Tag Archives: dealing with life’s annoyances

Seven Marketing Tricks That Need To End

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1. So Rich You Look Poor

Who thought to take a pair of jeans, rip gaping holes at the knees with lots of dangling threads and sell the jeans at ridiculous prices? Celebrities, the very rich ones, like to be seen wearing jeans with raggedy holes. I remember a time when people who wore jeans with holes carried tin cups and asked us if we could spare some change. Not anymore. You need to be quite wealthy to wear jeans with ripped holes in the knees. Don’t think you can gash holes in your Kirkland jeans from Costco. You have to have a designer label and have paid well over one-hundred dollars for your holey jeans to be authentic. read more

A River Runs Through It (on my birthday)

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“Jerry! Don’t do it!”

“Why not? I can make it. It’s not a problem.”

Jerry stopped our GMC Terrain and we sat in our car watching the melting snow flood the road ahead like a raging river. The runoff raced over the road, obstructing our path, then disappearing into a precipitous drop toward the swelling creek below. We didn’t see shortcuts or detours. If we wanted to continue on, we had to drive through the river. I, for one, did not want to travel through the top of a waterfall. One misstep and our car would be tumbling downward. read more

I bought a beautiful Maidenform bra

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Life has a lot of tiny problems that cause irritations in our daily life.

Apples knock around in the car’s back seat because your groceries fell over when you turned the corner too sharp. You forgot your phone and the restaurant’s hostess asks your number so she can call you when a table is ready. On your birthday, someone remarks you look good for your age.

Annoyances plague our lives. Even on our birthday.
However, a too-tight bra is not one of them.
It robs us of joy. If I say I feel like killing you because my bra is too tight, some of you understand and back up slowly. Others think I’m joking.

I’m not.

I bought a beautiful Maidenform bra. The kind with lace and ribbon and pale, pink silky fabric. I tried it on at the store and it felt a little snug, but in the dressing room I thought snug felt good.

At home I tried on my new bra again, and this time it felt more like a 600-pound gorilla performing the Heimlich maneuver. I could hardly breathe.

I really didn’t want to drive thirty-five miles back to the store to make an exchange.

Not to worry, I thought. I’ll throw it in the washing machine. This process never failed to stretch out bras in the past. After washing two times, the bra continued to put me in a stranglehold. I tried hand-stretching, yanking both ends of the bra back and forth like you do with rubber strips for resistance exercise. I did this for several days. I yanked and pulled. This method proved a failure, but my arms developed some nice muscles.

I decided the bra needed to stretch out overnight. I threw it back in the washing machine and when the machine finished the job, I stretched the wet bra around one of my gigantic throw pillows. I let it dry in the attached position. I knew this had to be the answer.

Apparently, not. Bra-strangulation persisted.

I searched Google. Someone must have had this same problem. I found a post that suggested attaching weights to both ends of the bra and let it dangle for days. I couldn’t figure out how to attach my five-pound dumbbells to the bra or where to hang it from. I considered hanging it from the ceiling fan and swinging from it like Tarzan. As I thought this over, I discovered several posts suggesting a bra extender. I had never heard of such an item, but I was desperate. Some ingenious person somewhere thought to invent a fabric strip that hooks on to your bra to lengthen the band.

I ordered a set of three bra extenders from Amazon for only four bucks. Amazon stated the item would be delivered the next day, a Sunday nonetheless. Imagine, two-inch pieces of cloth delivered by truck to my house within 24 hours. Amazon really knows how to come through when there’s an emergency.

The set of bra extenders arrived but did not fit the bra. Who knew you had to order a size with the correct dimension between the hooks? I asked Jerry to measure to make sure I had the correct dimensions. It turns out I needed 3/8 inch between hooks. I ordered again and this time I had the right size. I had to use two extenders to make it finally fit.

That said, I have this sudden urge to apply blue face paint, fire up Jerry’s blow torch, and blast my bra to cinders while yelling, Mel Gibson-like, “Freeee-dom!”

Except I won’t. That bra was too expensive.

βω

Note from Bronwyn—After a two-year hiatus, a pandemic, and a new appreciation for toilet paper, my blog returns. The blog’s former name “Bronwyn’s Writing Room” gave the impression I wrote about the craft of writing. The new name describes what this blog is really about. “Almost nothing.” The ups and downs of life are important parts of living and that’s what I will write about. For many of us that isn’t “nothing”—that’s why I included the important additional word: “Almost.” read more

The Saddest Part of 2018 (you probably don’t realize)

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Some people say “the good ol’ days weren’t so good.” I’m here to tell you, they are wrong.

In the good ol’ days, like 1987, we didn’t have cell phones. At least they weren’t a common household item. Cellular phones in 1987 cost about as much as a Ferrari and were the size and weight of a toaster. They didn’t fit very well inside our purse. They didn’t make toast.

Most everyone in 1987 had touch-tone dial phones that sat on desks or hung on the walls. We almost always answered the phone every time it blasted its loud jangle. We didn’t have caller i.d. and we never knew who might be calling. The thing is, in 1987 you could still hope for a fun phone call. read more

The World Is Going Nuts

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What happened to the ticket booths at the movie theater? You know, the ones where you pay your money to a cashier and get your ticket? You tell the person behind the window you want to see Such-and-Such movie. And you know the ticket-seller thinks you’re waaay younger than you are, but ‘looks can be deceiving’ and you insist you get the senior discount just the same? What happened to those ticket booth persons?

I didn’t see a ticket booth anywhere last night when entering the movie theater. Instead a bank of computers, lit up in colorful futuristic lights, called out to moviegoers. It appears, you not only tell the computer what movie you want, but where you want to sit. You stick a debit card in the machine and a ticket comes out with very faint lettering notifying of your seat number and row. read more