What the Power of Words Can Do!

Join us on Thursday, March 19th for an in-depth interview with Simon Rose, science fiction and fantasy children's author nominated for the Silver Birch, Diamond Willow and Golden Eagle

Book Awards. Simon also gives workshops, visits schools and teaches classes to authors. Please come and learn more about this author of five outstanding books for children. He will be here to answer your questions after the interview.

If you want to learn more about him visit his blog and check out his video on Youtube.

The Mattress Saga

I wonder sometimes if anyone is reading my words and of course, I love the comments all of you leave when you stop by. For a writer comments are like applause and we need that very much.:) That's why I always try to answer your comments, because my answers are like a performer's bows.:) But I never could have anticipated what would happen when I talked about mattress shopping on Friday in my blog.

So I opened my email box to check on email on Saturday and found an email addressed to me from the Vice President of Customer Satisfaction of Sleepy's! :) Somehow, and this kind of scares me, he had found my email address after finding my post about the mattress shopping experience on my last blog. I was very happy to know that my post had received attention. Probably they have an automatic service that checks constantly for their name or mention of their products. But how did he get my email address? I sent this person an email back to find out how they got my email and also to thank him for what he offered to us. Here is an excerpt of the email:

We thank you for taking the time to share your experience about the Miralux mattress and our showroom.

At Sleepy’s we work continuously to accommodate our customers with quality in both service and merchandise. We are sorry that you had to experience anything less.

He then went on to give some background of Sleepy's. Started in 1957 in Brooklyn, NY, by the Acker family, Sleepy's now has almost 700 stores in 12 states. He also mentioned how they deliver over 2000 Miralux mattresses a week and that one dissatisfied customer will tell ten more people and that is a problem in the age of the Internet. He also said that the percentage of negative comments was far less than the 2000 mattresses they had delivered.

But there is more:

I would like to extend my personal assistance in helping your daughter find the mattress that is right for her, no obligation to select a Miralux and will see to it that a Regional Manager gives you personalized attention at a day and time of your/her convenience.

Again, I apologize for the behavior of our salesperson and assure you it will be addressed with the Regional VP. We regret the outcome, but unfortunately it becomes our greatest learning tool. We hope to hear from you.

Because of this email we went back to a Sleepy's store today and my daughter finally found a mattress she liked and she bought it. It's a Kingsdown with a soft pillow top. She needs the very soft. Sleepy's has this test for anyone who needs a mattress. They lay you down on a computerized mattressand it finds the exact level of comfort you need. Then they show you all the mattresses that fit your profile. The salesman we had today knew what he was doing. He treated us with respect and gave us information so we were able to decide with facts.

My daughter originally decided on an IBC Mattress, but when she checked on the website she found....Miralux. They are the same manufacturers of the Miralux mattress. She was all set to buy it because it was the only one in her price range that felt comfortable. But after she went back to the mattress one more time she decided to lay down on the Kingsdown. In a few minutes she had changed her mind and though the salesman had written up the order for the first mattress, he switched it and it only ended up costing her a little more than the first one for much better quality.:)

He threw in the delivery for free and they're taking away the old mattress for $14.95. So they're delive

ring the mattress on Tuesday and I hope that this will be the end of the mattress saga.:)

And we didn't even need the help of the Regional Manager. This shows a queen size bed. Imagine it as a twin.:)

What Have They Done to Facebook?

Now one more thought before I end my ravings.:) What have they done to Facebook? They've pared it down so much and put things in different places and restructured the group pages. I don't like it. It's confusing and I wonder why they are always changing things when people get comfortable with using something. I just wish once that things wouldn't change on websites. In this crazy changing world of ours we need places that don't change and where we can find our friends. We need the comfort of the familiar to keep us sane. It's kind of like the "Cheers" song:

Sometimes you want to go

Where everybody knows your name

And they're always glad you came....

Click the link to see all the lyrics.

One last thing and then I promise it's finished! We did see a movie this weekend! But it wasn't the one I would have chosen myself. We saw "Taken" with Liam Neeson. I have mixed feelings about this movie, because it is about the horrific practice of kidnapping and selling young girls as sex slaves. Liam Neeson is a retired CIA agent who when he hears his daughter being kidnapped over the phone rushes off to save her. It incorporates a great deal of violence and some torture with a little bit of blood and the minimal amount of gore. There are horrible scenes of debauched girls at a construction site giving favors to men while drugged in some cases todeath! I was really disgusted by a lot of this movie, but at the same time there are edge of your seat chase scenes. It's very much like a larger version of "24" if Jack had been in this situation. It didn't get a great set of reviews as you can see, but for people who like adventure movies you might like it a little more.

Until the next time, welcome to my new readers and please leave a comment. Thank you to my readers who have been here before. Remember we have the pleasure of an interview with children's book author Simon Rose on Thursday.

And to think that I saw it on the internet

Highlighted blog: No You're A Towel

Olive Juice Bag - of - the - Month Contest

This is my next favorite bag for the olivejuicebags.com contest. If you have a blog all you need to do is post something about the contest and let them know every time you post. This will enter you into the contest for one of their bags. If you win you will get their featured bag of the month. The contest goes until August, so start posting!

