sarahmichelef | Entries tagged with product placement

M gets so persnickety in my eternal search for the perfect bag, which he doesn't realize is situational. HOWEVER! I have found something that is pretty darn close, for most day to day stuff. It is the EMS Brighton shoulder bag. I got one (in black) at the outlets in New Hampshire (I blame

relentlesstoil and

sammybaby for encouraging me) and I'm loving it so far. Lots of nooks and crannies, a lined electronics pocket, a zip-away water bottle pocket and on and on and on. Easily goes over the shoulder or cross-body. Big enough for books and stuff but not so big as to be cumbersome.

Some days I feel like I'm 18 years old, and then I look in the mirror and I see wrinkles. Eye wrinkles, nasal-labial folds like crazy. M denies that they exist or says they're all smile lines. But I don't like it. I went on a search for a good wrinkle cream at a reasonable price... like under ten bucks, because I am cheap. These aren't easy to find - most of the ones from major skin care manufacturers run in the range of $20 at Target. But then, wandering the organic section at Wegman's - dermae Vitamin A Retinyl Palmitate Wrinkle Treatment Crème, on sale for $9. I figured what the heck... it's not much money. That was two weeks ago. I've been using the stuff once a day - sometimes twice - and I think I'm actually seeing a difference. Not so much in the eyes, but around the mouth. Possibly this is because those are the wrinkles that bother me the most, or possibly because it's making a bigger difference there - I don't know. But I'm pretty happy with it.

But I'm still getting old. My knees tell me so every day.

Current Music: last week's Dollhouse on hulu

A while back someone, I think it was

nomadmwe or

siriel, was wondering how to winter-proof windows without using the obnoxious saran-wrap stuff.

Enter DAP Seal & Peel.

This stuff WORKS. Seriously - we sealed off the bottoms of all of the windows in the house and noticed an IMMEDIATE difference. When we'd only done the downstairs, upstairs was always NOTICEABLY cooler than downstairs. Now that we've sealed the upstairs windows as well, the house is retaining warmth REALLY well. We're actually planning to use our last tube to seal off the top joins of all the windows (where the upper and lower sashes meet) and then we'll be living in a moderately hermetically sealed bubble. :^D As a double-bonus, M won't spend all winter messing with it the way he did with the saran-wrap - I just WISH we'd known about this stuff when we lived in MA, because our electric bills would have been much more bearable.

It's pretty noxious smelling as it dries, so I recommend applying it on a warm day when you can open doors for ventilation. (When we did the upstairs I joked that we needed to open the windows to let the house air out...)

Current Music: Local news on NPR

I was getting bored with the old layout, so I'm trying something new... Jury's still out on whether or not I actually like it.

I'm generally not a Lysol-type-gal (I believe that germs in small quantities are GOOD FOR US) but DAMN does their mildew remover work. Our upstairs shower is all sparkly now. Yay. Next project: patching up some grout that appears to be cracked. This means that we will be showering/bathing downstairs tomorrow. We'll deal.

Now I'm going to go sit on the porch in the sunshine and read (academic stuff, even!). Go, me.

Current Mood: the internet isn't amusing me.
Current Location: study of non-productivity
Current Music: Smashing Pumpkins -- Where Boys Fear to Tread

I <3 foaming drain cleaner. Given the sheer amount of hair we found in the kitchen drain, it shouldn't be terribly surprising that the upstairs bathroom had a very, very slow drain. And it only got slower with time, to the point that it would take a good 5 minutes to drain when M shaved in the morning. We'd tried regular Drano to no avail, and we can't take the trap off and clean it manually because it's a pedestal vanity and it's not really feasible to get in behind it. (I'm sure a real plumber could do it no problem, but not us.) Foaming Drano, however, worked like a charm.

Current Music: American Idol

after my attacks of stupid and techno-hate...

