BaconSalt!

Because I love The Pudding. The Fluid Pudding, that is. Because she talks smart and fancy, and is funny, and is kind, has made out with Harry Truman, and shares important discoveries with the world, like this one:

It came yesterday, delivered to my office, and Alex and I went around forcing everyone to taste it, and to say, "Oh my gosh, that really DOES taste like bacon!" I knew that FP had had a somewhat disappointing first BaconSalt experiment with scrambled eggs, that involved various parts of her brain arguing with each other (I can't really sympathize, because I can ONLY eat eggs as a side dish, no matter what flavor they might be, so this is one I'd never have tried--plus, the various parts of my brain are not on speaking terms with each other), so Alex rushed right over to the grocery store and bought some big ol' potatoes.

Short review: BaconSalt baked potatoes are DEELISH. I used both the original and peppered flavors of BaconSalt on mine, and if I'd had a baked potato the size of my head with the BaconSalt on it, I think I could have eaten it. Or, you know, gone down trying. So, in the end, we had a low-cal dinner of broccoli and baked potatoes, but felt as though we ate like kings. BaconSalt + 'Taters = GOOD THING.

I speak more of this, plus the week in review and the horror of my front entryway, in a couple of recent posts over yonder.

Oh, yeah--no remuneration was received for this post, not even free BaconSalt, sadly. The BaconSalt people don't even know I exist, but for my order. Although, now that I've posted this stuff everywhere, if they just wanted to send me free swag, I'd be totally cool with that.

Want To Get A Kid Reading? Here's How!

When Bella and I got home from running errands today, we spent some time with the boxed DVD set of "The Electric Company" that I'd finally gotten around to ordering for her, and sang all the songs and tried to sound out as many words as possible before Bill Cosby or Morgan Freeman could. And here is where I take a minute to let everyone know that, if your kid is at all interested in learning to read, you can't make any better investment than DVDS OF "THE ELECTRIC COMPANY."
We've had them for about a week, and Bella has gone from knowing the sounds that the letters in the alphabet can make, to READING COMPLETE SENTENCES in that time. Seriously. Why is there no equivalent to this show around any more? I was reading competently at age 4, and my own mother swears by the influence of "The Electric Company."

TEC does tend to wear a body out, so we did take a nap break. Come on, I told you it was the best day ever--you had to know that would include at least a short nap. And with Bella, "short" is the only kind of nap there is. Bella made the peanut-butter sandwiches for lunch, and we spent the rest of the afternoon playing "Sphere" (your kid will be better at this than you would ever think possible) and reading. THE REST OF THE DAY, excluding a short dinner break when Daddy came home. Until her bedtime. And it never got boring, not EVER.

What did we read? Well. Here is where I get to share with you a rare moment of mothering inspiration, because frankly, this is genius. Bella LOVES looking at pictures on flickr. LOVES IT. And I noticed that many flickr photos have simple titles, descriptions, and tags. That gives you a LOT of words, which are associated with real-life images, and endless hours of reading practice material. Tags in particular are great, because they tend to describe the subject of the photo, which helps with comprehension. I don't guess any developmental stepping-stone has made me as giddy as this whole reading business. It's just phenomenal. She's got the concept of the silent 'e' knocked, as well as being able to swap out long and short vowel sounds, and hard and soft consonants. I am completely in love with this child, and her sweet, ever-growing brain.

Yep, it was a good day. Getting to have this time with my daughter before school starts and I go back to work has been a real gift, and I'm appreciating, and loving, every minute of it. Even with the Loudest Child in the Universe, bless her little noggin. Now, sing along with me:

Easy Reader, that's my name;
Uhn, uhn-uhhhhhhhn;
Reading, reading, that's my game;
Uhn, uhn-uhhhhhhhn.

Top to bottom, left to right;
Reading stuff is...OUTTA SIGHT!
Easy Reader, that's my name;
Uhn, uhn-uhhhhhhhn!

Stupid Wendy's Commercial

Is it just me? Does anybody "get" that stupid Wendy's commercial with all the tree-kicking people, and the doofus in the "Wendy" wig? If I'm not eating Wendy's, I'm a tree-kicker? Maybe I'm just old. If you are young, and this commercial is funny, please let me know. I'm off to get some kasha and have a nap.

My issues with the current Burger King ad campaign inovolving "the King" would just open up a whooooole 'nother can of worms, and...well, my nap, you know. Must go.

