UngsungBlog: A (Fantasy) Sports Blog

Quick hitters:

- The Los Angeles Dodgers’ magic number: ONE.

Start engraving that MVP trophy with Manny’s name on it! Sure, the Dodgers are only 28-21 since his acquisition, but do you think the Dodgers win more than 2-3 of those games without him?

And how great was it to see Rafael Furcal and—to a much lesser extent!—Jeff Kent back on the field?

(Somewhat off topic, but why do newspeople insist on raising one finger any time they say the number “one” with emphasis? I’m looking at you, FSN’s Patrick O’Neal!)

- Subject and From: field of an email I received a few days ago:

Walmart.com bought a Walmart.com Gift Card for you!‏

From: Walmart.com bought a Walmart.com Gift Card for you!‏

Spam, right? If I offered you 1:10 odds that this was spam, you’d bet the house on it, right?

Amazingly enough, it was NOT spam! You see, a couple weeks ago, Walmart.com had offered several workout machines for ridiculously low prices. Sure enough, they turned out to be pricing errors, as stated in the “kill mail” email from Walmart that immediately found its way into my trash can.

Good thing Hotmail hadn’t yet emptied my trash when the email containing the GC hit my inbox.

- Current rebate-o-meter: $1,039, but I haven’t yet updated it with over $500 in recent purchases.

- So you might recall that my really cool neighbors recently moved out of their condo. I’ve met two of the three new tenants in that condo; the lone female seems like a nice person, and one of the guys seems to be a grade-A jerk. There’s a third guy there, but I have yet to meet him.

Unfortunately, I have become quite acquainted with the fourth member of that condo: a super-annoying, barks-every-waking-minute dog! Of course, every time the stupid rat dog starts barking, the other dogs near us start barking away as well.

One of the dogs—a serial offender, and one I’ve probably written about before—is now so bad, there have been times where s/he has barked at 3-4AM!!!

Stupid dogs…and their stupid owners.

- Needing to use up some expiring ECBs yesterday, we swung by the Encino CVS. I was hoping to score some more FAECB body wash, deodorant, and some really cheap Propel water. I also needed eye drops, and after picking up all the items above, I went to the checkout counter, where I met my favorite cashier.

After all my coupons and ECBs, my total due was $3.00. As I reached into my wallet to pull out a $20, the cashier started giving me the death stare.

(Oh sh*t…what did I do???)

In her thick accent, she started scolding me! “Three dollars? Usually you hand me a few cents!”

I responded with “It was the darn [Propel] water…too good of a deal!”

She responded “Come on, I know you’ve got a two-dollar-something ECB in that envelope of yours.” Then she almost tossed my change back at me.

As I grabbed my bags, I told her “Does this mean I’m banned from the store now?”

She responded with “You better come back next time and spend a few cents. You’re letting me down!”

I love my CVS.

Better yet, apparently my sister forgot a bag of items, and we didn’t realize this until we got home. Upon realizing this, I instructed her to call the CVS and, to prove that it was her bag of items, I told her to identify what was in it.

She called, and while speaking to a cashier at the front, she could hear another cashier screaming “It’s all my fault! I’m so sorry!!!”

We went back, and as soon as we stepped in, the cashier screamed, “I’m SO SORRY!!! I can’t believe I did that!”

I love my CVS.

- I’m now 1-2 in both of my Fantasy leagues, no thanks in part to the injuries to Donovan McNabb and Brian Westbrook.

In my “crap” (read:  Carson f**king Palmer) league, I’m 1-2, thanks to Maurice Jones-Drew.  I now face the only winless team in the league, and unfortunately, he’s not 0-3 because he drafted Tom Brady.  Worse for me is the fact that Reggie Wayne, Dallas Clark, and Roy Williams are all off next week.

1-3 here I come!

In my other league (read:  Donovan McNabb and Brian Westbrook), I got drubbed 97-56, so it’s not like those two would have helped much.  I’m now up against a 3-0 team next week.

Fantastic!

Until next time!

Tags: barking dogs, brian westbrook, cool cashiers, cvs, donovan mcnabb, ecbs, encino, fantasy football, gift card, injuries, jerks, los angeles dodgers, magic number, manny ramirez, maurice jones-drew, neighbors, rebate-o-meter, spam, walmart.com by Peter
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I have so much to blog about!

