do you?

...ever get tired of disneyland posts?  The ones from me?  Well we've had a break for a while since our passes expired in March, and there have been a lot of block-out days since then.  We (I) have been waiting to buy a new one because, why not?  Beckett's free for one more year, and I want to take advantage of this time since he looooooves it and he's free!  Some people don't like to take their kids this young, but to be honest there is a lot there that can entertain him, and has entertained him since he was about 14 or 15 months old and started talking a lot and recognizing characters from shows and movies.  It looks like we will be making a few trips in July with friends and family, and I cannot wait!

So, now I'm going to tell you something that you may want to laugh at, and/or judge me for.  I won't lie, I did before I knew.  The first time we met up with Abby's future in-laws at the happiest place on earth, I watched in confusion as they spent the majority of their time walking around and finding "cast members" to trade pins with.  What was up with these lanyards they wore?  Why would someone spend their time doing that?  What about the rides?  the joy?  the everything else?  Talk about nerdy right?  Well, a few months later my mom thought of a Christmas present idea for Abby and Jesse...to secretly make a bunch of trips to disneyland with me and Beckett to trade pins and get ones they collected while they were at school that fall semester.  My mom did the frugal thing of course...ordered 100 pins on ebay from China (where they are made) for a ridiculously small fraction of the price that they sell for at the parks.  And we started trading.

Of course, from the China batch there were some good ones that we kept right off the bat, and some that I thought Beckett would love.  It was all downhill from there.  Beckett got his "starter lanyard", and loved wearing his pins!  Oh my, it was addicting, and an excellent thing to walk around and do when he would fall asleep for his nap(s) in the stroller for an hour or so.

If you don't know, here's the skinny on pin trading:
You buy one lanyard from the dozens sold at the park to wear.  Some come with an initial set of pins on them.  There is a store just for pins in frontierland, and a kiosk at California adventure.  Certain employees in the park wear the lanyards.  These employees get special pins from the park to wear each day that are not sold to the public.  If you walk up to an employee, see a pin (or max, 2 pins) you want, they have to trade that pin for any one on your lanyard that you want to get rid of...no questions asked.

(image from Disney)

Some of the employees wear a special turquoise lanyard, which means that they are only allowed to trade with kids who are 3-12 years old.  They also wear different pins in the morning, even different from the other employees, that you can't buy at the stores.  Even though he's not 3, some of the kid lanyard employees have let Beckett trade with them.  There are even some crazy trading booths by the frontierland store where, at a certain hour on Tuesdays (I think), two employees come out with massive books filled with hundreds of pins.  People line up and wait their turn to trade for 2 pins from each book.

So now you probably know more than you want to about a hobby that you may be less-than-interested in.  I just got an order of pins in the mail from ebay, and have loaded up our lanyards with the ones we don't want to keep so that we can trade on our next trip!

Amazon

That's where I'll be buying a lot of textbooks for Jeremy and other things from now on.

Here's the story:
8 days (more than ample time to receive an item purchased online via ground shipping) before the fall semester started for Jeremy, we got online and ordered his textbooks.  I have been known to shout praises and recommend half.com (a branch of ebay) for textbook buying needs.  I found it and loved it back in the days when I owned and frequently used CD's because it was one of the only places that I could find Kanye West's first cd edited.  Many semesters of school taught me that I could find my books there for sooooo much cheaper than at my school's bookstore.  Naturally, I let people know that they should look there for books because the amounts of cash my parents were throwing away on textbooks for me was disturbing.  Not to mention that many sellers will let you upgrade shipping to get things quicker.

This semester of school was approaching, and I bought one of the books Jeremy needed on half.com.  I would usually get an email a day or two later saying the book had shipped.  No such email ever came.  I emailed the seller and asked that they would hurry and ship it because my husband needed the book for school.  His first week of school came and went, and with no response from the seller, Jeremy had to buy the ridiculously expensive book from his school.  Meanwhile, my debit card has already been charged over $100 for something that clearly isn't coming.  Ebay is super awesome with customer service (NOT!), so they don't let you file claims on not receiving items until the allotted shipping period (two weeks) has passed.  At exactly two weeks, I "filed a claim" about my never sent item.  They tell you it will take up to 30 days to process your claim.  30 days later, and no email from ebay or refund of my money.  This is where it gets fun.

