That thing I call labyrinthitis

It's been over a year since I wrote about labyrinthitis—the affliction that caused me to feel spacey, dizzy, and out-of-it for several weeks running last winter. I call it labyrinthitis, as a kind of working title, though really I'm still not sure that's what it is. What it is, is just an odd feeling of being  disconnected from reality. It's sort of like being mildly drunk, without the accompanying mood lift.

Though I haven't brought it up much here, it brings itself up often enough. In the past year, every time I've caught a cold, I've ended up with some degree of spaciness about a week later. I had a cold last week, and I'm experiencing it right now. I'm used to it now, so it's not as scary as it was the first time, but it is undeniably annoying. 

It takes away my appetite. It ruins my ability to concentrate. It makes me feel sleepy all the time, even when I'm not remotely tired. It is, in short, a minor annoyance that becomes a major distraction. But never fear—I think I know how to beat it!

I think it's triggered by dextromethorphan, the cough suppressant!

I'd never before felt like this after a cold, until that epic coughing cold last January. It's a good thing I like to blog about my sorrows, because reading my posts from that time is giving me all sorts of vital information about my actions and symptoms, which I can compare to what I'm going through right now.

Early last week, when I was still in the feverish stages of my cold, I was trying to avoid getting one of my Stuffy Noses from Hell, so I took a 12-hour decongestant pill in the evening, then before bed, I took a 12-hour cough suppressant pill. Then I tossed and turned all night, unable to sleep even a wink! And lo, about a week into my infamous cold of last year, I had a similar experience of sleeplessness after consuming cough syrup and decongestants.

The plot thickens! The next day (last year) I was in what I called "zombie mode." I attributed it then to lack of sleep, but later I realized it might have been the first onset of my own special brand of "labyrinthitis." Similarly, a few days ago, the day after the night I couldn't sleep, I also spent the day fully awake but spacey and like a zombie. I attributed that feeling to lack of sleep too, but I marveled to myself how similar sleep deprivation feels to my labyrinthitis. Is it really a coincidence? Or was that spacey feeling actually a side effect of the dextromethorphan? Recreational users refer to this drug as DXM, and for the sake of brevity, so will I.

This week and last, I've only taken a cough suppressant twice—the night that I couldn't sleep, and last night. And both times, I've spent the next day in a stupor, regardless of how much sleep I'd gotten. Last night, I slept just fine. I think maybe it's the combination of DXM and pseudoephedrine that keeps me up all night, but the DXM alone makes me spacey. Last year was the first time I ever took cough suppressants, and I really went on a spree—I believe I referred to myself around that time as "swilling" cough syrup. So if indeed the DXM was in some way responsible for my spaciness, it's no surprise that it took me weeks to get over its effects.

If I can avoid labyrinthitis (or whatever that weird feeling is) just by avoiding cough suppressants, I'm all for it. I hear honey is just as effective. But I'll have to wait until the next time I get a cold to find out...and if I never get another cold again, I won't mind missing out on that learning experience.

Compare and despair

Since I've been shopping for houses, I've never been more aware of how little your money can buy around the DC area. Thinking back on the house that I spent my childhood in, I realize now that it was a mansion. It had 3 regular bedrooms, plus a master bedroom with 2 closets and 2 sinks, 2 additional bathrooms, a "mud room", a huge kitchen with room for an island counter AND a kitchen table, a family room, a parlor, a foyer, a dining room, and a library! Don't even get me started on the 2-car garage, the semi-finished storage space above that, and the attic and basement we never bothered to do anything with because the rest of the house was plenty big enough, thank you very much! Oh, and it was brand new when we moved in. In my old home, I never would have had to worry about spilling out of my space.

I bet my parents spent less on that house than I am likely to spend on 2 or 3 dinky bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a cramped kitchen without even enough space for a table, a living room, and, if I'm lucky, a basement which has been clumsily converted into a living space, all in about a third the square footage. The houses that I'm looking at, the ones I'm preparing to blow my entire life savings on, are decrepit old things, built 60 - 70 years ago and sized for, uh, coziness?

What I can find in my price range is invariably run-down or sloppily repaired. Part of me likes the idea of buying a fixer-upper, because it means I can put my own stamp on it, but part of me cringes at the thought of dropping a fortune on a house and then continuing to drop small fortunes over the course of years, to make it into a home.

So that you can see what I'm working with, consider the last house I looked at. This house has been the best prospect in a long string of houses I've visited. Yet, before I would consider it up to snuff, I'd have to:

• Renovate a bathroom
• Add a driveway
• Fix a leak in the basement
• Add attic flooring (this could be as simple as a few sheets of plywood, but currently it lacks even that) 
• Enlarge two windows
• Rearrange some walls
• Add flooring and kitchen appliances in the basement

The last three in that list are just to make a livable space in the basement, which is a necessity in order for me to have renters, which are a necessity in order for me to be able to afford the house in the first place.