(I hate the fact that I’m a lazy bastard :P)

I could blog about the horrible time I’m currently having with my latest computer build (and the worst part is, this build’s for my sister!).  I could go into a mega-rant about one of my biggest pet peeves in the world.  I could blog about my Dodgers being in first place in the National League Pee-Wee division (aka the West).

Basically, I could go in many directions with tonight’s blog entry.  Instead, I think I’ll continue with my Fourth of July weekend adventures.

And sorry, no quick-hitters:

- So on Saturday, we decided that we were going to go to the beach.

(Can you believe it?  Early July, and I haven’t yet stepped foot on a beach???)

As we were determining what beach we wanted to go to, I got an IM from cousin David.  You see, I had been helping him pick out a digital camera for weeks now, and he was trying to decide between one of the following (warning:  shameless link-spamming ahead):

• A Nikon D40 DSLR (my personal choice!)
• A Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5k
• A Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18k
• A Canon S5 IS (his eventual choice)

Apparently he wanted to go to Camarillo outlet to go clothes shopping, and he bribed us to go with the promise that we could play around with his new camera.  Moi, passing up the chance to play with a new toy?  Are you kidding me?  Not to mention, Camarillo was about 10-15 degrees cooler than it was here!

We didn’t get to the outlet until about 3PM, and because we hadn’t eaten yet, we stopped by the Food Court and grabbed some grilled steak sandwiches.  Pretty greasy, I might say, but what did I expect?  Very non-filling too, I might add, as I grabbed a Wetzel Pretzel about two hours later.  The pretzel was awful!  I ordered a Jalapeno Cheese pretzel, and for some reason, the Jalapenos were sweeter rather than hot.  And don’t even get me started on the substance on the pretzel that resembled cheese.

- Later on in the day, my sister wanted to go to the Coach Factory Store, and apparently they were having a huge sale…which I figured out when we were about ten stores away from Coach.  We went to the NIke store first while my sister went to Coach, and after a few minutes, we attempted to locate her in the Coach store.

That was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Eventually, she finished shopping, and got in the quite empty line.  Seemingly out of nowhere, a cute little saleswoman came up to my sister, grabbed her purchases (she accidentally grabbed my sister’s wallet, which was pretty funny), and scurried over to the register.

I believe this is a good summarization of what the cashier said to us:

“Hi!Isthatallyouwanttoday?CanIinterestyouinawalletforthirtyorfortydollars?Yourtotalcomesoutto[some-odd dollars]oh!Isthatagiftcard?Cool!I’msohappytoday!”

Seriously.  Someone might want to check the coffeemaker in the Coach Factory Store break room.

David had an excellent response to the girl:  he asked her if she wanted my sister’s phone number.

I nearly cried from laughter the second we stepped out of the store.  To this day, I’m still trying to figure out how the girl could have been so hyper.  It was nearing 7PM, and the only reasonable explanation I could come up with was that the girl works a four-hour shift, which started at 6PM.  David, being inappropriate as usual, mentioned that perhaps she was hiding something…

- After a bit of deliberation, we decided to have dinner at My Brother’s BBQ, on Ventura Blvd. between DeSoto and Canoga Blvd.  I had the Tri-Tip, sliced ham, and sliced pork dinner, and boy was the Tri-Tip excellent!  The ham was average, and the slice of pork I had was a bit too fatty.  The cole slaw and baked potato were about as good as you could expect it to be (namely, just OK), but the garlic bread was incredible!  Super garlic-y, and super buttery.  Yum!

My sister and cousin David split two dishes:  broasted and BBQ chicken, and chicken and ribs.  I tasted a bit of the ribs, which were really really dry.  The BBQ chicken was ok, and I forgot to ask how the broasted chicken was.

After dinner, we headed to Gelson’s to get some bakery grub.  We decided on a chocolate truffle (quite good), a canolli (very good!), and a Napoleon (awesome, especially because it wasn’t nearly as sweet as some places make it).  The day ended with us chowing down on dessert, followed by cousin David going crazy on SingStar 90s.  Too bad he deleted the video we made of him singing New Kids on the Block’s “Step By Step;” it was quite awesome.

(And by quite awesome…you know…)

Until next time!

Tags: broasted chicken, canon, coach factory store, garlic bread, gift card, hyper cashier, lumix dmc-fz18k, lumix dmc-tz5k, my brother's bbq, nikon d40, panasonic, ribs, S5 IS, singstar 90s, tri-tip by Peter
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