Excuse: Salsa vs. Sangria

Mondays are normally salsa class night, but this Monday we were naughty, naughty hookey playing, sangria drinking, tapas eating fools! We went to Menlo Park to sit at the bar at Iberia Restaurant and change the television from sports to Spongebob Squarepants when the bartender wasn't looking. It's a nice place. The Yelp reviews call it the closest thing in the Bay Area to being in a tapas bar/restaurant in Spain. If you like weird meat dishes, it's a great place to go, but as a vegetarian I thought it was pretty tasty, too. The sangria was especially good, I'd go back there again just for that.

I realized yesterday (Tuesday) that my bf and I spent nearly 8 hours together Monday evening. That is practically a standard workday! No wonder I don't get much done sometimes. Haha...but c'mon...we have to enjoy life while we can, right?

tbux.com: my story

Recently, I was removed as a member/seller from the site tbux.com. I had been selling ThereBucks there for 3 1/2 years. I was also removed from all the related clubs on There.com. I get tired of secrets and gossip and I thought I'd just talk honestly here about why this happened, at least from my point of view.

Tbux.com has maybe a dozen members...I don't know, recently the numbers changed after being the same for years...and those members have the privledge of listing themselves as selling ThereBucks on the site. Anyone else with ThereBucks to sell can put in a sell request, which generates an email that goes out to all the tbux members (although the email part was broken for quite a while) letting them know someone was selling and they can all race to "claim" the transaction. Whoever claims it first then has the right to email the potential seller and ask them to send the ThereBucks.

In my opinion, this system is very inefficient. Also, smaller sales requests require a lot of work for a very small amount of profit, and it wastes the time of anyone who is trying to claim the request but doesn't get there first. It also wastes the time of the person looking to sell, as they have to wait to see who claims their request to be able to send their ThereBucks somewhere and then receive a PayPal payment.

Honestly, if I were setting up the site I would have just claimed all the sale requests myself, instead of having all the sellers squabble over them or selectively only claim the larger transactions or whatever. Of course, I never would have said that while I was a member of the site, because if that suggestion was actually taken seriously I'd never have been able to claim any requests myself.

Another inefficiency is simply the number of sellers on the site. Recently even more sellers were added, so if you are a member-seller you have to compete with other member-sellers for sales. The more sellers they add, the more they have to compete with each other and the more uneven the sales and the longer it takes each of them to sell out the ThereBucks they have. Also, the site doesn't really tell you how much they are selling or take note when a larger transaction comes in, so they need to build a lot of padding into the amount they are selling or risk not being able to fill the orders received, which is always a hassle.

I don't mean to bash tbux.com. I sold there for over 3 1/2 years and it's been the best thing out there for that whole time and has helped me make a living. I'm only pointing out the flaws that bothered me more and more over time but certainly not enough to leave the site or even really complain about it. Kittenkat runs the site and asks almost nothing from the other members, and it's been great selling there and I think she was really visionary to build it in the first place back in 2003.

Rather than complain about the limitations of the site, I simply tried to adapt. I wanted to claim as many sales requests as possible, so I set up primitive systems to help me claim them before any other tbuxer. I kept a laptop right next to my bed, I set an audible alert for sales emails, and I really never went anywhere or had a life because I didn't want to miss a single sale. Seriously, I was afraid to go to the store and run errands because I didn't want to miss a big sale that might make the difference in whether I could pay rent or bills that month. I bought a treadmill so I could exercise without leaving my apartment. I was obsessed, and I was really good at claiming the sales. My day would be ruined if someone else managed to claim one. And of course, they probably wouldn't bother if it was a smaller transaction, those they would sometimes just leave for me. I never thought that was right and never did it myself until finally I saw Kittenkat herself blatantly do it, so then I decided I was justified in doing it without guilt.