Left a message to set up TRex's first-ever dentist's appointment (won't that be fun!).
Dudes are coming to (finally) change the locks on our house next Wednesday. We decided that we liked the original 1950 hardware on our front door more than we cared about it being on the same key as the back doors.
Purchased plane tickets for TRex and me to go to OK for the first bit of spring break. They were remarkably reasonably priced, too! It's sad when tickets on United cost $250 less than Southwest AND have better flight times (though the latter of those is not all that surprising). My loyalty to Orbitz cost me a dollar - I could have had the same tickets from either Expedia or CheapTickets (which I think might have been swallowed by Orbitz - the site layouts are identical now). I'm sure we'll manage to amuse ourselves for 3 hours in O'Hare on the way there. It was that or be on a 6:30 am flight out, and I didn't want to mess with that.
Read over the notes that I was mad about not being able to print. Percolating exactly how I'm going to write the theoretical section of the diss. *hate*
M made the tactical error of sending me a link to a bunch of refurb stuff that Apple has on sale. *lust* Another low-end iBook (1.5 GHz, 512 MB, 60 GB, combo drive, airport extreme, etc.) would last me another 4 years (which is how long I've had X^2), I'm sure of it.

Thinking about the possibility of a new computer makes me wonder... Wherein lies the soul of a computer? When X's HD died in September 2004, I changed her name to X^2. Does the identity of the computer lie in the hard drive, as this would imply? Or is it somewhere else?

What does this tell us about the seat of human identity?

Damn... I didn't intend for this to get all philosophical. Back to your regularly-scheduled Friday afternoon.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Music: quiet

Earlier this year, I posted about the beauty that is Zim's Crack Creme. I do still love me some Crack Creme, but it has its drawbacks. It burns, it smells medicinal, and it doesn't absorb into the skin very quickly. It being winter again, and us now living in a house with the very-civilized gas-powered central heat (hallelujah, no more space heaters strapped to the walls masquerading as a reasonable way to heat a house), my hands are once more a bloody mess. Not as bad as they were a year ago when I was scrubbing in to the NICU on a daily basis, but still a mess.

Enter Palmer's Cocoa Butter Formula Concentrated Cream. I happened upon a tube of the stuff in the medicine cabinet at my in-laws' over Thanksgiving and it works just as fast as the Zim's, smells fairly yummy, doesn't hurt when applied, and absorbs pretty quickly. Hooray!

Current Mood: waiting for delivery dudes

So in an attempt to clear both my & TRex's congestion, I picked up two of these things: a grownup one and a childrens' one.

They aren't all that useful. The two nights we've used the thing in TRex's room, her nose has been MORE stuffy and her cough worse than they are when we're just using the 1975-era vaporizer. I put the adult-strength one in our room and the smell of it irritated my throat so much that it actually made my cough WORSE rather than better. Four days later, there's STILL a hint of the overpowering menthol smell in our room.

They're also a racket in much the same way that the Schick Intuition razor is a racket - the little vapor pads are good for 8 hours of use. What they don't tell you is that they're not good for much more than 8 hours of non-use. We tried it for a few minutes the first night, and then decided to go back to the old-school vaporizer, so I just stuck the Vapo-Plug in the cabinet. When I got it out a couple of days later, it was completely spent. Also, they're good for 8 hours. My child sleeps for 11 hours. So we've been using the water vaporizer from when she goes to bed 'til we do ANYWAY.

So yeah. The upshot is, don't bother.

And now I think my disease is transmogrifying into a sinus infection. Lovely.

Current Music: chainsaw outside

Two new things that are making my life easier:

Zim's Crack Creme. I went to the store last night thinking I was going to get some of the Johnson & Johnson's skin crack filler (washing one's hands and/or using Purell on the order of 20 times a day takes its toll, after all...). Instead I found this stuff, which claimed to moisturize and let your skin actually heal so that it won't crack again. It burned a little bit the first couple of times I used it, but in under 24 hours, my hands are already amazingly better. The skin is soft enough across my knuckles that it can actually stretch as I move my fingers, rather than cracking!

the MacSense AeroPad Plus - a USB wireless device made to work with Macs. Ahhhhh.... broadband access! If you have an older iMac or iBook OR if you want to be able to share a wireless adapter between computers, this is definitely a good option. I'm not 100% sure of the stability of the drivers yet (I've had to "you must reboot" crashes) but in principle, there is rocking.