Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 30

Tote Bag Hell

In 2016 (!!!), I bought this tote bag and I love, love, love, love it! The two pockets in the back are everything and elevate the bag for me to the nth degree.

Only now, the bag is starting to become a little worn on the bottom corners. I'm thinking about buying another to replace it. Only the site I bought this from doesn't have this bag anymore. Oh, they still have canvas tote bags that look exactly like this, but without the handy interior pockets.

Somehow, and I'm not sure how, Instagram picked up on my interest in tote bags and my feed suddenly exploded with ads.

Okay, I thought, if I can find something similar, it doesn't need to be the same brand.

I thought this tote bag had been a little expensive (which is why I hadn't bought a back-up bag), but that was nothing compared to the bags I was shown on Instagram. Most were several hundred dollars and ther was one that was more than $900. Nearly $1000 for a tote bag???? You've got to be kidding me!

In the past, I blogged about making my own tote bag, but after messing around with the pencil bag and all the issues I had with that, I'm a little leery about making my own tote and seriously, the one I own is perfect if I could just find another exactly like it to replace this one.

I searched online, looking for a comparable tote, but a lot of them have special sections for laptops. I don't need that. Others had the pockets toward the bottom of the bag. I tried one of those already and didn't like it at all. Most have only a single, zippered pocked on the inside. I never use that zippered pocket, so not what I'm looking for.

Seriously, I never realized how hard it would be to replace this one simple bag. If I'd known that, I'd have bitten the bullet and bought two from the start.

The Non-Delivery Delivery

I had a subscribe and save shipment that was delayed. Twice. Finally, though, it was out for delivery. I was at work when I received the notification that it was left near the garage.

And then when I got home, my dad came out to meet me in the garage. There was a package delivered, but it belonged to a neighbor, not to us.

We were going to drive it over, but it was a large box and it was stamped fragile. I didn't want to be responsible if something broke, so I contacted UPS and said, hey, we have the wrong package and mine is missing.

You might remember if you've read this blog for a while that I had a previous adventure with FedEx. I feared the worst.

But UPS was much, much different. Almost as soon as I closed my Twitter window, my phone was ringing. After giving the woman the information she needed, I received an email with a confirmation number telling me the misdelivered package would be picked up the next day.

I began to doubt as the morning became afternoon, but sometime after two pm, UPS arrived. The driver took the box and delivered it to the neighbor. Cool. One thing down.

But my package was still missing.

And when I arrived home from the office the next day, there it was! Holy crap was there a huge difference between dealing with FedEx and dealing with UPS. I will sing the praises of UPS for the foreseeable future because of the way they handled this issue.

Review: You Cast a Spell On Me

***Warning: There might be spoilers ahead***

You Cast a Spell On Me has a release date of 2015, so I'm going to assume that if you wanted to see it without worrying about spoilers, you would have.

You Cast a Spell On Me stars Nikki Deloach, Ryan McPartlin, and Harley Jane Kozak and it's a paranormal romance. Light paranormal romance. I don't know if it's available anywhere else, but I streamed it with Amazon Prime.

The description of the movie doesn't make it clear that it's paranormal romance. I had some confusion in the beginning of the movie who had powers and who didn't, but it sorted itself out and didn't impact my enjoyment.

Basically, the hero is a witch (he calls himself a warlock, but only dark magic users refer to themselves that way and he's not that) and the heroine is mortal. She's dragged to a Halloween party by her friend and meets the hero. They spend all night talking out on the patio, but nothing more. She's got a boyfriend who's working in Geneva and he's been forced into an arranged marriage with another witch.

Somehow, the heroine starts exhibiting magical abilities afterward and she doesn't know how to control them. There is some very light humor here, but it's not played for laughs.

The movie was cute. I know that's what I said about the last movie I reviewed, but that word fits this one, too. I guess I'm in the mood for those frothy Christmas films, but not quite ready for the ones actually set around Christmas.

I found the relationship between the hero and heroine relied a whole lot on fated mates and didn't provide much depth. In fact, they're apart for most of the movie. This isn't my favorite thing, but it was cute enough to keep watching and both hero and heroine were engaging enough to make those scenes enjoyable.

Of course, we get our HEA. I won't spoil how that comes about.

Is this the best movie ever? Definitely not. Is it an enjoyable enough way to spend an hour and a half? Yes. If you're looking for a holiday movie that's light and fluffy, but not Christmasy, this is a good option.

Happy Thanksgiving!