Dell Tech Geeks Bring The Funny--And The Help

Great jumpin' cats, this Dell thing is taking on a highly entertaining life of its own. If you don't know what I'm talking about, start with my previous post. Read the comments, then follow the magic of the intarweb over to Notes From The Trenches and read Chris' post, "Where Is My Larry?" Do NOT skip the comments, because there are bloggers and tech guys making Veggie-Tales jokes. Chris may not have Larry, but hey, she's got Rick, and he's got attitude. (He's the guy in this video second from left in the back--we speculate that he's the only one of the group wearing a jacket because he got something on his shirt right before the filming. We mostly speculate this because if Alex or I had to be in a video for a corporate vlog, we could almost guarantee you that that would be the day we'd drop a chili-dog down our front.) I predict a happy ending.

To paraphrase an old, seriously annoying ad campaign, Dell: "Dude--Everyone's Watching Dell." Don't make a liar out of me, Rick. Right now, women of the blogosphere are positively buzzing about "the power of the internet." Justify my love, guys (and Margaret). When you have the all-powerful Mir asking, "What have we learned?" and promising "...we'll take a look," you can't drop the ball.

On that, I'm out. Alex and I, thanks to a hugely generous gift from my faboo mom-in-law (you wish your mother-in-law was this great, but mine is the best), are celebrating his birthday all weekend in high style, with fine dining and cushy accomadations. You realize, of course, that this means I'm leaving. My. House. The homefront and horses are well-covered, Bella is thrilled about spending time with grandmommy/aunt/uncle/cousin, the dogs are parceled out among friends and family, Jack The Cat is in charge, and I'm moderately sedated. So hopefully, we'll be living it up this weekend, and Alex will have a happy birthday (it's a Big One), and I won't spend any part of our time away crouched in a corner, rocking back and forth and muttering to myself. I do believe I AM beginning to feel the beneficial effects of the Wellbutrin, so the way I figure it, this little retreat will either snap me right out of my funk, or kill me outright. Either way, the waiting is over. Oh, and we're only going, like, 20 miles from home, and that helps.

And I'm taking my new laptop with me. Thanks to consarned Matthew Baldwin, there will probably be a fierce marital Peggle duel waged all weekend long.

Hello, Dell? I'm Staying. Thank Larry.

And give him a raise. I'm not kidding. DO IT, or else I'll...I dunno, type something. You may recall my grousing a little while back, here and here, about our recurring problems with the power source in our Dell Inspiron laptop, and our huge frustration with Dell's tech support/customer service. Our computer had been sent back several times, the problem was never fixed, and we kept buying new power cords (from Dell) and trying to use the computer while holding the cord in place with one hand. I might have publicly stated that "Dell is full of crap" at least once. It could have been worse.

Blogosphere, I present to you a happily resolved customer service issue:

On the left, Old And Busted. On the right, New Hotness (MIB reference-nod to TSM). Let me 'splain, as best I can, how this miracle of corporate responsiveness came about. You may already know what's coming, but I had no idea, so for the other three people out there who might be likewise in the dark, this is for you.

Within hours of my first post mentioning a problem with our laptop, I received an email bearing the subject line, "Problems with your Dell computer." It was short and sweet, and seemed too good to be true:

Belinda

I am a customer advocate at Dell headquarters in Texas. I read your Blogspot post about having to send your Dell computer back to the repair depot a second time. I wanted to get with you to make sure we get things taken care of. If you can send me the service tag for the computer or a reference number for one of the services and I can pull up all the notes and see what options I have available. If you have any questions for me I will be more than happy to answer them.

I look forward to hearing back from you,

Larry
Dell Customer Advocate

OK, stop right here, before I admit that I thought this was probably bogus, because you're all smarter and more internet-savvy than me, and would not suspect that Larry was actually a Nigerian scam artist who was going to somehow empty my bank accounts and ruin my credit-rating by getting hold of my Dell service tag number. Shut up. And yes, one of two very simple things would have settled the question immediately: A Google search (DUH) or checking my own site's traffic report. What I actually did was to kind of blow Larry off, and ask around. No one I spoke to had heard of anything like this, though most people said it "seemed harmless."

So a few days later, when I griped online again, in a bare mention tacked onto the end of this post, I immediately got another very polite email from Larry, again offering to help. This time, I thought (because I am clever like that) I'd just find out if Larry was for real, and asked for a phone number and extension at Dell...to which he responded by offering to call ME. To which I responded by saying to myself, "AHA! He won't get me that easily! I didn't just fall off the turnip truck, Larry!" I wrote back pretty much implying that I was onto him, and no way was I giving out any information without knowing who I was dealing with. BOY, did I tell him. Ahem.

