(Linking up with Jennifer of Ramblings of a Suburban Mom for Thursday Thoughts again!)

I was just thinking that perhaps On My Mind/In My Life would be slightly more appropriate for these posts, but that title’s too long, eh? You get the point, right?

Gogobot bear!

~Some totally awesome things have happened lately!! For one, I was happily surprised to find that I became a Gogobot Pro 2013! I only joined the site in late February so I certainly didn’t expect that so soon. Granted, I did spend a ton of time ramping* up my reviews past 100 so I could get that free swag I shared previously. As a Gogobot Pro, I get even more awesome stuff, which is on its way, yay! Can’t wait to show you what else I get AND to plan a trip to take advantage of it all. 🙂

~Sometimes you get what you want just by holding out hope and having some luck. That’s what happened with a recent eBay auction, where I bid around $2.50 and the ultimate winner of the auction bid around $7.50. I was not willing to pay that much, but I held out hope that I’d eventually get the product at the price point I wanted. AND THEN I got a second chance offer! If you’re not familiar with eBay, sellers can choose to give a “second chance offer” to any of the bidders who didn’t win the auction. As long as they have more product (or the auction winner doesn’t pay up), they can extend that offer to you if they feel your highest bid price is acceptable. I got a pretty great deal.

source: lilblueboo

~Wondering what I got for that eBay auction? Well, it’s some foldover elastic – which may mean nothing to you – and it’s what you use to make those hair ties you probably know as Twistbands. I was certainly not about to pay $2 for ONE hair tie, but I do want to try them to see if they’re more effective. Once I figured out the “technical” term for them, it was pretty easy to find on eBay. My long, desperate searches in the aisles of Joann’s, Michael’s, and Walmart are thankfully over. I’m excited to make my own!

The coveted welcome screen.

~As of last night I FINALLYYYY got a working code for Graze! Thanks to a lovely reader posting on Jennifer’s Ramblings of a Suburban Mom Facebook page, I have signed up for my weekly snacks. The default is every other week, but with just four snacks per shipment, that’s not enough for my snacking habits so I increased the frequency.

~If you’ve never won anything, let me just say that you just gotta try a lot and set your heart to doing everything you can to win. So many people complain that they never win… and you know what? They never even enter. Beyond that, you can still win at times if you don’t give up and stay positive! Check out the time I won a $150 UCLA rug because I tried really hard.

~So for the past two or three weeks, I’ve been having this strange thing happen to me; whenever I eat small bits of food, inevitably one piece will get stuck in this extra space in my throat. I swallow and swallow to no effect, but a rush of water usually flushes it out. Is this normal?? Shouldn’t my throat be one straight tube? Maybe these pieces are somewhere in middle ground between “throat” and “windpipe” territory. :-/

~Last week it was reeeeeally windy! I seriously thought that a palm tree might come crashing down into the house. Thank goodness they’re sturdier than the more “branchy” trees. I believe these are the Santa Ana winds, which I first learned about when I arrived to SoCal 10 years and read a passage in English class, telling me that these winds cause scenes in which “Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.” Talk about mildly traumatizing. I didn’t get it then and I still don’t get it now, but it sure did stick with me all these years.

With a toilet paper holder between the toilet and sink, how am I to reach back there??

~And finally, a pet peeve of mine: why do so many places put the toilet paper holder in an inconvenient location? I don’t want to have to do some sort of contortionist act just to reach it. I know that due to the design of the space, sometimes that’s all that works, but you’d think they might take that into consideration when drawing up the blueprints. I guess I could retrain myself to get the toilet paper first, but old habits die hard.

*as a side note, I realized the way I work is in “binges” – more on that in a later post