No Thought Involved

This past Monday evening, I made a trip to my local IKEA where I purchased a brand new STENSTORP. At the time, I did not realize that the solid oak top benefited from regular treatments of BEHANDLA. Needless to say, when I went to assemble it Thursday night, I was upset.

Not wanting to make the trek back to down to Stoughton, I did some research to see if I could find a similar product at my local Home Depot. It’s a mixture of tung and linseed oil, and the offerings from Minwax didn’t seem to quite fit the bill and a return to IKEA seemed inevitable.

Then I remembered about Task Rabbit, which I had read about when it launched in Boston a few months ago. I logged on and explained my task, etc. My biggest worry prior to posting the task was that no one would pick up the task and I’d end up going to IKEA. Much to my surprise, though, the task was assigned within ten minutes (at 7:15 p.m. Thursday evening).

I received contact information for the person assigned to the task (which they refer to as Task Rabbits, appropriately enough). We had a small conversation over email to make sure she had the exact product description and my work address. She also let me know what time she’d have it delivered by. This also happened very quickly and by 7:30 we had sent our last email to each other and then all I had to do was wait.

The cost to me was $19 (which is the Task Rabbit’s bid to complete the task plus a service fee that goes to the company (I’m not exactly sure how that break down works)) and $5.30 for the actual item purcahsed. Task Rabbit takes care of all the money and charges my credit card.

As you can gather from my overall elation in this post, the item was delivered without issue and on time. I strongly recommend the service – they do a great deal more than delivering things from IKEA.

The 2011 Holiday Mailing took part in two phases. Phase I, postmarked on December 19 from Somerville, included 100 holiday cards bound for all destinations outside of Massachusetts. Phase II, postmarked on December 20 from Burlington, consisted of 136 holiday cards, all bound for addresses inside Massachusetts.

VistaPrint provided printing services for these cards. Excluding the cost of shipping the order, I am quite pleased with the cards and I hope the recipients are, too!

Some other fun facts about this mailing:
* 236 holiday cards
* States Represented: 20 (New England, NY, NJ, PA, MD, VA, NC, FL, MI, IL, LA, TX, CO, CA, OR)
* First holiday mailing to include all six states in New England
* Lowest ZIP: 01075 (South Hadley, MA)
* Highest ZIP: 97035 (Lake Oswego, OR)
* Top 5 Cities: Boston^† 22, Somerville 16, Worcester 15, New York^‡ and Brookline 7
* Most Distance Traveled: 10,519 miles (as the crow flies) to Richmond, Victoria, Australia
* Least Distance Traveled*: .3 miles to Windsor Road, Somerville, MA
* Sent to Massachusetts: 57.6%
* Sent to the balance of New England: 14.4%
* Sent to the Atlantic North East (NJ/NY/PA/MD): 13.6%
* Sent to the balance of the United States: 11.9%
* International: 2.5%

Compare to 2009.
Compare to 2008.
Compare to 2007.
Compare to 2006.

† – Includes Boston, Charlestown, Dorchester Center, Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury
‡ – Includes New York, Bronx, and Richmond Hill
* – Excludes the cards mailed to my roommates and downstairs neighbors

I met a young woman named Ali over the weekend. No matter how much time passes since I was first introduced to Homestar Runner and Strong Bad, whenever I meet someone named Ali, I immediately say in my head “Ali, Ali’s Sister” per this cartoon.

As a preface, I don’t usually delve into politics on my blog. Moreover, I don’t know why MSNBC was so excited to have all of these emails from Mrs. Palin and her staff. I imagine any day-to-day governing would be quite boring.

I did do a quick search on the keyword Friday (since it is Friday, after all) and found an email where she thanked her scheduler, Kari Spencer, for (I assume) sending gift baskets to victims of a fire in Juneau. A quick search on the Internet leads me to believe it was this fire on April 4, 2007 (based off of the date of the email).

I did find it amusing that Mrs. Palin thanked Ms. Spencer by saying, “thank you. you sure know how to put out fires.” Her lack of winky face makes me think she didn’t realize her word choice at the time.

This weekend, as part of Memorial Day Weekend 2011, I went to the town wide yard sales Harvey Cedars, NJ in search of a typewriter.

As a small aside, I had tried the same thing during Memorial Day 2010 but did not see a typewriter. Instead, I ended up purchasing the soundtrack to Aladdin on cassette tape.

This year, however, I was far more successful in finding a typewriter. She’s a beauty. It’s a Corona-Smith Coronet Super 12 (Brown). From my cursory searches on the Internet, I’m led to believe it’s an early 1970′s era model.

One YouTube video I watched indicates that the Coronoa-Smith company was known for their high quality craftsmanship. I can’t disagree as the machine works extremely well for a device that could be approaching (if not already over) forty years of age.

Among some of the finer qualities of the machine include:
* Easy cartridge load design to enable hot-swapping of different color cartridges (thought I can only find black on eBay)
* A tab button
* Unique charcthers like ¢, ¼ and ½
* No hassle with unnecessary keys like the tilde, back tick, carat, and square/curly/inequality brackets

They had requested $35 for the machine but I countered at $20 before we settled on $25. My friends argue I should have opened at $15 but I’m happy with where it ended up.

I’ve already written ten letters with plans to write several more. A quick check on the Internet also tells me I should be able to get replacement cartridges for the machine with great ease at a nominal fee.