Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Never give up... Never surrender....

The watchwords of the crew of the Protector, the sci-fi spaceship made real by aliens in the delightful comedy film GalaxyQuest.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know I'm never going to give up my quest to win a laptop computer. Or a notebook/netbook/mini or whatever other cutsie name they come up with for a compact and portable personal computer.

My quest has today taken me to The Mommy Files, where the prize is a Toshiba Portege A-600. It weighs just over three pounds and includes an Intel Core 2 Duo Processor SU9400, 3GB of SDRAM, a 320GB hard drive, and a DVD-SuperMulti drive. It comes with Windows Vista installed, but nobody's perfect. I also love the fingerprint reader. Wow, just like James Bond.

Hope on over to The Mommy Files before midnight on Wednesday for your own chance to win this beauty. And my offer stands -- if you win, and you don't really need the computer, I'll be happy to take it off your hands.

Monday, June 08, 2009

Don't it make my brown eyes blue...

So, DH left work at 5pm and walked down to the theatre and he looked over to where the line formed for the Elcano, and he said, "Doesn't look like there's a line today." So we hotfooted it (literally, it was boiling) one block east and a couple of blocks south to the gate of the port, and the cop was turning people away. And it wasn't 5:30 yet!

Flashback to Saturday. We parked at DH's work, and he said, "Let's go look at the farmer's market" so we walked over to the next block and looked at the stuff, and then we headed down to the port. The line was out the gate and up to Main Street, so we waited for about an hour, and we were about 25 people away from getting inside the gate and they shut it.

The Juan Sebastian de Elcano is a Spanish tall ship, a sailing ship, that is visiting Pensacola as part of the Fiesta of Five Flags and the 450th Anniversary of Pensacola. Nothing was said about how the gate was going to be shut 30 minutes before the tours were scheduled to end. Not until after Saturday morning. Then the paper says the gates will be shut a half hour before the tours end. So, we should have been able to get in on Monday. Nope, they shut it earlier.

Now, I would imagine that these tours are nothing new for the Elcano and its crew. They should have some reasonable idea of how many people they can have aboard during a three-hour tour window. How about having someone at the gate counting off as people go in (there's a clicker that counts, we used them at Disney before)? How about looking at the line and establishing a cut-off point before people waste their time standing in the hot sun for an hour?

I understand if it's full, but use some common sense and don't waste people's time.

So, I'm very sad. I could be made happy again if I won a beautiful Vivienne Tam-designed HP Mini. If you read my blog regularly, you know how badly I want a laptop of any description, but I have coveted this Vivienne Tam one for months, since it was first unveiled. It's gorgeous, it looks like a stylish evening bag but it's a computer! The website BlissfullyDomestic.com is giving one away today. I won't win, because I want it so badly. Such is the way of things. Still, I have to try. You might as well try, too, and if you win, and you really don't care about it that much, you could give it to me, and that would be your good deed for the day and help you get into Heaven.