And then, within a few years, I'd have to:

• Replace the carpets
• Refinish the deck
• Replace the air conditioner
• Replace or repair half the windows

And this, let me remind you, was the only house I considered good enough to even consider twice. Sometimes I wonder whether home ownership is a reasonable goal. Sometimes I'm just too morose to even feel like finishing

Architectural deja vu

I went to look at more houses today. Four in a row, in fact (after which, I decided that for my sanity and for my ability to actually make a good decision about buying a house, I probably should not go visit so many in a row, because now I can't remember which one had the bar in the basement and which one had the sump pump and which one didn't have a shed and, well, you get the picture. In related news, I've also decided I'm going to start making videos of my walkthroughs, so I don't have to rely on my goldfish-like memory).

One of the things that struck me during this marathon visitation session was how so many of the floorplans look exactly like those of houses I've lived in. Sure, I guess there are only so many ways you can lay out a rectangular space, but it did serve to remind me just how many houses I've lived in.

From 2005 to 2010, I went on a veritable housing binge, starting when I moved to Maryland and set up residence at 9741 Narragansett Parkway (Two weeks ago, I visited a house laid out just like that one, right down to the weird alcove above the water meter in the basement).

I stayed there until June of 2006, when I started living alternately in an apartment in Greenbelt and a luxury condo in Falls Church (each one was convenient to one of my two jobs at the time).

Pretty soon, I had given up Falls Church, and in January of 2007, I moved back into College Park, into a group home at, uh, something-or-other 53rd Ave? One of the houses I looked at today had the same floor plan.

I had another six-month residency there and then I moved two streets over, to 51st Ave., where, again, I forget the address, even though I stayed there for a whole year this time. The layout of that house was eerily similar to my maternal grandparents' house back in Toledo.

The next house I moved into (with all my housemates from the previous house) was right next door, in July of 2008. It also had the exact same layout as the last house, plus an extension! And there I stayed for over two years, until finally I couldn't bear my slovenly housemates any more and decided I needed to take control of my living situation.

The house I moved into in 2010 ended my house-a-year average, as I haven't yet left it. It is the most distinctive of all the houses I've lived in, in that I've never seen its shadow in any other house I've toured. That alone is enough to think maybe I'm wrong in trying to move out... but nah, now I'm committed.

If I keep shopping for houses in North College Park, I'm almost certain to end up either on a street I've already lived on or in a house just like a house I've already lived in. And that is my new goal in life.

Much Ado Over Due

Like many people who speak English, I say "due to" a lot.
Recently, for example, on my eBay listings, I added a note: "Due to the Christmas holiday, handling time on this item may be extended." According to grammarians, this is an incorrect usage.

The phrase "due to" (or, specifically, "due") is an adjective, and adjectives describe nouns, not entire sentences. So I would be correct in saying "The extended handling time on this item is due to the Christmas holiday" (in which sentence "due" describes the "handling time"). But saying "Handling time is extended due to the Christmas holiday" is casting "due to" as an adverbial phrase (like "because of"), and if you want "due" to become an adverb, you spell it "duly".

So what to do?

I first learned this little intricacy of English (much to my astonishment and puzzlement — it took me forever to comprehend why the common usage is wrong) thanks to Claire Kehrwald Cook (who neglected to clarify whether using "thanks to" in this format is equally wrong) in her book, Line By Line: How to Improve Your Own Writing, back when I was still studying for my master's degree. In this book, Cook explains that while most grammar guides advise against using "due to" as an adverb, hardly anyone actually cares.

So I (and you—come on, I know you like to start sentences with "due to" too!) am off the hook. Except for that little anal-retentive part of me that makes horrified faces at the other part of me whenever it tries to get away with this usage. Being your own worst critic is so much more uncomfortable than having hordes of hecklers.

Until next time, fellow language lovers, I'll be around somewhere, self-flagellating. You can say I'm doing it due to guilt.

*Editor's note: I wrote this post in January of 2013 and then promptly lost it until today, when I happened to notice the "drafts" tab in my blogger settings. So, while you might be wondering why I would be talking about the Christmas holidays in June, now you know. And if you were wondering whether I still say "due to," let me put the answer this way. If someone were assert that I don't say "due to" any more, I would have to respond, "I do, too."

But I still can't stop thinking about it, usually trying to replace the incorrect phrase with something else, unless the resulting sentence becomes too clumsy.

