No thank you...

surprise

Have you ever been to one of those stores where they flag you down JUST before leaving so that they can 'check' your receipt? Those that I'm aware of are Sam's Club, Costco, and Fry's.

I HATE this. (hate it enough for bold, caps, AND underline!)

I'm not really sure what bothers me most about this. Since when is it alright to presume that every one of your customers is attempting to steal from you? Why not just ask me as I enter the store "Do you plan to steal from us today?" People probably wouldn't like that very much. I find the same to be true of the dude standing at the exit asking for my receipt and wanting to look through my bag. If you think I stole something you best DETAIN me and stop insulting me.

The other issue that I have with this whole thing is that it is a complete waste of time.  I get to wait for the mom with 3 kids screaming and crying attempting to find the receipt she was handed 38 seconds ago but had to put away so she could... oh I don't know, CARRY THE CRAP SHE JUST BOUGHT.

Long ago I decided how to deal with this, I would simply fail to comply with their request. Here is how it goes:

Creepy guy with highlighter: "Your receipt please" Me: "No" [keeps walking]

This is extremely effective as they aren't allowed to touch you in any way or risk being charge with assault. Jordan actually worked somewhere that said if she saw someone stealing she had to be 100% positive the item was on their person otherwise, attempting to detain them would mean her job. Gotta love it.

This actually pains my wife each time it occurs. The shear social awakwardness of the situation makes her love me a little less each time. So in an attempt to placate her, I've now switched to "No thank you" as if this gentlemen armed with a highlighter was politely offering a service, I politely refuse. This is actually far funnier for me because it left the guy we walked past today TOTALLY speechless with his mouth hanging open.

Thanks for the laughs today highlighter guy, your face was priceless.

Blurb book is in!

For those who don't know, we tried to have our wedding on a pretty tight budget. We used a pretty inexpensive photographer who gave us the rights to our photos, all of which were given to us on a CD. We didn't bother ordering any prints or albums because we figured we could get what we wanted later, and hopefully cheaper. I did quite a bit of research on online photobook sites, and was able to make our own book for a fraction of the price. I looked into shutterfly, mypublisher, snapfish, mpix, picaboo, iphoto, kodak.... and blurb. I knew that I wanted our book to be large (in number of pages and dimensions). There was no way that 20 pages was going to cut it when we had almost 2,000 photos to choose from. Most books were priced based on 10-20 pages, then had a flat fee per additional page, ranging from $0.99-2.99. Most had relatively small page limits, around 50. Some got horrible reviews online. Some of the page-building software was so confusing that it required a PhD in god-knows-what to navigate. Some were just downright expensive ....and then there was blurb.

I spent some time reading user reviews and trolling their message boards, and it seemed like it would fit our needs well. Their software (Book Builder) was easy to use and had plenty of pre-done layouts. It was easy to build my own layouts when I wanted to... their edit screen is like graph paper, and all you have to do is click and drag image boxes where you want them (it is even kind enough to give the dimensions and values for x and y axis). Their books can accomodate up to 440 pages and come in a variety of finishes and sizes.  In comparison to the other photobook sites, they were much less expensive for larger books (but similarly priced for small page numbers). We decided to give it a shot, and are thrilled with the results!

We ordered a 13"x11" 160-page hardcover album with image wrap (where a picture is printed directly on the cover instead of using a dustjacket) on premium paper for $130 after shipping. The day after we received the album in the mail, I got an email from our photographer advertising a special she was running on photobooks... $275 for a 10-page 10"x10" album. I consider that quite the savings! It took me about a week to put together and edit our book, but it was definately worth it. You can view a preview of our book here.

Our first Google

firstgoogler

As most who know me are aware, I'm a major geek. As such I've been religiously watching our site traffic with google analytics since we started the blog. I'll certainly talk more about this in detail (when maybe there is something interesting to say), but for tonight, we've received our first visitor that located us via search.

While it is entirely likely that they did NOT find what they are looking for, their search is also a humorous confluence of two posts: "500 days of summer purse"