Last Commented Lifestyle Blogs (2,471)

I'm on again shopping for a condo near my office. One development has units in the right price range but the mandatory annual club membership at $70,000. That's more than the selling price of the condo!
That explains why so many are up for sale.
Not far from there is a retirement community where the golf, exercise & pool membership fees are optional and $45 a month. I'm waiting for an agent to call me back.
The listings don't show laundry rooms in the apartments... you know how I feel about laundry. It would totally suck to have a shared coin laundry at the end of each floor shared by many.
I doubt the realtors would know the history of each unit for sale and if someone had died in the place I'm bidding on. Surely it wouldn't hurt to ask...

When I first joined CS it was because of the forum. Then I started getting interested in the blogs. Now I’ve started dabbling in the poetry section, which has come as a bit of a surprise to me because, in all my 63 years of being on this planet, I’ve never had the slightest interest in poetry. I put this wandering about down to my restless nature, but now I’m starting to get worried. When I become bored with the poetry, it seems the only place left to move onto is the recipe section.

Little by little I've been downsizing to buy a condo or move into a rented apartment close to my job and rent out my house to offset the expenses.

The problem is, I have too many unused 'things'. You know... things that women call JUNK. Office equipment, tools, old computer parts, software, gadgets, etc. Technology changes and some of these things are obsolete. Actually, some aren't and that's the problem. Obsolescence is often a marketing tool or a state of mind. Many people have simple needs and don't require the very latest technology to run a business or make their lifestyle complete. That's like the decision of buying a $2,000 quad-core computer simply because you need it for e-mail. If the salesman at the computer store told you it was necessary, he should be executed by a firing squad in the morning.

When you run a business, you have to keep records. This I have. OK, so maybe I don't need 20 years of records sitting in my storage shed in my back yard, but I don't want to spend a day sorting through boxes of old things deciding what to throw out.

I do have years and years of hand drawings for furniture I designed... some of my life is on those drawings and I would like to select the nicest ones and scan them for my portfolio/archive.

I've been looking for 2 other things somewhere in storage that I did while in High-School. One got me an award when submitted to the county art show for all the schools in the area. It was a pencil sketch of Eric Clapton, guitarist of the Cream. The other was an ink & watercolor psychedelic rendering of a man with a big puffy (Afro) hairstyle... something you would find on logo for the Broadway show HAIR. I was proud of some of my art work, these were my favorites. I know they are somewhere in a box of junque waiting for me to reclaim them.

My daughter offered to help me rid my shed of junk. Unfortunately she doesn't know the difference between junk and junque. So, I cannot trust her as she could mistakenly slip some junque in a garbage bag with junk and I'll never see it again.



Thanks for reading my blog!

You always come across the occasional spider in any building and I get my fair share of them. I don’t dislike spiders, even though I have a mild aversion to them, as do a lot of people. I usually try to catch them in something and release them outside. A couple of weeks ago I kept coming across shed spider skins (or exoskeletons if I wanted to sound like a know it all pillock) on the floor. Since then I have evicted two quite alarmingly large specimens from my premises. I’m wondering if it is anything to do with the unusually long spell of very warm weather we had this summer, and a sign of things to come.

For the benefit of non UK residents, a monster spider is about two inches across and is absolutely no danger to human beings.

I’ve been looking for a wall mirror for my bathroom ever since I moved into this flat two years ago but haven’t been able to find a reasonably priced one. I was in Ikea earlier this week and, lo and behold, spotted exactly what I’ve been looking for. When I took one out of the wire cage where they were stacked, I was struck by how heavy it was, and it was thicker than I was expecting. It turned out that the pack actually contained four mirrors. This is where I come to the point of my blog, which is not really about mirrors at all, but about human nature, or at least my nature.

When I saw the price of what I took to be one mirror, I was happy with it. When I realised the price was for four mirrors, I suddenly begrudged having to pay for the three I didn’t need. Even though I can see the absurdity of my attitude, there seems to be nothing I can do to change it. I did actually buy the mirrors, but, even though it could be seen as getting four for the price of one, I’m not happy about it.

I look forward to all comments, provided there are no suggestions on what to do with the surplus mirrors, unless anyone wants to make me an offer for them, of course.

After coming home yesterday morning, opting not to sit in the pouring rain at the market, I edited some photos and puttered around the house as the rain moved this way. Checking on a local fb group, someone had posted a video of some tiny kittens playing under the brambles under the bridge.

The woman that posted the vid said they were under the bridge with the black mother cat, but she didn't have anything to catch them with. Being the cat lover I am, I volunteered to go down there and see if I could capture them with some food. While there, another couple showed up, leaving their kids in the car so they wouldn't make a lot of noise, and the dad crawled under the brambles, and just sat there in hopes that the kittens curiosity would bring them to him.

His wife and I sat at another entrance into the brambles, so if they came our way, we'd be there to get them. We were there about two hours, and the kittens had ventured close enough to B and had actually climbed on his leg. But they weren't all that close, so he wanted to wait until all four of them were close enough. We were just quietly waiting.

Across the street, some van comes zooming up, parks, and some woman strides over as if she's in charge. She starts tramping around the area, talking loudly and going down near B. He keeps motioning her away as she's scaring the kittens, talking quietly to try to get her to quiet down. Nope, she's too full of herself it clue in. So she comes and starts talking to me and J, bragging how she got tuna fish to entice the last cat she caught. Big deal. We had soft cat food.

