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Xmas Presents

December 26, 2014 / / 0 Comments

This year, Christmas for me was not a cornucopia of presents.  For one, my sister Kathy didn’t come home so there was nothing underneath from her or my parents.  For another, I neither asked for much nor made much of a deal about Mike getting me anything.  Therefore, I feel free to write about the great presents I did get, without having to feel the shame of participating in unabashed consumerism – or at least, of owning up to it.

So this is what I got.

IMG_1906Mika got me these gorgeous owl earrings and at the San Francisco Zoo no less! She got Camila some gorgeous elephant earrings as well.

She also got me a homemade card with the words of the Backstreet Boy’s song The Perfect Fan

The San Leandro main library has a tiny gift shop run by volunteers.  They always manage to have cute, unique and reasonable price items.  I don’t go there too often anymore (e-books be damned!), but during a recent visit I spotted a few items items I did like. I pointed them out to Mike and he got me a couple:

IMG_1908 IMG_1913IMG_1907A very cute gold & black necklace.  I think it was supposed to come with earrings, but it didn’t 🙁

A messy chain necklace with matching earrings. Yeah, I’m probably too old for it, but who cares?  🙂

 

leathergloves

 

Mike also got me a new pair of leather gloves, as I lost my last one.

I like listening to history lectures on YouTube before I go to sleep, and somehow I came upon some lectures by Timothy Snyder, a historian of 20th century Eastern Europe.  Snyder is incredible – both as a scholar and as a lecturer -, and I quickly listened to anything by him I could find on YouTube.  From there I graduated to his magnum opus Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin  I had it out of the library for over a month, but it’s a long and emotionally challenging book (I’m haunted by the images of roving bands of cannibals hunting little children during the holodomor, and then things get worse) so I couldn’t finish it. I asked Mike to get it for me so I could read it at my own pace.

Camila, meanwhile, made me a beautiful collage.

I didn’t think that I hadn’t really given myself a present until too late (though I did get some clothing, cooking equipment and tea on sale), so I’ve decided to splurge by getting a couple of subscription boxes.  I already ordered a Petit Vour box, just for the thrill of getting a surprise at a low price ($15 a month), but after doing more research on subscription boxes, what I really want is a GlobeIn Artisan Box.  GlobeIn is a marketplace for artisans worldwide, you can go on their website and buy a clay onion container, from an artisan in Russia, a hand-knitted horse poncho from Mexico or a handmade small yurt from a yurt-maker in Kyrgyztan trying to jump star his business.   But you can also get a mystery box for $35 a month including shipping, and that’s what I really want.  I may very well order it for myself, but I’ll wait to see if the come up with any more “first month free” offers.

Golden Nugget – Las Vegas – Hotel Review

August 12, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Golden-Nugget-Las-VegasMy first introduction to Las Vegas came through a TV show that I watched as a kid in Argentina called Vega$.  Dan Tanna, a private detective played by the very good looking Robert Urich, went around the Las Vegas casinos solving crimes and helping get people out of trouble.  The show had plenty of scenes involving show girls, cocktail waitresses and gambling rooms, and that’s what I think of when I think of Las Vegas.  Staying at the Golden Nugget brought a little of that back, though the hotel has been modernized significantly.

Our real reason for staying, though, was that my youngest daughter, Camila, wanted to go to its pool.  The Golden Nugget has a very cool pool. It has a large, tall aquarium in the middle, which is full of pretty fish and sharks.  A 3-story high slide circles around the aquarium, depositing you in the pool.  The pool itself is pretty small, but I liked the in-water lounge chairs.  As things turned out, neither my husband nor Camila were particularly impressed with the pool.  The line to go up the slide was very long, which meant they only could go once, and the trip down is too fast to see anything.  My 12-year-old, however, really liked swimming around the aquarium, and said that changing hotels for a night was worth it for that opportunity.  The pool, by the way, is open until 8 PM in summer, though only until 5 PM in other seasons.

We stayed in the Rush Tower.  Our room was large and very nicely appointed with stylish furniture. There was plenty of storage space, though not as many easily accessible outlets as I wished.  I particularly liked the modular sofa/lounge chair in the room.  My oldest daughter was able to sleep there for the night, though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone tall.  The room doesn’t have a fridge, though apparently you can rent one. It has a TV but with few cable channels and no children channels.