I was pretty miserable having no life, my biggest thrill being claiming sales requests on tbux.com before anyone else, so I decided I needed to automate the process. It took me about a year to find someone to do this for me, but I ended up with a really great system that even might occassionally pass a turing test. I was soooo happy! It wasn't foolproof, this system of mine, because it was still possible for someone else to be there at the right time and claim a request before me, but it did a better job than I did and I could sleep soundly at night or go get my hair done in San Francisco, go on dates, find a boyfriend, work out at a real gym, go away somewhere overnight etc. My quality of life improved about 1000%, and I believe it was better for those selling to me as well, since they didn't have to wait for their transactions to be claimed, or only had to wait maybe 15 minutes no matter what time of night or day.

Okay, so far so good, but obviously things didn't remain that way or I wouldn't be writing this right now. After more than a year of automated bliss, at least one member of the tbux.com site complained that they suspected I was using a bot and it wasn't fair and was in fact immoral. I was contacted and asked that, if I was in fact automating the process, I stop immediately and if I wasn't that I leave some transactions for other members, and eventually an email was sent out to members of the site informing us that using a 'bot was now against the rules. Well, I don't want to break the rules, but I also have gotten quite used to actually having a life, so following this new rule meant to me that...

1. I would either have no life once again, or I would keep my life but lose at least half the money I was making or more from ThereBucks reselling, plus if I go back to the "no life" option I'll probably just look like a 'bot anyway...I'd probably get told to stop claiming so many of them even if it's manually, because other members have decided it's not fair. Too me this is really silly, and it means that each time a sale request came in, I'd have to go to the sale request page and evaluate whether it was appropriate for me to claim that particular request or not. Maybe wait 15 minutes to see if someone else would like to claim it instead so I don't get chastised again. What a big waste of my time! Plus, it's just not...well...who is going to voluntarily take a cut in income like that, especially without a cut in time spent on the activity, at least without a fight? Or...who is going to take a cut in quality of life like that, especially after spending a year trying to automate the process in the first place?

2. I still felt the whole claiming of requests by some random person manually was inefficient, and it seemed like a step back in quality of service for the people that "we" bought from.

So I sent an indignant email back to Kittenkat, not admitting to using a 'bot, but protesting that I hadn't done anything wrong. She still wanted me to stop using the 'bot, so I simply stopped responding to her emails. I didn't know what else to do, and it seemed like the best way to buy time while I set up a new system. Eventually, she kicked me off the tbux.com site, and so I started up my own site...it wasn't really what I wanted to do, the whole thing made me really sad, but it seemed like far and away the best option.

The silver lining is that now I can run a ThereBucks selling site the way *I* want, and fix the little things that have bugged me over the years. I can claim sales requests instantly, I can pay buyers within ten minutes, people can see how much is for sale and I don't sell more than I have. I'm actually starting to get excited about it, because I think it's a good system and people have actually been using it! So thanks, and if you haven't tried it yet, it's at http://jinx.tv/tbux

Well, glad we have that all sorted! Be sure to read the above with the thought that this is just *my* side of the story, and each person involved is sure to have their own version.

See you in There! (or IMVU, or somewhere.)

Excuse: I'm being efficient

Most mornings I spend two hours at the gym. One hour is for weights with my trainer and one hour is cardio on the eliptical trainer or maybe the treadmill. I'm a little bored with it and this morning I decided that it would be a more productive and efficient use of my time to go home and clean and do laundry instead of that second hour. Besides...who would know? So, I'm at the Grocery Outlet buying water (oh, okay and a Haagan Das bar...) when this guy behind me in line says "done at the gym already?" WTF??? I'm so busted! Some guy from the gym recognized me and started a conversation with me. It was kind of cool actually because 1.) he's been working out for 30 years so he probably knows a thing or ten and 2.) even though I have been going to the same gym 3-5 days a week for over a year, I can count on one hand how many people I even say "hello" to, and now I might have to start counting on two hands!

Oh, Regina Spektor's "Fidelity" was playing at the gym this morning. It is REALLY not good gym music, and although I love her the other people around me were like "oh, ugh, what is this crap?" It shows, though, that she is now officially popular. Just don't try to pump iron to the following lyrics:

And suppose I never met you
Suppose we never fell in love
Suppose I never ever let you kiss me so sweet and so soft

Excuse: I stink!

