Sweet Catastrophe

Last week I was given a chance to try out some self defense products. I was really interested considering, sometime last year, I had my mace taken away at a concert. If I had been really insistent, I probably could’ve gotten them to place it somewhere with my name on it, but I mean, I was trying to get to my spot to watch Lifehouse and you just don’t have time for such trivial things as safety when you’re talking about getting front row; though, mace probably would’ve come in handy…hmm.

Anyway, I live right next to campus, which means I don’t have to pay for a parking permit or fight for a spot, but it also means I have to walk through the park every day, which is great most of the time, but not when I’m walking home from an event or study session at night, or when/if I take another night class. We have a couple of drug dealers who work in our park. They don’t hang around and solicit or anything like that, but the park is where they make their exchanges.

I also have to walk by a particularly rough frat-house. They’re not so bad, but the kind of people who come to their parties can be downright intimidating.

So obviously, safety is definitely a concern at the front of my mind. I was hoping to get a new can of mace, but I got a pretty cool product to check out.

Mace Hot Walkers are 1lb hand weights to carry when you’re out, well, walking! One weight has a can of mace hidden inside, where it’s easily accessible immediately. Interestingly, the other weight is also hollow in the top half, an the top comes off (not easily) so that you can drop in keys, or money.

Even though I should, I don’t go walking. I’m actually thinking about getting a bike though. Anyhow, I’m sending these off to a friend who’ll get plenty of use out of them, and I’ll definitely rest better knowing she’s safe from angry retired grannies when she goes for a morning run!

Dane demanded that I demand him to come to Valdosta. I listened. You should demand him too. He’s pretty and says funny things. Me likie.

I read this post on Colleen’s blog expecting to find a story of idiotic criminals. Instead, I found a hilarious tale of a game of “What would happen if…”

I laughed and laughed. You’ll have to read it in her own words to crack up the way I did, but the story basically goes that she gets the idea to see what would happen if she tried to buy 25 bottles of Nyquil. Come to find out, nothing ’cause Nyquil doesn’t have the ingredient you need to make meth anymore! So she returns the Nyquil and tries to buy 25 boxes of Sudafed…that certainly gets a little reaction. It wasn’t enough to excite her, but it gave me the giggles.

I could easily see Catie doing something like this. Well, maybe not right now, while she’s trying to get into Law school haha.

Catie found these Implicit Association Tests while she was doing some of her law research.

I’ve only taken two so far, but by the results I have a slight automatic preference to whites and straight people over african americans and gays.

There are quite a few other tests to go through.

I pretty much agree with the results of these two, though a portion on the sexual preference test had me a little confused. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not 100% accepting of extreme homosexuals. By extreme, I mean overly flamboyant gay men, or incredibly butch lesbians. In those cases, I really think it’s been a lack of exposure. I’ve just not been around many examples in South Georgia and I’m really just now getting a taste here in Valdosta. It’s still hard for me to understand a female flattening her chest and dressing to appear manly. It’s not something my mind is apt to grasp.

I used to tell Pete we were lucky to have come out of Douglas as open-minded as we could be. I still stand by that.

I think it was Catie and I who were discussing how weird things must be for all of our parents. Our generation, I believe, is really the first to have such a large percentage who understand alternative lifestyles. We’re in that big push towards understanding that sexual preference is just that, a preference; it doesn’t define someone. So our parents are on the edge, where they’re forced to learn to understand because they have homosexual children, or their children have homosexual friends. I can’t imagine how conflicting it is for them, fighting against the way they were raised.

I had a lot more to say than I thought about these tests.

Wow! I seriously just learned something new from Youtube. I was browsing through videos and came across a bunch about cats with asthma! I had no idea cats could even have asthma!

I’ve looked through a few sites and learned that only about 1% of cats develop asthma, but apparently the number is growing due to pollutants.

If your cat ever experiences something that seemed to you like a really stubborn hairball, only no hairball ever comes, you  should consider discussing this at your next vet appointment. You can glance at some of the videos on Youtube to get a better idea of what a cat experiencing and asthma attack looks like. I’d post some here, but they’re breaking my heart! I know it’s not necessarily a serious problem in every case, but I know how the poor kitties feel!

I developed asthma towards the end of middle school. It was brought on by a combination of my horrible allergies, and my constant exposure to cigarette smoke. I’m one of a handful of people in my family who doesn’t smoke. There’s a definite downside to developing asthma versus being born with it. Many people who are born with asthma eventually grow out of it. The chances of someone who developed asthma later in life ever outgrowing it are slim to none.

I’ve only ever had a few serious attacks in my life. The absolute worst was probably in my Jr. or Sr. year of high school. At the time, for one reason or another, I only had one inhaler. I woke up around 4a.m. wheezing, and reached for my inhaler. At this point, I didn’t really need the inhaler,  but I have a really hard time getting to sleep while I’m wheezing. I found myself panicking when I realized my inhaler wasn’t there.

The trick to avoiding a full attack is to calm yourself down and get control of your breathing. That’s a pretty impossible task when you know that if you can’t do that, you’re pretty screwed. I knew where my inhaler was. It was sitting next to my register at Kmart, so my dad drove me up there, but of course, the store wasn’t open yet. The doors can’t open without a manager key and I had no way to get in contact with whoever was opening that morning! It was absolute torture sitting in front of the store, looking directly at my inhaler through the window. After a four hour attack, I finally got that glorious puff and I was okay again.

I ended up in a world of pain though, later realizing I had strained all the muscles in my chest. Imagine what it would feel like if your lungs were physically bruised. That’s how I felt. It hurt to breathe, it hurt to talk…on top of that, the stress caused some major heartburn so I had do deal with just about every possible symptom of that.

