Dhivael/Anne’s Hyperactive Blog

Yes, what IS a ‘monstor’?

Originally uploaded by annelions

Alright. So. Really. People should learn to spell if they want to run Google ads. ‘Monstor’? Honestly, that’s something that any decent spell checker will pick up. If you bother to use it.

Of course, the page that this ad points to is… very boring indeed. And pretty inappropriate. When ‘loch ness monstor’ doesn’t come up, it searches simply for ‘ness’. Which brings up… well, there are a couple of Loch Ness monster related items, but not really.

I love tortilla chips. And, of course, Dorito’s are some of the best, if not the best. Cool ranch, spicy guacamole, nacho, spicy nacho, etc. Delicious. I never thought that they could do anything that would make a Dorito chip taste bad.

I was wrong.

‘Lemon’, ‘lemon pie’, ‘lemon meringue’, ‘lemon cookie’… all these are ways you might choose to describe the new Dorito’s ‘The Quest’ chips. You’re supposed to guess the flavor, go online and then there’s a contest thingie.

So what delicious flavor are these ‘mystery’ chips? Mountain Dew. Yes, soda flavored tortilla chips. All I can say about them is that they are… unique. And not completely horrible. But would I buy them again? No! If I want Mountain Dew with my chips, I’ll buy some on my own. I don’t need them to be making my chips flavored with soda. And they don’t even really taste like Mountain Dew. One person described it as ‘Gatorade’ flavor. And that’s a pretty accurate description. It’s definitely a flavor that no tortilla chip was ever meant to be.

The last time that they did a mystery flavor like this, it was cheeseburger. What’s wrong with chili dog? Bean burrito? Steak & cheese? Even ‘Italian dressing’ flavor might have been a good choice. Instead, we get… EGH!

I guess Doritos got paid to do product placement and they didn’t bother to stop and think whether or not many people would actually like the flavor.

Is the monsoon coming? Or is it already here? I never can remember. Either way, I found some lovely images of monsoon weather.

Lightning is spectacular (if you go watch it) during a desert storm, and I found a picture of lightning as a backdrop for a local Bank of America building. Definitely difficult to tell, but from the angle, that lightning strike might very well have caused a rare power outage here. But I’m not positive. It’s hard to tell where the camera’s pointed, let alone how far away the lightning really is.

If you look online, you can find a ton of before pictures of monsoons, but it’s not as easy to find a picture from the inside of a local dust storm. I found another, though. Both are… wow. Yeah, it pretty much looks like that for at least the first 5-30 minutes, until rains come to wash the dirt back down again.

California gets earthquakes. The mid-west gets tornadoes. The southeast gets hurricanes. The northeast gets blizzards. And we get dust storms with pretty lightning. Yeah. I’ll take the dust storms.

I now interrupt your day with this dose of cuuuuuuuute kittens. These kittens aren’t my kittens, but darn are they cute! There are a couple of stray kittens outside right now that look like the grey ones, but the kittens are too scared of me.

Oh well, at least they know I mean ‘food’, which is a good thing.

Darn, kittens are just too cute! I wish cats would stay kittens forever, then they’d always be extra fun. Older cats are okay, but they’re just not as funny as kittens.

Or as cute.

Riding the buses in the Phoenix Metro area (also known as ‘The Valley’ or ‘The Valley of the Sun’) is a bit like playing roulette. Tempe is not too bad, they seem to pour a lot of money into the mass transit system. Most of the bus lines run on Sundays and even run on major holidays. There are many buses that run every 15 minutes, including the free Orbit shuttles. Plus, many of the north-south buses connect with either Chandler or Scottsdale, both of which are affluent areas. So Tempe gets shiny new buses.

Mesa, on the other hand, you’re lucky if the bus runs every half hour (as opposed to every hour). There is pretty much no Sunday service. No free shuttles. And there is certainly not service on major holidays.

But one thing remains constant, about all the buses in the system. They all break down fairly frequently. And yesterday, I heard something a bit alarming. The bus was stopped at a light and the driver was chatting with another passenger while waiting for the light to turn (better that than a cell phone, which some drivers do). He mentioned rather matter-of-factly that the previous day, a certain part had broken on his bus that meant he couldn’t do his last run of the day.

Pretty routine, yes. The alarming part? He also mentioned that the mechanic noted that many of the bus parts used were ‘illegal’ and ‘not up to state specs’, but that nobody says anything for fear of losing their jobs.

Considering how often buses break down, it sounds pretty realistic to me. And definitely scary.

(BTW, I also passed the ‘expensive gasoline‘ station yesterday and it was up to ‘$41.79′ now. Hasn’t anyone noticed the misplaced decimal? I guess not.)

In some cities in the Phoenix area, the bus system is tolerable. In Tempe, they have many buses that run every 15 minutes, including the wandering ‘Orbit’ shuttles. And by ‘wandering’, I mean that the routes look a bit random, on a street map. They don’t go down any one street, but go down different side streets. But, hey, they’re free! This is good.

Anyway!

On most routes, the buses turn around by going around a block and then coming back. On Thursday, I was sitting at the bus stop on a corner, waiting for the (somewhat late) bus which was running a bit late. It’s near the end of the line, but the bus is supposed to come from down the street. I look up and there’s the bus, turning the corner instead. It missed the correct turn, oops!

So on Tuesday, I get off the connecting bus and I’m sitting there at the same corner. Waiting, waiting… this bus is supposed to come every 30 minutes (boo!), about 15 minutes after I get off the connecting bus. After I’ve been waiting there for a good 30 minutes, I finally decide to call the bus company. I get the runaround on their automated system and finally end up connecting to an operator. I’m put on hold for a bit, only to be told that ‘the bus went by 15 minutes ago’. Uhm, no. It did not. I was there. The bus that I wanted was, supposedly, about 5 miles away. Er? Where’d the bus go? The operator claimed that the bus didn’t take any wrong turns, but I KNOW the bus absolutely, positively did not go by me or I would have seen it.

And they wonder why more people don’t take the bus around here. Waiting almost an hour, in 110 degree heat for a bus that was supposed to have come a half hour ago is not fun.

Kittens and bathrooms do not mix

Originally uploaded by Sapphiren

I’ve been getting a lot of people coming to my site looking for ‘hyperactive kittens’, so I thought I’d give them something entertaining to look at. No, these aren’t my kittens. I just thought they looked pretty cute. And hyperactive. Woo! Hyperactive kitties!