Our ridiculous excuse for a refrigerator (brand Maytag; moral of that story: avoid the brand like the plague!) finally decided to pack in for good, and it did so with flair. Refrigerators apparently have heaters in them (who’d have thought it?), and the repairman just replaced it for the third time. Well, the very next day, we noticed the refrigerator warming up again, and when my brother peeked into the heater area, he found the heater red-hot, like a hot iron poker. This kind of freaked us all out, because who knows what would have happened if this had taken place while we were all asleep…maybe the refrigerator would have caught fire or something? We unplugged it, and decided to put an end to it’s 10-year existence.

This weekend we’ve been searching for an upright freezer to replace the refrigerator with. We went everywhere, and finally landed at Sears. We found a model we liked, and told the salesman we’d decide over the weekend and come back during the week. He said, “But this is a 20% discount, and starting Sunday it’ll be only a 15% discount…” We said, “We don’t care, we’d rather pay $20, $30, $40 dollars more later and be super-sure, than buy it now and then be disappointed with it for the rest of it’s life.” We took the guy’s card and came home.

Then, my mom got onto the Mommy Phone A Friend For Advice Network (every woman has one, right, ladies?!), and one of her friends told her about the Sears Appliance Outlet, saying that they usually have very very good deals, so go check them out first. Maybe we’ll find the model we liked, for up 40-50 percent less. So, ok, we went. Here is where I stop talking about the refrigerators and start talking about ovens.

Because while it was 85 degrees outside, it was about 105 degrees inside this outlet store. The whole time we were looking at the refrigerators, we felt like we were in an oven. What in God, Heaven, and Hell’s name are they thinking in that place?! And they had these huge overhead fans circulating all this hot air around to make us feel even worse. I was so blisteringly hot in there, I wouldn’t have bought anything even if I was really in love with the item. I don’t know how the employees go in to work there everyday–no wonder they sounded kind of surly on the phone when I called to ask what products they had in stock. Talk about sweatshop labor!

When we got back outside, it was like stepping into winter. For a few minutes, we didn’t even have to turn on the air-con in the car. Until we realized that it is summer in California, after all.

Ok, back to talking about refrigerators, or more specifically, the prices on things in there. It was really weird. Some things were really reduced in price (the more the cosmetic damage, the greater the reduction), but then when you add the Sears Master Protection Plan, it jacks up the price to be the same as you’d pay in the store, because the Master Protection Plan at the Outlet is based on the item’s original price, while the MPP at the store is based on the sale price. Very odd, or shall I say, very gimmicky. (And the MPP is pretty much a necessity to have, so that all future repairs will be covered, parts and labor, for 3 or 5 years…given how things are made these days, whatever we buy will definitely be seeing a repairman within a couple of years…and we’d rather go with a Sears repairman than the independent one we’ve been using the last few years…coz that has clearly not worked out very well!)

So, back to the store we go. Where we won’t have to feel like we’re shopping inside an oven.

Oh my Allah, it is so hot. Yesterday, of all days, when we decided to spend the day outdoors at a local botanical garden, was the hottest day for that date in 95 years. It was an uncharacteristic 95 degrees. At the time, while we were outside, I had no idea what the temperature was. I thought it was probably 80 or so, which it should normally be, and I was wondering why I could hardly stand it. Come to find out this morning that it was indeed hellishly hot, and there is nothing wrong with my internal thermometer. Whew!

Today, the heat was back. Unrelenting it is. The only thing that makes it slightly bearable is praying. Sounds odd, and not something I’ve noticed before, I don’t think. But, at the end of dhuhr salaah, I felt about 15 degrees cooler. And the process repeated for ‘Asr. I wonder if it will repeat for Maghrib…which I’m off to pray right now.

Oh, this is murder. What will hell be like? I hope I don’t have to find out. I can’t handle this, as it is. Oh my Allah, I didn’t even realize there is an air-conditioner right next to me that I can turn on!!! It’s official, the heat has fried my brain.

We were waiting at a red light, which seemed to be taking forever. Eyes were wandering around, looking for something to distract ourselves with. We saw two girls on a bike. They came to stop at the intersection. The girl pedaling the bike got off, and the girl who was riding the handlebars took the newly vacated seat. The first girl walked off in one direction, while the girl on the bike headed off in another direction. My brother said, “Aww, she stole the other girl’s bike!” I said, “No, it was the second girl’s bike, not the first girl’s. If one is giving you a ride, shouldn’t you at least pedal till you reach the split-off point?”

I wonder if this is how those negotiation went down:

Girl 1: I’m headed to the bus-stop. Thanks for studying with me.