I can’t imagine how helpless a kitty feels while having an attack. For me I know there’s help. I know that at the very least, I can go to a hospital, and after they make me wait a ridiculous amount of time (nope, no quick inhalers to get you out of the way, they don’t give a squat!) they’ll give me an oxygen treatment and send me on my way.

Even though kitties generally cause my asthma to flare up, I’m sending my love to all the asthmatic kitties of the world!

Okay, so there’s a new(ish) app on Facebook called Cash Cliques. Basically it works like this:

You go to the app page and click on an ad.
It opens with a timer at the top
After 30 seconds, you get a penny.
You can click 10 ads a day.
You can cash out (through PayPal) when you reach $10.

In this way, you could cash out after 100 days. Here’s the thing though, when you refer friends, you get a penny for every ad they click as well. So if you have 10 friends, it’d just be a little over a week before you’d earn ten bucks.

There are also bonus prizes, which I haven’t fully looked into, but I think it just goes that when you click an ad you can win up to $100. If a friend you referred wins a prize, you get 40%.

So, it’s a really simple idea, but it’s only really worth it if people sign up under you and do it as well, so in the spirit of that– my referral link.

It’s about 5 minutes of your time a day, and I’m doing it in one tab, while browsing in another tab.

I’ve read through discussions and such that yes, they’re making money doing this, but about 90% of their profit is going back out to payouts (including 10% that’s donated to charity.)

So again, really simple idea, can either be a waste of my time if no one else bothers, or a really easy way to make extra cash if other people sign up!

(Sorry for the brevity of this post, I’ve gotta get to my real job…*tears*)

This is something I received in an email forward, but it’s really worth reading.

ICE campaign - “In Case of Emergency”

We all carry our mobile phones with names & numbers stored in its memory but nobody, other than ourselves, knows which of these numbers belong to our closest family or friends. If we were to be involved in an accident or were taken ill, the people attending us would have our mobile phone but wouldn’t know who to call. Yes, there are hundreds of numbers stored but which one is the contact person in case of an emergency? Hence this ” ICE” (In Case of Emergency) Campaign The concept of “ICE” is catching on quickly. It is a method of contact during emergency situations. As cell phones are carried by the majority of the population, all you need to do is store the number of a contact person or persons who should be contacted during emergency under the name “ICE” ( In Case Of Emergency). The idea was thought up by a paramedic who found that when he went to the scenes of accidents, there were always mobile phones with patients, but they didn’t know which number to call. He therefore thought that it would be a good idea if there was a nationally recognized name for this purpose. In an emergency situation, Emergency Service personnel and hospital Staff would be able to quickly contact the right person by simply dialing the number you have stored as “ICE”. Please forward this. It won’t take too many “forwards” before everybody will know about this . It really could save your life, or put a loved one’s mind at rest . For more than one contact name simply enter ICE1, ICE2 and ICE3 etc. Be sure it’s in your kid’s cell phones also….. A great idea that will make a difference!

Please pass it on. I know sometimes things like this seem a little ridiculous when they first start out, but the success really depends on people passing it on. Ryan has a 4 hour round trip every day, always coming home well after dark and there’s always at least a little bit of background worry on my end (especially since he doesn’t seem to know how to operate a phone ) and I don’t know what I’d do if something happened and I didn’t know until it was too late. So just store those ICE numbers. I hope you never have to use it.

This has totally been my summer for movies! Every time I turn around, there’s another one coming out that I have to see! Up next on my list is Superbad! Seth and Evan are two co-dependent High School buds who’ve just found out they’ve been accepted to different colleges. Now’s the time, they’ve decided, to go all out and change their social status with one huge party that goes…not totally according to plan–of course!

The trailers and clips are cracking me up, and I know there’s so much more to come. They’ve taken over the Youtube homepage for the day (August 1st) so now’s the best time to see exactly what I’m talking about! (You can find 3 unedited clips on their site.) My personal favorite is Seth’s intro–the scene from Home Economics. I had FIVE Home Ec classes in High School that I never asked for! I feel his pain! I have no desire to ever again make another Crème Brûlée!

It probably doesn’t help that I’m a little partial to Jonah Hill. I’ve really enjoyed watching his career take off. He’s been in a lot of my most recent favorite comedies–namely the ones we watch constantly here in the apartment. I’m excited to see him in a larger role!

I keep cracking up over Evan’s video as well. He reminds me so much of someone I’ve known since High School. They favor each other as well! It’s weirding me out a little.

I also find it incredible that the writers, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, starting writing this script when they were only 14. “We just wanted to see if we could write a movie.” Man…apparently I was a waste of space when I was 14. I never wrote any movies, or won any prestigious medals, or cured any diseases…I should probably get on that now.

Anyway, stop reading my ramblings and go watch some clips for yourself. You know it’s about time you got ready to get out of the computer chair and out to see a movie anyway! This is the first ever Youtube homepage takeover, so let’s make it huge!

Want more? You can go to the Superbad official site for downloadable ringtones and wallpapers, maybe even some buddy icons if you’re Superbad enough.

I just saw that headline and now the song is stuck in my head! We play this song at work all the time so I’m sure I’ll be changing the lyrics and itching to blog while I’m at work!

Anyway, this came from the discussion of the new site, Fechr.com (pronounced “feature”). Every day, one site will be featured on the main page for a full 24 hours, for a nice traffic boost. They currently enjoy 100+ visitors a day and are steadily growing.

How can you get in on the fun? Currently it’s totally free, and all you have to do is write up a quick post about the site and what it’s all about, and how others can join in (kinda like I’m doing right now ) And submit your post and that’s it! Of course it’s first come, first served at the moment, but even if it takes a while to be featured, you’ll have a link in their buzz directory!

So whatcha waitin’ for?!

This guy sorta blows me away….