Once again CSN Stores has come to my rescue. On the very day our trusty crock pot bit the dust, the store, which sells twin beds (that link is required by them to activate the promo code that allows me to make the following “purchase”), requested my reviewing services once again.
What could I do, but agree to review a Hamilton Beach 7 Qt. Slow Cooker? As soon as it arrives and we fire it up, I’ll let you know what happens…
Alas, the many summer projects bouncing around in my brain’s possibilities department require money. So, as I said to a coworker at our end-of-the-year picnic Friday, “I’m trying to learn contentment.”
“Yes,” he said. “There are two ways to be rich. One way is to have a lot of money, and the other is to be happy with what you have.”
“If I’m ever rich,” I replied, “it will most likely be the latter kind.”
I’m sure my bemoaning our financial status would strike most people in the world as completely ridiculous: I’m already rich, with a wonderful house to live in, met needs, and many met wants, not to mention the things I have that money can’t buy, like family and good health. Just look at our gardens:
Are we wealthy? No doubt. These pictures don’t even show the berries patches or orchard.
However, that global perspective gets clouded by more immediate Things I Want to Do: move the electric pole from the middle of our front yard ($1,500); replace our car with a minivan ($15,000); relocate our wood stove ($2,000), move our kitchen ($10,000); and the list goes on and on and on. And on. I doubt $100,000 would even take care of it–just for starters.
I’ve always been this way. My favorite adolescent reading was Gander Mountain catalogs, and my parents had to maintain tight control over my paper route earnings. Their general rule of thumb was, “Think about it for a week, and then we’ll talk about it.”
That took care of many of my ideas then, but now my desires lack neither longevity nor practicality. Maybe a week would have been enough time for me to forget about that little plastic audio mixer with a built-in mic and two tape decks for disc jockeying parties (which I never had, anyway), but now that our band is becoming established, my want for a sound system feels more grounded.
All that said, the limiting factor of our cash flow means that our spending glacier is not threatened by global warming, and so moderation and contentment are more than ever necessary for the learning.
Fortunately, as my dad told me my uncle says, there are always free projects to work on. So I’d better get busy.
Here’s the moral to the tale: When the going gets tough, stop calling yourself tough.
Recently, after I wrote about a Corona eGrip transplanter that lasted for two thistles, I received comments and emails from a fabulous customer service person (see the post and followup comments here). It was great to be so well accommodated by a company willing to stand behind its products.
Just yesterday the replacement transplanter arrived in the mail. Notice anything missing from the new tool’s red sticker?
I’ve only used the new transplanter for one thistle so far–and it hasn’t yet broken.
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.
You might remember part one of this review, in which I couldn’t write much because I hadn’t yet really used the Cuisineart Power Advantage 5-speed hand mixer provided to me by an online business that sells computer desks and tons more.
But now I’ve used the mixer–and on tough chocolate chip cookie dough, at that. Check it out:
Of course, I can’t speak for the mixer’s longevitability, and as the video shows it makes a pretty good whistle when it’s working hard, and when I tugged on the cord strap to put the whole deal away afterward I pulled it apart:
But other than that, the mixer kicks ass! No expert advice required!
PS. It’s tail cord joint swivels, too:
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.
This is part one of the review of my promised hand mixer review because of one major situational fact: we haven’t really used it yet.
The package arrived quickly, and when I unpacked the Cuisinart Power Advantage 5-speed hand mixer, everything looked great. It even felt hefty. And the accompanying stiff, single-piece spatula will be good for, oh, say, scraping burned rice off of a crusty skillet.
My heart sank when I plugged in the beaters and turned it on, just to see if it worked, and only one spun. “Oh,” I said. “Its beaters have designated ports.” I breathed a sigh of relief, switched the beaters, and let the thing wail. It sounded powerful (I refrained from a finger-in-the-blades test), the middle shaft-less beaters promise easy cleaning, and I just can’t wait to get a chance to mix up some sweet dessert with it.
I’ll keep you posted.
On Friday while visiting M’s parents, we stopped at a Tractor Supply store where I bought a live trap for the groundhog that still lives near our garden and an eGrip trowel made by Corona Clipper Inc. for digging thistles out of our yard.
I wreaked havoc on two thistles before it broke.
UPDATE: Apparently Corona Clipper Inc. has excellent customer service. See comments.
Back in November, after I reviewed so shamelessly the wood basket offered for my critique, someone said they wondered if what I’d written was even a review. Pretty much all I’d written about was getting the basket, putting it together, and how shiny it was. Here’s a follow up:
So far, the wood basket has held up to my beating of large loads of logs. For a while, though, the little handle nuts kept loosening, so I Gorilla glued them in place and now they seem to be holding. The basket also squats–or sags–under its heavy loads. I never carry it loaded over my feet for fear it will collapse and deposit the firewood onto my toes.
But it’s still in one piece, and if I’d clean it, it’d still be shiny.
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.
Today I asked a colleague who grew up in the vicinity of The Logger if she knows him. It’s a small community, after all, and she seems to know everybody.
