Duct tape goes nuclear?

I've heard the joke that duct tape is like The Force....it has a dark side, a light side, and it holds the universe together. Having used duct tape to fix all sorts of things, this joke has some truth to it and I never thought you'd be able to make something more handy and durable than a regular roll of sticky, silver duct tape. To prove me wrong, 3M now makes "nuclear grade" duct tape available from Amazon.com for about $14 a roll. If that isn't amusing enough, click through and read some of the reviews people have left for this stuff. It's well worth the 5 minutes of your time.

These aren't your grandma's prunes

It's fun to think about how things are perceived differently based on their packaging, specifically food packaging. Recently, I saw an article that talked about Tropicana having recently changed up their packaging. For as long as I can remember, cartons of Tropicana orange juice had been adorned with a picture of an orange with a straw coming out of it. Recently, Tropicana decided to change it's packaging up and some people didn't like that one bit. In fact, enough loyal customers disliked the change that Tropicana is switching back to their original packaging.*

Lately, I've noticed several brands changing their packaging (i.e. the entire line of Pepsi products) but one innovation that I never saw coming was a product called "Ones". I saw a commercial on TV for these and they're basically individually wrapped prunes. According to the ad, the individual wrappers are supposed to lock in the juicy sweetness, but I bet it's just so that they can charge more. Plus, if you've ever bought a package of prunes and seen them all squished together, it's not very appetizing. I'm curious how many people my age or younger have ever actually eaten a prune. Prunes have a bad rap as a food only eaten by people who are either old or constipated. I admit that I started eating prunes when I was a kid at my grandma's house, and I know she was at least one of those things. The stigma is so strong, in fact, that a few years back, prunes stopped being marketed as "prunes" and instead are now called what they actually are...dried plums. It would be like if everyone got together and started hating raisins, so manufacturers changed up the packaging and started calling them "dried grapes" until people realized that they're not so bad after all. I would certainly hope they wouldn't start individually wrapping grapes though, because eating those guys would take all day!

The same company that's selling "Ones" have also started marketing prune juice as "PlumSmart Plum Juice". I have never actually had prune juice, so I can't speak to either the flavor or "digestive benefits" of it. I will admit though, petty marketing change or not, I would feel much less awkward standing in the check out line with some stylish new Plum Juice in my cart than I would with a bottle of prune juice.


*On a side note, I would be interested in knowing if companies get as many complaints about changing a product's formula as they do about the packaging. In fact, I can think of tons of products who's packaging I've seen change over time, but I can't think of a single product that I've stopped using because I thought they had changed the formula on me.

Dreams

Something about pregnancy has started effecting my dreams. I don't mean my hopes and aspirations for the future, I mean the actual dreams I'm having at night. Before I got pregnant, I might remember my dream a couple of nights a week. On the other hand, there was a night this past week when I fell asleep at a normal time, then woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom (something which has become a regular event), woke up again before the alarm went off, and then woke up when the alarm actually went off. This gave me three distinct sleep periods, and I remember a different dream for each one. I've always known that you remember a dream better when you wake up, so that's part of the explanation I've heard as to why pregnancy can do this to you, but I have to think it's more than just that.

Last night, I had a dream where I was trying to pay my taxes at the YMCA. When I handed them my driver's license, it said my name was "Elizabeth Cocalo". (Co Ca Lo is the name of the company that made our nursery bedding by the way, so that's where that came from) They tried to arrest me for having false ID, but I also had ID with my actual name on it, so they let me go. Then they refused to give me a haircut because they insisted my fake ID proved that I wasn't a U.S. Citizen. The lady was trying to be discreet about it, so she just slipped me a note that said "People with green cards are not eligible to receive haircuts". I was able to convince them that it was all just a misunderstanding and they agreed to let me get a haircut. Unfortunately, there were a lot of other people (bona fide U.S. citizens, I suppose) who were there for haircuts, so I had to sit in the waiting room and watch Jeopardy until a chair opened up.

Gears of War 2

One of the things Daniel and I like to do together is play video games. We've both been playing video games since we were kids, so it's something fun to do together. In fact, when we were dating, he used to bring over his laptop and we'd play Diablo II on a LAN. Since then, we tend to go through phases of what our go-to game is at any given time. Between then and now, the progression has been: C&C Generals -> Rise of Nations -> Battlefield 2 -> Battlefield 2142 -> WoW -> Halo 3 -> Gears of War 2.

Our most recent kick playing Gears of War 2 is mostly due to the online Horde mode. In fact, I don't think I've played through any of the campaign in that game. If you've not played Gears of War 2 in Horde mode, let me explain. It's played on xbox live where you're teamed up with other players to make a group of 5. You then play against a wave of NPCs of varying degrees of difficulty. Players don't respawn until the start of the next wave, but you can revive teammates that are "down" but now completely dead yet. Every 10 waves, the difficulty level of the type of enemies resets, but their base stats increase. This means that wave 11 actually feels easier than wave 10. There are a total of 50 waves. I've made it up to 26 and Daniel has made it as far as 34.

