Monday Meanderings - 5.1.2017

I am a coffee drinker. A serious coffee drinker. None of the flavored foo-foo drinks, the double-pump soy chia tea latte, or the extra-espresso americano, or the ones they squirt hot milk in. I'll take mine plain, black - and sweet.

OK, the sweet part is a problem. I gave up sugar a hundred pounds ago. It's unquestionably bad for you. But that leaves artificial sweeteners, and besides tasting off, I worry that they can't be a healthy choice. Recent news stories seem to confirm that. Coffee, good. Sugar, bad. Sweetener, very bad.

The only option seems to be black, unsweetened coffee. So this week, I began drinking my coffee without anything in it. Predictably, I'm drinking a whole lot less coffee, so maybe it's for the best. Yeah, right.

This week was the Volunteer Appreciation gala at Learning Ally. I was recognized in two areas - first as an "Overachiever" which simply means that I have volunteered more than 100 hours in the last 12 months. I got what seems to be a dribble cup with Learning Ally printed on it for that honor, and then this, for passing the 1,500 volunteer hours mark.

While 1,500 hours seems like a lot, you have to know that we have some seriously dedicated volunteers at the Austin studio. We have several folks with 2,500, 3,500 and 5,000 hours, and one with a Life Time Achievement of 15,000 hours!

A while back we ordered a product that we saw advertised on Facebook. That was a first for us, but we had been for sometime looking for something to keep a small mat in place in front of the door to the bonus room. It's a heavy traffic area and the mat is there to keep the carpet clean(er) - but, with normal traffic the mat scoots all over the place.

The advertised product was a set of silicon "rug grippers" that were guaranteed not to harm the underlying carpet, but wouldn't let the mat slide. Sounded like what we needed, so I placed an order and charged the nominal $8 cost on PayPal.

The first clue that things were not what they seemed was in the free shipping. It was free, but we were offered premium shipping so as not to wait the 6 weeks (!) free shipping would take. Premium shipping was more than the cost of the pads, so we opted for time over money. The next clue was when PayPal added .75 cents for a "foreign transaction" fee.  Then there was the email that said the product had been shipped and it should be there in a few weeks, but they were not responsible for delays in customs!

And the final part of the story revealed the merchant was, as suspected, located in China, based on the customs declaration on the package.

As the rug grippers themselves? Worth about $8.75. Plus, it would have been helpful if there had been instructions on how to actually apply the grippers. They at least could have followed IKEA's lead with pictures of what to do.