Beach Bummer

I went to the beach last weekend. People really love beaches. Supposedly, the epitome of a good holiday is to be lounging on the beach with a drink in your hand and your toes in the sand. Thus, is it heresy to say that I really don't like the beach? I used to. Family vacations in tropical locales were mostly spent splashing in the waves for hours on end, and I never seemed to grow tired of it. However, my modern adult mindset brings a new perspective. 

With my pasty-pale skin and propensity towards burns, I really wasn't built for long hours in the sun. When I was young, I didn't need to worry about cancer or wrinkles. A sunburn would hurt, but it would fade and leave me with a tan to be proud of! Now that I'm well aware that sun damage is forever, I have to be oh-so-much-more careful. 

To survive a day at the beach, I have to make a choice between two evils: to slather myself with sunscreen, or to bundle up like a bedouin. The former option leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth (usually figuratively, but sometimes literally) because sunscreen is just plain gross. It's sticky. I can feel it resting on top of my skin like an oil slick—even the oil-free varieties. If I put it on my scalp, it makes my hair stringy. If I put it on my face, it gives me zits. 

But if I choose to forgo sunscreen, I have to protect my skin some other way, usually with clothing. Yet I look forward to summer all year so I no longer have to wear confining winter clothes! To have to cover up from head to toe to shield myself from the summer sun seems like the cruelest irony!

To avoid the necessity of sunscreen, I've become quite fond of using a parasol when walking from place to place, but that becomes less effective when at the beach, where wind speeds are so high. And trying to keep a sun hat on my head in those conditions? Forget about it!

So half the fun of the beach has been sucked away by the necessity of skin protection, but my distaste for beach-going goes far beyond the ravages of ultraviolet light.

There's also the simple matter of endless discomfort. You're either too hot or too wind-blown, and you're getting covered with sand no matter what you do. Half your mind is staying vigilant to ensure that no part of your body has accidentally slipped out of the shade. But the other half of your mind is likely feeling bored, sitting around with nothing to do. Sure, you can read at the beach and enjoy the sounds of the waves and the birds...but you can also read at home and be a lot more comfortable.

If you're getting restless loafing on the sand, you can always go into the water, which brings up a whole host of new problems. It's cold! It's the ocean, after all, and it's never fun to get into. You get used to the water temperature after a while, but you never get used to stepping on broken seashells. Or squishy anemones. Or a jellyfish! (This has never happened to me—knock on wood).

I'll admit that playing in the waves can be kind of fun – for maybe 20 minutes! – but the price of that fun is a swimsuit full of sand. Even if you don't get driven butt-first into the ocean floor by an unexpected breaker (and good luck avoiding that!), you still somehow end up with sand embedded into your suit. Swimsuits are like flytraps for sand—once that stuff gets in, it never comes out again.

So passes the 20 minutes of fun. You then leave the water, your hair is a godawful mess, your bottom is dragging with the weight of ten thousand grains of silica, all your repulsive sunscreen has washed off and been replaced by a film of salt, and you're about to get the sunburn of your life. The end.

Epilogue: Can someone please tell me where's the fun in that?

Making Space

Recently trying to clean up my sinkhole of a closet combined with my ever-disheartening search for a house have combined to bring you this blog post.

One of the biggest limitations in my housing search is the amount of storage space I require. I would happily live in a condo, never to mow a lawn or pluck a weed again in my life, except, compared to houses, condos offer around half the space for the same price. After looking at a couple houses and a couple condos, I am pretty certain I could not live in anything less than 800 square feet—and even that would be pushing it.

I don't want to be so high-maintenance. I care little about luxury, and I'm kind of embarrassed that I demand the equivalent of a penthouse suite for my day-to-day living. It's just that, between my boyfriend and I, we have a lot of gear. Way more gear than could ever fit into an apartment.

Originally, I was going to list all the things I own that contribute to my clutter, but that would take up almost as much space in my blog as it does in my home, so I'm going to practice the art of efficiency. The only thing that's important is how much space they take up (beyond  a few bookshelves and the cabinets and closets that come standard in any home), and that is as follows:

• 2 standalone wardrobes
• The area under my loft bed
• A corner of the basement
• A quarter of the shed outside
• Under the front porch
• The area around the access door to the attic

With my stuff scattered about the entire property like this, I feel like I need tons of storage space, but when I actually got out my tape measure and did the math, I could only account for about 600 square feet of living space and (very approximately) 200 additional square feet of storage space in use. 

