• goodbadi

    Rats!

    August 3, 2011

    Well, not literally, other than the one yesterday that our cat chased out of the tree right beside our back deck into the menacing jaws of our lovely dog, who is apparently intent on losing her piz wat status.

    Nope, I just mean that exclamatorily, as for the first time I have had eBay auctions removed for “copyright violation.” It appears that I can’t legally sell the language-learning software I purchased dirt cheap from the maker of the software a decade ago (when I worked for the company), which is a bummer because I have level I (and some level II) editions for sixteen different languages just sitting in my closet.

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    Perfection

    August 1, 2011

    While I am very much a perfectionist, I am too lazy to strive for impeccability.

    My shed, for example, is rife with avoidable, naked-eye horrors, and so are my gardening and food-preserving procedures, and everything else I do. You should see the trim I installed over the weekend (and the associated ruination of adjacent walls and trim).

    Only a few of the undesirabilities in that which I do can I blame on circumstance, since most of the time I am at least partly responsible for how life plays out; I neither accept my own ineptitude as a fair excuse nor condone my impatience, both of which are prevalent worries.

    As a perfectionist, I am not blind to the myriad blemishes; I spot them every time I’m around them. Only the other things I’d rather be doing keep me from trying to work out their collective salvation.

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    Shameless Self Promotion

    July 20, 2011

    I have never once said there has ever been a time when my primary concern wasn’t making myself look good. If I had, it wouldn’t have sounded very sincere, since I’ve had a blog now for quite some time, and there can’t be anything too much more vainglorious than a blog.

    But it’s true: As a single dude, I had to sell myself to potential spouses. (Don’t worry, I didn’t turn into a slob as soon as I married.) As a teacher, I have to sell myself–almost as a personality, I like to imagine–to my students, both to command authority and to be interesting enough to learn from. As a musician, I need people to enjoy me and my music so they will buy recordings and leave tips (and so they will enjoy themselves, too).

    Anyway, you know those ads that show up along the side of your Google searches? Let’s say you type in “generators”; an ad for “Vainglory Generators, Inc.” might show up on the side. I confess: For a time, I became one of Them.

    See, Google mailed me a first-time-user promotional code worth $100 to start using Adwords. The deal was that my ad would run alongside results for searches using keywords that I would select, and each time the user clicked on my ad (thereby visiting my website), a small amount would be deducted from the $100. When my money ran out, my ads would slurp to a stop.

    I quickly put together an ad for my band’s cd, and now, about two weeks later, I have 28 promotional cents left. My ad showed up 438,624 times, netting me 397 clicks. Website page views skyrocketed. Sales…well, the jury’s out hanging on that one. iTunes and Amazon don’t report their sales to our distributor, CD Baby, for like millions of weeks, so maybe the band’s made it big on those sites but I just don’t know it yet.

    As for sales from CD Baby, which reports immediately, we’ve had none since the campaign launched.

    But as M often sighed when I gave her website traffic updates, “C, does any of that really matter?”

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    Starbucks? Not if I Can Choose

    September 4, 2010

    Tired of feeling sleepy in the afternoons, I have developed an antidote: milk, instant coffee to taste, and chocolate-flavored syrup to taste, all shaken together in a nice little glass bottle and chilled.

    A note on the bottle: I have two of them (for alternating days, I guess) that I bought once at a convenience store when I was traveling. I could have paid $2.71 for one bottle–all I really wanted–but if I bought two, it was only $4.00 total. So I bought two, and neither tasted very good. Or just good, even.

    Phooey on expensive Starbucks drinks! My homemade concoction is way satisfyinger.

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    History

    August 8, 2010

    Mark Twain is believed to have noted, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme”; others have said that “if there’s one thing we’ve learned from history, it’s that we haven’t learned from history.”

    Which brings me to my own history of repetitive patterns of high-level wants list making. Remember that not too long ago I said that the projects I’m itching to do around the house would cost over a hundred grand? Well, check this list out, from 1987, when I was nine (click on the photo to enlarge it):

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    Live Trap

    July 21, 2010

    Last Thursday my bro-in-law D and I visited the bar where my drummer and his other band were playing their funky metal really, really loud. I wore ear plugs, and was mightily impressed with both their effectiveness as well as the instrumentalistism of the band.

    I didn’t get home until crazy late, like 10:30, and the Pepsi I’d ordered up from the bartender was waning but still keeping me on my toes. As I unlocked the doors and opened up the house to let in some fresh air, down on the road a car stopped. I could tell someone was walking around, and I heard a voice say, “I got it,” before the car drove on.

    I get really nervous about things like that. Was somebody prowling around? I wondered. I hadn’t heard the person get back in the car, so I ran upstairs for the big and heavy flashlight I bought with last year’s birthday money.

    I stood on the porch and shined my light around but didn’t see anyone or anything else down at the road. Then, what I felt was the same vehicle drove by again, the other way, and I watched from behind one of our pretentious pillars for suspicious activity, but of course it was dark, so nothing stood out.

    That didn’t mean I wasn’t still on edge, though. I ate a bedtime snack on the porch and kept my flashlight handy before I headed to bed, my jumpy spirits calming only slightly, largely due to the reassuring presence of the driveway gate I put up last summer.

    But the next morning I discovered that I’d forgotten to shut the gate after coming home (so much for that barrier to invasion). I also discovered what my flashlight hadn’t made obvious: the live trap in which four groundhogs, a possum, and a skunk had met their ends and which I hadn’t set for several weeks but had left in place down by the groundhog hole on this side of the stream bed which is on the house side of a sturdy pasture fence was very much gone.

