Thursday, November 17, 2016

How many of you didn’t realize, like me, that Thanksgiving is only one week from today?

It’s the wee hours of Thursday morning here at Howdygram headquarters. Sam is in bed and I’m wide awake with pain issues. These include: 1) burning and pinching skin pain on the back of my thighs; 2) a bleeding blister on the back of my left thigh; 3) a rotten rash in a variety of locations that are none of your business; and 4) I can’t think of anything else at the moment but you’ll be the first to know if this changes, okay? In the meantime I think I’ll just sit here and whine for a while.



I’ll begin this section by stating the obvious. The first font — “Grown Localy” — on the following list was misspelled by the font designer, NOT by yours truly. Most of the free fonts I share with you are downloaded from iFonts.xyz, which I believe is a website originating from somewhere in southeast Asia, such as Viet Nam. There are usually lots of hilarious typos and wrong words in the font descriptions and sometimes even in the font names, such as “Grown Localy,” which drives me crazy and makes me want to slap people. But spelling issues aside, the deal of the year is “Between,” a huge family of 48 fonts that’s being sold (as we speak!) on MyFonts.com for $199.95 ... or $35 per font if you’re weird enough to buy them individually. Actually, why buy them at all? I’VE GOT THE WHOLE FONT FAMILY FOR YOU RIGHT NOW ... FOR FREE! Incidentally, “Isabel” is nothing at which to sneeze, either. It’s a beautiful family of 15 fonts that includes five weights plus italics for each and a unicase font in five weights. (Unicase is where uppercase and lowercase letters are all the same size and you can use them interchangeably). Download links appear below the graphic. Enjoy. Live and be well.



At this point I should also show off a few of the new high-resolution images I got for free this week from Creative Market ... some colorful watercolor whatnots and a pile of fruit.


Show of hands ... how many of you didn’t realize, like me, that Thanksgiving is only one week from today? And neither did Sam! So a few minutes ago I sent him to Tom Thumb to pick up a few essentials so we can eat a nice, fancy hot meal in our bathrobes and not have to clean up after company. For Howdygram regulars who’ve been reading my posts for a number of years, Sam and I gave up on the take-out holiday meal from Boston Market because BOSTON MARKET SUCKS. Three years in a row their pick-up operation on Thanksgiving was a logistical nightmare; in 2015 it got so bad that Sam actually walked out of the store and came home without dinner. (We survived.)

This year, therefore, Sam will prepare our very easy (but completely delicious) Thanksgiving meal all by himself: 1) a frozen Jennie-O turkey breast; 2) a family-size Stouffer’s spinach soufflé; 3) Bruce’s sugar-free canned yams that we moosh up with with sugar-free brown sugar (yes, sugar-free brown sugar is actually a thing); and 4) Ocean Spray whole berry cranberry sauce. Not pictured: Stove Top stuffing and McCormick exceptionally yellow instant poultry gravy. I’ll volunteer to give Sam a hand with prep this year as I plan to sit in the kitchen to thicken the gravy, throw a jar of mushrooms into the stuffing and add the brown sugar to the yams. However he’s goddamn handy in the kitchen these days and probably doesn’t need me to do ANYTHING.


Our bill from Dish Network DOUBLED this month. Sam was outwardly calm about it, but I could tell this was just one more incident of extreme bullshit in addition to basal cell skin cancer (details follow) and Donald Trump winning the election. I called Dish to find out what happened.

Actually, it took two phone calls, ten minutes apart, and two different billing agents to explain how their system got confused in October when we bought home theater installation for $99.95, a pile of high-quality cables and a surge protector. We paid for the home theater whatnots last month but Dish never charged us $91.25 for our regular monthly bill ... so this month we got hit with that TWICE: $182.50. Dish was very nice and nobody got impatient with me when I kept saying, “I don’t get it. Tell me again how much we paid for that eight-foot optical cable.”

We finally figured it out.

As long as I had them on the phone, however, I made a few changes to our movie lineup. When we signed up for Dish around September 1 we took their biggest package because all the premium channels were free for three months. So ... today I dropped all the premium channels except for HBO (we can’t live without Bill Maher and John Oliver), the Starz Movie Package and the Dish Movie Pack (Sony, MGM, HDNet, Retroplex, Epix, Pixl and Fox Movies).



This is more hoo-hah than I can stand for one day so I think I’ll lie down now and watch a movie with a couple of TicTacs. But first ... Sam’s needle biopsies at the dermatologist last week have been confirmed as three areas of basal cell skin cancer. He’ll have them removed with a local anesthetic on December 5. Thank you for reading this, and I hope you have a really pleasant Thursday.

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