In addition, there are plenty of things I own that I don't really need. If I were to vacate the premises, I'm pretty sure I could leave these behind without many regrets:

• My dining table (pretty much spends all the time with the chairs stacked up on top of it anyway)
• My soap-and-candle-making supplies (I'm pretty sure I won't want to invest in another block of glycerin once the ones I have are used up)
• My airbrush (I love it, but when you use it only once a year, you begin to wonder if you couldn't just make do with spatter-painting when needed)
• My holiday decorations and huge tub of Christmas lights (nice to have for parties, but really, who likes stringing up Christmas lights anyway? And wouldn't it be better not to waste all that electricity?)
• My stockpile of containers (these take up a couple of 13-gallon tubs and a small bookcase. It's ironic that I require storage for storage, but you never know when a sturdy box or a lidded tin will come in handy! Nonetheless, in good time, and by the grace of Freecycle, all things come, empty containers being no exception)
• My large collection of gardening supplies (kind of moot if you don't have a garden)
• My exercise bike (it's a pretty regular part of my life in the winter, but many buildings have a gym, and I'd probably get more bang from my workout buck if I took up running, which requires no equipment whatsoever)

So could I actually downsize? Well, there are many other reasons not to live in a condo, foremost among them being fees, but the lack of bike storage coming in a close second. If, however, the price was right, and I could find a place to keep our bikes that wouldn't make me hate my life, I might survive. It's a scary thought, but if ever I still haven't bought a home and my housemates decide to move out, I might try to move out, too, into an apartment...just to see if I could do it.

Rants and Raves

My last post on the things I love and the things I could live without was in September. Today, seven months later, I have another 7 of each.

Rants

People leaving toilet paper on the seat

I get it. You want to be hygienic, so you cover the seat with toilet paper before you sit your skin on it. I think you're being a little paranoid, but you have that right, if you insist. But are you so hygienic that you can't even pick up and flush the toilet paper that your own butt sat on, after you are done? You have to leave it for someone else to touch? Where's the hygienic in that?

Loud sudden noises 

My propensity for worming my way to the front row at concerts indicates that I don't really mind loud noises (the ringing in my ears afterwards indicates that maybe I should), but sudden noises are another matter entirely. They don't even have to be that loud, but if they are unexpected, unintended, and especially if they are inadvertently caused by myself, I just can't abide them. For example, there is something about glass plates crashing together when I'm putting away dishes that instantly trips my rage trigger.

People spitting on the sidewalk

Do I really need to expound on this one? That's just gross.

Satire "news"

This one has really only come into being since certain people started taking everything amusing they find online and posting it on Facebook. One thing that turns up there fairly regularly is some "news" story or other from an outlet like The Onion. These are completely fabricated stories that are supposed to be "funny." Except that usually they're not. And sometimes, they are right difficult to distinguish from a real story. I don't really have any legitimate reason for hating these stories, but I do. And sometimes lists of things that annoy me just have to contain things that annoy me. So there.

When my housemates cook bacon. And turkey.

Gosh, that stuff stinks up the whole house.

Syncopated traffic

You know what I mean by this? It's when you're waiting to cross a street and the cars just keep coming from your left. So many cars! Coming from your left. Finally they stop coming from the left, and you look to your right, ready to finally cross the road, and there's a new  whole line of cars coming from the right! This might be the world's worst form of teasing.

Feedback beggars on eBay

I buy and sell a lot on eBay, so I interact with all sorts of people on the site. By far the most annoying people that I've encountered are the buyers who message me shortly after I've sold them something, begging for positive feedback. I, like many sellers on eBay, think the buyer feedback system is a sham (you are not allowed to leave a buyer negative feedback), so leaving feedback after a sale is not very high on my priority list. Nonetheless, I do do it. Eventually. Maybe a month or two later, depending on how motivated I am. I just don't understand why so many buyers are so anxious to get their feedback right now! Patience is a virtue, and begging is not.

Raves

The smell of wet dirt 

I used to love thunderstorms. Living in a neighborhood where limbs fall on houses and the power goes out every time there's a gust of wind has kind of mitigated that love somewhat, but I still enjoy the rain's aftermath—the musty smell that seeps up from the soggy earth. It smells so fresh and clean! You can get this same olfactory pleasure from watering your houseplants, which makes it a very cheap thrill!

Being drunk

And now for a not-so-cheap thrill! It took me a long while to appreciate the benefits of alcohol consumption. I was a hard-core teetotaler until 2006, and was still pretty reluctant to drink the stuff for a good six years beyond that, but time and peer pressure slowly converted me. Turns out it's a lot less obnoxious being drunk than it is being sober around other people who are drunk—in fact, it's downright fun. And considering that a glass or two significantly relieves my crippling social anxiety, I don't feel bad at all that I have crossed over to the dark side...except sometimes the next day.

Exploring empty houses

When I was young, I lived in neighborhoods where new homes were being constructed left and right, and on the weekends you could waltz into any number of them in varying degrees of completion, walking through their skeletons, stomping around in the gravel beds that would one day be their basements, climbing their stairs without banisters, and standing on the second floor looking straight up into the sky. Nowadays, thanks to my (sort of stalled) search for a permanent home, I mostly find myself walking through completely constructed homes, but they are no less interesting. It's fascinating to open doors, discover all their nooks and crannies and little quirks, and imagine what it would be like to live there. Searching for homes is stressful, but touring homes never tires me.

