills together, I ask?  The clerk said it was likely because it wasn't worth it for the manufacturer to package one refill at a time.

I would really rather have paid $4 for one refill than $8 for two.  What are the chances the other refill will not have dried up by the time I've used up all the ink in the first refill?  What are the chances I'll remember I have a refill for this pen when the first one runs out?  What are the chances I'll be able to find the other refill two years down the road... 

Will I still like this pen in two years?