Aggravating evening
The first part of my evening last night was rather annoying. My drive home was held up by an accident about 4 miles from my house. What made it annoying was the stupid way the police were handling the traffic situation. They basically only paid attention to the cars out on Immokalee Road and totally ignored us poor saps on Wilson Blvd. They let vehicles turn left off Immokalee onto Wilson but basically stonewalled cars on Wilson wanting to turn right onto Immokalee.
I consumed all of my available patience after about 10 minutes of watching this bullshit. After that I was unable to control the obscenities coming out of my mouth regarding the apparent lack of traffic control skill exhibited by the deputies.
Once I finally got home the frustration did not end. Tuesday and Thursday are Roomba days. I found the one Roomba stuck after it ingested the Christmas tree skirt. I found the other one spinning around stupidly under the hope chest where the one charging base is. It evidently had been stuck in there for almost an hour.
We had a box out front. It was the Peanuts xmas yard decoration we ordered. We saw it in a catalog and thought it would be a nice little addition to our Xmas display outside. We paid like $40 for this thing. I think we overpaid by about 30.
As soon as I slide the thing out of the box there is also a landslide of little pieces that slid out as well. You were supposed to be able to just unfold the two halves of the thing, stake it into the ground and plug it in.
Well the front of the display is attached to the back of it via a series of plastic standoffs that are secured with plastic push pins, standard shitty Chinese quality. Well a bunch of these stand offs had fallen off during shipping which allowed part of the front to just dangle.
I spent a good 15 minutes “fixing” our brand new item. Not only did I reattach the missing stand offs, I also pushed on the ones that were still in place. Each and every one of them was loose. I finally got all the parts back in place and grumpily lugged the decoration outside to hook it up.
I plugged it in and was underwhelmed. The lights in the decoration shine much brighter than what you see in the catalog picture above. They diffuse so much that from the road you can’t even tell what the hell it is. It just looks like some glowing shape. Needless to say I was not pleased with our purchase.
Eventually my evening settled down. Ali and decorated the Christmas tree and we sat out some stuff. We did not put out all of what we have. It is probably the least amount of decorations we have ever put out although you wouldn’t think so if you looked around. Each year the motivation level at Christmas seems more difficult to cultivate.
I have been messing around with making some running club shirts on http://logosoftwear.com. A lot of the current merchandise just is not all that appealing. I ordered myself a shirt that I thought was cool, I always liked “property of” shirts.
As I was digging on the site I saw that I could quickly and easily set up a “store” that will allow people to buy GCR merchandise directly. Basically I set up a few items and then people can peruse them, customize them and order them directly. After setting up the designs we don’t need to do anything else. Logosoftwear.com handles all of the rest and cuts the club 15% commission on the sale.
The set it and forget nature of this store is pretty nice but there is one disadvantage, price. Ordering custom shirts/clothing items one at a time translates into premium pricing where as if we ordered a number of the same items at once we would get bulk discounts. However then the club has that up front expenditure and the hassle of managing inventory.
I figure we have nothing to lose by offering this option to runners. It costs us nothing and allows people to order custom merchandise that they can tweak so it suits them exactly even if it does cost a few bucks more. If you want to see the store go here.