The world around us

I’ve been getting bad headaches since I was a teenager. At first, I didn’t know what they were and why I was getting them, then it turned out to be a migraine and not just any old headache. Since then, I have learned to avoid foods that give me a migraine such as MSG or mono sodium glutamate, chocolate, cheese and wine. Combining these foods make me get a migraine much faster for some reason. MSG is the worst of these four for me, and so I am careful about pre-packaged soups and other foods that usually have it as a major ingredient and also make sure to eat at Chinese restaurants that do not use it.

Here’s another old cartoon from BLaugh. No new ones uploaded there for ages, so I decided to dig through the old ones. This one is pretty good, even though it isn’t on the top 10 list. Enjoy

Holiday shopping is coming to an end, with Christmas just a day away, but retailer s are still not happy with the results of the holidays shopping. There have been lots of foreign shoppers coming to some US cities such as New York City, which has give a bit of a boost to retailers, but on the whole most retailers are barely going to match last year’s holiday sales figures. Online retailers seem to have fared slightly better, especially due to the special deals that they offered on Cyber Monday. It doesn’t look like a very good year for retailers, and next to be hit are grocery stores with the expected rise in prices coming next year.

Lately, I’ve had to buy lots of gifts for children and have found it really hard to come up with stuff for boys, while it is just to easy to find gifts for girls, as the choices and variety of stuff available is just amazing. We’ve had several birthdays for kids in the neighborhood and its been a completely different experience shopping for gifts for children. I remember when I used to work for a children’s wear retailer, I spent a lot of time, mentally buying things for all the kinds I knew as a sort of exercise in understanding what would be perfect for whom and so on.

With barely a few days left before Christmas, shoppers are still holding out till the very last minute to get the best deals possible and are making retailers extremely jittery. Many stores will be keeping their doors open till late right until Christmas. J.C. Penney will have its stores open till midnight on Friday and Saturday, Mervyns will remain open till 2am through the weekend and will also give away $10 gift certificates to its first 200 shoppers everyday, when the store opens at 5am.

Kmart will also be revving things up and is holding a non-stop 64 hour sale starting at 6am on saturday at the majority of its stores across the country. Beating Kmart are the Macy’s stores in Greater New York that will stay open for 83 hours, with its Queens Center Mall store opening at 7am on Thursday and closing at 6pm on Monday, a continuous stretch of 107 hours. Candace Corlett, a principal at WSL Strategic Retail, put it perfectly, saying “There’s a lot of desperation out there. This is a weird, wacky holiday.”

Retailers are not the only ones who are facing the crunch, the International Council of Shopping Centers announced that sales for the previous week were up by only 2.1% over last year’s figures and were the weakest year-on-year figures. There have been a series of unfortunate events getting in the way of shopping, from storms to the economy to procrastinating shoppers waiting for last minute deals.

Britt Beemer, chairman of America’s Research Group, shaved his holiday forecast this week, saying sales at stores open a year or more would rise 1.8%, not 2%. It was his lowest forecast in a decade.

Consumer Reports’ final shopping poll of the season found that one-third of respondents hadn’t bought anything as of Dec. 9 and that 34% didn’t expect to finish acquiring gifts until Christmas Eve.

We’re really big on having a nice home entertainment center, so getting some tv stands was pretty high up on our list of items when we moved in here. For our bedroom, we found a really nice and sleek TV stand in a pale ash color that looks super in the room. It has two drawers and two open shelves, so we have a decent amount of space to store our CDs and DVDs as well as other stuff that need not be displayed but is required. We will have to get a shelf fixed above the TV or on the side of it, when we get a music system, which is one of the last few pending items on our list.

OK, I know it’s too soon to post another cartoon, but I just could not resist this one from bLaugh. I didn’t want to forget about it or worse lose it, so here it is. Enjoy, it’s really good isn’t it? Bloggers are always looking for new things to blog about, but this one really takes the cake.

There are so many ways to tackle drug treatment these days that just didn’t exist earlier. For one, going into rehab was a decision that was hidden by most people, but with the rush of celebrities going into rehab for one reason or the other, it has become much more acceptable than ever before. You just cannot pick up a magazine these days without reading about the latest entrant to a drug rehab center and this is completely changing the way average consumers leads their lives.

I just can’t seem to get enough of the cartoons of bLaugh and I seem to have stumbled on a whole bunch of the older ones that I had not seen earlier. This one is on the ever growing power of Google, and it even though this one came out over a year back, it holds even more true today than it did before. Most of the older cartoons on bLaugh don’t appear on the front page as they don’t have enough votes from viewers, so if you want to see some great cartoons then use the previous arrow at the top of the cartoon to find new cartoons.

With the long holiday weekend coming up, we’re making full use of the opportunity to finish up a lot of our pending shopping, not only for the holidays but also for the house in general, stuff that we’ve needed to buy but just haven’t had the time for it as yet. So the HDMI switches that have been waiting to be bought will finally get done, along with the shelving unit we need for the hallway, and a trolley for the kitchen/pantry area. Also on the list are some new curtains and cushion covers for the living room, so it won’t just be us giving present to each other, but also to ourselves and to the house.