This weekend has been long and yet at times relaxing. It started Friday evening when we went to The Stinking Rose and then took a tour around the city via Equinox, meant to dance at Milagros but ended up elsewhere making our servers find out their fortune...in bed. Finally, Sunday was a day of mostly inspiring reading but also some purge cleaning.

Thursday I saw the movie Tsotsi, and I decided I liked it so much I had to get the soundtrack, plus while I was at it the soundtrack to Shortbus, a movie I like more the more I think about it (the bonus stuff on the dvd was really interesting, and helped me like the movie more.) I also got an album by Mika (Life in Cartoon Motion), which was recommended on the Shortbus website. So I'm really liking all my new music, plus the Tsotsi dvd had a cool music video on it so I tried my hand at ripping one track to an iPod sized video using CloneDVDMobile and it seems to have come out great!

Friday was The Stinking Rose. I wanted to go there because it's famous. Any time you read an article on garlic in a food or gourmet magazine or a book talks about it, it's always "there is even a restaurant where everything has garlic in it, even the icecream!" and they are referring to The Stinking Rose. It didn't get very good reviews on Yelp, so I was prepared to not like it very much, so I would have to say it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be! The restaurant is rather pretty, especially on the outside - I guess it has to be, to be in North Beach and entice people away from all the other gorgeous-on-the-outside restaurants there. We ordered the roasted garlic cloves in olive oil and butter (Bagna Calda) to start and it was delicious on our bread (and everything else I put it on, much to the amusement/alarm of my bf) and then the Garlic Swiss Chard Fontina Fondue as an appetizer. The menu isn't very vegetarian friendly, so we then just split the Garlic Gorgonzola Neon Ravioli. My bf isn't vegetarian, so I guess he could have gotten Midwestern Corn Fed Beef with Garlic Mashed Potatoes (um, corn fed? why would someone brag about that? isn't that kind of the default? Now, if it was grass-fed, free-range, that would be something to brag about...but don't get me started with big agribusiness and government subsidy ranting!) but it's nice to split dishes so we don't end up wasting so much food.

The wine tasted like it was watered down, but we each had two glasses anyway. We didn't eat dessert there because the only garlic dessert was the icecream, and the icecream was from Gilroy, and we were in Gilroy last week eating garlic icecream which (false advertising!!!) is actually made in Santa Cruz. So we started wandering up and down the street looking for a dessert place. The people watching was fun (and nice revenge for being watched ourselves through the window of the Stinking Rose) but eventually we decided we'd rather go to Equinox, the revolving restaurant at the top of the Hyatt Regency.

At Equinox, we ordered some dessert I don't even remember clearly along with a couple glasses of port, which I am not usually a big fan of, but for once the sweetness of it was tasty. Maybe that's what happens after you eat a pound of garlic. As we were eating our non-memorable dessert, we noticed a lime wedge on the window ledge. The seating area of the restaurant is always turning in a big circle, but the center and the windows remain in place. So this lime wedge started heading towards us. Then we saw a strawberry with a grape on top of it coming 'round the bend, so my bf gave me a blueberry and I put that on top of the grape (since I was closer to it). Then, more lime wedges came around and eventually a wine cork with a butter ball on top. My naughty bf handed me a sprig of mint from our dessert and I garnished the butterball with it and we collapsed with laughter. After that more stuff came around...eventually messages on napkin pieces..."Help", "SOS" and finally "I need money!" Then...nothing. So, we had some irish coffees and left. Without the view and some amusing mystery people putting stuff on the window ledge, it would have been a pretty boring restaurant.

Saturday we were planning to go to our salsa instructor's dance fieldtrip at Milagros for Cinco de Mayo. However, Saturday wasn't just Cinco de Mayo, it was also the day of some big boxing match with Oscar De La Hoya. Not being a boxing fan, the guy to me is just a way to remember how to order my beans without lard en espanol, but hundreds of rowdy, drunken Milagros patrons seem to think otherwise. Even my bf; since he didn't get to watch the fight he's getting it on PPV next weekend.