For my American friends, Happy Thanksgiving!

Series Bible Dilemma

I have an official series bible for the Paladin League stories. I bought it from a shop on Etsy and have made tweaks that work for me and for the series, but I'm wishing I could figure out ways to improve it further.

There are a lot of things I really like about it. The fact that it had headings and tabs so that I didn't have to figure out what I needed was the biggest help, but it also had things that I never considered.

But as I'm heading into book 5 of of the series, I'm starting to run into a few issues.

For example, there's a sheet for all the characters whether they're main characters, secondary, or merely walking through. This was great! Until I got close to a hundred names.

They're kind of sorted by book, but not completely. I'd kind of like them to be alphabetized, but I'm scared if I sort the column in my Excel file that it might mess things up.

But one of the major secondary characters from Wicked Deception had another name in the spreadsheet, and I didn't see it, so I named him again. This is only going to get worse going forward.

I saw someone else selling a different series bible, but it was priced at a ridiculous cost and there was no way to look at it and see what I'd be buying. If I had a chance to take a close look at it, see how intricate it was, judge the level of Excel skills involved, I might be willing to pay that much money. But this isn't an option. The website doesn't even have the item listed to get any view of it. I only heard about it through a promotional email.

Another drawback for me is that I know Excel is powerful and the series bible I'm currently using isn't touching any of the formulas or other tools it has. It's basically just fill in the blanks. I know there has to be a way to harness some of what Excel can do. Unfortunately, my Excel skills are not as awesome as I wish they were.

So I'm using the best spreadsheet available to me. Now I'm wondering if I should create a character sheet for each book. Except that a lot of characters overlap. A lot of the locations are used in multiple books, too, which is another pinch point. I'm just not sure how to organize all my information for the maximum benefit and it's leaving me frustrated.

Plant Assassin

I'm horrible with plants.

Even the hard-to-kill kind die on my watch. But I have this lucky bamboo plant that's survived living with me for more than ten years. It might even be around fifteen years.

But it outgrew its pot. I needed to go in and prune the root ball since I had no intention of buying an even bigger pot for it. The pot it's in is big enough.

Of course, I only had a YouTube video on how to do this pruning of the root ball and a super busy schedule. By the time I got around to the attempt, most of the plant was dead.

I took Friday off from work and this was one of the items on the agenda for the day.

As it turned out, with most of the plant dead, there was no need to prune the root ball. I just pulled out the stalks that were still green. There were three small ones. I put them in fresh potting soil that I'd bought months and months ago, tamped it down, brought it back in the house, and watered it.

Now I wait and see if it makes it.

So I didn't actually assassinate the entire plant, just 3/4 of it. At least up till now.

I wonder how long it takes to know if the plant is going to dig in and go on or if the three remaining stalks of bamboo are going to give up, too?

Review: Just Like Heaven

 ***Warning: There might be spoilers. Stop here if you want to watch the movie and be surprised.***

Saturday night I streamed Just Like Heaven on Amazon Prime. It stars Reese Witherspoon as Elizabeth and Mark Ruffalo as David. The movie was released in 2005, so I decided not to worry about spoilers.

Elizabeth is a doctor who cares about saving people and neglects her personal life to stay at the hospital. She appears to work in the emergency room? It was hard to tell.

David was a landscape architect, but when he lost his wife two years earlier, he started drinking and appears to not have a job any longer? It was hard to tell.

Elizabeth's sister has set her up on a blind date, but she's running late because she's busy saving patients. When she leaves the hospital, it's raining heavily and she's hit by a truck.

David is looking for a furnished apartment, but nothing is right. Until he sees this one apartment that's being sublet on a month by month basis. He takes it. He continues to drink and doesn't use a coaster for his beer cans. Something Elizabeth points out to him when she appears. It's her apartment and she doesn't appreciate him squatting.

Through a series of events, it becomes clear Elizabeth is a spirit and David goes from trying to get rid of her to trying to help her.

This movie was really cute. I can't believe I'd never heard of it before I was scrolling through, trying to find something to watch. It sounded like it might be interesting and it was!

Is this movie a masterpiece? No. It's cute. That's really the perfect word for it.

Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo were cute and sweet together. There were a few coincidences, but it didn't detract from anything.

It's definitely more of a movie for women than men, but if you're looking for a movie and just want something cute (yes, that word again!) and enjoyable, Just Like Heaven is worth checking out.

Who Are You?

