If you were my friend on Facebook

Then this is a sampling of what you might see:



So there. Now you can stalk me without even being a member.

He saved me the trouble

Wednesday night a door-to-door salesman for Verizon stopped by. I know, crazy, right?

But it worked! It was freezing outside and when we offered to let him in out of the cold he said company policy dictated that he couldn't. So we stood outside and listened to his pitch. If he had been a telemarketer, I'd have hung up on him.

The thing is, we were probably going to switch to Verizon FiOS internet service anyway. I knew it was available in our area and looking into it was on my do-sometime-this-month list. So I stood out in the freezing cold, in my pajamas and socks, hat-hair aflail, with snot flavored stalactites forming from my nose, and pruned dish-pan-hands, listened to all of the details, and signed us up. They're installing it on the 1st.

They're giving us a $100 American Express gift card, and a free linksys wireless router (hello eBay!), which recoups the $20 installation fee and then some. I can't wait. :)

Part of me is wondering if switching back to the door-to-door format would help all of these companies throwing money at telemarketing advertising companies. It's certainly a lot harder to slam the door in someones face than it is to hang up on them. I suppose telemarketing is working to some degree though, or it wouldn't still be going on. But I have to believe that if "Mary Smith" (insert your own Indian accent) called me to try to convince me that I should switch to FiOS I would have given her an earful about how the call was illegal because it was unsolicited and to a cell phone (we don't have a land line – who does any more?), not to mention my being on the do-not-call list; and then I would either have tried to sell her something back, cracked lewd jokes until she hung up on me, or just hung up on her.

There's value in a face.

Taking it to a new degree

My freshman year of college I made friends with a guy on my floor named John. He was the youngest of two brothers – his older brother went to the same college and was a junior during our freshman year, so I got to know them both fairly well. They were two of the funniest guys I've ever met.

I don't remember how we ended up on the subject, but one day John told me that his mom had a miscarriage between his brother's birth and his — and that he was glad she did. This really caught me off guard at first, but then he explained that the reason that he was glad was that if she hadn't, he wouldn't be here. And then it clicked.

I've always been of the opinion that I should never regret things from my past, because they're part of who I am and how I got here, and I like who and where I am. I had never taken it to that degree, but if I had I can say without a doubt that I would've agreed with John.