And as it turns out, I was still ON the turnip truck, because Larry very politely answered that my position was perfectly understandable, and provided the main customer service number at Dell, along with his direct extension. By this time, it had occurred to me to Google the phrase "Dell customer advocate," which I should have done in the first place. If I had, I'd have found numerous articles about this program, and this one in particular, from Dell's own blog, that addressed the very issue I'd had with "stranger danger" apprehension about being approached out of the blue by someone offering to solve a problem. Because honestly, how often does THAT happen? Also at that link, you get to see (and hear) our hero, Larry, in the flesh (and voice) on a video clip! Go, Larry! He's the quiet one of the bunch, but he gets the first and last word in that clip.

So once all THAT was out of the way, Larry got right down to solving our problem. And we were positively bowled over with the speed and efficiency and fairness of his work. When one thing wasn't available, he'd upgrade to the next better thing (I know you love that technical lingo), until finally, because of the uniqueness of our problem and some particulars of our repair history with Dell (seriously, our laptop was whacked), we wound up with a new replacement computer, upgraded from the model we'd had before, because that model wasn't available at the time, and Larry didn't want to make us wait. I'm here to tell you, we had Larry earning his paycheck in dealing with us, because we seemed to have one issue after another, and while he had us our new computer inside of a week, we weren't able to send our old one back to Dell for more than twice that long. (We had to figure out how to transfer our many programs and files from one unit to the other, which was complicated by the fact that the old was unit running Windows XP and the newer one came with Vista. Hint--it involves ordering a special magic cord. For real.)

So now, we are humming right along in computerland, and as you can see from the picture above, we got everything transferred over to the new 'puter, right down to my Huey Freeman wallpaper. Larry even made sure that I got the same faux burled cherrywood cover on the new 'puter that I had on the old one. Between the upgrade and the not having to type with one hand while holding a power cord in the other any more, this new laptop is like a bionic version of the previous one. THANK YOU, LARRY.

As for Windoze Vista: Not a fan. It has a lot of new bells and whistles, true, but anything I needed? No way. Plus, a lot of the new features--heck, most of them--actually clutter up my internet/computing experience and get in the way. It doesn't seem to want to play nice with Mozilla Firefox right out of the gate, but having been told firmly by Alex that this is the way things are going to be, browser-wise, seems to have settled down on that count. And it only took me ONE session of using Vista's "new and improved" Internet Explorer to know beyond a doubt that I LOVE FIREFOX. Never leave me, Firefox.

That Mac commercial, where the PC has the Secret-Service looking guy interrupting him every 5 seconds asking him if he really wants to do what he's trying to do? Totally not an exaggeration. Constant pop-up windows are everywhere, and you have to spend a lot of time turning things off. Software designers and computer manufacturers would make everything easier on us if they'd just send us the units stripped down to the bare basics, along with optional programs on disks, so that we could install only what we WANT, rather than going through the headache of having to figure out how to uninstall what we DON'T want.

Consider this a Love Thursday post. We love Larry. All right, it's not your typical LT fare, but seriously, he brought some happiness and relief into our lives during a very frustrating time.

And that's not for nothing.

UPDATED to add--A response by Lionel Menchaca, Digital Media Manager for Direct2Dell. In part, he writes, to those of you who've expressed your own Dell-related woes:

"I encourage you or anyone else that needs help with their Dell hardware to go here:

http://direct2dell.com/contactus.aspx

My personal e-mail is at the bottom of this page, and the Customer Advocate team email is listed as well (fourth bullet point from the top list)."

Hit it.

Healing A Sick House

So, I never did tell you the horrific story of our ridiculously incompetently-installed and maintained air-duct system, although we did have warnings, starting last summer--and it got worse after that.

The three of us, despite those new-generation antihistamines, the new steroidal nasal sprays, and vigorous use of the much-ballyhooed Neti-Pot, have had multiple respiratory infections since moving to this new house. MULTIPLE. Alex, who is prone to pneumonia because of his asthma, had full-blown pneumonia no less than three times in 2006. Bella, who never had a real sick day in her life for her first three years, went through course after course of antibiotics for sinus infections, as did I--I am just NOW finishing up a 10-day course of fluoroquinolones, and my chest is already hurting again less than 48 hours after the last dose.

