Spambots, I'm pregnant

It's been quiet on the blog front; I know. I just thought I'd let my loyal spambots know why. It's this awkward period of time, where I'm due in September and I've just been exhausted and sleeping in so much of my spare time.

It's not good. My plan to become internet famous in two years seems to be set back something fierce by this lack of motivation to write, at a time when I could really use some internet fame to help pay for a kid that, as the internet loves to tell me, will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise. Oh well. In the meantime, I'm going to talk about another commercial I don't care for.

There's this diaper commercial (and these ads) touting this one diaper brand's "heavy dooty blowout protection." Ugh. Look, I get it. In less than seven months, I'm going to have a baby. And the baby is going to poop. Sometimes, the baby is going to poop and there is going to be poop everywhere. I understand that this is just a part of taking care of a baby.

What I don't understand is why your commercial has to depict this act even in a cartoon, tv-friendly form. And again, I get what you are going for; you want to assure me that, should I select your brand, I will be protected from the potential mess. But cartoon babies blowing up their diapers and getting a score from a panel of other babies ... well, I just want to let you know that this is not associating your brand with a positive feeling.

Honestly, as cliche as it stands, cute, smiling babies sharing a moment with family and friends are the best way to imprint a positive image to me with your brand. Just saying.

And also, I'll be getting the diapers that are the cheapest no matter what, so I guess it doesn't really matter what your commercials do.

Really?

So I know it's cliche to make fun of the weird places people seem to access my blog from, but when I checked my hits the other day, I saw that apparently someone was browsing for "generics in India" and instead stumbled upon my blog instead. Crazy world.

I mean, I get it. You're trying to save some money on your medications. But I'll just let you down right now. I'm not in India, and I don't have any generics for sale. Sorry.

Just like riding a bike

You might recall that I have previously (as in, within the last year of my life) learned to drive a standard car. Certainly this was no fault to my parents, as my dad did spend an afternoon with me in his Jetta as I started and stopped across a parking lot when I first was learning to drive. Since his car was the only standard one we had though, I never progressed further since I had other options, such as the most wonderful Sebring, to drive.

Then my husband and I came into possession of a new-to-us Corolla that happened to be standard and I found myself in a situation where I needed to learn standard. There was a bit of a learning curve, but after, oh, several months, I felt confident enough to even start going for short jaunts out in the car by myself.

Then the clutch gave out and my husband got to repairing it with his dad but it's still out of commission and so that good old standby of the Sebring has been getting me to where I need to go. Until last weekend.

Last weekend my sister-in-law roommate and I drove down to Gainesville. The only problem was, she had to work until about midnight before we could make the drive. So once we finally started driving, she drove for part of the trip and then asked me to take over.

Of course I said yes. What better time to relearn if I remembered how to drive standard than at 2 something in the morning in a car I'd never driven before to a location I'd never driven before?

I got into the driver's seat and spent a few moments adjusting the seat, the tilt, the mirrors... anything I could think of as I tried to remember everything I knew about driving. I figured I might stall once or twice in first and then I'd pull onto the highway, get into 5th and stay there for awhile. I could do that.

Well, I stalled three times trying to pull out of the parking spot in reverse until we realized I had left the parking break up. You see, one of the things my dad taught me was to always use the parking break, even in an automatic. So it's not like I wasn't used to putting the parking break down before driving; in fact, I'd been on the other side of the seat, watching people starting to drive in the Sebring with the ebreak up. To forget this, of all things, seemed horribly ominous to me.

Luckily (?), my sister in law was tired enough not to just kick me out and take over. I put the parking break down and, though I wouldn't say easily, I competently backed out of the spot and got into first without stalling and started down to the highway.

I'm happy to say that we even arrived at our destination in one piece. Oh sure, I had to pry my stiff hand off of the clutch with my teeth and use that hand to pry my other hand off of the steering wheel, but that was more nerves after the fact than anything else.

Later that day when we drove back up to Tallahassee, I got to drive again and that time, I kept my stalling to the bare minimum of maybe once, if that. I haven't driven standard since and the Corolla is still out of commission so it might be awhile longer, but at least I know I'll probably kind of sort of be ready to tackle driving on an uncrowded highway in the middle of the night.

