Fridays are highly anticipated in this house but not because of the normal TGIF crap that everyone usually feels on the way towards the weekend.  In this house, Fridays are treated as a national holiday because Friday is GARBAGE DAY!

The progression of the week is marked by its relation to garbage day.

• Is it garbage day today?
• When is it going to be garbage day?
• It’s going to be garbage day soon.
• It’s only Monday.  It’s going to be garbage day on Friday.
• It’s going to be garbage day tomorrow.
• It’s garbage day TODAY!
• It was garbage day yesterday…

Dan has been enthralled with garbage days since he was 2 1/2.   He can hear the garbage truck coming down the street from the back of the house. He will then fly into action and stop whatever he’s doing and proudly announce that a garbage truck is here. He then makes his way to the front window where he gawks and talks about the garbage truck at length.  He’ll even sing songs about the garbage truck (or the dog as she never leaves his side) while he watches them take our trash away.

And boy are we are in for a treat if there ever happens to be TWO garbage trucks on the street at the same time – which does happen especially if they are working both sides of the street or if both the recycling truck and refuse truck show up together or if its free garbage day (where you can throw out anything and everything without paying for $2.50 stickers).   I don’t know what the fascination with garbage trucks is.  With Dan it’s not really about the “truck” part.  He’s not into trucks as much.  It’s all about one special truck – the “garbage truck”.

In fact, the highlight of yesterday came on the way home from the grocery store.  There was a garbage truck in front of us. In front of us!  Dan of course got all excited.  At some point we passed the truck which ignited a hailstorms of “Look momma, we’ve passed the garbage truck.”, “Look momma, its now following us.”, “Drive faster momma so we’ll win!”.  Yes, it’s not every day in the life of a boy where you can race a garbage truck down the highway.  LOL!

Not shortly after, we came to a stop light.  We were on a highway with 3 lanes and by the way the traffic was lining up, I could tell that the garbage truck would end up right next to us if no one cut it off.  I announce this to Dan who has twisted around in his seat in order to keep his eye on the truck.  As it pulls up next to us, he can see  the driver inside the front cab and starts waving excitedly and announcing to the world “Momma!!!!  There is a GARBAGE TRUCK next to us!! and it’s a GREEN garbage truck!”  The driver looks over and has this confused look on his face like “What the hell?”

I’m sure firefighters and policemen are used to being adored as celebrities by little 4 year old boys… but garbage truck drivers?  hmmm… usually not.  I hope it made his day.

Thursday mornings are my grocery shopping time.  HATE IT!

Two posts in one day… wow… but I just had to take time to have a major rant…

I am SO TIRED of investing my time watching a new TV series only to have the network pull the plug before the season even finishes.  This seems to becoming more and more the norm these days.  Networks are all about instant gratification and any show that is not an “immediate” number pull gets canceled while shows that “used to be great but now suck” stay around and die a slow death.

This season ABC came out with a new series Defying Gravity.  It’s been really good so far – a show we look forward to watching every week.  It’s been one of the better shows to come out in a long time.  But as usual it’s already in cancellation talks – they might not even show all the made episodes.  Nice.

The network advertising for Defying Gravity has been poor at best as was the initial release date of the show.  It’s an ABC new show.  Have you even heard of it?  Hopefully some of you have… but if not… check it out.  It’s a good show.  But the show started its season so early in the fall schedule (abnormally out of sync – it has already aired 8 episodes) that most people weren’t ready for the “new shows” and were still in the summer mindset. This show could be great and have a tremendous following if it was advertised properly and put in the correct fall schedule.

Why should viewers invest their time watching new shows when these networks don’t give the new shows a fighting chance to survive? LOST’s first season wasn’t all that great. It wasn’t until end of season 2 and the beginning of season 3 where it really picked up its steam.  In fact if I recall correctly, LOST was on the chopping block at one point too.  But LOST has got to have one of the biggest cult followings ever.  The internet made that show.

Networks are starting to make a habit out of coming up with great new – unique – shows and casts and then cutting the legs out from under them before they have a chance to really succeed.  As a viewer, I’m beginning to not trust the networks.   This is 4th or 5th show in the past year that had potential to be great (good premise, great cast, great acting) but was canceled.  Who the hell needs another “reality” show… I for one can do without.

We started watching Kings (an NBC show) – another show that had a very unique premise and good acting but poor advertising and poor time slot – CANCELED.

