I don’t suppose it’s national news, but there’s a cheating scandal over SAT scores here on Lawn Guy Land. Some high school students supposedly paid some college students to take the exam for them. As I understand it, one of the fraudulent test takers received several hundred dollars to achieve a combined score of 1,920 out of 2,400 on the test. As I figure it, that’s a solid B. I got 1,500 on the test when the highest possible score was 1,600. I’d be happy to take the test for others except for two things: I’m too old to pass for a high school student; and taking the SAT for someone else is a felony, at least where I live.
In the last item, MS Word’s grammar checker objected to my use of the contraction “it’s,” but would have allowed me to substitute “it is.” Sometimes it tells me both “it’s,” and “its” are wrong, but it has never told be both are correct.
It’s a little early to conduct the voting, but the current TV commercial for Fruit of the Loom t-shirts has to be considered a front runner for stupidest commercial of the year.
Pillsbury is advertising its cinnamon rolls on TV as containing Cinnabon cinnamon. That’s fine, but on those rare occasions that I go to Cinnabon, it’s not for the cinnamon, it’s for the gooey, sticky white icing.
Speaking of cinnamon, I’ve been experimenting with adding it to my oatmeal. I got up to two heaping teaspoons full, and I could barely taste it. At that rate, I don’t think I’ll continue to raise the stakes.
Thinking I would like it, my daughter bought me a geek present from a vendor on Etsy.com. I do like it, so I was looking through the website for something else and found a “blue screen of death” t-shirt. As one more proof that there’s always someone who doesn’t get it, the shirt comes in 14 colors, and only three of them are blue.
Vacuum cleaner is a peculiar term, because a vacuum is clean by definition. However, vacuum cleaner or shop vacuum for home use is a very simple tool, usually easy to repair. My wife’s family kept an upright Hoover going for 40 years or more. I had to clean the powered beater bar on the carpet attachment for our canister vac yesterday. Two things about repairing a vacuum: it’s handy to have a second vacuum around so you can clean up the mess you find inside the one you’re fixing, and keep that mess from getting all over the house; and if I didn’t have the manual for mine, I would never have been able to take it apart without breaking it.
I usually lose paperwork, so when I buy any appliance, if it has a manual, I try to download it to my computer. I haven’t lost the computer yet, and while I have had a couple of hard drive failures over the years, I back up pretty regularly, so it hasn’t been a problem.
We don’t use our formal dining room a lot, but we used it for Thanksgiving dinner. It was the first time since I reupholstered the dining room chairs. I didn’t just change the fabric; I also replaced the seat cushions with thicker, softer ones, and replaced the plywood base of one of the chairs. What an improvement! Not only are the chairs much more comfortable, but the new fabric looks really classy. Additionally, I treated the chairs with Scotchguard so they ought to be stain resistant as well.
