Amazon

And His Money Are Soon Parted

I really need to quit Instagram. I used to enjoy it, but it, like Facebook, has become just a way to sell you stuff. A lot of times it is stuff you really don’t need but looks so cool that it is hard (for me at least) to not want to buy this stuff.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love The Flight Wall and don’t regret that at all. I’ve also bought a couple of alt-ballcaps that are being worn almost daily. But the “giant” garden octopus, which looked great in the marketing photos, really didn’t live up to the hype of the photos. I think the last straw is my purchase of small peeking cat stickers and I don’t have a cat.

Red Sox chances of making the Wild Card round in the 2026 playoffs: 12.4%

 

Bye Buds

While chatting with neighbor Tere over the fence several weeks ago, I noticed an odd-looking thing that sort of surrounded her ear. At first I thought maybe they were cochlear implants, so I didn’t ask. I did what anyone would do; I entered long strings of words into Google until I got a picture of what she was wearing. They were bone conduction earphones.

That sounded really good to me because I have several in-ear earbuds that I have trouble keeping in my ears. I have three sets, one for each car and another to use while in front of the PC, and all of them don’t stay in my ears very well. They all came with three different sizes of the flexible cones to allow for a fit in many sizes of ear canals. I’ve tried all three, but none stay put.

I’ve been mulling it around, and then on Saturday the person in front of me in line at the coffee shop had a set on, so I went home and did some research. I searched for reviews and tests, and then I put in “best bone conduction headphones,” and the consensus winner is the Shokz OpenRun Pro 2, which retails for $180. Wow, I have to think about that. Of course if you check Amazon for these things, they start at $20 and work their way up to that $180.

The clincher was that just two days later, after the Google and Amazon searches, what should appear in my Instagram feed but an ad for bone conduction earphones. Nice work Internet! I figured instead of getting something via that way, I’d go to a review site and click on an Amazon affiliate link. Instead of the $180 top-of-the-line, I’d just buy the regular OpenRun Pro (no “2” on the end) for 70% the cost of the big boy.

Fedex arrived this afternoon with one wheel and tire for the GTI. Hopefully tomorrow the other 3 arrive…

Red Sox chances of making the Wild Card round in the 2026 playoffs: 14.0%

 

Oh You Amazonian Temptress

When we lived in Klamath Falls we took advantage of the Amazon Prime free delivery. Someone once told use Klamath Falls was nicknamed Katalog Falls because of the limited shopping opportunities of that rural small city had. It was always fun to see where the stuff was coming from. Most of the common items came from one or two places, either Reno, Nevada whish is about 250 miles away or Troutdale, Oregon which is nearer to 300 miles away. Both places were an easy 2-day delivery away.

You would think that now that we live in a suburb of Portland, the largest city in the state of Oregon with a population of nearly three quarters of a million (over 3 million in the Metropolitan Statistical Area) we might not have to rely so much on ordering things from Amazon. But that is not the case.

There are several reasons why it is still so tempting to order from Jeff Bezos’ minions. The first is because we are now so used to doing it. Secondly, because we are in the “big city” physically going shopping anywhere is a hassle because of all these people and their traffic. The third reason is probably the coolest. Remember those two towns with big Amazon distribution centers from above, well the Troutdale one is literally a mile away. On the way to Friday morning grocery shopping, invariably when we will get the traffic light down the street, we will see a line of those funky looking Rivian electric delivery trucks lined up across from us.

When the printer ran out of ink last week at 8 o’clock at night I ordered some from Amazon and the package was waiting on the front porch when I got up at 6:30 the next morning. Two days, HA! Certain items we get same day or overnight.

No Plan B

I know back in February that I said that Better Off Dead, might be my last Jack Reacher book, but it wasn’t.

After buying a couple of new sweatshirts with my self gifted Christmas bonus I still had a wee bit of money leftover. I thought maybe I would get our local bookstore to order for me the latest Jack Reacher book, No Plan B. That way I could pick it up on our every four week visit that coincides with our haircut. The next of which was on the calendar for the 29th.

Donna said go ahead and get it from Amazon, so you could have it for Christmas. So, on the 18th I placed an order. At checkout my estimated delivery date was listed as the 28th, so much for that expedited Prime delivery. In the end they did get it to me earlier than that and even earlier than Christmas to boot, the book arrived on Christmas Eve.