Fitted sheets

So underappreciated are fitted sheets. People seem to get hung up on the conundrum of how to fold them (solution: roll them into a ball and stuff them in a drawer!) but can you imagine how life would be without them? Somehow trying to tuck a flat sheet under your mattress and have it actually stay there? Fitted sheets, your shape may be ungainly, but you will forever have my admiration!

Drush

The other day, I walked into my coworker's office and announced, "I hate working on a command line." Well, I take it partially back. One of my favorite tools for Web development is Drush, which allows you to do many of the management tasks for a Drupal website on a command line! At first, I was a little leery of it, but now that I actually know some commands, it makes everything so amazingly fast! I'm not much of one for graphic T-shirts, but if someone gives me a shirt that says "I heart Drush," I will wear it.

Warm weather

Well, here's a shocker for you. After numerous posts complaining about the cold, this time I'm going to flip the script and rhapsodize about the warmth. Every spring, there are a few days where the temperature suddenly rises from frigid forties to sunny sixties, and during those days, my heart is as buoyant as the pollen. As a bonus, I am one of what seems like only 3 people in the DC area who doesn't suffer from spring allergies...so there is no downside to this upshot!

The distant sound of lawnmowers

Since I love spring and summer so much, it should be no surprise to you that I get a little lift from a sound that goes hand-in-hand with them—lawnmowers! Mind you, now, I don't feel this same ebullience when walking behind a mower (I could write a whole post on how much I dislike mowing the lawn), but the sound and what it signifies are music to my soul.

Obsessed with the weather

I began to suspect I might be a little bit obsessed with the weather just about a month ago, when, whenever someone would make any kind of comment or passing speculation on it, I would respond instantly with a detailed forecast for the next two days, and usually state the current temperature to the exact degree.

I never for a minute think this indicates I should have gone for a career in meteorology. However, I do think it's a useful obsession to have, for all it stems from a comparably un-useful curse.

What curse, you ask? Well, the curse of my almost complete inability to maintain a consistent body temperature. I feel this makes me a rare breed, like some kind of magical unicorn of thermoregulation.

Some people are always hot. I feel a little sorry for them in the summer, but at least they're consistent. Some people are always cold. This was me until a few years ago, and, while I don't miss those days at all, it was predictable at least, to know that I was never going to get overheated no matter what I did.

Now, my comfort zone is all across the board.

Once again, they turned off the heat in our building as soon as it hit 70 degrees outside for one day, leaving us poor souls shivering in our shoes now that the temperatures have returned to April normal. The rest of my coworkers are handling it all right, though complaining. I, on the other hand, am running a space heater all day, wearing fingerless gloves, and still feeling miserable. I don't start getting warm until midafternoon, when all of a sudden my torso is sweltering in my blazer, while meanwhile my fingers are still sticks of ice.

On the other hand, while 65 degrees in the office is like 8 straight hours of torture by ice, just let me walk outside in the same temperature for 10 minutes, and I'll be stripping off layers like I'm in a sauna. Any small amount of exercise usually heats me up to uncomfortable levels—hence my careful choice of biking clothes—but all the same, my nose is still running and my hands are still frozen.

I live for the days when it hits 80 outside (about the only days when it's warm enough for me to wear sandals), but come 86, and I start feeling lightheaded.

When we ride together in the car in winter, my boyfriend and I both love to crank the heat way up, but while he can survive the whole ride in his puffer jacket without any sign of discomfort, I am always having to remove my coat and gloves (and subsequently losing them) after only a few miles. But then comes springtime, when all of a sudden he wants to drive with the window open. Naturally he's fine with the breeze, but it is enough to turn me into a blue-lipped popsicle.

I have calculated (by a scientific process of wild guessing) that I have a temperature comfort zone of approximately 5 degrees Fahrenheit...but that zone shifts by 15 degrees or more depending on what I'm doing, what I'm wearing, and whether it's sunny or windy.  Unsurprisingly, this means that I'm rarely comfortable. But it also means that I always make an effort to prepare for whatever climate I'm going to be in—and in the spring or fall when the climate is so unpredictable, that often means checking the temperature and forecast dozens of times a day.

I might be a slave to the thermometer, but it does have its upside. At least for my friends and companions, who can be confident that, no matter where we are or when it is, if they ask me, I will have a weather forecast ready for them.

Savings

I have a reputation for extreme thriftiness, but since Hansel's expensive accident, I have been making an extra effort to save money, which has of course gotten me thinking about all the ways I conserve my cash on a regular basis. Here are some thrifty tips that I hope you can benefit from too!