Rebranding

I've been meaning to post about this much sooner, and in my mind, the post was decorated with cute little drawings of dancing plums and maybe some senior citizens kind of doing crazy dance moves with the help of their canes and walkers. As you'll notice, none of that happened. I know that it's not literally true that every moment of my life is spent on washing dishes and laundry, but lately I've had the energy level of "nonexistent" so in fact, every moment of my life that I'm AWAKE, I'm probably working in some fashion. Ah well.

So I know that if I were to ask anyone, "hey, where do raisins come from?" it would be an easy answer to say, "Dried grapes. That's why there are dark raisins and golden raisins and red raisins. Because those are all types of grapes."

What about if I asked you where a prune comes from? Some of you might shrug and ask your grandparents. Others might grin knowingly and let the truth be heard: A prune is a dried plum.

You don't hear the word prune on TV anymore. Prune juice (in the mind of America) has long become the snack of choice for constipated seniors and ditto for prunes. Your grandmother offered you prunes when you visited. They were dry and nasty and smelled like old people.

Today's prune has shed that image. It has been rebranded. Dried plums are the snack of choice of that averagely hot guy who is eating fruit on his breakfast cereal. It is the snack of choice for that group of women on their way to yoga. There's not one mention of potential laxative properties and certainly no grandparent figures in the recent commercials.

This kind of rebranding greatly amuses me. I never thought much about prunes before but I assure you these commercials have made me think about prunes. Are they now truly a superior product to the prune of the 1950's? Or is it the same product in a cute new package?

More importantly, do people know that dried plums are prunes? And does it matter?

These, ladies and gentlemen (and dedicated spambots), are the kinds of questions that keep me up at night. You're welcome.

Reasons Why My Dogs are Not Dogs

Sophie is not a dog. She's a cat cosplaying a dog. Whenever she can, Sophie does her best to jump up to the highest spot in the room. Granted, that usually means she has to give up around the height of the couch back, but still. You don't see many Goldens hanging out on the backs of couches, do you? (Is Goldens an accepted shortening for golden retrievers? My mind says yes.)

Sherlock is not a dog. He is a hog cosplaying a dog. Whenever he goes outside, he starts grunting and making entirely un-dog-like noises as he roots around in the yard, presumably looking for truffles. Sad to say, I will not be making tons of money since there do not seem to be any truffles in my backyard despite his best efforts.

When Sophie goes outside, she becomes a goat. I have seen her time and again casually chowing down on grass while we play outside. Granted, she's tiny, so each blade of grass is a battle to be won and typically she has to start in the middle of the blade just to take it down to size. Sometimes she'll eat weeds or clover although, again, she's tiny, so I don't think we'll be switching to this method of lawn care unless we move to a city space with a square foot of yard.

In conclusion, I thought I had dogs. Boy was I wrong.

Blog stats

So, blogger.com comes with a built in stat counter so that I can see how many hits my blog gets. It's not many, but I know I have at least three consistent spam bots checking me out, and that certainly is an ego boost!

Everyone once in awhile, however, I will get a larger amount of hits during a short period of time. Then my little hit graph will spike and, much like when you move into a higher tax bracket, it will reorient the graph to better show my stats. In other words, the Y axis changes to a new numbering system.

The problem comes from the fact that this larger amount of hits is a sham, a lie, a fluke; it is never indicative of a flux of new people finding my blog and choosing to stick around and maybe read my next post. So then my page views go back to my dutiful bots, friends and family. And then I have a very sad looking chart.

I realize now as I type this that a visual graph would say it all but I'm not feeling great today (I think I slept for at least as many hours as I've been awake) and don't have the energy to open photoshop. So let's just picture it, ok?

There is one large peak from my unexpected hits and then thanks to the new scale, the couple of hits I normally get here and there basically don't even show up on the chart as peaks. They just sort of are tiny bumps at the bottom of the graph.

Eventually time will go by, and I won't get any more large amounts of visitors and the graph will reset to its old chart numbers and my hits LOOK more impressive. And really, isn't that all that matters?