When I come home from vacation, I want a quiet and peaceful home. I want my sheets washed. I want my bed made. I want my towels fluffed, my shower scrubbed, and the floors cleaned.

I simply want to come home, pour more food into Hambone�s bowl, and get into bed.

And since I�m flying for more than half a day to get home, it�s especially important that the place be precisely in shape.

I�ve made arrangements for someone to stay with Hambone while I�m out, and I�m afraid that she�ll be in my house when I get home. I need to reiterate how important it is that there�s no visiting hours when I get back. I�ll catch up with her some other time. After hours and hours on a plane and the time differences, I�m not going to want to play friendly to anyone.

Since I�ll be gone for a while, I�ve lined up some guest entries for each weekday next week. On Monday you�ll hear from Bethany9, a fellow Chicagoan I�ve hung out with on several occasions and hit the gay bars with. Coincidentally, you�ll get someone of the same description on Thursday when Oz takes hold of my username and password. Between them is Miss Pink Kate (NYC, represent!) and Crowhihs (my cyber-twin and Vegas partner-in-crime from Cali). Friday should be hers-all-hers for Catie-Dids, but she hasn�t written me back to confirm this. So, um, write me back, Catie, before I give up your spot. It should be interesting to see what these Diarylanders come up with since they know me in all different capacities.

I was talking with Benito about the guest entries yesterday on IM, and he said he wanted to write a guest entry sometime after his project wraps up. (Oh, third week of September, will you hurry it along already?!) I told him that the next time I went on vacation without him, he could. [smirk]

Really though, I think Benito�s stuff would be pretty funny. His emails are friggin� hilarious. His IMs are copy-and-paste worthy. The man�s sharp with his words. Something tells me that he�d capture my antics well. I�m sure any embarrassing story about me that he wrote would go down in ChicagoJo history as one of the greatest entries to have ever graced this page.

So, yeah. Maybe it�s best that I hold off on giving Benito the reigns. He�ll get a big head, and we don�t need that happening. He�s already got me around as constant proof that he�s pretty damn great.

Okay. So now I�m gonna just talk about some stuff I saw recently and what I thought about it.

Gas Prices

The other day there was a local news report about increased traffic at food pantries because of the increase in gasoline prices.

Let�s say that gas goes up 10 cents a gallon. If you fill up once a week and your car holds 20 gallons, that�s $8 a month.

Two bags of name-brand chips. A meal-deal at Subway with three extra cookies. A pair of on-sale shoes at Payless. One tube of drugstore lipstick.

Eight dollars, people.

In how many people�s worlds does an increase of $8 in the monthly budget actually send them to the poor house?

Now, I understand that there have been multiple increases over the past year, but remember that it�s $8 per month per dime increase.

$16 is one pizza delivered to your door. $24 is an afternoon of skee-ball and go-carts. $32 is an all-you-can-eat buffet for two. $40 is an all-you-can-eat buffet for two if you order a soda with your meal and increase the tip accordingly.

And this is once a month.

This last example is when we get up to a 50-cent increase per gallon. $40 is $10 a week.

Do you seriously know anyone who is truly affected by the $10 each week? If so, do you think they could resist one impulse evening or purchase to even it out?

Most people aren�t in such a dire situation that the $10 will influence them to seek public assistance.

If you need it, by all means get it. But don�t go on TV and tell me that it�s solely because of gas prices.

Ugh.

Oh yeah. There should be a law against complaining about your Hummer or Porsche�s gasoline prices gouging you. If you can drop the dough on that kinda car, you can afford the gasoline. Quit yer bitchin�, pronto.

The Dove Ads

The Merchandise Mart el stop has these ads plastered, many with phrases like, �Real women have curves,� and �Slimming the thighs of a size 2 supermodel is no challenge.�

Now here�s my problem. I�m no supermodel, but I am a size 2. I have the XS, S, 0, and 2 on my clothes� tags to prove it. Now, if these are real women with real curves and all that, and I�m essentially the antithesis of what they�re talking about, why does my body look exactly like this?

I�m not about to get all neurotic and shout, �I must be fat if this girl is being used as the model for Dove ads!� I�m not delusional.

It�s just that she doesn�t seem all that shocking, as the rest of the ad tries to be. Hell, I think she�s got a hot bod. (I swear that it�s the self-love and esteem rubbing off and not any lesbian tendencies.)

[shrug] That is all. I just heard other comment on the ad campaign, and I thought I�d point out what I noticed.

Diet Root Beer

Last night I discovered just how far I�m willing to go to get a Diet A&W. I ended up in the three stores by my house, including the CVS that I�m boycotting because they aren�t ever open and have 500 condo units right above them. (If you�re bad at basic business skills, I can�t support you.)

SIDE NOTE:

There�s a grocery store in Texas called HEB, and they completely dominate Austin. One day when I had a scratchy throat, I went in for some cough drops. I�m fine with generic stuff so long as it doesn�t taste like poop on a stick. The generic stuff was 89 cents, and the real stuff was 99 cents. Yay generic, saving me a dime. (Thus reducing my excess weekly gasoline expenses to $1.90...)

When I looked at the content amount, the real stuff had something like 36 cough drops. The generic had something like 48. My immediate though was that HEB generic cough drops were bad for business (not that I was getting a bunch more essentially for free). If they packaged them in packages of 36 and kept them at the same price point, they�d make more off their cough drops.

Yes, I�m so friggin� weird about writing stores off that HEB was almost off the list. If Albertson�s wasn�t 20% more or didn�t smell like wet dogs, I�d have been an HEB defector.

Walgreens. STRIKE.

7-Eleven. STRIKE.

The bad CVS. STRIKE.

Boooo!

I wasn�t giving up. I wanted my root beer, dammit!

I ended up walking down to the east side of my neighborhood to the bigger Walgreen�s, crossing my fingers, throwing salt over my shoulder, and rubbing my lucky penny.

Lo and behold, my Diet A&W was there in the 12-packs. I bought the last two and trekked home for a dinner of two veggie hot bogs and six cans of diet root beer.

I�ll leave you with that.

Be kind to my guest entry-writers. I bet they too could drink six cans of diet root beer in one night.