The blog I am highlighting today is No, You're A Towel, which is written by a man named Andrew. He writes mostly about sports, but he also writes about TV and movies and daily life. What I like about it is that he moves around in topics a lot just like me!:) He also talks about music and a little bit about sports. His latest post was about his travels in New Zealand. But the one before that talks about "24" as did mine last night. He posted about how "24" is going green and links you to the article in The New York Times. Most of his posts are about sports, but they dig into the situation and give you more than you would find in a newspaper. I like the variety and the spontaneity of it. I also like that though the author went to New Zealand he didn't stop posting!! Also, I really love his icon.:)

One more thing. Yesterday was Dr. Seuss Day and also Read Across America for all the kids in school. People went to schools to read to children. This is the day when we celebrate Theodore Geisel, or Dr. Seuss. He is a fixture of almost every child's reading, but unfortunately, he is not taken as seriously as a writer as he should be. Geisel wrote his catchy rhyming phrases for new readers. He wanted kids to read things that were fun. So he wrote his first book: And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street originally published in 1937. You can find the reprinted one reprinted by Random House on amazon.com. When I was a Literacy Specialist my first graders and I wrote a poem in the style of Dr. Seuss. The kids loved it. Anyway, Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss. You brought reading to millions of kids who might never have picked up a book if they hadn't seen a cute elephant or a funny cat on the front.:)

I have to get started writing my next chapter on the Sweet 16. I've decided that I'll just put my fingers on the keyboard and start. I have done enough research and thinking and I hope that the words will come. Wish me luck!! Until the next time....

Shaken to the Core!

If they had only let Jack Bauer do his thing.......

Taken in Yonkers, which is south of where I live.

First of all, would the networks please stop warning us that we are getting the worst storm of the year? Maybe it's because I lived in Buffalo and eight inches was the norm there, but today's snowstorm was a bit of a bust. Yes, it was snowy and blowing and a lot to dig out, but when I looked out of the window at around 6:30 AM the street was pretty clear. I guess I'm used to a big snowstorm being one that kept us inside for three days. That was back in 1977 in Buffalo and we called it the Blizzard of '77. Traffic couldn't move at all. There was so much snow they had to dump it in Lake Erie. I remember that on our street when the snowing and blowing finally stopped our neighbors had to take turns pushing each other's cars out of the snow drifts caused by the plows and the blowing snow. The snow was three feet high!! We had a dog then, a Newfoundland, and we walked him in the street since people hadn't shoveled their walks. On both sides of us the snow that had been plowed and was piled over ten feet high. So it seemed like we were walking between two walls of snow when we walked in the street. After the snowstorm someone printed a button: VBW '77 - Veteran of Buffalo Winter, '77. Now that was a storm. This was a minor inconvenience.:) Yet they closed schools. Maybe for people who live on Long Island, where we used to live, it was a little more than that! But up here in Westchester, it wasn't so much.:) The paper says that we got about 10 inches. I thought you might like to see some photos of what it was like here. Also if you want to get the flavor of what it was like here are some slides with the actual commentary from the radio back then.

The title of today's blog refers to how I felt after seeing "24" tonight. I don't think I've really talked about this, but I am a big fan of "24". I'm not as much of a fan as my daughter, though, but it's because of her that we all got into watching it and I've been watching since the second season. We caught up by getting the Season 1 DVD's and marathoned them one whole week to watch them all. Now I never miss a show. I'm usually a very vocal watcher and between my daughter and I we are always either yelling things at the screen or screaming or holding each other's hands. But tonight I was really upset.

I've read a lot of the articles that say that "24" goes too far in portraying torture, but this has nothing to do with that. In tonight's episode a group of armed soldiers from the mythical Zingala invade the White House and attempt to kidnap the president. I was horrified to see how this could be done. They came in from a subterranean area using a blowtorch. Obviously they had a man inside who disconnected the electrical grid so the alarm didn't sound. They shot everyone they saw and eventually, though the president was locked down with Jack Bauer, they got her daughter, who happened to be visiting her, and used her as bait to get the president to open the locked door. General Juma took everyone in the White House as hostages and made them sit in front of the door too. But the part that had me shaken to the core was when General Juma slapped the president of the United States!!! I mean it was the president. I have never seen anyone in a movie or in a TV show ever have anything happen to the president. Even in fiction this is a very disturbing thought. Could the White House be invaded?

So on the heels of this program comes the evidence that I heard on The Rachel Maddow Show of the blueprints of Marine I, the president's helicopter. They were leaked over the internet and guess where? They were leaked to Iran. It seems that terrorists watch the internet and steal whatever they can. How did they get these blueprints? Someone in the Defense Department used a social networking site for music and video sharing to send them to someone else. What??? Was he thinking at all??? So how safe are we all when morons like this send private classified documents over a public site????

Then it turns out that not two videotapes were made of the tortured prisoners, but 92!!! It doesn't matter, because they were erased, but really!!! And could we have become a dictatorship due to what Bush had in place? While my friends and I were protesting war and petitioning to keep our waterways and forests intact, the government was torturing people and finding ways to cut out all of our freedoms. It's much worse than any of us thought, and there was some pretty scary talk out there in the blogosphere. It makes me proud that I never believed the Bush government and protested the war and the 2004 election as well as working for voting rights. Everyone ridiculed me and said it wasn't so bad, but my friends and I never believed that was true. We knew something awful was going on and now that Obama is president it can all come out - the dirty laundry of the eight years of the Bush Administration piled up in front us.

I was going to highlight a blog today and will probably post again. It could be yours today.:) Until then, I've calmed down a little. Please leave your comments and I will try to answer them. Welcome to any new readers and thank you to the ones who are here awhile. This is still a work in progress.:)