Target:

The Target Redcard is a credit card that allows me to save 5% on every purchase at Target. I don't know of any other store that offers such a consistent discount on their store card, and since Target usually has the best prices on everything, and I shop there regularly, it is pretty much a no-brainer. Those leery of holding another credit card can also opt for a Target debit card, I'm told. I am also a member of the Cartwheel club, which basically allows me to select coupons for a variety of products, usually the Target store brand, for a trifling discount (usually 5 percent). Plus, I have Target Pharmacy Rewards, which gives you a gift card after 5 prescriptions filled at the pharmacy. These loyalty programs aren't worth much—in the year and a half I've been a member of Cartwheel and Pharmacy Rewards, I've saved about 30 dollars, but every little bit helps!

Discover Card and Bank

All credit cards offer rewards these days, but my favorite is Discover Card, which offers a 1% Cash Back Bonus on every purchase. You can sign up for additional bonuses every quarter (if you remember, which I usually don't). Additionally, I have Discover Bank checking and savings accounts, which offer their own perks. I get a pretty darn good interest rate on the savings account, and a 10¢ Cash Back Bonus on every debit card purchase through the checking account. So I use my Discover debit card to make all my small purchases under 10 dollars. The only downside is that a lot of businesses don't accept Discover, so sometimes I'm stuck using my regular Capital One debit card or cash, which offer no bonuses at all!

Gift cards

 Last year, I learned that you could buy gift cards at several online marketplaces for a discounted price—I always start at Gift Card Granny, which scours all the gift card sites so you can find the best discount. I buy gift cards for all the stores I shop at frequently—Home Depot gift cards at about 8% off (for all my hardware, home improvement, and occasionally artistic needs), Joann Fabrics cards for around 15% off (for the rest of my artistic needs), and various clothing store cards at 10-30% off (for all my fashion needs!) are my favorites. And if I use my Discover card to purchase the gift cards, I get my Cash Back plus the discount on the cards!

Reward Points

In my free time (when I'm too lazy to be artsy or active), I try to fill it with brainless activities that also reap rewards. I'll fill out surveys for any number of companies. If you qualify, you spend a few minutes answering easy questions, and at the end of the survey, you earn points which you can redeem for prizes or cash cards. Sometimes the surveys can be painfully tedious, and it can be very frustrating when you submit a whole series of screeners only to find you don't qualify to complete any of the full surveys. But every once in a while, you'll hit the jackpot and get invited to participate in a product trial (a few months ago, I got 6 free cans of Diet Pepsi to try out and review, and I got compensated for it!). The points don't add up fast (I'd say I earn about a 25 dollar gift card from each company once a year, when I'm participating a few times a week), but it's easy to earn a few pennies instead of loafing around watching TV or playing computer games, so why not? If you're going to get into the survey-taking business, steer clear of the companies that only offer sweepstakes entries as a reward—you want a guaranteed compensation. My favorite is Ipsos i-Say, which usually gives you a few points just for trying, even if you don't qualify for the full survey.

Hand-me-downs

 If you have the time to wait, you can get almost everything you need for free secondhand. My couch (yes, the sagging disaster) was free. My guest bed, comforter, and one of its sheet sets were free. My toolbox (to replace the one I got as a gift at age 16) was free. Two of my nicest coats were free. A significant portion of my clothing was free. My dining table was free. Bike rack—free. Wardrobe—free. Dresser—free! Bookcase, bed, doormat—all free! The list goes on and on. How do I get all these good deals? Mostly from Freecycle, a network of local people who give away the old things they don't want any more. But also, because I have a reputation as a scavenger, other people I know who are not Freecyclers also give away their old things to me. When you're not paying a red cent for most of your possessions, you don't always get the cream of the crop, nor all the features you want, nor the best matched collection of anything, but you do get a lot more money to spend on the things you are particular about!

These things really only scratch the surface of my obsession with saving money, but they are some of the simplest websites and groups anyone can join, put in minimal effort, and reap the benefits! Happy Penny Pinching!

Sticky Fingers sandwich cookie

I ate my first cookie from Sticky Fingers way back in 2011, just a little before I began reviewing Giant Cookies. It's taken me four years, but I'm finally getting around to writing up this vegan cookie from a DC eatery.

I want to love it and love a local business in the process, but sadly, I find it kind of lacking in flavor. Fortunately, this is not just any cookie—it is a sandwich cookie, meaning it's filled with decadent vanilla frosting that amps up the experience a bit. It also has a dash of saltiness here and there, making it a bit less boring.

The cookie itself is made with oats, which I always love for the texture they impart—this cookie is no exception, being good and chewy, and mostly passing the Crumble Test, although I lost some tiny bits of cookie here and there. Eating a sandwich cookie is never simple, apparently.

