Nebulous Mooch

The thing about cars is that every now and again something goes wrong and they need to be fixed. I wish it wasn’t so, but unfortunately it is. The battery died in our car last week. It happened when my husband was on his way to a gig. Usually he turns the car off when he’s stuck in London traffic. This time at a particularly busy intersection the car didn’t start up again. No worries. He was able to push it into a parking space and get to his gig. He got a jump from someone so he could get home after.

Needless to say, we needed to get a new battery. That’s kind of a drag because we’re only keeping this car for another two months and we don’t want to spend any money on it. But Frank (that’s the car) can be quite demanding. He keeps insisting that he won’t start without a new battery so off to Halfords we went to purchase one. Since the bolt that held the battery in was very rusty my husband decided to have the people at Halfords put the battery in for him.

While all of this was going on I went to the shops next door. When I came out I saw my husband standing in the parking lot with two 18-year-old girls. “When I asked them to put in the battery I didn’t realize the girls at the register would be doing it,” he whispered to me when I came outside. “I feel really guilty now.”

We stood around forever watching them struggle with the rusted bolt. Finally they went inside and get some guy who works in the audio department to help them get the bolt off. “I could’ve done this faster myself,” my husband whispered to me. With the bolt finally off, the tattooed guy from audio left and the girls quickly put in our new battery. When they were done with us, they moved on to replacing the headlight in the SUV parked next to us while the owner and his son stood by watching sheepishly.

It was great seeing this role reversal in the Halfords parking lot. It made me think that I should learn a bit more about fixing cars. Then I remembered that I’m not really that interested in learning to fix cars. I already have too many things to do. I’ll leave the car maintenance to the adolescent girls at Halfords.

I go on Facebook quite a bit. I log on and I share things I feel like sharing about my life. Mostly I just snoop around and look at what other people are sharing about their lives. Facebook is one of the best inventions for snoops like myself. I especially enjoy looking at other people’s pictures. Don’t be scared. I’m not stalking you really. I’m just curious. There is one aspect of Facebook that has been getting on my nerves recently though.

Why does every site I sign up for want me to sign up through my Facebook account? I don’t want to share every single thing I do online with everyone I’m friends with on Facebook. If I want to listen to New Edition on Spotify I don’t want everyone to know. I don’t want to log into Facebook and see written on my wall that I listened to Mr. Telephone Man three time.

If I read an article about the worst Oscar dresses this year, I don’t want everyone I’ve ever spoken to in my entire life to know. I want to privately scoff at Gwyneth Paltrow’s caped dress as I sit on my sofa wearing a lovely green and blue cape of my own.

The other day I was on Rotten Tomatoes watching the trailer to 21 Jump Street when I noticed that Rotten Tomatoes was signed into my Facebook account somehow. Yes I was a 21 Jump Street fan in my younger days, but maybe I want to secretly jump down on Jump Street.

It’s bad enough that I can’t figure out how to unlink my Pintrest account from my Facebook account. I don’t want any other accounts linked to it too.

NOTE: The 21 Jump Street trailer looked terrible. 21 Jump Street is nothing without Hoffs, Hanson, Penhall, Ioki and Captain Fuller. Why would you remake a television classic like Jump Street? I just don’t understand.

The other day we went for a walk and we saw a dead badger on the side of the road. I’m talking about the European badger here not the honey badger. (Note: The honey badger isn’t really a badger. It’s a weasel. No wonder.) European badgers are big. An adult badger can get to be 50 pounds. I wouldn’t want to run into one of those in a dark alley.

Apparently there are a lot of badgers around here. How come I never see them though? I see tons of foxes and even see strange fat little deer but no badgers.

Anyway…the point of this post is that I searched for badgers on YouTube and found this video the someone filmed of badgers in their yard. It’s longer than it should be and has no sound, but I was shocked by the how many badgers there were.

According to Wikipedia “[The badger] is very fussy over the cleanliness of its burrow, and defecates in latrines.” That is too funny. Now I’m afraid I’ll open my bathroom door one day and find a badger sitting on the toilet saying, “Do you mind!” They are also social animals who have been known to bury their dead and they don’t mind sharing their burrows with rabbits and foxes.

