Anya Weighs In

Hooray! My cat has successfully lost weight! How, you ask? I stopped giving her treats. Instead of rewarding her several times a day (to encourage her to scratch the post and not the couch), I now only give her about one treat a week.

If only it were that easy to cut my treats from my diet...

Matches

Have you ever seen statements similar to this one?:

"Once a match is used, discard it properly. If you blow out a match and throw it in the trash, there is a danger that it might not be totally extinguished." (found online at least here and here)

Well, I have been trying to start a fire like that for years, and it has never resulted in anything.

I think it is because I am using the strike on box matches:

instead of the strike anywhere matches:


I'm not going to rush right out and buy some strike anywhere matches just to try it, but I'll let you know how it goes when I eventually switch.

Hypocrite

Last night I went to the grocery store. As I was staring at the vegetarian sausage patties, I heard a clatter at the end of the aisle. I knew what that sounds meant: someone had dropped their plastic spoon. I heard the resultant exclamations of disappointment, and ventured a quick glance. It was a little girl. With her was an older woman, perhaps her grandmother.

Grandma kept walking down the aisle, urging the little girl to come along. "It's no good," she said about the spoon. "It's dirty now."

The little girl, however, stuck by her spoon for a moment more, then asked as she walked away from it, "Why can't we pick it up and throw it away?"

A very good question, I thought. To put it mildly, I was upset with the grandma. Those sorts of things make me mad, when people don't take responsibility for their actions. Who would deliberately teach their child to litter like that?

They continued down the aisle.

I probably glared at them as they passed. I'm just that sort of a jerk.

As soon as they were past me, the grandma said, "Because there's nowhere to throw it away." Which was a lie: there was a trash can at the end of the aisle.

But... ask me whether I picked up that spoon, either.

Sigh.

Oh, thou hypocrite.

TV Dinner

When I was little, my siblings and I sometimes got to eat tv dinners when my parents went out on a Friday night. Tv dinners came in aluminum trays, had to be baked in the oven, and were a rare treat (for me, at least); more often we had leftovers.


Tv dinners are now called frozen dinners, though I still call them tv dinners. I ate a tv dinner tonight, and I noticed that every time I eat a tv dinner, I feel pathetic. It's not just the lousy food (although I will admit that Marie Callender's tv dinners are better than most I've tried); I think it is the fact that I am resorting to this cheap processed meal instead of making something myself.

Last night I cooked some ground beef, grated some cheese, and made myself soft tacos. Even though they didn't taste all that great, I felt good for having done something.

Tonight, however, it was the tv dinner.

Pathetic.

Because Nobody Wants to See What'll Happen If They Raise the Price...

Sometimes when I see a tampon machine in the bathroom I want to put up a sign that says:

STILL ONLY 25 CENTS!

It's not much, but hey, when everything just keeps getting more expensive, it's nice to know that some things remain the same.