As for price, well, that's probably the worst aspect of this cookie.

It weighs 135 g (not much more than your standard single-layer Giant Cookie), but costs $3.25 (according to the Sticky Fingers website since I don't have a receipt to verify), adding up to 2.41¢ per gram.

The Bottom Line

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A series of unfortunate events

It has been a very unlucky fortnight for me, so this is one of those posts where I entertain my desire to just vent.

It started months ago, when the power jack on my laptop started to go bad. It only costs 3 dollars for a replacement jack on eBay, so I could even fix it myself...but...have you ever tried to open up an Asus laptop? Hahahaha—just replacing a hard drive took my boyfriend nearly a half hour with all the screws, panels, and wires he had to move out of the way. Getting at a component like the power jack would be even more work (and may require soldering, which I've never gotten the hang of), so I decided that, for once, I would just leave the job to the professionals. Last Friday, I called my neighborhood computer shop, got an estimate for 100 dollars, and planned to bring it in on Monday, as soon as I had posted all the photos from my Iceland trip.

Last weekend started off on a great foot. My boyfriend and I went to look at a couple of houses for sale, and after the visits, I was seriously considering making an offer on one of them, when all of a sudden disaster struck. We were driving to meet a friend in DC when we got in a small car accident. Small, but destructive! A big dent was punched into my poor Korg's right front side, and the headlight and grill were completely knocked off. Since the accident was our fault, we are responsible for all the repairs, which add up to...I don't know yet, but I'm sure it won't be pleasant!

Already I was thinking maybe this was a sign it wasn't the right time to buy a house, when, the next day, my rabbit got into a high-speed chase with a couple of dogs and somehow managed to break his leg (the day before Easter, poor bunny!). Not many vets work on rabbits, and none do orthopedics on rabbits, so the cost of rebuilding him was astronomical. All last week, I was dropping tidy sums left and right on his medical care. As of today, he's cost me $4,231.37 and still rising. I'm calling him the Six Million Dollar Bunny, but I really hope he doesn't come to that.

The fun didn't stop there, though. Last night, on the way home from the Cherry Blossom Festival, I somehow misplaced my phone (I say "somehow" like this doesn't happen every couple days—but this time, I wasn't able to recover it). I am nearly certain that I left it in the Uber car, but all attempts to call the phone, leave a message on it, and contact the driver failed. When I got home, I was able to trace its location to George Mason University (not anywhere near where I had been), so I'm confident that the driver had it and was ignoring our desperate pleas to get it back. So now my faith in humanity is shaken AND I'm out 200 more dollars! And I'm definitely never using Uber for all my transportation needs.

My boyfriend keeps telling me it will get better in the future, but every time he tells me that, another bad thing happens, so this time, I'm sticking faithfully to pessimism. The world sucks and I will never be happy again!!

Cosi white chocolate walnut cookies

If you remember all the way back to my first Giant Cookie Review, Cosi's white chocolate macadamia nut cookies were my ultimate favorite—pretty much the reason I started Giant Cookie Reviewing in the first place!

I kind of lost interest in them after a few years, though, when they replaced my beloved macadamia nuts with walnuts. I do enjoy walnuts in cookies, but they just can't compare to the crisp, splintering crunch of a macadamia nut.

However, a Giant Cookie Reviewer must not leave any cookie unreviewed, regardless of her feelings about walnuts, so I decided to take one for the team and give the white chocolate walnut cookies another try.

They were a little dryer than I remember, but basically the same soft-all-the-way-through texture.

The flavor didn't grab me, though, like it used to. Walnut just goes better with dark chocolate.

Usually when I re-review cookies years later, price is the area that's deteriorated the most. These cookies were $1.99 each and 105 grams, so I'm pleased to say that if anything, their value has improved since my last Cosi cookie review, because there was slightly more mass to the cookie, but the price hadn't changed. However, at 1.89¢ a gram, they are still within the 2-star range.

The Bottom Line

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Anger Management Fund Annual Report

Have you been wondering how my Anger Management Fund is doing? You should be; it's been over a year since I last mentioned it! Since the purchases I make with the Anger Management Fund are pretty much always clothing and accessories, I've been wanting to wait until I've actually used them and gotten a photo before blogging about them. But (I guess because they're generally also frivolous purchases of non-essential items with limited use), most of them are still sitting around unused. And since the list is getting pretty long and I'd like to pare it down, I might as well share its status.

