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Flowerbabies Return

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Flowerbabies Return

The last month and some change has been insane for both myself and my wife.  The teacher walkout and protests at the state capitol caused the tail end of the school year to be compressed in a way that had my wife either lesson planning on the fly or grading mounds of paperwork each night.  There were many weekends where she started work on Friday night then continued it through Saturday and Sunday and still had a bunch of stuff left over to do to carry over into the next week.  My own life has been slight madness because stuff has been happening at work that initially did not effect me…  but has triggered some musical chairs as folks change positions throughout the department.  While we managed to get our backyard largely in functional order over spring break weekend, we held off on doing the flowers thing since we were expecting a few more freezes.

Finally it is time for “flowerbabies” as I ultimately refer to them.  Tam gave me a bit of shit this weekend before the podcast saying something along the lines of “people will personify anything” but they are my babies.  I water them and care for them and they bloom so pretty for the rest of the summer as a result.  It becomes part of my morning routine of making sure they are happy and well and have sufficient moisture to keep them functioning.  I’m a nurturing person and this year we have some amazing flowers that come from a bunch of different locations.  We spent most of Saturday roaming around and looking at various options hitting I think ten different places before gathering up the plants that we wound up walking away with.  Our backyard does not have a lot of natural spots for flower beds so instead we mostly do hanging baskets.

Flowerbabies Return

At some point I still need to treat all of the petunias for the nasty caterpillars we managed to get a few years back.  I have the bacteria mixed up in a spray bottle so I can just mist them a few times during the season and hopefully everything will be good.  It seemed to work last season and we did not have a repeat of the year when we had the pretty but damaging pink worms on all the flowers.   In our travels we came across at least one cursed object in the form of these planters outside of a Walmart Neighborhood Market.  There is just something about them that screams Walmart doesn’t it?  I am not entirely sure why anyone would get these but if you can see from the display there are several missing.  There is part of me that wants to buy one just to mess with my wife…  but then I would ultimately end up taking care of a plant in this hideous shell because I could never bring myself to just let it die.

Apart from the backyard I spent a significant amount of time playing State of Decay 2 but didn’t feel like I had enough time this morning to do it justice.  If you absolutely want to know my thoughts and feeling about the game right now…  then I suggest you listen to this weekends AggroChat since I lead off with a discussion about what I like and dislike.  I’m not going to go into much more detail here yet because I fully expect that tomorrows post will be my big “thoughts” piece about it.

Cat Fountains

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Cat Fountains

My eldest cat Allie does not want me to write a blog post for you this morning.  I mean I guess it is fine given that I did’t have an awful lot to talk about anyways.  I’ve been in this weird gaming slump that I have been in many times before… of not really being super excited about anything I happen to be playing right now.  I’m largely splitting time this week between Destiny 2 and dinking around on the Void Elf Hunter in World of Warcraft.  Neither of which are things I am terribly excited to be talking about.  Tonight however I hope to be playing State of Decay 2 on the Xbox One and may or may not have things to say about it come Monday.

As for the cat impeding my progress…  this morning for some reason she has kept crawling up into my arms any time I paused for even a moment.  She does this occasionally where she just wants constant attention and I never can tell if she actually wants love…  or is just hungry and wants me to hurry up so I can feed her.  This week I purchased one of those cat fountains that recirculates water in a bubbler sort of method and I was happy to see this morning she was drinking from it.  The first few days the cats all seemed to be confused and our middle cat Kenzie simply wanted to try and scoot it around the kitchen floor making a mess.

It seems to have reached a state of equilibrium and maybe just maybe the cats have sorted out what to do with it.  The fountain is an attempt to win a battle I have been having with my cats for years…  where they don’t like drinking from a normal water dish.  What they actually want is for me to leave a faucet dripping so they can drink from that, so in the winter time when we do that already to keep the pipes from freezing…  they love it.  The next best thing is a cup that I keep in the sink and fill up with water…  because that appears to be a consolation prize.  If I try just a normal bowl of water on the ground someone tips it over trying to play with it.