 

I realized as I started Deck's story (Wicked Persuasion) that while Kyle is still on the team, Griff is off at medical school. Green Beret teams have two medics, which means someone replaced Griff when he left.

I thought this might be helpful information to have since Deck is the team's captain and he knows what's happening.

Only I didn't count on the new medic not being willing to share anything with me. He's a vague, shadowy figure hovering in my subconscious. None of the other guys on the team are stepping up to answer my questions either.

On the one hand, this isn't must-have information. I can write the book without ever knowing anything about this man.

On the other hand, it's bugging me. :-)

I absolutely hate it when characters won't reveal themselves to me even if they're only secondary. Heck, for all I know, the new medic won't even make an appearance in the book. Doesn't matter. It's annoying me now.

It's become a must-win mission. ;-)

Creating My Own Adventure

When I took my dad to the doctor a couple of weeks ago, I went over a speed bump a little faster than I intended and my car started making an intermittent pinging sound. Maybe from the entertainment console? But it stopped after a while and I didn't worry about it.

Then, last week, I started the car when I was leaving work and it pinged like it did after the speed bump. Only this wasn't intermittent, it was constant.

I turned the car off and back on again, but that didn't fix the problem. I decided to go home and mess with it there.

Only the constant pinging was driving me bonkers. Whenever I stopped at a light, I started pressing things and fiddling around with the entertainment system. Nothing fixed the issue.

I have one of those vent clip phone holders. At some point while I was fiddling, I was like OMG why is it so hot over here? It was right by the phone and my first assumption was that the charging cradle was overheating. I yanked the cord loose. The arms opened and I tossed the phone in the cup holder.

It didn't fix the problem.

More investigation showed that one vent was blowing air conditioning--as it was supposed to be doing--and the other was blowing out very hot air. I'm like don't tell me my air conditioning system is messed up now. I pressed climate buttons. The air kept blowing hot, but the pinging stopped. Win?

I was on the freeway when I noticed my side of the car was set at its normal temperature, but the passenger side was set to HI. Yes, the heat was blowing as hot as it would go on one side of the car.

Obviously, I touched something while I was trying to stop the noise. I reset the temp on the passenger side and the temperature returned to normal. That's about the time the next problem ensued. My GPS was rerouting me around a backup at my exit. Now I needed to see my phone, but the cord was unplugged and the arms were wide open which meant the phone wouldn't remain in place.

Yeah. I reached up and manually squeezed it closed. It didn't go all the way against the phone, but it was good enough.

It Pours

I blogged on Tuesday about the roof. It was repaired, everything was good, and then Friday happened.

I lost my keys and key fob in the parking deck at work.

Queue sobbing.

You see, I have a routine. I go to the passenger side of my car, put in my laptop and tote bag, and because I'm paranoid about locking myself out of my car, I take my keys/key fob out of the bag and put them in my pocket. Then, once I'm inside the car, I put them back in my tote bag.

I don't know what happened on Friday. The keys were in my tote bag--the car wouldn't have opened without them--and I took them out and put them in my pocket like always. I could have sworn I took them out of my pocket and put them in the tote bag again.

Only when I get home and go to get my keys out to unlock the house, they're not in the pocket of my tote. This isn't the first time I've missed the pocket and they wind up on the bottom of my bag. Not this time.

I searched the car and then I realized if I'd dropped them in the car, it would start if I pressed the button. Instead, I get the message: No Key Detected. This was not what I wanted to see. I did another search of my tote bag, taking absolutely everything out. I searched my jacket even though those keys are sort of heavy.

Nothing.

So I called the lobby at work, hoping someone had found them and turned them in. No such luck. They said to call back around 5:30, they'd have security look for them. When I called back, no luck.

The surprising thing is how calm I was through all of this. I was like, well, we'll go get keys made on Saturday, I'll wait and see if someone turns in the keys the next week, and if not, I'll order another key fob from Ford. In the meantime, I have my extra fob and it worked fine, so it would be okay.

My dad, however, was seriously stressing about it and couldn't stop thinking about it. He decided to search my tote bag again. He calls out, "I found the keys!"

I'm thinking he's probably found the extra fob that I put in my tote bag, not my actual keys. But I went to look. And guess what? HE FOUND MY KEYS!

They'd fallen into the front pocket of the tote bag. I don't know how that could have possibly happened. I use one of those LL Bean totes and that front pocket is pretty tight to the bag. But somehow it managed to happen. It still has me confused, but who am I to question a minor miracle?