Meijer’s, (regional grocery chain) is having a sale on jewelry this week. 70% off! But, it positively ends on Saturday. So, if you want to take advantage of their discounts, you’d better get there soon. The next sale won’t begin until next Sunday.

Come to think of it, the sale is the same regardless of the week. That same sale was on 4 years ago when I bought my gold earring.

There must be a tremendous markup on jewelry.

Here at work, we have a lot of white boards with colored markers. They are the equivalent of what chalk boards used to be in generations past.

With special markers and special erasers, you can draw on these boards and then erase them. It works really nice.

But, one of our secretaries discovered that the markers that we were using had a chemical that was some what toxic. So, she found some marks that were not toxic.

The only problem is that the new markers don’t erase as well as the toxic ones. So, after a while, the white boards get messy. No problem. Our secretary got us some cleaner to clean the white boards. The only problem is that the cleaner is, well, toxic.

So, instead of gradually getting poisoned by the old marks, we can get poisoned in mass by the cleaner.   Go figure.

The remote for the door locks on my car has a panic button on it. If I feel threatened and happen to be near my car, I can hit the panic button. And by doing so, the horn will start to beep and the lights will flash. Certainly a nice feature for nights when I am working late.

The other night, Kathy and I were sitting at the table eating supper when we heard a horn beeping in the garage. Right a way we knew that one of the cars had gone into the panic mode. So, with keys in hand, we both headed for the garage.

When we got there we discovered that it was my car doing the beeping. I always keep my car keys in my pocket so I must have accidentally bumped the button.

I was surprised that the transmitted had enough power to go through the walls of the house. Who knows how many times I have accidentally locked and unlocked the car doors while eating?

My new car has a remote for the doors. If I press the lock button once, it locks all of the doors. If I press the lock button a second time, it shuts off the lights.

I can also unlock the doors with the remote. If I press the unlock button once, it unlocks the drivers door. If I press the unlock button a second time, it unlocks all of the doors. But, the kicker is that I have only a few seconds to open a door. If I fail to open a door within the alloted time, all of the doors will lock.

Once, I backed the car out of the garage and left it running while I went back into the house. When I returned, the doors were locked. I had to get Kathy’s set of keys in order to get back into the car.

I don’t know why it did that so I am scared to leave the car running when I have to get out for something. And when I do, I also leave the door ajar.

My new car has power door locks. OK, my past three cars have had power door locks. But what makes this car different is that all the doors lock when I put it in gear. But more to the point, they don’t unlock when I put the car in park. The only way to unlock all of the doors is to manually hit the unlock button.

This feature is annoying because I keep forgetting to unlock all of the doors. So, I may get out of the drivers side and go to the backseat to retrieve something only to discover that the door is locked. Bother.

It was cold last weekend. It was so cold that when I went out to get the paper, street lights had spires of light shooting up into the sky. They kind of looked like light sabers. The spires are caused by the heat from the lights. It was really kind of cool.

The other day when I was at the grocery store, I noticed a couple loading groceries into the bed of their pickup truck. The only problem was that the truck was too tall just to set groceries in the back. Instead, the woman stood in the bed of the truck and the man passed groceries up to her.

I guess they don’t have to worry about getting snowed in.

Shrimp was on sale the other day at Meijer’s (regional grocery chain). It was a buy one get one free offer.

They were 26 to 30 count and were selling for $9.99 a pound. But with a buy one get one free offer, that equates to about $5.00 a pound. That’s cheaper than an pound of 50-60 count.

I bought 4 pounds of shrimp and got 4 pounds for free. We eat a lot of shrimp so we are always looking for sales on shrimp. Meijer’s has them several times a year. Bubba Gump would be proud.

When I was setting up our surround sound system, I noted that the wire that was supplied was not long enough to reach one of the speakers. So, I headed to Meijer’s (regional grocery chain) to get 50 feet of speaker wire.

A quick scan of the electronic section revealed that yes indeed they did have speaker wire. (Meijers’ is kind of hit or miss when it comes to these sorts of things) I could buy a 50 foot spool of 16ga speaker wire for $20.

That’s $0.40 a foot which is a bit pricey. But, I needed the wire and didn’t feel like driving to GR so I put it in my cart.

As I started to leave the isle, I noticed that there was another 50 foot package of 16ga speaker wire for $10. Same size wire, same manufacturer. The only difference was that the $10 wire was just loosely coiled and not on a spool.

Well, the $10 package was a lot more attractive than the $20 package so I put the $20 package back and took the $10 one instead. Besides, I wouldn’t know what to do with the $10 spool once the $10s worth of wire was gone.

7 million disappeared! Where did this happen? It happened in the US. It wasn’t on the news. It wasn’t even an op ed in the New York Times. In fact, very few people heard about it.

The years was 1987 and it wasn’t the result of an alien abduction. It was the year that the IRS required a Social Security Number for every dependent that you claimed on your tax return.

7 million children gone in an instant! Amazing!