We used to watch the new Knight Rider series (an NBC show) with the kids last season.  It wasn’t great on plot or acting but it was a decent family show one the kids really enjoyed – CANCELED.

We watched Terminator: the Sara Connor Chronicles (FOX show) – another one the kids liked.  This one was actually starting to get decent with an interesting plot – CANCELED.

I’m almost afraid to even mention Merlin (NBC show) that we have been watching.  It’s been very good and the kids really like it.  We are fearful this one will be canceled too.  Sad.

My all time favorite… this one was painful… Battlestar Galactica (SciFi) – CANCELED.   But at least in this case, SciFi gave it a “final (short) season” to allow the series to wrap up the plot and tie everything together.  They did that well so I at least have that… but was it really necessary to cancel a great show like that?  I mean it was one of the best SciFi shows on the SCI-FI channel!  What more do you want, network?

SciFi also canceled Stargate Atlantis for no real reason -  it was just too successful and too costly to make.  Right.  Loved that show too.  And the irony here is that just like Battlestar Galactica, they were going to turn around and produce a spin-off to the series.  Why the spin-offs?  Why not keep the original shows considering they were still good – in both cases.  Incidentally, whatever did happen with Caprica?  They advertised that one to death during the final days of Battlestar but then nothing ever materialized.  I know they DVD’d the movie but I thought a series was in the works.  Must have gotten canceled based on poor DVD sales.  LOL!   I think SciFi has another Stargate spin off series in the works too.  But seriously? Why would I want to invest the time in a show that is just going to get canceled when it starts to get good.  I’m so tired of being played a fool.

Speaking of rants and SciFi…. the SciFi channel drives me nuts.  They are supposed to be a SciFi station but all they play is their own homegrown movies that are awful.  I mean utter CRAP!  The great sci-fi shows of the past and present are no where to be seen in their programming.  It’s truly disgusting from a sci-fi fan point of view.  And what is up with that new “SyFy” logo?  How stupid is that name?  SYFY?  You have got to be kidding!

… but hey they got their trademark now so it most have been a great strategic move… um… not.

Did some house cleaning this morning on firefox and came across some new (well new to me at least) add-ons and thought I’d share.

I had been using SAGE as my RSS reader and then migrated to Sage Too.  I haven’t come across too many RSS feeders that I like.   The RSS feeders I had previously tested all seem to operate as a tab of your browser.  But with Sage my list is an actual sidebar item not a browser tab.  This way my feed list stays viewable on the left no matter what tab I’m looking at.  It just seems easier for the way I browse.  Anyway… I haven’t been thrilled with sage – it does okay but has bugs.  The developer moved on from the project at the beginning of the year so no new updates/fixes.  Got tired of stray errors so I started searching for a new reader this morning… came across Wizz RSS and it works almost identical to sage (meaning integrated into firefox as a sidebar) but is much faster and seems cleaner to me.  It imported my sage feeds very quickly.  If you are looking for a RSS feeder that is integrated into firefox this one seems like a good improvement over Sage.  The only thing I would like is to be able to set the preview screens as a multiple column view like sage.  Maybe it can do that and I just can’t figure out where that setting would be.  At any rate, it seems to fit my needs at the moment so I’m happy.

Another add-on that I installed is Tab Mix Plus.  It allows extensive configuration of your tabs.  The feature in particular that caught my eye is the customization based on READ vs NOT READ.  A lot of times, I’ll open several tabs as I’m blog reading that have content I want to come back to and give a closer read or download.  This add-on will keep those tabs marked a different color until I click them so I’ll know if I missed any.  That’ll work very nicely for me.  I do have the “Read It Later” add-on that keeps a list of  URLs to read later but I don’t seem to use that very often.  I never seem to go back to sites in that list – it’s too out of sight out of mind for me.

I also installed Update Scanner.  This add-on notifies you of website updates from websites that don’t have an RSS feed.  I have come across a few (not many it seems these days) that put out regular content I’m interested in but do not have an RSS feed – galleries mostly. I’ll bookmark the sites, but find it a pain to go back through them regularly.  This add-on should help keep track of those types of sites and update me with any changes.  Haven’t tested it yet, but looks promising.

And lastly, I installed Update Notifier.  It checks for add-on/theme updates and gives you a visible notification in the upper right corner.  I never remember to check/install new add-on updates so this is great for me.