We were walking to the cafeteria to pick up our students from lunch when I asked her, and all at once she was no longer walking beside me, but was instead perched on her high (and I mean high) heels and swaying a bit as if she would lose her balance, planted as she was there in the middle of the hall.
“Yes,” she said, covering her mouth. “We dated for five years. We were young, 16-22.”
I quickly assured her that it was just a question out of the blue, and explained the situation. She said that normally he would be true to his word, but she’s heard through the grapevine that he may have “fallen off the wagon. He’s such a redneck [not a derogatory term at my school], and he was always all about seeing how hard he could work, and earning a good name for himself, so I’m surprised at this. Maybe something’s wrong.”
“If his dad knows about it, though, it’ll get done,” she said, and recited to me the man’s parents’ home number.
And then she added, “He’s sort of stalkerish,” she said. “He knows when my husband leaves for work, and at our wedding I had a friend who’s a cop on the lookout in case he showed up. Now his brother’s dating the girl who lives across the street from me, so I think that’s how he keeps tabs.”
So for now I might continue sitting back and waiting to see what will happen next. Might my colleague’s grapevine shiver with its exciting gossip–Has The Logger indeed fallen off the wagon?–and firewood show up at my house?
I’m tempted to bet on it, even without calling his dad.
I’m pretty good at getting what I want (remember the washer/dryer fiasco?), so when the load of logs that was to become “4-4.5 cords” turned out to be only 2.46 cords (with generous measuring), I went straight to the phone to call the guy whom we’d overpaid $105.
As soon as I explained to the logger about the amount of firewood I’d received, he said, “I’ll make it right to you. Would you like the money, or more logs?”
I was a bit taken aback at his non-defensiveness. “Logs,” I said, and he said to expect a call and logs from him in the next two weeks.
But when two weeks passed and I hadn’t heard a peep, I called him again.
“I was sick,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll make it right to you.”
Two weeks later, he said, “It’s been so wet, I haven’t even been able to get out to bring in logs.”
Two or three weeks later, when I said I’d like the money back if he couldn’t get logs, he offered to bring me a cord of seasoned and split wood instead of the logs.
“That’d be great,” I said.
“I’ll call you the night before I come,” he said. “I’ll be there Thursday or Friday.”
By Friday evening, I was a bit peeved. As I loaded our wheelbarrow to bring in wood from the stack left behind by the previous residents, I pondered and plotted: I could tell him I’d advertise myself on craigslist as a reference for him; I could ask him point blank if he was just saying he would bring wood, or will he, really? Or maybe I could call him and say something like, “Well, I don’t like being ripped off, and I’ll never buy firewood from you again, so there!”
But then the truth of capital punishment–that when we kill murderers we become murderers ourselves–dawned on my furrowed brow, and I realized that I could just simply choose not to be a jerk even though he’s a crook.
So maybe I have been ripped off. At least I still have my self respect.
When I called Dad to ask him to bring along his chimney brush next weekend, he said that he had thought their water tank would be installed in July–and just this morning he wrote out the check paying for the completion of the project earlier this week.
It’s possible; maybe the rest of what’s due will one day come my way. In the meantime, becoming a non-Scrooge sits higher on my bucket list than does holding a contentious grudge or acting nastily.
It finally arrived.
The first one shipped directly elsewhere. Here’s what the tracking info, which I looked up long after the woodbasket was due, told me:
I emailed my contact “Khara” and requested it be resent. A “Jamie,” who wrote back that Khara had “moved on from the company,” responded that it would now come to my “correct address,” which was actually “goodbadi in care of” the initials of some local friends who innocently agreed to receive it for me, friends who only later realized the potential ramifications of their charity:
Friend: “You may have said, but why isn’t it going to your house?”
Me: “It’s not going to our house because I’m hoping to keep my blog totally anonymous. It’s probably a ridiculous hope borne of paranoia.”
Friend: “So what you’re saying is that you’re going to send all the wackos to OUR house?”
Me: “Hmmm. Good point. Maybe they’ll be nice wackos.”
Friend: “If there are serious repercussions, we’re moving to your house.”
But then, before the resent package arrived, our friends moved (not to our house, though; just into town). Their neighbors at their old house (also friends of ours, but herein referred to just as “their neighbors”) obligingly kept an eye out for the package, but it was our friends’ former landlord who actually ended up receiving it and who took it to the neighbors, who brought it last night to our friends’ daughter’s birthday party supper of pancakes, sausage, cider, and persimmon smoothie (and cupcakes and ice cream and fruit salad and more).
So as you can see, it was a rather convoluted process, actually getting my grubby paws on this “free” polished trim brass woodbasket for use, review, and keepage.
But the box looked flatter than I’d expected. Was it flattened? Just a little bit. I had to assemble it, apparently, so, after tearing open the nuts-and-bolts package and scattering them like a thousand points of light all over our living room floor, I used the heavy duty wrench that came with it to bolt on the feet, the handle mounts, and the handle.
And so far it works! It’s shiny (err, I thought it was going to be black with brass trim), sure footed, and–to me, anyway–totally worth the runaround it required of the UPS, our friends, their neighbors, and their landlord (and picking up those scattered nuts and bolts).
I trust that it will serve me well until I let you know otherwis
e.