Since Milagros was ablsolutely packed with drunk revelers and we didn't think it would be very easy to salsa to the mariachi band playing La Cucaracha and the service is usually bad there anyway, we decided to go to what is normally our Monday night restaurant, A Tavola. We sat at the bar and ordered wine and appetizers, and it would have felt just like a Monday night except it was a different bartender. We asked her why they weren't showing the fight, and she said "maybe because it's our last night". What????? It seems A Tavola is closing and then "remodelling" to become part of Milagros. Wahhhhh! But A Tavola has better food, better wine, better service and better decor! Life is so not fair! The only good part is that at least we got to be there on their last night.

Lately we have been - well okay, *I* have been - carrying around fortune cookies so we can read them after our meals. Our chances of being in a chinese, vietnamese, tiki bar or other fortune-cookie-serving restaurant are pretty small, so we have to bring our own little nuggets of future-divulging goodness. It's pretty fun, and lucky for us when we give one to our server and my bf says "and you have to play the in-bed game", they actually know what he is talking about. At least they have so far. The bartender at A Tavola was cool about it and so was the woman at Savvy Cellar, where we went next since Milagros was still totally packed with drunken revellers.

At Savvy Cellar, at least we look familiar to them I think. So when we called behind the bar from my cel phone and asked for one particular server to come over to give her a fortune cookie, she wasn't too like "omg, I think these people are crazy stalkers". In fact, she read her fortune to all I dunno...ten people in the place? So that's cool. Oh, and the wine...that place has amazing wine...really, really it does. I may start getting wine there for home use instead of BevMo or (hahaha) Grocery Outlet.

I may have broken some rule about how long a blog post should be, so let me just (wheeeee) slide on over to Sunday here and say that it was a very productive "idea" day. I've been reading a book that just came out that is called something like "The Four Hour Work Week", and it has some great ideas about efficiency and thinking outside the box and I found it very inspiring both business-wise and cleaning-my-patio-wise. And...that's all for now. Time to get ready for the gym and then ready for the arrival (finally) of the Rabbit Hutch! Then...what will happen after class tonight? No Monday night A Tavola! Wahhhhh!

Excuse: Hot Fuzz!

Did I mention I hate cleaning? I'm trying to remove mildew from my shower and it mostly worked but I think I stripped some grout off at the same time. Cleaning is the least rewarding thing. It's like making gingerbread houses...you put all this work into it and it's only temporary.

Yesterday started out very stressful. I almost didn't go to the gym because I thought I was going to be so busy. Then I just did weights and no cardio, because I thought what's one hour out of my day? Then I found out what I thought I HAD to do, I actually was not ABLE to do, so I spent my afternoon cleaning and doing laundry. Oh wait, that's not all I did...I did some Photoshop work...woohoo! I don't need excuses for yesterday because I did some real work beyond my basic monitoring of sales and customer service and the like.

So the fun part...we went to see Hot Fuzz. Honestly that movie was not as good/funny as I thought it would be, but it was still pretty good and relatively funny. There were only I think five people in the theater including ourselves, and it didn't look like there was much of anyone in any of the other theaters, either. It's rather sad. All of Redwood City is rather dead most of the time, even though they have this nice new downtown area. Fridays and Saturdays are a bit better, but Sundays are so bad we often go to Palo Alto instead - everything that is actually open that day will be closed by 7pm in RWC. Mondays are almost as bad, with places like Angelica's and the wine bar we like being closed...fortunately we found a quiet bar in one of RWC's nicer restaurants is open, and the bartender is cool, so we go there. This was a Wednesday, though, shouldn't things start picking up by then? I've thought of moving to Palo Alto...it's not a bad idea if I can find something right near the town center. I think that might scare the IMVU employees, though!

