Ever since buying the new Garnet Red Miata, things are very slowly turning maroon around here. As I mentioned a couple days ago I will be painting our bedroom this weekend, we picked out our color tonight at Home Depot. Guess what it is called? Vin Rouge. Guess what color it is? Maroonish Red. Oh boy!Going to have to buy me some maroon shirts to replace all the blue ones I own…
…so I’m going to bed.
On the way home this afternoon when we got to the exit of the parking lot at work, Donna said, “Go left.” As we normally go right, that phrase meant, let’s take the long way home. This is a great stress reliever for both of us, I like the drive and Donna likes the ride.
I proceeded to wind my way home via some of our usual back roads. It was a warm afternoon, but it felt good to be out driving around. The dogwoods are blooming along with the azaleas and everything that is not flowering is turning green. Even though there were a few more cars on our route than usual they didn’t diminish our enjoyment. About 3 miles from home on a relatively lightly trafficed road we passed a little girl selling lemonade along the side of the road. We looked at her as she looked at us as we went by.
It is spring break for the local schools this week and both Donna and I envisioned this little girl telling her mom she was bored and her mom saying, “Why don’t you go sell lemonade out in front of the house,” in an effort to keep her entertained and get her out of mom’s hair.
We got about 200 yards down the road and Donna said, “Do you have anything smaller than that ten?” I pulled out my wallet and sure enough there was a single in there too. We turned around in a driveway a little further along and headed back. The lemonade was 50 cents a glass, so we bought two. We drank it right there at the side of the road and chatted with her a bit. It was from a mix and not too cold, but it did hit spot. When finished we turned around in her driveway and drove off with a wave and toot of the horn.
I think we kind of made her day, I know she made ours.
This morning in my inbox I received this little ditty:
I’m a web master, and I was just searching Google for extenze ron jeremy. I found your domain, barndoorfanclub.org ranked 14, which is pretty cool.
My site is all about Health – Men, too . Maybe we should link up? I wouldn’t be stealing any of your sales, because all I do is write informational articles…not selling anything on my site at all. And most of my visitors write back to say that they love the fact that I only write good, quality info. As a matter of fact, I’ve got a pretty loyal following of people that come back over and over again (they use the site as a reference), so if you link to me, you should get some pretty good traffic from it — which is always nice.
Anyway, let me know if you’d like to swap links. I’ve already linked to you, and will keep it up there for a few days until I hear back. Hope to hear from you soon!
Beth Perry
RAC IM: 1175455.
I actually did rant once about Ron Jeremy and Extenze so it is conceivable that I might show up on Google when searching for that combination of words. There wasn’t any clickable link to Beth’s site, so I typed in www.bethperry.com and got a “Page Cannot Be Displayed” error. Hmmm. Type in the URL in Google and get 3 options, 1) web pages similar to – nothing, 2) web pages linked to – nothing and webpages that contain the term – one hit, a fellow blogger with the same experience, just different search terms.
Curious, I type in extenze ron jeremy in the Google search window and there is my site, not at 14, but on the 3rd page about #27. Because I have been in a playful spam mood this week, I decided to write back to Beth:
Dear Beth,
I am afraid I am going to have to ask you to unlink me from your page. I just checked my Google ranking for the search term extenze ron jeremy and I have fallen back from your reported #14 to a disappointing third page listing of #27. I can only assume your recent linking to my site caused this. Having invested an awful lot of time and money to increase my Google ranking I am very upset. If the link to my site is not removed from your site forthwith I will be forced to take legal action.
Sincerely,
Brian the Red
I haven’t gotten the email bounced back by now, so I’m betting that someone or thing got it. After I had a good laugh with my co-workers by reading Beth’s letter and my response, I got to thinking just what might this be about. It isn’t like comment spam where the intent is to spread the google ranking seeds of crabby internet scum sites hither and yon. The only thing I can figure is my little bit of fun played right into her hands. By replying I confirmed that they had a valid email address that they could then resell.
Anybody else heard from Beth Perry lately?
None of these events are recent, but an ambulance sighting tonight made me think of this.
I’m not sure how many other places do this, but when we moved to Aiken, South Carolina it was the first time I’d ever seen it. People pull off the side of the road if a funeral procession of autos passes by. Even on the other side of a 4 lane divided highway. The first few times I encountered this phenomenon I just kept on driving. Boy, did I get some angry looks and an occasional ugly gesture. Sometimes I have stopped, but mostly because I’ve been trapped by cars half pulling over, usually I just keep on driving.
But for what ever reason, these same people are loathe to pull over for an ambulance. If they are traveling in the opposite direction from the ambulance they won’t even slide over in their lane any. If they are traveling in the same direction on a four lane road they might pull over out of the way if it isn’t too inconvenient. I have been passed and nearly rear ended by people who are wondering why I’m slowing down or pulling over.
Go figure.
A little over 2 weeks ago in one of the weekly email newsletters I get I saw an offer for a free CD from Microsoft that included every security update available up until February. Really free. No shipping even. So I signed up. It got here Saturday and I took it as a sign that I really did need to format c: and start over (along with the earlier deleting the question mark extravaganza.)After freshly installing Win2K I went to the Windows Update site and it reported that I needed to run 2 Critical Updates and Service Packs, 19 Windows 2000 Updates and one Driver Update. I didn’t do anything because I wanted to try my new CD. I ran it and whatever it did took like 15 seconds…WTF. I rebooted and went back to the update site, I now needed to run 2 Critical Updates and Service Packs, 18 Windows 2000 Updates and one Driver Update. Wow that was a big help.
Also in the same CD package was a trial version of a firewall and a virus software. I didn’t even investigate further.
The other day I noticed that my Radio/TV card was not working. I kept reporting that another device was using something or another. This morning I decided to fix it. I uninstalled the software and while I was at it I uninstalled some other software I wasn’t using anymore. Then I uninstalled the entries in the hardware section using the Control Panel. While I was at it I also uninstalled another couple entries. There was a question mark item there too, so I thought that would be a good thing to get rid of too. Wrong! A couple seconds after I hit next, my mouse cursor went away and the PC kind of locked down. I fumbled around mouseless for a while and figured I should just reboot. As the PC came up I had a 640 x 480 display with only 16 colors. And it proceeded to find nearly every piece of hardware as if had never heard of any of them. I had to reinstall drivers for audio, video and networking to go along with my planned Radio/TV stuff.
Oh well, I’ve been threatening to reformat C: and start over again with a clean install…I guess I’ll start on that right after I get through with this entry.