Kudos or Budos?

 Kudos or Budos 

Kudos to the young man who walked me to my car with an umbrella during a terrible storm after a restaurant pickup. I thanked him and said, ‘Gd Bless’. I don’t know how he took it but I meant it in its most positive way. 

Boo-dos to the elderly gentleman working at the pet store who wore an upside-down flag face-mask. When I asked him why he did that, he replied that at least he didn’t salute it (?)  

This is for you; 

                               

     

Along with automated $5 donations to Dog n Kitty City, I’ve also included an auto $5 monthly donation to Best Friends animal sanctuary. 

It’s a little difficult to copy/paste it here without giving away my minuscule financial information, but I’ll try to include copies of it to the Rescue tab/page soon.  

   

    

ADOPT

Found a Donation Home

 I found a home for monthly automated donations, at least for now, to one of very few no-kill shelters. 

Best Friends pledged to make the entire country no-kill by 2025 but that’s coming up sooner than they thought! Still an awesome animal sanctuary. 

In the mean-time, DogNKitty City was created as a no-kill shelter for dogs & cats. It’s a small shelter in an industrial area but they’ve got good support and I hope they can expand. 

It’s a tiny route, a tiny shelter, and a tiny $5 monthly donation. 

 

DogNKittyCity.org

HSUS

 It looks like my monthly automated donations to HSUS have stopped. 

Taking a look, I saw that HSUS.org has changed a lot. 

For one thing, the Humane University has moved to, of all places, 

Madonna University..!?! Yep, Madonna.edu, where;  

Get your degree in a cutting-edge field connecting social justice, environmental conservation, and animal protection.  

I guess anything’s possible these days as banks, schools, conferences, and classes have been moving online. 

I’m not going to concern my work with social justice, laws, or the environment. 

Critters, that’s it, just critters. 

I realize that laws can benefit animals, social justice can help the climate which can help the animals, and on it goes, but what I found is that it ended up taking me further and further from the critters themselves. 

I should say here that it is my intention to help animals, that is, the care and comfort of animals. Realizing this can mean helping people help animals, it moves too far into a political/social realm and animals get left behind yet again. 

Real work with real animals looks more like this; 

  TAKIS SHELTER  

This guy runs his shelter somewhere in Greece, he has lots of volunteers and employees. 

If u think the New World is cruel to animals, it’s nothing like the Old World. And it’s not really cruelty so much as it is disregard. Animals are virtually things there, like furniture that eats and poops and that’s it. 

This guy sees them as beings with feelings, souls, instincts, thoughts and care. He stays on grounds with them day and night and dedicates his life to them. I couldn’t do it, I don’t know many who could, but I would if I could but I can’t so I don’t. 

I do what I can which really isn’t much at all compared to dedication such as Takis Shelter, but I try. 

I’ve long been a fan of Cesar Milan, the American version. 

I have no idea of their political leanings and really truly don’t want to know, I’d just like to see more awareness available of the healing powers of unconditional love and hope more centers like these continue to thrive. 

I’m aware of the political leanings of HSUS and try to avoid anything that isn’t directly applied to the care and comfort of animals, so with all the new information available, I’ll re-start my tiny monthly donations to one of these wonderful places and will stay posted here. 

A Perfectly Lovely Week

 I don’t get bored. 

How can u get bored when u can pick up a novel and travel to Tahiti, to return home at no cost by closing the book. 

Or u can read the Bible and be thankful for the abundance of God and man, be shocked by history of war and corruption, be moved by Proverbs, or all of the above. 

That said, and except for a flash thunderstorm on Friday, it was a perfectly lovely work-week. No drama, no chaos, no ugliness at all, just peace and pajamas. 

Enjoy it while it lasts!  

On the Road Again...

 I drive. A LOT..! 

I check my vending route at least once a week, 

I drive to stores for merchandising assignments, for errands, on shopping assignments for customers, and for courier and delivery gigs. 

Whenever I come across extraordinary experiences, positive or negative, I write reviews on Yelp.com. 

Being that I’m sometimes sent to stores that I’d never seen or heard of before to pickup items for delivery,  I’ve learned of really cool places, especially a few restaurants that have been around for decades but I’d never heard of that I found to have exquisite menus. So look for my store reviews soon! 

An experience at a tiny bar left me so flummoxed that I had to write a review of it in Yelp when I realized that my understanding of it might be the only recent one in the life of that location. In other words, did others see the same things I did? 

Even if they did or didn’t, why can’t I write about any unusual experiences I've come across? 

And so I think I might do just that. 

Why not add a page to my blog that reviews my restaurant visits, or even store visits? 

Purely subjective, but sometimes I got a lot to say! 

Look for it soon!  

By the way, google is discontinuing automated email updates from blogs so I think it’s up to bloggers to manually send out updates. 

I’ll try my best to send some sort of work-around. 

Pandemic Over Yet?