Girl 2: Want me to give you a ride to the bus-stop?

Girl 1: That would be great! Where’s your car parked?

Girl 2: No, I came by bike today, it’s such a beautiful day and I could use the exercise!

Girl 1: Oh…your bike…ok…I’ll fit on your handle-bars.

Girl 2: Oh no, you don’t! You could use the exercise, too! You pedal till we get to your bus-stop…

Girl 1: Hmmmm. Ok. Good idea. I get to exercise, too. Lovely idea. Just stellar, my dear!

This is a post dedicated to my sister. Today is her first day back to school (awwwwwww isn’t she cute?! mashaAllah!) and like an excellent student, there she is chatting with me, on Web Messenger. The dumb thing about web messenger is that she can’t see my display picture…and I so badly want to share this with her on this cold, rainy, and windy day:

For you, honey bunches. It’s fresh! You can thank me when you get home :p

This past month has, by all accounts, been slowly economically. I believe it, because until this past Friday, shopping has been painless: it was easy to find parking way up front, we could walk in and out of any given store without bumping into a single shopping cart, and the check-out was literally a breeze. Thursday evening, I went to Best Buy, an electronics store, to check out a laptop I was interested in, and the place was practically deserted. I decided to go home and do some reading about the laptop I wanted before shelling out the dollars for it, thinking “eh, it will still be around tomorrow.”

In the final days before Christmas though, things have definitely changed. We tried to go to this huge Target at the mall on Friday, and I drove around for about seven minutes searching for parking. Nada. Eventually, I decided to go to another Target that is older and smaller, and even there, parking was a bit difficult. But at least it was possible. Headed back to Best Buy that evening, and the place was both under-staffed and over-shopped…they were clean out of the laptop I finally decided would be a good buy. What a difference just one day can make! Went to Costco on Saturday, and same story: no parking, and indoors was a zoo. I’m sure the merchants must be a bit relieved to see the uptick in sales, but it certainly took long enough.

But you know what the surest sign of a feeding frenzy is? Crazy drivers. You can tell from the way people drive that they are stressed and in a rush. Drivers do the dumbest things, which makes me want to lean on my horn and let blast! These two three guys made a left turn in the middle of a busy boulevard into a driveway on the opposite side of the street, effectively blocking the entire boulevard. They couldn’t get into the driveway of the small parking lot they were headed into because someone was backing out of a parking space and blocking said driveway. Instead of waiting at the turning lane, they lost patience, and just decided to block the intersection. Did it occur to them that someone going too fast might collide into them? Did it occur to them that they are delaying other people who are in as much of a hurry as they are? Did they care? Probably not…after all, they have enough of their own worries to care of.

At least some people are going to be relieved to get their gifts this Christmas…but the toll its taking is evident, even to an outsider to the whole Merry Season.

Last week was filled with days of raging fires in southern and central Cali, which burned about 1000 homes and 17,000 hectares of land. All we could smell for days was smoke, and this is what our skies looked like last Sunday, when the fires were at their peak.

We went out yesterday to the library, and my eyes happened to fall on an ever-present gas station. The average price of gasoline out here is US$4.40 per gallon. This is astronomical, and only last week, it was around $4.01. How much are you paying for gas (or petrol, if you will), or if you are commuting by mass transit, how much is gas in your area? The curious would like to know.

I was reading the LA Times online, intending to link to two opinion pieces, when another headline caught my eye: Tough love ends in family tragedy. I am not a person who is too big on tough love, so this headline seemed like it would cater to my inherent biases. And it did! It certainly did. It’s an article about a 41 year old son who has a history of refusing to grow up, broke into his father’s house while the dad was on vacation, and was about to make off with a baseball cap. A neighbor heard the door of the house being kicked in, and called 911, the cops came and arrested him, and called his parents, who decided to press charges against their son because really, enough was apparently enough. Little did they know. This is what happened:

[The father] pressed charges, banking on a prosecutor’s assurance that Sean would be ordered to undergo alcohol counseling as a condition of his probation, if he was convicted.

“You don’t want to see your kid in jail,” McNamara said in a recent interview. “But I felt that him being put in rehab was going to be good for him.”

But Sean never made it to rehab.

He was nearly beaten to death in a Los Angeles County jail after being placed in dorms with about 200 fellow inmates, many of them violent members of the Southsiders gang. McNamara was attacked when the guard who was supposed to be watching them left his post.

The attack, in which inmates allegedly jumped from third-tier bunks onto his head as he lay on the floor, left him with permanent brain damage.

[...]

Sean was in jail awaiting trial at the North County Correctional Facility in Castaic, a barracks-style lockup well known for inmate brawls, when he was attacked on June 7, 2005.

