Wednesday, July 12, 2023

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things ...

  1. Amazon Prime Day. Always a bunch of good deals, including:
  2. A nice pizza stone, with a peel, for less than $20 (not an affiliate link). I'm been planning to try pizza on my Weber kettle grill for some time now, not wanting to try to come up with the money for a real wood-fired pizza oven. So now I can do that.
  3. A Fire HD tablet for Tamara (not an affiliate link), $55. Her work laptop is on its last legs. They're getting her a new computer, but it's a docking station type outfit to replace both her work laptop and her office desktop, and she mentioned that she might want to use something else for e.g. Zoom meetings and/or just fucking around with non-work stuff. So it's Christmas in July for her.
  4. The new Echo Pop (not an affiliate link). Normally $39.99, but on Prime Day (for Prime members), $17.99. It arrived today and went in the living room, where Alexa gets lots of usage. The third generation Dot that was in the living room got moved to my office, and the second generation Dot that was in my office went in an envelope to send to Amazon for a $5 gift card and a $25 discount off my next Echo purchase of any kind. I will probably end up doing the same thing with my second generation Echo Show, which for some reason just proved to be a real pain in the ass and got put away. I'm sure at some point I'll be buying more Alexa devices, so I might as well have discounts in my arsenal. The Pop has pretty good sound quality, it's pretty (I got the teal color per Tamara's desire), and all it lacks are touch and temperature sensors, which we don't need (we do not have, for example, an Alexa-controlled thermostat).
  5. Instacart (that's an affiliate link -- if you sign up with them through me, I get a $10 credit and you get some kind of discounts up to $30). With  transportation uncertain this week due to some car repairs being done any time now, I ordered stuff for burgers tomorrow, dough, sauce, mozzarella, and Italian sausage for when the pizza stone arrives on Saturday, and some other groceries. Saved Tamara a stop at the store.
  6. UPDATE, I forgot one: Bitrefill (affiliate link -- you get $5 in Bitcoin once you've spent $50 through them, and so do I!). I already had a bunch of Amazon gift card credit built up for those Prime Day purchases (I collect and redeem Microsoft Rewards points, etc.), but if I hadn't, I could have used cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Dash, and others, but not Bitcoin Cash) to cover it. And I did use some crypto recently to buy Instacart gift card credit. I only order through Instacart once or twice a month (often when it's heavy stuff, like cases of soda and water that I don't want Tamara to have to lug around if she goes to the store alone), but I try to keep a balance there to avoid unexpected/emergency/spur-of-the-moment debit card use.
OK, now I've done my good deed for the month and can return to my relentless negativity.

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