So. The time came for an evaluation of our heat/air system. It's all electric, run by two heat pumps and two air-handlers. Short story: The whole system sucks. There is rotting ductwork all through the house, full of mold and mildew and dirt from 10 years of total neglect (aside from the occasional duct-taping, shown below). There are entire sections of crappy flex-duct that has rotted completely away, so that we've been blowing heated/cooled air directly into the attic. Nice. Also, the square-footage heated/cooled by one 2-ton, 8-SEER heat pump was just about DOUBLED when a huge room was added on, but the heat pump was NOT upgraded. Not only that, the same people who added the room without allowing for proper heating/cooling also decided to opt out of any form of insulation for this new room. Which is walled entirely on two sides with WINDOWS. Do you see where this is going?

So, since Christmas, when we learned that we're most likely breathing deadly poison of one kind or another anytime we're running our heater, we've had to choose between being warm OR being able to breathe. So mostly we've been huddled up in the master bedroom with a space heater. It's been a fun January.

Cut to the present, in which we've taken out a small loan, and begun the three-day process of ripping out the crappy ductwork--seriously, don't just take my word for it (click images to see flickr notes):

This last one is of the interior of our inside "air-handler" unit. I think this particular part at one time actually functioned as a FILTER. Wonder how that was working for us, air-quality-wise?

And YES, we had a pre-purchase home inspection! In which the inspector did not notice any of this not-to-code, disintegrating ductwork (among many other things in the attic), OR the fact that there was ZERO insulation in the attic! Lack of insulation which, you would THINK, would make the crappy insulation VERY obvious! The name of our home inspection company, should anyone else in central Arkansas (or the rest of the country--they have inspectors everywhere) be dying to employ them now, is "PILLAR TO POST." Go ahead, give 'em a call! I particularly enjoy this passage from their website--apparently "inadequate insulation" they notice, but "NO insulation" just slips through the cracks:

3. Attic issues. Home buyers almost never look in attics but inspectors always do, paying special attention to signs of roof leaks, missing support trusses, pest infestation, illegal venting, illegal electrical wiring, inadequate insulation, etc.

Also, YES, we obtained a Home Warranty when we bought this house! A Home Warranty which specifically covered DUCTWORK...but guess what claim they're refusing? That's right, the claim we submitted upon discovering our criminally inadequate DUCTWORK. Why, you ask? Well, because, since the ductwork was improperly installed before we bought the house, they classify it as a "pre-existing condition." Are you relishing the irony of this situation yet? Are you getting the hearty belly-laughs that we have been? Are you thinking, you foolish thing, as we were, that when you buy a house FROM SOMEONE ELSE, that pretty much EVERYTHING about that house is a "pre-existing condition" for you? And that that is the motivation for BUYING a Home Warranty? Oh, you silly, silly person, you. The name of our wonderful Home Warranty company, should you want to rush out and buy a policy upon your next home purchase, is "WARRANTECH." Oh, and Warrantech's portion of the cost of replacing the non-operative ductwork, had they chosen to honor their policy? About $1,000-1,500, because they have a limit on what they'll cover. WE are paying MUCH more than that, but Warrantech ain't kickin' in their share--pre-existing condition, you know.

So anyway, this is my crazy-eye, from hiding in my bedroom surrounded by poodles while several strange men tromp around in my attic, apparently playing a rousing game of horseshoes or something equally loud and unsettling, for the next three days. Whee.

Dear GAP: Stop It. Right Now.

Seriously. You know what I mean, GAP. You and your creative agency, Laird+Partners. Just stop it. Leave our precious Audrey Hepburn alone, could you? The dance scene in "Funny Face" was sweet, charming, and endearing. But cutting Ms. Hepburn out and having her shill your sweat-shop-sewn, generic American uniforms to the backdrop of AC/DC? That's just wrong. It was wrong when it was Fred Astaire posthumously hawking vacuum cleaners, and it's wrong now. So stop it.

Also, GAP? During her "Funny Face" heyday, Ms. Hepburn was certainly a tall, skinny drink of water, appropriately suited for "skinny pants" and the like. As a matter of fact, she was 5'7" tall, and weighed in at a whopping 110 pounds. Just like so many American women of today! A full 2% of American women, I believe the statistic is, fit that body type now. So, good luck (but not really) with your brilliant ad campaign, and the sales of a record number of "skinny pants," GAP!

I think you're gonna need it.