I put my glasses back on last night. I decided that even though everything tends to look better in soft focus–here soft focus really means blurry–being able to see is a bit more practical than not being able to see. I think my insistance on not wearing my glasses was getting on my family’s nerves anyway.

They were getting tired of my need to stand directly in front of the television in order to see anything that was happening on screen. My husband was also getting tired of hearing me say, “I can’t drive because I’m not wearing my glasses.”

Lifetime movies are much easier to figure out if you can actually see the various characters and make out what they are doing. Apparently, being able to see the screen is an important aspect of movie watching…surprise, surprise.

Even though my grandmother has had success using eye exercises to have good vision in her nineties, my vision is already shot. It’s probably too late for me. I’ve decided to put my sights on more obtainable goals like building a robotic housekeeper that cooks delicious ethnic food and cleans the bathroom–not at the same time of course. My robotic housekeeper would clean the other rooms in the house too of course, but the bathroom is the room I hate cleaning the most.

We’re looking for a new place to rent and decided to look beyond the Watford area. So we went to look at a house in North Mymms the other day and it raised a lot of questions in my mind.

Firstly, I wonder why North Mymms is spelled with a Y but South Mimms is spelled with an I.

Secondly, I wonder who in the world would want to live in North Mymms. Talk about a depressing place. It was ugly and flat and somehow unfinished looking. It seemed like we weren’t even in England, but instead in some horrible place populated by people who looked like they were at one time very heavy drinkers. Even their dogs were quite unfortunate looking. North Mymms was a bit like one of those gray scale cards you use in photography when you set your white balance. It was a neutral gray place with no charm.

I don’t mean to insult North Mymms or the people living there. I’m sure that if you have a particular love for the color gray and if you have a bulbous red nose you’d love it. You would especially love it if you have an English bull terrier. Actually this picture is a pretty good representation of North Mymms to me.

Here’s an example of the countryside.

Lovely, isn’t it?

Despite all these details real estate in North Mymms is a hot commodity. The place we went there to see was taken by the people who saw it before us. The real estate agent said that as soon as things become available there they are snatched up. Property is booming in North Mymms. I guess there are a lot of red faced, bulbous nosed bull terrier owners who are missing the facial muscles that are used when you smile looking for a place to live.

Now I really can’t move to North Mymms because I’ve probably made a lot of enemies. I heard that  bull terriers can easily tear off a human arm so I won’t be moving there.

Pictures by katesheets and satguru.

Did you know that there is a miracle product residing in your kitchen cupboard? I kind of knew, but was only truly convinced of the baking soda miracle this week when I used it to clean my oven.

When I was in college I took a Spanish class taught by a very interesting teacher. Though I managed not to learn a word Spanish in the class, I did learn about the many uses for baking soda. The teacher spent an entire lesson droning on and on about the uses of baking soda once. The baking soda class and the class he spent explaining how to shrink a human head were the two most memorable classes. At the end of the head shrinking class, he warned us against trying to shrink heads ourselves by saying, “But in some countries there are laws.” Fortunately, there are no laws about the use of baking soda. Here’s a list of things you can do with baking soda.

Note: Baking soda is different from baking powder but the same as bicarbonate soda.

Clean Your Oven: Make a paste with baking soda and water. Put the paste on the dirty bits in your over and let it set over night. In the morning use a wet sponge to wipe it away. If your oven is crazy dirty you’ll have to put some elbow grease into it.

Deodorant: On one of my trips to Florida I forgot to pack deodorant. I put some baking soda under my arms in the morning to keep me smelling fresh when I went to the store to get deodorant. The baking soda worked so well that I never bought deodorant again. Now I feel like deodorant is a scam.

Freshen Your Carpet: Sprinkle some baking soda on you stinky carpet, let it sit for 20 minutes, and then vacuum it up.

Brighten Up Your Wash: Add a cup of baking soda to your laundry to brighten up you wash.

Cool Science Projects: Make a spectacular eruption for your model volcano by mixing baking soda and water.

Are you convinced yet?

Photo by [F]oxymoron

I’m obsessed with checking my email. I get up in the morning and check my email. Then 5 minutes later, I check my email again. It will continue like that throughout the day. I must check it more than 100 times.