Go ahead and try to find any contact information on ebay's website...I dare you.  You won't find any number, email, or be able to make any sense of their customer service portion of their website.  I googled and googled in an attempt to find a number to call to get my money back.  I found plenty of phone numbers...all of which were disconnected but one.  You have to somehow pick the lucky sequence of prompted menu numbers to find out that you need some kind of claim code from the website to be able to talk to a representative.  Don't worry because this claim code is not the number given to me when I filed my claim, instead it is supposed to come from part of the customer service portion of their website that does not exist!  I called the same number again and by some stroke of luck navigated correctly thru nearly a dozen menus to get to a live person without the claim code.  Then I sat on hold for almost an hour.  I am finally on the phone with some fool, from India no doubt (ironically I find the show "Outsourced" hilarious), who takes about 15 minutes of putting me back and forth off-and-on hold to tell me that he cannot do anything to process my claim, he could only direct me to send a reminder email to support@half.com about my case (aren't YOU the support@half.com??).  I hang up, send the email with more information than should be necessary asking for my refund.  A week later I get a response.  One Week.  The response asked me if I was sure the item still hadn't arrived (really??), and that my claim would be resolved within 30 days.  I responded letting them know that no, after more than two months the item still wasn't here, and also I don't want it anymore!  I want my money back!


That was two weeks ago.  No response yet.  No money back.  No acknowledgement that there is an end in sight to getting a refund for an item never sent to me that I ordered 3 months ago.

I will never be visiting ebay/half.com EVER again.

                                                                                                

Compare that experience with this...
After two weeks of seeing empty shelves above the "How to Train Your Dragon" blu-ray tag at every walmart and target I went to, I found it on Amazon for $3 cheaper than it sells for at target.  And because we have a trial of amazon prime, we got free 2-day shipping on it.  I was more than thrilled not to have to waste gas searching for it anymore, and it was actually at my door within 24 hours of me buying it online!  Not 48...24!!

Amazon...you have my business from now on.

Go Cougars!

I loved my time at BYU.  It was everything I hoped for and more.  It was crazy-hard at times, but I'm glad I had to earn my degree that way.  From religion classes to the student wards, everything was amazing.  It still seems crazy to me how fast it went (not at the time, but looking back now).  I am very proud of my school and all it is as an institution.  Amazing football teams may come and go, but the rankings this university gets in all areas will continue to be way up there.  Just wanted to brag about it for a second...

BYU Grads 11th in WSJ Rankings

Recruiting companies ranked BYU grads 11th in the nation, according to the Wall Street Journal. America's Most Popular University according to U.S. News #1 MBA Program #1 Stone Cold Sober Campus

The Great Debate

For the past 12 years the media, etc. have been blaming autism on vaccines mainly due to one magazine article known as The Wakefield Study published in a British medical journal in 1998.  

"On August 27, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the 2009 ruling of a special vaccine court denying a link between vaccines and autism."  Since 1998, 18 highly controlled studies have evaluated the previous findings of Wakefield, and all 18 came back with the same result..."There is no link between vaccines and autism."

The study from that journal from over a decade ago has recently been retracted, and the doctor who performed the study has had his medical license revoked due to his actions and falsifying of results.  If this isn't enough evidence for the world then I don't know what will settle this unfounded debate.  Read the whole article on these recent events here.

Being a scientist and knowing how difficult it is to prove a hypothesis through my own personal experimentation, I know how definitive and undeniable results must be in order to come to such a conclusion.  The recent outbreaks in my own city of Measles and Pertussis, which the CDC has concluded are due to children that have purposely not been vaccinated, really hit home.  Some may not like me saying this as it is a personal decision and other factors (genetics, etc.) may be behind your choice, but if your reason for not vaccinating is autism then reconsider and please vaccinate your infants and toddlers.  We all (me included) need to stay up to date with adult vaccinations as well because they wear off and these diseases are coming back with deadly force. 


Sorry if this post leaves a bad flavor in anyone's mouth.  It is not directed at anyone.  I'm off my soap box now.

Planet Earth...

About one weekend every few months Discovery Channel airs a handful of these 11-1 hour each shows. I saw one of them when they were first aired a few years ago and loved it. I'm so glad they show them on tv for free again! Jeremy and I love to dvr them on the HD channel and then watch them on Sundays. I love animals and learning about the living things that we share the earth with! It is definitely something we enjoy as a Sunday activity and would recommend to everyone.

Grammar Nazi

For most of my life I have here and there been referred to as a grammar nazi by friends and family. While I don't really care for this title, I do care about grammar. No, I by no means use perfect grammar, but I do get annoyed easily by blunders I see made repeatedly and by a majority of writers. Call it (as my family does) a slight case of OCD, or as Jeremy calls it, an excuse for everything. So here are a few of the errors that drive me batty...

The "their/they're/there" blunder... Their is a pronoun that implies possession, they're is the contraction for "they are" and is a verb, and there is a noun referring to a place.

The "defiantly" blunder... Often this spelling is used for the word definitely, but they mean very different things. Definitely comes from the root definite meaning free of ambiguity or uncertainty, and defiantly comes from the root defiant/defiance meaning a disposition to resist.

The "for all intensive purposes" blunder... This one doesn't bother me very much, and I actually did not realize that it was a corruption of the correct phrase until I heard someone say it another way. "For all intents and purposes" is the correct phrase, and makes more sense when you think about it. It means for all intents, and for all purposes. The former means only for purposes that are intense, and would then not apply to the instances it is often used to describe.