Nut: the other dead meat

So, Tuesday was my birthday (woot!) and I told my bf that for my bday I wanted to go to the San Joaquin Valley, someplace I'd never been before.

The reason for this choice was almonds. See last year the California Almond Board decided that raw almonds should be pasteurized, BUT they don't need to be labeled as pasteurized. So you go to the store, pick up a package of raw California almonds (and more almonds come from California than anywhere else in the world) or maybe some raw almond butter or something like that and you think you're getting all these livings enzymes in a live, raw food, but because they don't have to LABEL these pasteurized almonds, you are unknowingly purchasing dead almonds instead.

So I found a farm in the San Joaquin Valley that lets you purchase raw almonds directly from them (but no shipping allowed, you have to come and get them) and we booked a B&B room right above a wine tasting room and made plans to follow the San Joaquin "Fruit Trail" and I was really looking forward to coming home with a car full of fruit and almonds.

This was not meant to be, because the almonds are still being harvested right now on that farm, so they aren't quite ready. Also, the "Fruit Trail" is kind of a joke...I'd say you're better off at the local farmer's market (although I did have an AMAZING peach from Sanger, CA. this morning) and the B&B was a little weird with the owner (who when we first met her launched into a tirade about how dumb organic farming and biodynamics are and how the guy with the grapes at the next vineyard over should spray his crops but he doesn't because he's a jerk and he doesn't care) seemingly poking around in our room while we were out to dinner. (She also seemed distressed that we were actually "hanging around" until the official checkout time of 11am, and after ascertaining that we are completely vegan and eat no meat, cheese, eggs or anything like that suggested we go to a pizza place or another restaurant that makes cheese ravioli.)

So that was my birthday. I'm not complaining, though. I got to take a road trip (woo hoo!) to someplace I've never been before AND spend over 30 continuous hours almost totally uninterrupted by phone calls, emails, or anything like that with my bf (okay, so we cheated a little, he checked work email a few times, I paid some sales transactions and sent a few emails myself...but for US we were amazingly unconnected.) Who cares where we go or what we do? Oh, and I did get a 25 pound bag of oranges, some fresh figs and some dried nectarines, and we finished off our trip at our favorite wine bar and then we even went and had a papusa.

I'm now going to be looking for raw almonds at farmer's markets or maybe with a group buy or "tree share" through localforage.com

Tomorrow maybe I'll tell you all about who can go to hell!

Happy/Sad - an informal poll

Okay, check out the sort of crappy picture I took above from the book "Building Mental Muscle" and please let me know, either in comments or by emailing me at jinx.tv@gmail.com which face looks happy to you and which looks sad. The pic is driving me crazy.

Thanks!

People who steal money in There.com

Y'know, I like a lot of things about IMVU. One of those things is the fact that they work WITH trusted IMVU credits resellers to catch scammers, which makes sense because if they steal from IMVU, they are likely to turn around and steal from members reselling their currency, and if they steal from members, they are likely to use their same credit cards/mommy's credit cards, ex-spouse's credit card or whatever on IMVU directly as well. So everyone works together to prevent fraud, and it usually works pretty well, although there are certainly some people in IMVU trying hard to create that fraud in the first place. I recover probably 70% of all scammed credits.

There.com is better in some ways because it's more of a sense of a close knit community, and scammers are somewhat more rare. I have had a number of occasions where I have had PayPal chargebacks and people have jumped through crazy hoops to fix the credit card problem or whatever it was to make sure everything was alright. One unfortunate young woman found herself in the situation of owing me 2 million ThereBucks and actually spent about two months paying me painstakingly raising the funds and paying me back ThereBuck by ThereBuck. You see someone who belongs to a bunch of clubs, owns a neighborhood, has a bunch of buddies and you think "this person must be alright!" and usually, they are.

This is fortunate because There has a total hands-off policy toward theft. You steal from me, you make a chargeback against me, and There could really give a rat's ass. Oh, they're happy if I want to let them know about someone that I think is trying to sell ME stolen Therebucks...they're happy to come in, take the stolen Therebucks out of my account and say "thanks so much!" But when the table is turned they're like "sorry, it's our policy to sit here with our thumbs up our asses." A policy which seems strange to me simply because it is sooooo different from IMVU's policy, and yet both places have the same roots. How did they turn out so differently?

So, it's usually not much of a problem at There, but lately I've seen a disturbing trend of chargebacks. Like in July, there were $140 worth of chargebacks from Matt_Tobin and Sarah_G. As far as I can tell, Sarah_G isn't even a real person, just an alt avie for Matt_Tobin, and Matt_Tobin doesn't receive WhereMail and uses a dummy address. So who IS this guy who stole $140 from me? Hasn't he been around since 2004? Doesn't he own a neighborhood? Doesn't he have a bunch of buddies and is an active, "respectable" member of the There community? And yet this person joined my club, Jinx_tv_tbux, and then made a series of purchases from me on July 8th at http://jinx.tv and then reversed the transactions only one day later, and EVERY attempt I have made at contact has failed.

Is this what our There community has come to? We can no longer trust even the most involved seeming members?

And...does anyone know how to reach this Matt_Tobin person and why they would do such a thing? (I even heard he did the same thing to tbux.com.)