"There are more pleasant things to do than beat people up." - Muhammed Ali

Guess who knits.

I use bar soap in the shower because I’m cheap. The last time I needed more Pam bought a pack of six bars of Irish Spring, each in a box and then wrapped together in cellophane. I got a new bar out of its box this morning and noticed that it says “Personal Size.” What?? And the other size is...?

Before she left Pam also set out some coupon pages from the newspaper for me to use after the goulash and the frozen dinners were gone. Because that’s now my situation I looked at them earlier to see my options for dinner tonight. I have a coupon for $1 Double Melts at Arby’s, “Limit 500.” That SO makes me wish I had $500 to burn, just to see the look on their faces.

If you are the most famous athlete on earth, are the richest athlete on earth, and front for more products than anyone else on earth are you really dumb enough to send text messages to the women you’re cheating with? Does it not occur to you that they’re saving these messages? And that you’re leaving a trail of bread crumbs that leads straight back to you? Somebody wasn’t thinking with their brain.

As mentioned above, I’m cheap. And our heat isn’t. Because AC is the primary issue here almost nobody has a furnace. We have what is called a heat pump, something very different from what the term means in the midwest. Our AC unit is up on the roof, and inside it are electric coils just like those in a hair dryer - only bigger. When we turn on the heat those coils get hot and the same blower used for the AC sends air over the coils and into the house. Very inefficient and therefore relatively expensive to run, but they figure we need to heat a house so seldom that this simple and cheap to manufacture method makes sense.

In an effort to keep our electric bills down (no gas at our house) I haven’t turned on the heat yet. I think it eats up more kwh than all the rest of the things in our house combined, including the hot water heater and the dryer. But I may have to bite the bullet soon. Each day this week the temps inside have dropped a degree or two and this morning it started at 62 degrees. By mid afternoon it had only managed to climb up to 64. In Michigan we set our thermostat at 58, but during the winter we kept a fire going all day long and ran a small room heater in the parlor where we spent the evenings, so most of the space we actually lived in was warmer than that. (The bathrooms, however, were really cold! Not fun!) So I’m close to being colder in my AZ home than we were in our MI home.
It’s easier to be stupid cheap when Pam’s not here.

According to the CDC, one in six Americans got sick with H1N1 and almost 10,000 people died. Am I the only one who wonders about those statistics? I don’t think I know anyone who was diagnosed with it.

Reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame makes me want to see the original movie version again.

Fun commercial for the French car Citroen.

Seen any Tiger Woods commercials on TV lately? Me neither.