EMS NEWS

I was listening to an NPR piece earlier today out of boredom. (I saw it linked from another site which I got from Stumble Upon. It’s an article about something called Miracle Fruit, and I was intrigued, so I purchased a small amount of it to see if it actually works.

Apparently, when this fruit is chewed, it tricks your tastebuds for about an hour, making bitter things taste sweet. This sounds better than top diet pills.

I am notorious for not eating vegetables. They all taste bitter and nasty to me. The NPR story had the hosts drinking black coffee and eating lemons and talking about how delicious it was. So I’m gonna try some brocolli once I get my order and wolf it down in front of Corrie and see if she faints.

I just celebrated my first wedding anniversary with my wife. Money is tight for now, but I think I came up with a good gift. I either wanted to get her some new office furniture so we could blog simultaneously, or I wanted to get her a nice new showerhead for the master bath. I ended up going with the showerhead! It has a giant face for rain, and a separate head with 8 different settings. It’s luxurious, and as an added bonus, we can clean Oliver with it!

Since my trusty laptop died last week I’ve been chained to my clunky old desktop pc. I was a desktop guy my whole life until 6 months ago. I had never realized the freedom that a laptop provided me. Maybe it’s the sheer laziness of browsing the internet while sitting on the couch, but sitting in a computer chair seems so very 20th century to me now. Especially with the proliferation of wi-fi allowing me to be connected anywhere in my humble living space. I couldn’t even back up my data to an external hard drive before it died.

It’s like a relative dying before you get to say I love you.

This is the current state of our bed.

As you can see, it’s been lived-in by our adorable pup pup Oliver. He brings toys into bed without our permission when we aren’t looking, and destroys them. We also have a problem with him destroying comforter sets and pillows when he feels ignored. We had a nice comfy down comforter that was destroyed a few months ago, and we’ve lost more pillows than we can count. Anyone want to contribute to our bedding fund?

I’m faced with something that I’ve never had to worry about before, and that is having a grown-up income.  Granted, being a paramedic is not a luxurious lifestyle, but I can finally say I make enough money to not live like a hobo anymore. 

My wishlist seems to grow each day closer to my written exam.  From a king size bed to home theater chairs, to a big HDTV.  I know my wife will rein me in, but I don’t think she’ll be able to resist a nice darkened room with powered recliners and a projector with a big screen and some 7.1 surround sound.

Of course I’ve got to actually pass my test first, but I’m pretty confident that I’ll make it my first try.   

I know a lot of people are interested in wine gifts, so I wanted to post our awesome little wine chiller. 

As you can see, it is quite full.  And there are more bottles next to it waiting to be chilled.  We are going to need a wine cellar in our next house, I can feel it.  It keeps our wine chilled at a constant 50 degrees.  If anyone wants to know, it’s an Emerson.

I try to drink a glass a day because it’s the most fun you can have getting your daily antioxidants.  When I drop dead from liver failure I can look back and thank my wine habit for letting me not die from a heart attack.

I need to build up some cpm on this website by expanding it’s focus a bit.

I’ve been a huge NIN fan since I was in middle school.  I guess that makes me old and lame, but whatever.  Anyhow, as you may know, last month Trent and company release a 4 CD compilation of instrumental tracks for free on his website.  It wasn’t anything you’d hear on the radio, of course, but I really enjoy it.  Great chill music. 

Last week sometime, he released a new track called “Discipline.”  Again, it was free, and it was decent.  Probably not up to his earlier stuff but it was catchy enough.

And today, he really blows the free music boat out of the water by releasing yet ANOTHER free CD over on NIN.com.  It’s offered in MP3, FLAC, lossless M4A, and WAV format.  Which means that there is absolutely no reason for any internet nerd to bitch.

After a few listens it’s growing on me.  Definitely gonna burn it to CD and take it on the ambulance tomorrow. 

This is a true story. 

Last week I volunteered for a long distance trip to southern Tennessee.  The trip should have taken about 18 hours round trip.  It ended up taking 28 hours. 

I took the trip in part to make my supervisor happy, and I also wanted the money.  With overtime I should have been making about $21 an hour for the trip. 

Today I found out that my rate would be $12 an hour, and I wouldn’t even get paid for the entire trip because my company is run by tightwads. 

My partner for the trip was someone I wish I had never met.  He talked incessantly about the most inane subjects.  He stopped constantly to “stretch his legs”.  He gave horrible patient care.  He scared the family members needlessly.  He got us lost several times.  Anything that could have aggravated me on this trip did.