The water fountain we ended up going with stores three liters of water at a time, which gives it a significant amount of weight and helps against tippage.  I just need to sort out a routine of when exactly I need to fill it up, and in truth I should probably check it when I go back downstairs as it has been running a few days now.  For reference we wound up going with the Catit Fountain, which I stumbled onto after following an adorable link with a bird splashing around in it.  I remember looking at something like this years ago… but the price was considerably more and not within that “impulse buy” territory.  It is my hope that this fills the needed niche in my home and stops the constant begging me to turn on the faucet in the mornings.

I love my cats… but they are also sorta assholes at times.  The image at the beginning of this post is completely unrelated to anything I have talked about to this point.  The can of pumpkin that shows up in the parking garage in late march/early april…  is still sitting there untouched.  I am sorta hoping that I get to make a birthday post for the can some day.  At this point it has been sitting in the Oklahoma heat for roughly two months and walk past it on my way into the office each morning.  It will be a sad day indeed if someone takes it upon themselves to throw it away at some point.  The fact that it hasn’t happened yet shows a general sense of apathy that I find interesting… I have to admit I almost did it myself when it made it past the one or two weeks mark.  It was around then that I started to daydream about being able to hold anniversary parties for the can…  and stayed my hand.

Adventures in Product Placement

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This morning I don’t have an awful lot to talk about.  I wound up watching two movies last night and don’t much feel like talking about either, so instead I am going to tell you a story of something that has been happening over the last week and some change.  Having a website as long as I have had mine means that you are ultimately going to run into a bunch of people who want something from you.  I get a regular stream if emails wanting to do paid product placement on my blog and I have written about this before.  I’ve gotten better at just instantly blocking an email address when I can tell someone is fishing for a paid placement, or in the case of the linked article that I just promote their site out of the goodness of my heart.  Side note…  this is a thing I do regularly but for things I enjoy/believe in or for people who I just generally think are awesome and that others should experience their content.

Recently I got an email from a manufacturer of a gaming specific product that wanted to talk to me about doing a review of said product.  Okay so right off the bat it passes a couple of my tests…  1) I am willing to review products and 2) it has to be something that I am interested in and that I think my readers might be interested in.  They also talk a bit about wanting to start a business relationship that could benefit my users which is always cool if I could provide discounts or something of the sort.  They did mention wanting to place a banner in my sidebar with a link, but that wasn’t an immediate no since if there was a decent discount code attached to it I would probably do that to offer it up easily to my folks.  I sat on this for about a week mulling over whether or not I should contact them back and whether or not it would be a good thing in the long run.

Almost exactly seven days to the date I responded back with an email talking about my terms for doing product reviews.  I talk about how I am willing to look at their product but I am not willing to promise a positive review and that I am only willing to link to their product if it is in fact something I believe in.  I talk about how the only way I am willing to have any form of a permanent side bar link is if they provide a discount code for my readers.  What I did promise is that I would give an honest assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the product and share that content with my readers and social media followers.  Having been through this before I fully expected them to just simply not want to do business with me at this point but I sent the email anyways.

After just stating that I would not agree to any terms ahead of reviewing the product I got back a laundry list of things in response…  completely ignoring anything I said in the previous email.  Here is what they wanted from me…

  • One written review with at least two dofollow backlinks and me to insert a number of specific keywords they requested
  • One video review of the product (I don’t even do these ever)
  • One post on twitter or other social media to promote the posts tagging them
  • Banner placement in my sidebar
  • Signing a contract stating I agree to all of this
  • The product would not ship until the banner had appeared in the sidebar
  • The discount code was some sort of a profit sharing thing…  which is not something I want.  I don’t want to profit from my readers.

Basically I stated that I would agree to none of that in my first response email, yet they rolled in and still threw it out there.  I responded back with the following email.

I apologize if I gave the impression from my last response that I would be willing to accept these terms. I realize as a manufacturer that you would love to have some assurances, but I am simply not willing to give you any. I’ve built my site on integrity and only passing things on to my readers that I completely believe in. That way when they know I am suggesting a controller or a computer accessory it is because I myself either am currently using it or have used it in the past and thought it was a great product. So I am not willing to sign a contract of any form with you or anyone else. I am also not willing to agree to any of your review terms, because I am not wiling to agree to that sort of thing ahead of reviewing the product. Nor will I agree to how much I will or will not promote your product, because again I have never experienced said product. Lastly I do not do video production at all so that one is completely off the radar from the sort of audience I have.