The first few books every story was more or less direct, as if you were walking in Reacher’s shoes, but as the series progressed the stories would occasionally give the point of view of the villain in the story, but still it was very Reacher centric. This last novel written with his real life brother, who will eventually take over by himself, was with four different points of view. Of course Reacher was the center point and there was also the main bad guy, a CEO of a for profit prison that was up to no good. That really was enough, but we also got a thread about a father out for revenge because of his sons death. There was also stuffed into the narrative, the story the story of a teenager boy who is running away from home. Both of these last two story lines were left until the end to fit into the main story and done in such a way that seemed jarring to me. And while both of them were, in some way, used to further the plot along, in the end they both were wrapped in about a paragraph each and they really weren’t really needed.

So, this time I mean it, No Plan B was the last Reacher book I’m going to buy. I’ve got digital copies of the first two dozen books and I’ll probably go back and read each one as they get adapted for the Amazon Prime TV series.

Third Times The Charm

We have been ordering Donna Celestial Seasonings DECAF Green Tea K-Cups from Amazon since before we moved to Oregon in 2019. There have been several different K-cup quantities over that period, but sometime late last year or early this year we started buying them in 96 count boxes. A few of months ago we couldn’t get the big boxes anymore so we found a seller that was selling the same thing, but they were listing it as 4 boxes of 24. This worked out well until early this month we repeated the usual order and when it was delivered it was a single box of 24…

We contacted the seller and they told us they even though they were the seller, the order was fulfilled by Amazon and we needed to contact them. Well, as you might expect, with Amazon there is no way to contact a real person by phone. Returns are dead easy, but because the tea is food item, returns were not allowed. After fumbling around their help center, I finally found a bot thingy and it took a couple of wrong selections before I did find a way to get it to refund our money or more accurately, added the total purchase price to a virtual gift card and we even got to keep the single 24 count box.

After the money showed up as a gift card in the Amazon account we reordered the 4 boxes of 24. It wasn’t two day delivery, but it was still free, so a few days later the order arrived. As you could tell from the title of this post, this second order once again contained just one box of 24 K-cups where we ordered and paid for ninety-six. This time when I found the bot there was no option that I could find to pick that would give us the purchase price and keep the money. I did find a way to have it put me in a queue to chat with an actual human. After a few minutes I was connected and after repeating my problem in a couple different ways, I got the same results as the first time, keep the 24 and the full purchase price in a gift card. Plus a guarantee that it wouldn’t happen again.

This time, thinking that the problem was the Amazon fulfilling part, we opted for a seller said that it was fulfilled by them not Amazon. We waited with baited breath to see whether we would get 1 or 4 boxes of 24, but when the packed showed up on our doorstep several days there was a large box that contained 4 boxes of 24 K-cups.

Was it the different seller or that guarantee from a chat bot? I don’t know, but we’ll see in a couple months when we order tea again from Amazon.

One Last Insulated Mug Post

The Pluses:

  1. I don’t have to wait near as long until the temperature is drinkable compared to the metal insulated mug.
  2. It tastes great, maybe even better than from a ceramic mug.
  3. It holds the temperature longer than the ceramic mug.
  4. It looks cool as hell with the powdered latte mix from Maxwell.

The Minuses:

  1. It feels really delicate, like little tap and it will shatter into a million pieces.
  2. I miss the heft of the ceramic mug.
  3. The temperature doesn’t stay warm that much longer.

Insulated Cup Update

When I used the new free metal double-walled 12 ounce mug for a second time I waited a bit before taking a sip. I even took the plastic sippy lid off to cool it down before taking a drink so as not to burn my tongue. But now that my tongue’s taste buds weren’t singed, the coffee tasted awful. Turns out this is the biggest complaint about the metal mugs. So I’m glad Amazon refunded the money, I don’t feel bad at all, because after washing, the mug got placed in the Goodwill donation pile.

Undaunted by my first try, I went back on Amazon to look for a metal double-walled mug with a ceramic coating. Didn’t have much luck on that front. The one that I did find had either 5-star reviews that were great or 1-star review because the coating wasn’t total or flaked off.

I was about to give up when I exited Amazon and tried a just plain Google search. I found something that looked interesting a Double Wall Insulated Glass Cup for sale. Of course it was for sale on Amazon…

It’ll be here Wednesday.