Two and a half years after establishment, it's still doing its intended job. Not all the time—sometimes you just need to have a major conniption (like when you just drove 4 hours home from a weekend trip and all you want to do is relax, but instead you've found out that your robotic vacuum cleaner somehow shut itself down a mere foot from its base, apparently because it ran over its own power strip and turned it off, and thus utterly failed to make it into your bedroom, which is consequently still covered with dog fur and crumbs, which just reminds you of how the dog got into your food while you were at a rest stop and chewed up a nasty pastrami sandwich all over your coat, which is also, incidentally, covered with dog fur and now crumbs, and you still have to pull the laundry from the basement because you didn't have time to finish it before you left, and the kitchen, which was never tidy to begin with, now looks like a war zone because your boyfriend has decided that, instead of putting the recyclables in the recycle bin, which you just went through a lot of effort to empty after also cleaning your rabbit's cage, because heaven forbid that something could actually be clean and ready to use when you get home, he will scatter the recyclables all over the kitchen to supposedly recycle at some undisclosed point in the future!)

But for other, littler things, getting a few bucks as a consolation prize does help me calm down. I've been keeping a tally of what these little things are, and they are mostly minor annoyances that belong, essentially, to just 2 categories: Forgetting/losing things, and Minor accidents to my person/possessions.

Observe: From the summer of 2013 to the summer of 2014, I accumulated 5-dollar credits for each of the following annoying events (I also had a few odd bucks left over from my last Fund expenditures):

• For just missing the train and having to wait 10 minutes for the next one and being about 30 minutes late to my destination.
• For having to drive all the way home from halfway to the store to get a gift card I thought I'd left behind, only to find it stuck to the back of the cell phone I had taken with me.
• For walking into walls all day.
• For putting my phone on the charger all night before a trip only to find that the charger hadn't been plugged in.
• For leaving my bike basket and my cabbage in New Jersey.
• For forgetting to pick up bunny food from the grocery store.
• For the air bag light going on again a week after I took the car to the shop, after having gone off right before taking the car to the shop.
• For having to stop for traffic 6 times on my ride to work when usually it's only once.
• For wearing only high heels to walk to the bus (when usually I wear sneakers) on the one day the bus was early (thus missing the bus because I couldn't move fast enough).
• For spilling my cookies all over the floor and then finding my potted plant had spilled all over my bag and then spilling the dirt all over the floor while trying to clean it up.
• For one dress ruining itself and another dress in the washer thanks to dye transfer, when I'd never even gotten to wear the other dress, since I had spilled oil on it within 15 minutes of putting it on for the first time, and had spent the last three days patiently removing the oil stain.

And for all these tribulations, I bought myself:

This wild-looking swimsuit for $19.39. I have worn it, but only for a 30-minute jaunt in a hot tub. http://www.dresslily.com/solid-color-bikini-swimming-suit-product358218.html
 

A pair of fun fun fun thigh-high socks with rainbow on the top, for 5 dollars. Unfortunately, rainbow thigh-highs have proved the most unwearable accessory I've ever owned, since you can't wear thigh-highs to a rave (they'll fall down with all the dancing) but they're too crazy to wear anywhere else!
 

A hilarious crop top with cat and galaxy print for $12.05. It's pretty much the embodiment of tackiness, and I do have every intention of wearing this one to a rave. http://www.romwe.com/ROMWE-Galaxy-Cat-Print-Sleeveless-Black-T-shirt-p-79889-cat-669.html
 

This rainbow-colored, ultra-embellished, cat-covered (of course) hippie shoulder bag from a store in Pittsburgh, for 18 dollars. Fortunately, I don't have any trepidations about carrying crazy purses, so this one will probably be gracing my shoulder for the entire month of April!

As of today, the fund is still up 75 dollars and I'm feeling pretty happy. You hear that, fate? No more sending trouble my way, because I've had enough in the past to last me at least a few more purchases!

Sassy ginger molasses sandwich cookie

Sassy indeed.

This ginger cookie was one of the sandwich cookies I bought when I discovered the new brand at my local organic grocery store, and like its chocolate sibling, the force was strong with this one. And by "the force," I mean the taste of ginger.

If you've ever eaten a mouthful of powdered ginger before, well, that's kind of how it felt eating this cookie. Not very sweet, but very strong. And even a little salty. At least it was not too spicy in the painful way. After a few bites, I got used to the flavor, especially because the lemon filling was delicious. Although it didn't taste much like lemon, it was still the high point of this cookie, being rich, creamy, and satisfyingly solid around the edges.

The texture of the treat as a whole, however, was another story. It was annoyingly crumbly, falling apart all over its package before I even opened it. The softness of the filling filling kind of made up for the excessive dryness of the baked part—if only this cookie had been all filling, I would have loved it! But it was not. It was too messy to eat in the normal way; after a few bites, I put it on a plate and finished it with a fork. That, however, made even the icing crumble! Perhaps I'll give it another chance later, since I ate it 2 days after its sell-by date.

The Bottom Line

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