I am a big proponent of taking the right equipment to work.  When I got home I bought two items on my wish list from Buy.com.  One of them was a set of professional headphones to create my own little zone of silence.  Not to be anti social, but sometimes you just want peace and quiet in this job and you can’t get it.  The second item on my list was a TomTom GPS navigation system that I got refurbished for $125.  No more getting lost.

The best part is that I used Google Checkout and saved $10 off my first order.  And that, my friends, is why buy.com rocks. 

One of my talents is finding great online deals.  I’ve gotten free samples of all kinds of good stuff. I’ve gotten a free coffee maker, free USB drives, an awesome deal on a cell phone, Best Buy discounts, and more.  A lot of these great deals come from Coupon Chief.  Coupon Chief lets you get coupons for tons of online stores like Target, Best Buy, Dell, and more.  If you need clothes you can find Kohls coupon codes or codes for Gap and Banana Republic too.

If only we had money to go shopping right now!

My wife is still trying to get into a job at a big PR or marketing company.  She’s qualified, smart, and an MBA.  She is also a great blogger and has a good grasp of online media.  Lots of people have no idea how to market online.  SEO is a delicate job and there isn’t a lot of help out there if you don’t have someone like my wife working for you.

If you are a non-techy who doesn’t know How to write a press release for search engines and get it noticed, you need to look into Newsforce.  Newsforce can be your secret weapon to get your news noticed on the web.  SEO, or search engine optimization, can be the difference between ending up on page 1 on google, or page 40.  Newsforce is only $20 per release, so you don’t have to take out a corporate loan.  (You could buy it yourself and be sneaky, claiming your results are your own hard work.)

This is an example of how your press release can show up quickly and boldly with Google and Yahoo!, the two largest search engines on the internet. 

I shouldn’t even be talking about this, because my wife needs work!

It can be our little secret.

Christmas is over.  It’s time to start saving for Valentine’s Day.  I think that 2 months isn’t enough of a break in between major gift giving holidays.  Why not have it in June? 

I have no idea what to get Corrin this year.  She always manages to get me cute stuff like boxers and plastic handcuffs and stuff.  And I’ll probably never top the Shitbitch bear.  I don’t know…maybe fine lingerie this year.  Although that strike me as more of a gift for me.  I think if it were up to Corrin some flannel PJ’s would be preferred.

Here in the midwest, it’s winter and that means dry skin.  I am moisturizing everyday and I still feel like sandpaper.  It’s uncomfortable when it hurts to smile. 

Of course if we moved to Florida that wouldn’t be a problem.  I was a hot mess in Florida in October, sweating my booty off and chafing in unusual places.  The humidity there is a definite no-no for me.  I would totally buy 10 dehumidifiers if I had to live there. 

That said, I still am gonna go back next year and lounge by the sand-bottom pool.

Today is the first day we’ve had in a while that hasn’t been below freezing, and I plan on taking advantage by washing my car.  I’m even going to wash it at work.  EMS has it’s privileges.  I might get brains on my jacket, but I can wash my car on the clock. 

I’ve been working on the Corolla a lot lately.  My mom wanted to know what kind of auto accessories I wanted for Christmas, and I told her some ramps so I can work underneath the car.  I’m gonna be quite the handyman someday.

Being a paramedic, or any public service job for that matter, is a humble life.  No one ever got rich hauling old people around all day.  With the average new home costing over $250,000 in this area, it seems more and more unlikely that I’ll ever be able to afford luxury homes with pools and lots of room for wiener dogs to roam around. 

I’m not an incredibly materialistic person when it comes to most things, but a nice brick house that won’t collapse in a storm and has enough room to raise a family is pretty high on my list.

A few weeks ago, my dad gave me his HD TV/DVD player combo as a gift because he didn’t have anywhere to put it.  I was looking at it and noticed that it had a DivX logo on the DVD player portion.  DivX is a format that compresses video.  Since I’ve been known to obtain movies from various internet sites, I figured I’d try and burn one to a DVD and see if it played on the DVD player. 

It worked!  And becuse DivX movies are small, I can fit 6-7 movies on one disc.  The quality is pretty good.  It’s not HD quality, of course, and you need a subtitle service if you need different languages, but it’s still pretty nifty to be able to cut your DVD collection down to a fraction of what it was.