After the movie, we went to Mandaloun for a light dinner, and of course some wine. Visually, that is probably my favorite RWC restaurant, but food and wine-wise the menu is rather boring. At least they have a fireplace.

Oh! I almost forgot! Last night my bf brought me a magazine from SouthWest Airlines. It has a really long article on virtual worlds in it, well Second Life actually, and even features a Second Life avatar on the front cover. I haven't read it yet, but it looks interesting. Oh, and I found it online if you'd like to read it too.

Excuse: I can't juggle

I just moved my blog over from the IMVU blog, which is somewhat limiting and hard to understand and had some sort of caching problem (which Dusty said they didn't know about and were going to file a bug on) to my blogger blog, which I set up in December when I was taking a class on vlogging and podcasting. It's very easy to use and now I'm a bit inspired to maybe do some actual podcasting, but in the meantime all the posts I carefully predated are showing up as all being from yesterday and they don't show up in the correct order anyway. I'm trying to get over that and not let it bother me because really I don't know if it makes any difference to anyone but me what order they're in, but if they show up correctly on blogger, why not in the RSS feed? More troubling is why the title text is white and the background is grey. It doesn't match the settings of the panel, the settings in my main blog OR the look in the RSS preview thingy. WTH???

I watched a movie last night called "Shortbus". That there is the epitomy of an "unrated" movie. Really sort of a porn/mainstream crossover. It's about a sex therapist who has never had an orgasm and she spends the movie searching for one in New York City. It's actually not bad, although I only know one person I would actually recommend it to. Tons of nudity and sex and some bizarre stuff I won't mention here.

So...other things I did yesterday instead of getting all the work done I should have...

Well, I spent a lot of time emailing. Oh, and talking on the phone, which sucks because my earbuds broke so I have to actually hold the phone up to my ear. I'm not a big fan of talking on the phone and when both people are on a cell phone it's often like "what? what? Can you hear me now?" and I don't think it's the network.

I'm just not good at juggling all the things that need to get done in life. Cleaning is a good example. I'm a bit of a slob, or at least messy. I have a lot of books and papers and not enough places to put them. Same with clothes and random things like boxes full of cd/dvd storage cases. Plus, I just don't think to do things like scrub the bathroom tiles very often. Recently I thought if I spent maybe 30 minutes cleaning every day, then eventually my place would be all clean. What I didn't factor in was the part where things get messy again and need to be cleaned AGAIN, so that 30 minutes a day of cleaning will eventually just cause you to reach some sort of half-messy status quo which is better than before but is not really "clean". Plus I still don't have enough storage space, and this is even after getting rid of tons of stuff.

Today I don't know how much actual work I'll get done because I really need to clean my bathroom, do laundry, vacuum, clean the kitchen, and run some errands like get more cat litter and bleach, and then I'll barely have time to get ready before we are going out to see "Hot Fuzz". Heheh...I am really looking forward to that movie, but otoh I am a little stressed about probably not getting anything done today work-wise. I know it's just life and that billions of people live it every day, but how do people balance income producing activities, social life, cleaning/organizing and exercise? Oh yeah, and cooking/eating a balanced diet...that has to fit in there somewhere too.

I know I'm totally whiney this morning and I know I'm hardly unique...but loads of people do all these things and I would like to know how! For a long time I mostly concentrated on work, and then I put my main focus on exercise and work fell to the side a bit and I added the cooking/eating part and work really started slipping. Then I added in the social life part and work got even worse and eating started to slip. Then I tried to add in cleaning and also get more work done...it's...so...hard! Someone either commiserate with me or explain how you do it!

Excuse: umm...my cat ate my homework?

I hate Tuesday mornings. Every Tuesday morning from 8am to 9am there is a leaf blower going right outside my window. This is a new experience since I moved to California, and I must say I just don't "get" leaf blowers. First of all, they are very noisy...they sound like a chain saw that isn't sawing anything down, and that sound drives me insane. Second of all, they simply aren't logical.

