advice for house sellers #3

Your cloying air freshener is fooling no one.

advice for house sellers #2

That sage-green toilet, tub, and sink set might have been the height of fashion when you remodeled, but all I’m seeing are dollar signs. There’s something to be said for classic white.

advice for house sellers #1

Stop watching Trading Spaces. (I kid you not, I saw a bathroom with that hay-on-the-wall treatment this week — in an expensive house in Westlake.)

back in business

Finally, the planets have realigned themselves and not only do I have outgoing e-mail again, but my Flickr badge has fixed itself, too. E-mail is my preferred mode of communicating with the outside world, so I’m glad to be part of it again.

lost

For some reason, I have not been able to send e-mail through my mail program since yesterday afternoon. It started with my virtuallori.com account, then worked its way through all my others. I can receive mail just fine; I just can’t send. Nothing in my settings has changed; all use the correct username and password, and are set to use authentication and the proper port. And my webmail (as much as I hate it) is working. It’s a mystery.

impatience

Argh. I’ve finally come across an incompatibility with Safari that I just can’t get around and have made the decision to switch completely over to Firefox. Of course, I am doing this on a day when I don’t have a ton of extra time to dive in and learn Firefox’s own quirks.

Big Island under siege

An earthquake on Monday jolted the Big Island of Hawaii, which is already under a hurricane watch and a tropical storm warning.

I was eager to see the video of the “Hawaiians” clearing the store shelves, so I could compare it to my experience, except that their video feed is not working for me, for whatever reason. (Although someone does need to remind CNN that “Hawaiian” is a race designation, not an indication of state residency. Some Hawaii residents are Hawaiian, but not all Hawaiians are Hawaii residents.) In the six years I lived on Oahu, I saw serious stockpile buying only once, right after 9/11. It was really weird to go into the store and see no bottled water, no toilet paper, no rice, no beer. I imagine it is pretty much the same in this instance.

Hang in there, Amy-san.

weirdness

I’m a little weird. People who know me know this, and I do, too.

But is it really all that strange that I don’t like blobs of mushy fruit in my yogurt? That I like fruit yogurt — not merely “fruit-flavored” — but that I really prefer the fruit to be smoothly pureed so as to blend with the smooth yogurty goodness? Combine this with my absolute abhorrence of all types of artificial sweetener, and, well, it makes it hard to shop.

Yoplait indulges me in this regard with its custard-style line, but I am worried about the future of our relationship. It seems that every time I go to the store, another flavor has vanished. Whither mixed berry? Blackberry?

I fear that soon I will have resort to buying some other kind (I do love the taste — if not the texture — of the Stonybrook Farm organics) and running it through the blender before I eat it. Kind of takes the convenience factor away, though.

productive day

This afternoon I knocked out one of the big items on my populous to-do list: getting a handful of new jewelry items finished and posted on Etsy.

I’m especially pleased with the brass etchings I’ve been working on. I first learned this etching technique several years ago, and in the past week I’ve been experimenting with how to apply some permanent color. I think these fit in nicely with the other garden-themed pieces I started making in the spring. I have many, many more than are posted on Etsy; come out to an upcoming show to see more.

Summer Market link

The Avon Lake Summer Market show launched their website today: http://www.folgerhome.org/summermarket/. Looks like lots of great vendors again this year.