Anyway, she just didn't get it, and went back down to where B was, and we could see she was determined to crash her way through the brambles to him. She came tramping back to us and said she was getting tuna fish. I lost it at that point. I said we had everything under control, we had soft cat food for them, and we didn't need more people tramping around the area, making noise and scaring them. She said she was only trying to help, and I said she should have asked first, if we needed any. She left in a huff.

She wasn't there to help the kittens particularly, she was there because she figured she'd be the hero in saving these cats, and didn't care that there were already people there looking after the situation. Thank goodness she left. Shortly after she left, the kittens gained enough confidence to all climb onto B and he just scooped them into the cat carrier. Mom was nowhere to be seen at that point.

He came out of the bush with the kittens, leaving the soft cat food on the dish. Mom appeared and just wolfed down the food. We put out the other half of the can, but there was no way she was coming near us. The couple left with the kittens and purchased kitten milk (they're about six weeks old), and took them home, where they seemed to be happily running over the kids and parents.

I went back to see if I could catch Mom, but to no avail. I left more food for her and a bowl of water, seeing as others had said they'd seen her drinking out of a puddle. Today, if the woman that said she has a live trap doesn't show up with it, I'll get a live trap and set it for the mama cat in hopes we can catch her and reunite her with her babies.

Fortunately, where she is, she's dry, as she's directly under the bridge, but it's super noisy there, with the echoing of the traffic overhead constantly. Thunder and lightning yesterday afternoon while I was there probably didn't entice her to come out to eat either. Poor thing is starving and not much older than a kitten herself.

I'm glad the other couple were there to take the kittens home, as Sadie would have been most pissed off if I'd have to bring them here. Hopefully, we'll be able to catch mom cat today.

I made the music/smoke/toke room a little more functional today. Moved some crap and got the computer next to where I stand to play so I have much easier access to the computer. Useful when playing along with jamming tracks and also should be good when I'm playing with some karaoke, closer to where the mic is than it was before. Admittedly, the room don't look as good with the new arrangement, but its much more functional. I also moved the digital drums and moved the sub woofer to make it all work out for moving the computer desk.

that it makes me sad I'm going to miss mine by just a few days" (Garrison Keillor)

Ok, a lot will depend how or when you kick the bucket. Be drunk and driving the world's most famous divorcee through a tunnel in Paris and you won't get a parade. The divorcee in question, though, went overnight from being jeered at and mocked for her behaviour, to near sainthood.

Bill Cosby would have had a fantastic funeral 10 years ago, back when he was still remembered as the TV-watching world's favourite father.

Not all love the dearly departed - when the subject first rose (a while before she died) about former UK PM Margaret Thatcher being given a state funeral, the ever-bitter Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle said why spend the money, just give every Scot a spade and we'd dig down far enough to hand her over to Satan in person. (As a hybrid Tory I would have smacked him on the head with the spade and handed it back, but that's by the by)

Of course there are porkies told. Itchy said in one blog she thought she'd gone to the wrong funeral.

And the reason I thought I'd blog about it (you knew there'd be a reason eventually ) is that we describe ourselves here as we want to be seen, and if we abruptly stopped logging in forever tomorrow, leaving our profile up, that's how we'll be remembered in this funny little cyber world.

If real-life friends or family read those profiles after we shuffle off this mortal coil, wonder how many would learn something about us, how many would agree, how many would think wow, who knew he / she was such a fibber ...

Okay no-one is going to rush off to re-word their profile into a eulogy. But if there's anything you'd not want forgotten (or would want taken into consideration, yer Honour) ...

ADDED after first exchange. Hey, could be interesting to see what others say when asked to sum up our lives in a positive way. Can't see that going nuclear in ANY way. Maybe not.

I was thinking how much better life is these days compared with when I was younger. Things that used to be mildly pleasing are now awesome , and things that I once couldn’t even be sure warranted the slight raising of an eyebrow have become amazing. In the 70s it took something like a star man waiting in the sky to blow our minds; nowadays a bit of extra chocolate dust on top of frothy coffee is enough to do it. Then, just as now, people lusted after the finer things in life, such as expensive cars and houses, but unlike now the cars and houses back then weren’t worth dying for. Going even further back to my parents’ generation, to OMG was merely to invoke thoughts of one’s giddy aunt, now, no less than God would be adequate to express the sentiment.

Woke up late here, having my coffee. It's my 3rd day off and don't have much to complain. My errands are almost complete, kid at school, parrot fed, plants are watered and sprayed.

Been spending a lot of time out or with friends the passed couple of days and just want to have some quiet time at home today. Thinking of what things I can get done today, first on the list is picking up mess and do some cleaning, laundry, wash curtains perhaps? Going through closets and get rid of stuffs I don't need, re-arrange my sitting room maybe? I cooked a lot the past few days and baked some brownies yesterday so I'm staying away from the kitchen but I've marinated some lamb riblets, the idea of sticky spicy roasted ribs is also tempting but then it's no fun eating alone.

Or I can just be lazy today, listen to music, lay on the couch, read some blogs and have some fun dirty talk with some hunk in DC later

I'm used to busy workdays and often times don't even get to rest on my weekends that I find it daunting to have a day with absolutely nothing to do that I was almost tempted to connect a second monitor to finish up some report, maybe later

Happy Monday !