March Musings

March Madness began for me with a trip to Indianapolis to see my beloved Rutgers Women’s basketball team play in the BIG 10 Basketball Tournament in early March.  My fellow fan friends and I saw nine games before Rutgers finally played in the quarterfinals, where they beat Purdue.  Then they lost the next night to the eventual champs, Iowa, in a spirited game.  In all, we saw 13 women’s games in five days, and, if that weren’t enough, about two dozen of us got tickets to see the Rutgers Men’s team play Indiana in nearby Bloomington.  I’m resting up now, eagerly awaiting news of the NCAA Tournament – “The Big Dance” – and hope to follow my team as they play on. Fourteen games in five days really borders on MADNESS!

You never realize how many clocks you have in the house until you have to spring ahead or fall back!

There is nothing that makes me happier at the supermarket than getting a good parking space where I can “pull through” so I don’t have to back up the car to leave.  Or when I can find one of those little carts.  I don’t need a huge carriage, and besides, I can’t even reach to the bottom to grab my purchases and put them on the conveyer belt.  It really is the little things.

Is it just me or has this been a long, cold, dreary winter?  I can’t wait until the real spring is here and I can relish the fresh air, longer days and getting out without worrying about cold, snow and ice.

You know I love my Alexa (Amazon’s Echo device), but, considering our friendship, I think she could be a little more forthcoming.  For instance, when I ask her for the weather report, she tells me the temperature and whether there will be sunshine, and she lets me know if there is a storm warning.  But unless I ask, she doesn’t mention snow.  Then she hesitates, informing me that there is a “possibility” of snow, really hedging her bets, and failing to forecast snowfall amounts unless I inquire.  I think she should issue a warning that is more like this: “I put a list together of your staples and I’m telling you to RUN to the store and buy up all the milk and bread.  It’s gonna be a bad one.”  She could go a step further and offer the weather as soon as I walk in or when I am ready to walk out the door, rather than waiting until I ask – which, she should know by now, is our main topic of conversation.  I get by with a little help from my friends.

Cage fighting is considered a sport.  Two people beating the crap out of each other for money gets airtime on ESPN, alongside football, baseball, etc.  There’s a profession no one aspired to when I was growing up.

Speaking of which, who decides at a young age to be an “influencer?”  Young kids manage to acquire a big following on social media by endorsing certain brands of makeup, clothing, etc., that reflects their own lifestyle (thank you, Gwyneth Paltrow, for that one), and the companies pay them for their “influence.”  On that basis, Bumble Bee owes me a fortune, because I have been buying and recommending their tuna fish for decades!  I guess I’m just not influential enough.

Sure, it is WRONG for rich and famous people to commit fraud and pay bribes to get their kids into colleges, but the US has enough resources to deploy 300 FBI agents and others to investigate this scam?  The rich have gotten their kids into prestigious schools for decades without meeting the necessary criteria, it seems to me.  Has anyone checked out how the president ended up at Penn?  How George Bush got into Yale?  Yes, it is a crime and those who gamed the system should pay, but while there are more pressing problems beyond the rich being different, shouldn’t our resources be used to address mass killings, gun violence, domestic violence and other crimes where people actually die rather than fail to attend a college class or get admitted to college when they are not actually members of the crew team?

Dear Movie Pass:  When I signed up, my purpose was to be able to watch an unlimited number of movies each month, which is what you advertised.  Subscribe for a year and see a movie a day if you wish!  But then you changed the rules.  First, you limited the number, and then you selected which movies I could see.  Now the application seldom works, so I cannot even get in to see the movies you are promoting.  Instead, you have offered me bargains on wine and now you are pushing a meal delivery service.  I predict Movie Pass will be out of business soon, since the company cannot manage to stay focused on the mission on which it was founded.  Keep your wine and meals and let me see movies!  I am not renewing my annual subscription.  What a disappointment you are.

Everyone likes a good sale, but “buy one, get one half off” is NOT a good sale, in my opinion.  If I buy one watch, why would I need another at half off?  You are actually getting a 25% discount if you buy two of the same items, but if you only need one, you are paying more for something you really don’t need.  Just give me the sale, not the package deal.

I get my nails done often, and while I like the way they look, going to the nail salon is not my favorite thing to do. Just selecting the color for my hands or feet is stressful.  Are my nails long enough for a darker or brighter color, or should I go light?  Should I try to match an outfit, a season?  Gel or regular?  Gel lasts MUCH longer, costs more, but it something I can’t mess up on the way home from the salon.  (I can ruin a regular manicure just putting on my seatbelt.)  And a regular manicure takes FOREVER to dry, where a gel manicure requires you to put your hands in and out of those ultraviolet light contraptions, the signals for which by the nail tech are just a subtle little nod of the head or wave of the hand.  The last time I went for a manicure I took a picture of the polish so I could remember the name of the color and its number.  This natural beauty stuff is complicated!