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This post is sponsored by Zenni Optical.

If I was capable of affording a doctor to get a prescription for eye glasses– which I need more than you can even imagine– I would absolutely use Zenni Optical to get my eyeglasses. Their prices are amazing and the selection is actually fairly decent. I’m not sure exactly which frames I’d get, but looking at it I’m torn between a handful of their rectangle frames.

Most places that sell eyeglasses swear up and down that they offer baseline prices– but mostly you’re paying for a label that doesn’t matter. I haven’t had a chance to check the durability of the frames from Zenni Optical, but I’m hoping they’d be sturdy, and worth the low price their offering them for, especially since they come with FREE Anti-Scratch coating, full UV protection, thin and light 1.57 index lens, protective case, and microfiber cleaning cloth, which with most places would add at last twenty dollars to the already ridiculous price.

I can say with some certainty that, should I ever get the chance to actually splurge on my own eye health through funds acquired, I will seriously be looking into getting glasses from Zenni Optical. I love to save money and get a good deal if at all possible, and this place has it in spades, and that’s all right by me.

I’ve been pondering do more playlists over at 8Tracks. If you love me you’ll come listen to some and maybe leave some comments or some’at. I like making them, and it seems to give me something to do. Have two for now… my profile.

One size fits all rabbit costume

Guest post written by Derick Burks

For years, television personality Dick Clark has been synonymous with New Year’s Eve and seen on Packages from Directtv all over. It’s hard to imagine starting a new year without seeing the ball drop in Times Square. That is why Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve is my favorite program to watch on New Year’s Eve. The show airs from 10 PM to 11 PM and starts again at 11:30 PM after local news.

Clark’s show has become the biggest tradition for the holiday. I remember when I was first allowed to stay up late to watch this show. It was like a rite of passage. The program has it all. It shows Americans at their best. It features great musical acts from the past and present. While some musical segments are taped in advance, the live performances from Times Square are usually the best.

Over the years the special has done its best to stay current. I remember the show on New Year’s Eve in 2001 when the terrorist attacks in New York City were remembered. The show captured it in a way that showed America was still here. In subsequent years there were feeds from the troops as well.

Dick Clark missed the special in 2004 as a result of a stroke. Regis Philbin hosted that year and did a great job, but the show missed Clark. The following year Clark was back along with Ryan Seacrest as his co-host. Clark’s role on the show has diminished, he still gets millions of people excited as they welcome in a new year.

This post is sponsored by The Steam Team

I’ve been asked to write about the Steam Team today, and though I haven’t had any real experience with the company as a whole, with what happened here a few days ago, I really wish I had.

Our sink started to overflow, and poured through the sink and dishwasher alike to flood the floor, I wish we’d have some of the services they offer (like floor tile cleaning Austin), because our floor ended up smelling like rotting eggs and the like for several days. It was pretty horrendous, and I imagine having someone come in to clean the floor and fix water damage would have worked better than our plan of towels to soak up the grossness and many loads of laundry.

It makes me wish we had a bit of water damage insurance. I wonder if they’d then cover the cost of getting this all fixed.

We’ve managed to sort of get the sink under control, though we can only really use the one side at this point, but sadly the rest of the house could really use some otherwise Steam Cleaning for the floors and carpets, given that the entire house is a bit off-kilter because we have two animals, a cat and a dog (if you can call a Pom a dog.), who are not good with the not knocking things over and it took them a while to get fully potty trained. Though we cleaned it all up I can’t help but feel it would benefit highly from some steam cleaning. Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and be able to afford to have this crap done.

Stupid sink.

Usually I find the idea of New Years Resolutions to be the kind of hokey bullshit people come up with to justify binge drinking on New Years Eve, because hey, you’re going to be a good girl tomorrow so why no have a few more drinks or show your boobs to that guy you just met, right? You’re turning over a new leaf, so all will be good. This year, however, I’m going to try to make ten New Years Resolutions that I’ll actually strive for– not just to justify my goings-on of the night, which will likely be nothing more than some random games with the boyfriend’s family or otherwise, but to truly try to give myself from goals for the years that I will actually strive for– not just say I’ll do to make myself feel better and then ignore for the rest of my life.

While it makes sense that most of these will be ‘utterly life changing and without a doubt wholesome’, some are bound to be just little things I need to get my head around and actually work on on a personal level that doesn’t involve anyone else or their ideals.

• Lose Weight – What’s that? Yes, of course people, this is the oldest Resolution in the book, but that doesn’t make it any less important for people to do, including myself. It’s also more than just about the weight, it’s about getting healthier and being a better person because of it. If I were happy with the way my health was, I wouldn’t even worry about it, but considering my health kind of teeters on the dire right now, it’s a needed resolution in the way that if I don’t lose weight and get healthier, I might die, so it’s a big one.
• Talk to my Mom more – The prospect of talking to my mother sometimes is utterly exhausting. I can’t help it, I wish I felt differently, but sometimes I have so much nothing going on in my life I feel like I’m sitting there in stifled silence with her when I should be saying something interesting, and then it’s just… she has such trouble breathing sometimes that it takes forever for her to get a sentence out. I love her, to pieces, I love her more than anyone can understand, but I avoid too much talking, but now that things are going so south for her, I need to suck it up and realise that even if it takes her an hour to get out a sentence or she asks me about a life I don’t have, I owe it to her to talk to her- besides, usually she’s pretty fun to talk to.
• Be a Better Girlfriend – as trite as that sounds, and even though I don’t think I’m a terrible girlfriend, I’m sure there’s always room for improvement. I’ll try to want to do more things that he wants, and maybe get around to feeling a bit more like the smoochy, cuddly type that I’ve been failing at for the last year or so– either that or he might end up deciding I’m not the girl for him…
• Spend more time with my Best Friend – My best friend is like… the end all for me. Well, one of at least, he’s pretty much everything to me, and when I think that we sometimes don’t talk for a while, or that all we do is chat about nothing and don’t get to do anything for really, it’s kind of heart-breaking, considering the boy makes me smile more than I should possibly be allowed to. That being said, striving to be around him more seems like something I should do, and something I’ll enjoy doing.
• Finish my book – Oh yeah, I wrote a book, it’s about some characters I play with the aforementioned best friend, with a few new characters added in, and it’s not great, but I want to finish proofing and editing it and get it actually up for sale, because you never know, someone may love the idea of my little book and go from there in making me a staaaar. Yeah, right?
• Read over 100 Books – I’m going to go out on a limb and say both new and books I’ve read before, because I can be a finicky reader, but with the Kindle, it should be a lot easier to slip myself through reading books a bit better than I had hoped. I’ll probably use a place like GoodReads to keep track, just to make sure. I don’t know if I should count the books I’ve read in the last couple of days, but honestly I think I’ll just start fresh come Saturday, and count these dozen books as starters. Tee-hee
• Try to find work – Yay, finding a job in America, or Yuma, Arizona, such a great prospect, but honestly it’s something I need to be working on. I’m not sure what I can do or what I’m good at, or if I can even make it to most jobs considering my lack of transportation and the fact that the bus route that goes near our house got cut off, but I need to find something to be able to… y’know, get income more than just writing– as good as writing is, it won’t help me or Ezrik get out of here any faster.

Honestly, that’s pretty much all I have in me at this moment. Though, I do plan to start doing book reviews on the site to coincide with my new ‘read a bunch of books’ thing. I don’t know, maybe it’s dumb, but we’ll see.