The room was fairly, but not completely, clean and ready.  There was no toilet paper in the bathroom (though some was brought up immediately after we asked for it) and a dirty towel had been left in the bathtub.  What would have been of larger concern, had we stayed more than one night, was the “view”.  Our room was in the fifth floor and faced the roof of a building.  There were too flood lights on these roof which were turned on at night, fortunately the curtains were heavy enough to not let any of the light come through.  However, even with the curtains open, the room was very dark.  We had to turn on the light to be able to see around, even during the day.  I’d recommend that if you stay here, you ask for a room on a higher floor, and on the other side of the building (an even number room).

The king size bed was quite comfortable, as were the pillows.  All in all we all slept quite well.

What I didn’t like about the Golden Nugget is how they nicked-and-dime you.  Internet was $13 extra a day; the room had a coffeemaker, but if you wanted coffee you had to pay $10 for it.

Mike and I did a little bit of gambling at the hotel’s casino, and I found it enjoyable enough, even though I lost.  It’s a smoking casino – as are most – but the smell wasn’t too bad.  It probably took 1/2 hour before a cocktail waitress approached me, but she was very nice and efficient when she did.  I had to wait less later when we were playing roulette.

We had dinner at Grotto, one of the more affordable (and yet, still expensive) choices at the Golden Nugget.

I don’t know that I’d stay at the Golden Nugget again, mostly because I prefer the strip, but it’s a definitely a good choice if you want to stay downtown.  It does feel much more intimate and comfortable than the hotels in the strip – but perhaps I perceived it like that because by the end of our four days in Vegas, I was tired.

Golden Nugget Hotel
129 East Fremont Street
Las Vegas, NV
(702) 386-8221
http://www.goldennugget.com/lasvegas/

Marga’s Hotel Reviews

Marga’s Las Vegas page

I got hacked: versus.php

July 14, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I just realized that my website marga.org has been hacked for over two years!  There was a file on my main directory named versus.php  which served up pages with information on how to buy drugs like viagra.  Yuck!  The pages were in a directory called “1”, which had been created within another preexisting directory.

Mike thinks the hack must come through an old, vulnerable version of WordPress.  The thing is that I didn’t notice it until I did a search for “Greece” on marga.org – suddenly most of the Google results were for drugs.

I daresay that the hack made me lose quite a bit of page ranking, but it’s my bad for not noticing it before.

I’m writing this in case someone comes across the same file in their website.

On Toe Corns and Hangers

April 21, 2014 / / 1 Comment

hangerI am a pretty intelligent person, all in all. I have degrees from top universities, kids called me the brain in school and only the truly dumb have ever accused me of being dumb.  But I have pretty much no practical abilities.  I don’t pay attention to the world around me, and therefore I don’t really know how it works.  This became clear to me today when i was hanging clothing to dry.

Our drier is broken.  Rather than try to figure out how to fix it – like any other intelligent person would do -, and tired of bugging my husband to take a look, I decided to start hanging the clothing to dry in the backyard.  So far, so good. I managed to install the cloth line between two trees without any major problems (though I keep having to re-tie it, as it becomes lower and lower).  But one cloth line is not enough for a whole load of laundry, so I’ve been hanging shirts on hangers from the branches of trees.  Trouble is, many of my t-shirts have wide necks and fall off the hangers.  I’d been hanging wet t-shirts on hangers from about a week, when I finally figured out what the purpose of those little loops of fabric under the sleeves is: to hook them into the little hooks in the hangers, to prevent the garment from falling.  Did I mention how I am 45 years old and I only figured this out now?

But here is a better one.   Today, still 45, I figured out that you can use those little hooks in the hanger to trap the shirts and make sure they don’t fall.  All these years I could have been preventing my shirts from falling off the hammers in my closet – if I had just spent a couple of minutes paying attention to the structure of the hanger!

And just now, before I started this blog article, I’ve had another revelation.  A couple of years ago I noticed I had developed ugly corns on the toes of one of my feet.  I might have had them for years before, of course.  The corns did puzzle me and I tried to figure out why I had them.  The most likely explanation – shoes that were rubbing and creating the calluses – didn’t really work, and the shoes I wear specifically do not rub that area.  Plus I started noticing that the corns remained year round no matter what type of shoes I wore.

Well, I think I finally figured out their cause.  When I sit at my computer, I just realized, I actually curl my toes on that foot and rest my foot on the ground, on those toes – just where the corns are.  I don’t know how often I do this, but clearly often enough to create those corns.  Now it’s time to test my theory. I’ll try to remove them and then be conscious to not curl my toes on the ground and see if they come back.

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