    It must have been a premeditated act of theft, as the trap was only visible from the road in the daylight. Those buggers had seen it and come back for it.

    I was a bit nervous, going away for the weekend. Our corn was about ready to pick, and our house certainly isn’t burglar proof, and my tools are just out in the shed out back.

    Thankfully, though, nothing else (that I remember having had) was gone when we returned. And I came back with some tremendous suggestions for dealing with the hooligans, including this one: put another live trap as bait into a really, really big live trap.

    Hmmm.

    Anyway, the corn survived, and today we processed and froze 235 ears. Whew!

    I actually enjoyed the ordeal a bit, after getting over my frustration at the looming fact of being trapped in a cycle of harvesting and storing food–what a wonderful problem to have–but not getting to do other projects.

    That’s a good live trap.

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    Shameless Commerce: Musician’s Friend Rocks

    July 3, 2010

    Please note: This is not only an unsolicited review of service; it is also an account of merciless bargain hunting.

    There’s nothing like an online mega retailer to make my day. Or week.

    See, I’d been checking out PA system packages for our band, and then, once I’d narrowed my search, I sat idly by while waiting for a sale to come my way. Last Saturday, one finally tempted me, from musiciansfriend.com: $50 off orders of $250 or more.

    My order would be $700, though–so after I thought about it, $50 really didn’t sound that great. But oh! I thought to myself. What if I divided my order into two smaller orders? I called my sister, who agreed to place the second order.

    Alas, the Internet order form wouldn’t recognize the sale promo code as attempted by my sister, so I ended up calling the store direct, then realized I would have to call from my sister’s phone with her credit card, and so on and so forth.

    “Why don’t you just ask them if you can use the sale promo code twice yourself?” M asked. “You know what Mma Ramotswe always says: just ask if there’s something you want to know.”

    I called the store back: “Can I use the promo code on more than one order?”

    “How many orders do you want to make?”

    “Two.”

    “That’s fine.”

    Yippee! I thought, and stayed up late placing two orders, one for $250.77 (the $50 off meant a savings of 20%) and one for $449.99 (again $50 off, but this time a saving of only 11.2%).

    I was pleased as punch–I’d gotten a $700 system for just $600, and with all free shipping, at that. Terrific!

    But then on Monday when I checked the mail, I found a one-time-use postcard from the same, dear musiciansfriend.com for 20% off my next order.

    Hmmm, I thought. If I would have applied this postcard instead of the original sale to my $449.99 order, I’d have saved an additional $40. I called the store back:

    “I know my order has shipped already, but can I cancel the original sale promo I used in that purchase and replace it with the postcard code?”

    “I’m afraid not,” the lady said.

    “Oh, shucks,” I said. “I was hoping that maybe your 45-day, best-price guarantee would apply.”

    “I don’t know. Let me check.”

    And after five minutes on hold, I was informed of a re-crediting my credit card for the $40 difference.

    Now I was really elated–and when the sound system arrived on Wednesday, I was one excited puppy (no, I didn’t pee all over everything).

    But my story hasn’t ended  yet. The next day, researching one feature of my new purchase, I came across a price markdown for an additional item that I’d thought about buying but ruled out as “potentially great but not necessary.”

    I wonder, I thought…and sure enough, the “one-time-use” 20% off postcard promotion still worked on the marked-down price.

    We plan to test the system in the coming week, so we’ll see if it performs as great as I feel about the whole purchasing experience.

    Before actually going out and purchasing any goodbadi-reviewed item, please email goodbadiblog@gmail.com to confirm that the reviewed item or service features include longevity.

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    Festival Fun

    June 28, 2010

    Yesterday M and I and our band performed at a lawn music festival in town, and it was hot and fun. Being in our band is a highlight of my life, and after we got home I stayed up late ordering a sound system of our very own even though it cost us a house project or two.

    But singing in the hot summer swelter wasn’t the only greatest part of my yesterday. Immediately after our set was up there was a “carry your spouse” race, with a first place prize of $20 to Cold Stone Creamery.

    M dashed up to me. “Let’s do it,” she said. We lined up with the other giggling couples.

    Did I want to win? You betcha. Unfortunately, ice cream, unlike perspective (as Hamlet says, “there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so”), doesn’t qualify for magical mental to physical materialization.

    In the first race I charged around a sun shade tent and back to the finish line, cutting off competitors, M riding me like a jockey on a thundering steed. We landed in third place.

    Then the announcer said the top three needed to race again. I gasped for more air, took off, and we found ourselves into an easy second place, and then, in the last ten yards, pulled from a ten-feet lag to a tie for first place.

    “Maybe you two couples will just have to share the ice cream,” the announcer said. I didn’t hear who made the final call, though: the charging steeds were to now be the jockeys of their poor wives.

    Now, M didn’t have a chance, really. Never mind that her counterpart has a two-month-old baby and is shorter; her counterpart’s husband is much shorter and slimmer than me.

    The race host said, “Go!” and I hopped onto M’s back. She gasped and groaned loudly, then did a fabulous job of making second place look worthwhile, stumbling across the finish line under my two hundred pounds of ice cream loverness.

    Finally, there was one more greatest part of the day. When another band played “Twist and Shout,” N took to dancing in the muddy pool where she’d spent a large portion of the day. I was able to film just a snippet:

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