Every once in a while, the woman that stocks our soda fund at work will pick something new for us all to try. This week, it was Izze, a sparkling fruit beverage (and at 70% juice, not that scary). I picked up the Sparkling Clementine flavor, expecting to be drinking clementine juice.

Wrong!

Ingredients: Pure juice made from white grape, apple, lemon and orange juice concentrates, sparkling water, natural flavor, citric acid, sodium citrate, gum arabic, beta carotene (color), ester gum

Well, at least it’s really made from juice. And at least the juice is the first ingredient. No added sugar or high fructose corn syrup is a nice touch, too (though the juice contains plenty all by itself, going by the nutritional information). It’s definitely citrus-y, just not clementines.

*sigh*

In other news, four very nice things happened all on top of each other.

First, I got a new washing machine. Yay! My old one was leaking and they were running some very good sales and rebate promotions. To all my crafting buddies, yes, it’s a top loader. While I don’t do a lot of felting, I like to leave my options open. Also, front loaders suck.

Anyway, this leads into my second nice thing, which is that I actually got a cash award at work for a project I was working on ages ago. So the washing machine was almost free! An unexpected bonus. I also used it as a justification to buy some of Knitpick’s interchangeable needles (but not the full set, because there are sizes in there I’d never use). So far, the needles are OK. The join where the needles screw in on the first ones I tried juts out ever so slightly and could snag. Actual use will tell me if this is so. The cable is as flexible as I could wish for, though a little thicker than the fixed length circulars. Oh, and I really really wish they’d print the size on the needle tips like Inox does—If Inox ever makes a similar set, I am all over that. But now I finally have a circular set of size 4′s again. Huzzah!

Third, I got to go to Katsucon and visit with Katie. I didn’t get to take very many pictures, seeing as how everyone kept stopping Katie and me to take our pictures (but you can see the ones I did take at Katie’s website as usual). We went as the Ice Climbers from Super Smash Brothers and I have the pictures to prove it:

Why yes, it was rather warm once we got inside. But very, very soft fleece. Mmmm…

And fourth (though no less awesome), I got to diagnose a phone line problem and solve a several month long string of misbehaving phones. I take back anything bad I ever said about FIOS telephone service. I had a bad jack in my kitchen that led to intermittant humming on the line. Not their fault at all…

Basically, on Tuesday night, I came home to that familiar loud buzz, the one I’ve been blaming Verizon for, mostly because it always seemed to go away right after I called them up and complained about it (coincidences can be so cruel). Anyway. So I unplugged the phone cable and plugged it back in, hoping for an easy (though unlikely) fix, only to discover that I went from having a noisy line to no working line at all. It was completely dead, no dial tone at all. I unplugged the phone, went upstairs, tried that phone, no dice. I call up my dad on the cell, he walks me through plugging the phone directly into my ONT, where the phone then proceeds to work. So the problem was with my wiring. Not Verizon’s. Uh oh. We open up some phone outlets and look at the wiring. Nothing was conveniently frayed or obviously corroded, so we were forced to determine that it was probably something in the walls. I call it a night, and go to bed.

But there’s a happy ending! The next morning, as I’m getting ready for work, it dawns on me that I didn’t look in the phone port very carefully from the front, where the plug goes in, not the wiring. Sure enough, in my kitchen, one of the little prongs that connects to the phone cord was bent back so far that it was actually touching one of the other little prongs. I unscrew the plate completely, go back up stairs, and voila, I have phone service again. So all I need to do to fix it is to buy a new phone jack. Yay!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 6:14 pm and is filed under Anime Conventions, Ordinary Life, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.