I can see the person who invented them going "yeah, we'll make this thing out of an old chainsaw (since we already cut down all the trees around here anyway) and we'll make it just blow leaves away from one area and into another, like out of Joe Schmoe's yard and into Sam Smith's yard. Then tomorrow, we'll blow those same leaves out of Sam Smith's yard and into Joe Schmoe's! Then back to Joe Schmoe's the next day! I'll never run out of work again...brilliant!" And, it is kind of brilliant. I am especially impressed that they managed to market such a stupid an inefficient idea.

Maybe there is just some weird attitude around here I don't understand. There is a woman who's job it is to wander around my gym and clean stuff all day. She doesn't seem to work very hard, but I don't blame her because I think her job sucks. She probably makes minimum wage and so y'know...she does a minimum wage amount of work. One day, she was complaining because the leaves from a tree outside kept blowing in the door. She said "I keep sweeping them outside and they blow back in." Ummmm...duh??? Leafblower mentality! Welcome to California.

Anyway, the last couple of days I don't know where all my time went, although an awful lot of it went to feeding China. Since she had lost another quarter pound at her last chemo appointment, I really need to work hard to make sure she doesn't lose any more and hopefully gains some. It gets time consuming because I have to shut her in the bathroom to keep Rodney from just eating all her high fat and extra tasty food (beef lung, yum!) Then to make it trickier, she will eat twice as much if I am actually supervising her and stiring up her food going "mmm...doesn't that look tasty? Don't you want some more?" I'm not sure actually saying it looks tasty has any affect, but stirring it up and giving it back to her will get her to eat some more. Now I've gotten extra fancy and when stirring the can of food stops working I give her something else, like veal babyfood. Of course, a whole jar of veal babyfood only has 70 calories in it, so sometimes I give her half and half instead...that has 70 calories in 2 tablespoons! Last night I gave her tuna, although that's a little low calorie and low fat. At least it's something more for her to eat.

I'm a little tired of my bathroom smelling like beef lung (it's pretty gross) so Sunday I ordered a rabbit hutch. That way I can put one of the cats in there (out on the balcony in the sun even, if it's nice) and separate them without yucking up my bathroom. I think it will be nicer for them, too. It doesn't arrive for a week, since it has to be trucked from New Jersey (there's some inefficient distribution for ya) but I can't wait.

Oh and of course Monday was salsa class night! I watched my salsa lesson dvd beforehand to figure out the whole 7-count, 8-count thing, and it's not a very good lesson, it goes on and on teaching you just the lead moves so if you are the follower you are learning basically the wrong thing and then to make it more confusing you are supposed to watch them facing you and follow along opposite. You know, like if you are doing an aerobics dvd the instructor would typically move his/her right leg and tell you to move your left, and you would mirror what they are doing, or else like our salsa teacher she would just turn to face the same direction that you are (with her back to you), but not this guy! He just faces you and expects you to reverse everything he does. Very confusing teaching style...we took a lesson from this guy in person at Club Kokomo, and he confused us then, too. But the important part....the important part is he says towards the beginning that salsa is 8-count, you just don't count the 4 or 8 because you are pausing. So it's like 1,2,3,pause,5,6,7,pause and Jinx is not crazy! So I am not as bad at salsa as I was thinking. And...class was really fun and I think I did okay but there was one guy, he's nice and fun and he is pretty good at doing the steps and has good rhythm and good leading skills, BUT last night the last time we danced he kept doing this boob graze during our "freestyle" dancing. And he didn't say anything or apologize, nor did he modify what he was doing with his arms so it didn't happen again. I mean, he must know he's doing it, right?

Oh well, whatever. I'm really enjoying salsa lessons! Our instructor is having a field trip/party/dance thing for Cinco de Mayo at a local restaurant and I really want to go, but my bf basically said last week that if we go to Monterey on the weekend we probably can't go to the Cinco de Mayo salsa thing so I had to choose. I chose Monterey, but I'm still hoping Cinco de Mayo could work out.

Today...I have just got to get some work done! After the gym I have no other plans beside feed China, so not much excuse.