He was one of a handful of white inmates in a dorm with about 200 Latinos, violent gang members among them, records show. The gang members struck when a guard left to monitor an area about 75 feet away, where he couldn’t see or hear those in McNamara’s area.

[...]
One of the inmates has since pleaded no contest to attempted murder and was sentenced to six years in state prison, according to a district attorney’s spokeswoman.

I would just like to add my opinion to all this: If this had been a person of color, and the other inmates had been white, the entire city of Los Angeles would be in flames right now. This crime definitely has overtones of being race-based, and I don’t understand how it is not being recognized as such. This is insanity, and those barbarians in that prison who did this need the death-penalty. 6 years in prison for causing somebody permanent brain damage? The bastard should fry. I know, I used a horrible word, but honestly, there isn’t another word that would apply to them.

I went to vote, and I discovered that my name was not on the list of Active Voters at my precinct. So, they gave me a provisional ballot, which, according to ever-trusty Wikipedia, is “used to record a vote when there is some question in regards to a given voter’s eligibility” There is no question about my eligibility! There is a question with you people’s records!!! Well, I voted as usual, with the electronic voting machine thingy, and I must say that when I dragged my mother to vote later in the evening, she just did not like that machine. I can’t blame her. I was pleased to see the paper receipt verifying all my “No” votes, though!

You know, for the first time, I have the feeling that I should have voted differently. Seriously. How weird. It’s like this: All of the main candidates, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have given their post-Super Tuesday speeches. On the Republican side, Mitt Romney was quite dynamic, but his message just did not resonate with me, as usual. Mike Huckabee would make me a good professor…it’s not that I can’t stand him, it’s just that there is something missing; I heard nothing about what he will do, but more of a relief that he has won a respectable amount of Southern states. Nice, but missing something there. John McCain simply bored me…as usual, don’t know why really.

I liked Hillary’s speech the best. It was positive, strong, confident, and complete with an amazing smile–that might be as shallow as it sounds, but oh well. I found Obama’s speech strangely filled with a lot of maybe’s, as in “Maybe next year we will have health care for everyone, maybe next year people won’t be suffering the mortgage crisis, maybe maybe maybe.” Why the maybe? Why are you not positive about what you will do when you win, rather than this impression of what you might do if you win? Well, in any case, I am pleased I did not give him my vote, but I am thinking maybe I should not have forfeited my potential Democratic vote. Ah, well, my fellow Californians seem to have made up for my one goof…according to CNN and PBS, California is going for Hillary Clinton. Experience over poetry, that’s what I am rooting for (opinion subject to change, of course!).

And, maybe, I will remember this lesson for next time

Today is voting day. I am not registered with any party, so I get to vote in the Democratic primary. I sorrowfully decline the opportunity, because…well, because it makes no difference who is in office, regardless of who wins the nomination on either the Republic or the Democratic office. I firmly believe that, until or unless the future indicates differently. We will still wait for a long time before we get anything close to universal health care. Our country will still be coping with budget inadequacies. We’ll still see unemployment rise, and the housing and stock markets fall. Then, five years from now, employment/economy will be all right again, and we’ll get ready to begin the whole cycle again. We can only hope and pray that we don’t suffer a major Depression-like situation, no matter who is in office.

However, there are a few propositions (or referendums) on the ballot here in California, and I always feel like an excited participant when I see those. I spend about 30 minutes reading up on them, see who is endorsing the Yes position, who is endorsing the No position, and run to the voting station with my checklist in hand. That’s some deep research, isn’t it? *Not really, I know.* And the really fun part of the proposition voting is seeing which of the ones go my way. It’s quite the spectator sport, I must say! This time, I am voting no on everything:

• No on some obscure Proposition 91 which has been abandoned by it’s own proponents, and which I don’t understand;
• no on community college funding (Prop 92) which will eventually cost the state and state university students down the road;
• no to increasing or decreasing (I can’t figure out which exactly it does) term limits (Prop 93); and
• no on Indian gaming (Props 93-97), mainly because,

1. they are not Indians, or American Indians; I am–they are Native Americans {first we take their land, and then we mis-name them, how insulting is that?!};
2. 15-25% of the gambling revenue will go to the state, which is really quite a sick way to make money off an already exploited people; and
3. how can I endorse a proposition that encourages gambling, which in turn corrodes society, by helping people throw money away on a dream, a farce, a total rip-off? Why can’t we find better ways to empower the economies of the Native peoples of our great nation? It’s ridiculous.

It’s my Super No-day. People do have the tendency to point out that my favorite word is no. Today, I get to prove it.