 Pandemic Almost Over

   Greetings, 

My routes and I are still recovering from the pandemic, and I just wanted to let u know that I’m able to focus back onto the route. 

This means that the few machines I have left will be tended to properly now. 

An update means recovering from my supply lines coming back up so that I can get fresh candies, my current supply sat too long with too many machines that no longer exist so my supply is a toss and a loss. 

  With businesses back up and running, I’m working with new personnel and their preferences so it’s a lot like starting over from the very beginning with only a few machines again. 

 The Honor Boxes are holding up fine, I didn’t stock up on their candies as much since I wanted to get to know the new line first.  

   I’ve been taste testing the gumballs and as hoped, they always hold up and I’ll tell u why. 

   When gumballs issue straight from the factory, they are so fresh, they melt in the mouth, no ability to chew on them at all. After a few weeks, they firm up but only a little bit. It takes a good 3-6 months to get a good solid gumball with fresh flavor that doesn’t melt away. After this, they gradually firm up more and more, but never have I ever seen nor experienced a gumball that won’t soften up after a bit, and flavor diminishes but doesn’t disappear ever. 

   I honestly believe, and there’s no way to test it, but I believe the better made gumballs, usually by Double Bubble, stored in an unchangeable environment, no heat, no cold nor moisture, just a constant room temperature in medium light, would be able to last with flavor and effectiveness for a few generations. 

    The only problem I have seen so far is that the Jelly Bellies took on flavor from the machines themselves. 

   Jelly Bellies are of exceptional quality and are known for their accurate flavors, which lasted protected in the machines thru the last several months but had taken on a plastic aftertaste from the machines, so I’ve changed them out for gumballs, which never take on any stray flavors or tastes. It’s really too bad, too, because Jelly Bellies are very popular but difficult to vend and maintain. 

   So I’m back on it, I haven’t forgotten the machines or customers, and thanku for your patiences!  

   

Let’s Not Forget the Chocolate

 

Altho I work mostly with bubble gum and hard candies, let’s not forget the chocolatiers and the history of chocolate in all its variations. 

I realized I was moving away from my candy route simply because it had been downsized so much from the pandemic, and especially since opportunities have opened up for my books business, I’ve been focusing on that, but let’s not forget the chocolate! 

Returning to M&Ms for some of my machines, I noticed that they do not have the metal spirals in them that the gumball turnstile machines sometimes have. Was that some sort of design flaw? I don’t think so because M&Ms vend naturally quite well and the metal springs that rotate in their canisters might break up the small candies. Gumballs are much hardier and are able to aerate easier. That’s why I fill gumball canisters to the top while keeping M&M canisters, both peanut and plain, half empty (or half full if you’re an optimist :-) 

So those of us working hard to survive the pandemic, or working hard to survive, let’s not forget the temporary pleasures of chocolate for the body and the permanent joy of God for the soul. 

eBay Lets PayPal Go

 Okay fine, eBay doesn’t transact with PayPal anymore. 

Did they come up with their own payment system like maybe ePal, eBayPal? 

No, they are demanding access to your checking account..! 

This is horrendous. 

One of the 1st rules of Financial Peace University is to never ever give credit card companies access to your checking account. Debit cards are okay because those are treated similar to credit cards, but eBay expects full access to your hard-earned CASH..? No interim steps, arbitrator, 3rd party with no hands on your cash, just unadulterated access? Nope, I don’t think so. 

People are already investing in invisible cash, cyber money, no hard copy, just a click of a button and ‘it’ comes or goes 💸 

I can’t even sell my books on there anymore. 

eBay is awesome but not that awesome. And I can’t in good conscience promote debt cards, I mean credit cards. 

I’m sure it will be wildly popular to trust Big Brother with your wallet but my books are outta there. 

I’ll post my new site soon. I never made that much money from books anyway, it’s always been from sheer love of the written word, on paper, cloth, cardboard, any hard-copy, but not invisible digital cyber-books that can disappear with the click of a button on a whim. 

So far, I’ve never had any purchased books on my Kindle disappear from me, but I’ve had saved books that I had planned to purchase later disappear...

     ~

Dare I..?

 Okay, so at its best, my route makes about $10 per visit, at its medium, $5 a visit, and not necessarily at its worst, but at its least, $0 a day. Those are the locations that only require a cleaning and making sure the machine is up and running and doesn't need to be re-stocked. 

I can service around 10 locations a day, and that's only if everything goes even semi-smoothly. 

So I could make $100 a day, (I haven't yet), or $50 a day, (once or twice pre-pandemic), or $20 a day. 

This is difficult to remember because I was just starting to settle into a decent routine when the pandemic hit awhile back. These days it's honestly just a few dollars a day. 

The best part is that independent routes like these are flexible and fun. 

This means that I can begin adding machines back onto the route, soon, hopefully, dare I hope..?  

            

  

    ~

God Bless Us

 

May Gd bless u and yours, even the house that flew the flag upside down, what a mess, this is for them, too. 

  

 

~