The reason we moved from Halo 3 to Gears of War 2 is entirely due to the online play. We played through the all of the Halo 3 campaign on hardcore, but after awhile the online play gets old. We just got tired of lopsided teams (which we saw fairly regularly, in spite of the intricate ranking system) and general mean-spiritedness (aka "tea bagging", trash talk, etc.). Since Gears of War has all the human players on the same team working together, you sometimes get people who can't pull their weight, but I rarely get on a team where people quit out early or sabotage their own team. Besides, in the rare instance where this has happened, your team usually fails out before wave 10 and you start over with a fresh bunch. On the other hand, by the time you've spent an hour getting past wave 20 with a group of teammates, it really is in your best interest to watch their back, work together, etc.

So there you go, if you're looking for a good multiplayer game to pass some time with a loved on on an idle Friday evening, give Gears of War 2 a look. Because nothing says "I love you" like hunting down the last wretch together.

Jeans crisis resolved

I'm sure you're all on the edge of your seats waiting to find out how the Old Navy jeans fit. Well, I won't torture you any longer! I'd ordered two pairs of the same size, but in a different waist. One has a full panel waist that goes clear up over my belly and the other pair just has a thick elastic band at the top. The pair with the full panel fit fine, but the other ones are too snug in the waist, so I'm going to reorder those in a different size and also get another pair of the full panel ones in a different wash. When those come in, I'll keep whichever pair fits better and send the rest back. That'll leave me with two pairs of jeans that will hopefully fit all the way through until after the baby is born. Unless, of course, I gain too much weight in places besides my belly. I gained 5 pounds last month, which isn't unreasonable, but I know it wasn't all baby. Some of it was just Otis Spunkmeyer "muffins" and Funyuns.

It's a girl!

Today was my second ultrasound! The verdict is in....it's a girl! More importantly, everything looks well developed and healthy. It was amazing how much the lady was able to tell from the ultrasound. She measured the baby's head circumference, checked for an intact upper lip, and was even able to see a layer of skin over the spine. She tried showing me where the kidneys were, but I just had to take her word for it.

She gave us 6 ultrasound pictures to take home. There were three of a profile view, one of the face (which looked like Skeletor), one as evidence that it's a girl, and one of the feet. The feet one is probably my favorite as you can see the little toes.

Based on my latest reading of the Sherwood Police Beat, here is a here is a list of things that can lead to you getting arrested for possession of drugs, other than being seen in possession of drugs:

1. Drive at a high rate of speed
2. Drive left of the center line
3. Failure to use your turn signal
4. Have a license plate with expired tags
5. Have a license plate that's illegible
6. Have no license plate
7. Park your vehicle at the Heritage building
8. Failure to leave a property after you've been specifically asked to do so

The search continues

I take back what I said about Old Navy. Upon further reading, you don't have to pay out-of-pocket to return items by mail. I found this out after getting my jeans from Penney's last night and deciding they weren't quite what I was hoping for. I thought I was going to really like them when I first put them on, but after sitting down in them and walking around the house for about 30 minutes, I caught a side view of myself in the mirror. The problem is that the "full panel" isn't entirely elasticy. I was expecting it to be like a belly band attached to the top of a pair of super low-rise jeans, which is what I've seen on my of the jeans in stores. These, however, had the panel made of a stretchy, but not entirely form fitting fabric, with a band of elastic at the top. I'm sure they would fit better as my stomach gets bigger, but for now, the top sort of balloons out more than I'd like. Daniel insisted they looked fine, and I'm not expecting maternity jeans to make me look like I just stepped of a runway, but I also don't want them to make me look like I just stepped into my 50's.

I won't return the JC Penney jeans until I knew whether I can do any better, but I'm not going to be wearing them for now. Instead, I went back to Old Navy and found 2 pairs of jeans in my size. I placed an order at around 11pm last night, and this morning when I got the email verifying the order, I clicked the little link to check the status. This took me to the Old Navy website, where, low and behold, right there on their front page was a code for free shipping on maternity clothes. I also checked the jeans I'd ordered and one pair had been marked down! These changes would have saved me about $15, so I called them up and spoke to a very nice gentleman at Old Navy. He told me that he couldn't apply the changes to my order, but was more than happy to cancel it so that I could place a new one. In my second order, not only did I get the same two pair of jeans for less, I also found a shirt and dress on clearance. So the downside is that I have to wait a little longer to wear a decent pair of jeans, but on the upside, maybe I will have actually found a decent pair of jeans.

Pants en route!

In my search for tall-sized maternity jeans, I found out that Old Navy has some available through their website. This was a pretty exciting discovery because I already have some non-maternity jeans from Old Navy, so at the very least, I felt like I had a better idea of what size to order. I try to avoid ordering clothes online when I don't know what size to get, but as a last resort, I figure I can always return things that don't fit, right? Thankfully, I checked Old Navy's return policy to try to verify this assumption before placing my order. Turns out, you can return unwanted items to the store unless the site specifically lists them as "Mail return only". If you see that, it means that you have to mail back unwanted items to get a refund, and they'll only refund the shipping cost if they sent you the wrong item or the item is defective. This is reasonable, except that on top of the cost of having them sent to me, I would also have to pay to ship them back. So in short, I might end up paying around $10 to try on a pair of jeans that I don't even end up keeping. With all that in mind, I decided to stick with JC Penney and their dated, but reliable, return counter. I found a coupon code online to get a discount and ordered one pair to try out. They should be getting here tomorrow, so hopefully I'll have a bit of variety in my wardrobe again. I love my new maternity corduroy's, but alternating daily between tan and chocolate brown cords can only go unnoticed for so long.