In the past I have simply not responded to requests for me to promote something on my sites. I have no interest in profit sharing, and the only reason why I was interested in some sort of a discount code was that if I chose to promote your product on my site that I would love for my readers to get some benefit from it. All of that said I am not willing to agree to any sort of promotion until I have seen and experienced your product to develop my honest opinion of it. I realize this is not the way you prefer to do business but this is the only way I am willing to do so. I also reserve the right to talk to my readers about my readers about what it is like to work with <INSERT COMPANY NAME HERE>.

I have a genuine relationship with my readers and followers and they know that I am not doing it to promote myself or to profit from them. As a result I only support products that completely believe in and without seeing your product there is no way I could feel comfortable agreeing to any of these terms.

I fully expect to never hear back again from the rep of said manufacturer.  I am not naming any names because hell they may shock me and respond with “okay, where do we ship it?” but I sincerely doubt it.   The truth is the product was in a range of products that I have never been able to suggest to folks because I have not had a great experience with any of them.  I would have loved to have had one that I could honestly support and suggest because it comes up pretty regularly in my timelines.  In video game reviews I have encountered plenty of folks willing to accept these terms, but in product reviews so far everyone has wanted some form of assurance that I am just unwilling to offer.  It frustrates me because I had hope that this one would be different and by the way the originally approached me it seem that way.  However they immediately went back to the same nonsense I have dealt with before, which is a massive disappointment.

More Things Going Wrong

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Today I have a riveting tale from our long running compendium of things not going as planned, soon to be made into a major motion picture.  The sequence of events that I was expecting yesterday was to go to work and then around noon head home to wait for the air conditioning folks to come service our unit.  When we upgraded to the nonsense thing as tall as I am… one of its quirks is that instead of a small filter it has a mega HEPA filter and a light that is supposed to kill bacteria as it circulates through.  This apparatus is supposed to be replaced every year, but for the last three visits they have not had the correct part on the truck so we are going on two years with the same bits.  I made certain that I asked ahead this time when we scheduled the maintenance that they bring the correct part so that it could be changed.  In theory the serviceman was supposed to arrive around 1 pm and my thought was originally that I could have a relaxing afternoon as soon as he left.

What actually happened was that the guy showed up between 2 and 2:30 and immediately stated that he did not have the correct parts because for whatever reason they had us down with the wrong unit in their system.  He called around to try and get one of the other trucks to bring him a filter…  and when that failed he decided to do all of the bits he could do without the filter and then would have to go back to the shop and get it himself.  I had every indication that this was a thing he was going to do when he left my home and come right back to finish the job.  So I attempted to patiently wait…  and not really get into anything I could not drop immediately if the doorbell were to ring.

It was around 5:30 that I called into the business who stated that he was still scheduled to finish the job, but that he had gotten diverted to another site temporarily.  They assured me that we were next on the list and that he would be there shortly.  When my wife got home around 7:30 she was also perturbed and called in again after two hours had passed since the previous call.  She got the after hours on call service, and someone got back to us extremely quickly…  at that time they seemed to have no clue what was going on.  It was around 8:45 that he finally showed up with this nonsense filter and uv light in hand…  wrapped up the job and paid.

The problem with all of this is the fact that I felt like I couldn’t actually do anything because I had to be available for someone to swing by and deal with our stuff.  So what could have been a leisurely afternoon of gaming silliness turned into an anxiety riddled one where I was afraid to put on my headphones for fear I would miss the knocking on my door.  Hell there was an interlude in there where I ordered a pizza but was too afraid to actually sit down and eat for fear the guy would show up while I was attempting to chow down.  I am annoyed with the service company because I expected more from them.  Usually their estimates are pretty accurate for when someone will be showing up, but the whole not having this part on the trucks is frustrating.  If you are actively selling this system then you should be actively prepared to support it.

Anyways…  so you my readers get another “non-post” because I didn’t really get to sit down and do anything involved until around 9 pm last night…  at which time I logged into Monster Hunter World and got one more Kulve run in before we say farewell to that event for an unknown period of time.  I managed to get another orange Hammer and another purple Light Bowgun…  but even then I was more than happy to say goodbye knowing how much I have managed to get from it.  Still kinda annoyed that I never got a decent bow from the event, which only means that I now need to research what bow to craft so I can fill that gap in myself.