What the heck am I expecting to find in my inbox?  Maybe I’m looking for an email offering me an incredible financial opportunity…wait, I get that email almost everyday. That mustn’t be it. Maybe I’m looking for help getting my website to the top of the search engines. No, I get that email about three times a day.

Just because I spend so much time poking around my inbox doesn’t mean that I do anything productive while I’m there. I haven’t made any effort of organize it. On average I have about 205 emails in my box at a time. Some have been read, but most haven’t. Deleting, reading and answering emails isn’t what I want to do. I just want to see what’s there.

While writing this post I checked my email about 5 times. I even checked my email in new tabs so I have three tabs open with my email on them. Imagine how much I would be checking my email if I joined the rest of society and actually bought a smart phone. I feel like I should join Emails Anonymous. 

Hi, I’m Lovelyn and I’m an obsessive email checker.

I don’t really need anything like that. I can stop any time.

Now that I’m officially British I have the right to do a bit of complaining about the weather. My favorite season is summer because I get to wear summer dresses and sandals and sit out in the sun. At least, in other places I get to do that. Here I get to sit inside and carry an umbrella whenever I go out.

Why is August always delivered wrapped in gray clouds? Granted, we had a lovely September and October stayed warm longer than it should’ve, but it doesn’t make up for the missing summer. When the sun is out it’s beautiful here, but it just isn’t out enough for me.

Some people might say that I’m trying to have my cake and eat it too. Okay, nobody would say that, but I wrote it because I just started thinking about cake.

Yum…

Anyway, we turned our heat on a few days ago and I’ve accepted the fact that I’ve seen the last of the warm weather until next year. As I look out at the cloudy sky I just can’t help but long for summer…and cake.

Photo by Aih.

Facebook is a giant time waster that some how keeps drawing me in. It’s like an addiction that I just can’t seem to pull myself away from. I do a few useful things and then I spend a few minutes checking Facebook. I can’t even write an entire paragraph without stopping to check Facebook mid sentence… See, I did it just then.

The thing is that I’m checking it all the time whilst complaining about it. Something annoying is always happening on Facebook. Why do they change the layout all the time? And what’s with this new scrolling feed on the right side now?

Christine from Happy Slip posted this video about Facebook. I thought it was funny so I’m sharing it, because that’s just the kind of thing I like to do.

I get a lot of crazy emails. Most of them are from SEO companies promising to get my site to the top of the search engines, but yesterday I got one that was kind of unique that I thought I’d post.

Hi there,

I’m contacting you as I’m sure many have in the past. After checking out your site at http://nebulousmooch.com/, I have a joint venture proposition for you and I’m pretty sure you’ll find it as exciting as I do.

It’s called the ‘Hair Loss Blueprint’ and it’s just been launched on the Clickbank marketplace. It’s a product type that is a proven money maker and a product brand that is solely unique. Promoting the ‘Hair Loss Blueprint’ is a great opportunity for you, for 5 HUGE reasons:

After checking this blog, he decided this would be a great business opportunity for me? I’m not sure how he decided that. Maybe he saw some pictures of my husband’s questionable hairline.

1. The ‘Hair Loss Blueprint’ is a dream product for those desperate to stop their receding hairline and to even boost hair growth for bald men. Using a mixture of traditional and modern techniques, this truly is an affordable, yet cutting-edge product which makes it stand out in the market. With this distinction, the ‘Hair Loss Blueprint’ is undeniably the best. And when was the last time you promoted a product that went literally uncontested?

2. We offer a downright sexy commission program. You’re going to earn 75% on each sale. That means a minimum of $20 in your pocket every single time someone orders through your affiliate link. Plus… with an unbeatable OTO offered that pays you 75% on top of that, you can very realistically earn up to $40+ per referral!

This poor fellow seems to think that commission programs are sexy. To get a good understanding of what sexy is exactly maybe he should look at that picture again. This time concentrate less on the questionable hairline and more on the sexy.

Now that’s sexy!! 

Reasons 3, 4, and 5 aren’t that interesting so I won’t make you read them. (Like I can make you do anything;) But, check out the closing of the email.

Rooting For You,

I love that. It’s always good to have people rooting for you.

If you are bald, I’m sorry but no $37 ebook is going help you grow your hair back. Instead of wasting money on products like that or this…

accept and embrace your baldness. Some of my favorite people are bald…

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