Snoskred Opinions

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Shoe Sunday – Boots To Hawaii

3 Comments Posted on September 21, 2014May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

One of the more difficult things about travelling is choosing what to take with you. In 2011, I travelled to Hawaii with only hand luggage, and we’re not talking about one of those suitcases on wheels. I took a small tote bag with one change of clothes for the day we arrived, because I knew I would be buying a lot of awesome stuff while there. I wore a pair of old – and I mean old, I’d had them since the 80’s – leather shoes on the plane flight over and threw them away because they were way too worn to donate..

In 2013, we had planned a trip to the Big Island of Hawaii so the star-obsessed other half could visit the Mauna Kea Summit at sunset, and then do some star gazing a little lower down the mountain. This meant we would not be shopping right away and therefore I needed to pack items to suit two completely different situations.

The heat of Hawaii at sea level, which is like a hot summer day in Australia, and the super cold conditions on top of Mauna Kea at night time. At the time of year we were visiting, it is not unusual to see snow there and it would be below zero at night.

I chose my good friends the Steve Madden Batell Combat Boots which are super comfortable, I can hike in them and my feet are not tired at the end of a long day.

These shoes gave me an amazing and unusual experience during our trip to the Mauna Kea summit. Our tour stopped at a lava flow for a closer look and a geology talk. While standing on the lava, just after taking that photo above, under my foot I felt a piece of the lava break off. I bent down and picked it up.

Looks like just some crusty black stuff, right? Wrong.

When I flipped it over, I saw a sparkly paradise. It was like someone took a rainbow and embedded it in the lava. What if I had not turned it over, and just put it back down?

I so wanted to take that rock home with me but we have this life rule –

take only photographs, leave only footprints

I called the other half over and we took a lot of photos of that rock and I hoped that maybe one of them could do it justice. However though you get an idea of the beauty of it, not a single photo comes close to the amazing brilliance I held in my hand that day. Sometimes the rules we live by are difficult to keep to but we have to live by them. Sure I could have made an exception for this but where would that end?

And for this experience, I have to thank my favourite combat boots. Nobody else had this experience happen to them on the tour, with their sneakers and flip flops.

Where have your shoes been?

Write a shoe post and link up here! ;)

Shoe Linkup, travel

Where Do Your Shoes Live?

9 Comments Posted on September 14, 2014May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

Sometimes the best ideas come to you as a surprise via the blog posts of other people. Suger from Suger Coat It wrote a post called – The triumphant return of the sneaker – and I commented – This inspires me to start a weekly feature about sneakers. I have so many pairs!

But then I thought, why limit it to one kind of shoe? Why not have a weekly shoe post? Each pair of shoes will receive a good cleaning in preparation for being posted – and the other half is Building Me A Photography Box especially for this project.

But before I begin this new blog feature – which will start on Sunday next week, I want to show you where my shoes live – and invite you to join me and show the world where your shoes live.

Drumroll…….

I will like to take you inside my Accessory Room.

Before you even open the door, there is a Scarf Bar –

This is a simple thing to create – some over the door hooks and you too can have a scarf bar. I got mine from Aldi but a lot of places stock over the door hooks. Some of the hooks are holding more than one scarf which is super handy.

If you don’t have a lot of room but you do have a lot of scarves, this is a simple yet great way to store them, all you need is a door and some over the door hooks.

The door to this room is usually left open because this is also Paper Goods From Costco Nirvana. I am not running out of toilet paper, paper towel, or tissues anytime soon. And to this I say, Jesse Pinkman Style, YEAH BITCH, COSTCO! because if there is one thing I hate, it is running out of essentials like that. ;)

On the back of the door there is a Jewellery Organiser which also holds spare phone cases. Spot the Swarovski one for my old iPhone there? It is sparkly. :) I also have a Swarovski one for the present phone.

Inside the room there is a Jewellery Cupboard – which also doubles as a Handbag Storage Unit, and holder of the Super Holographic Duct Tape. Yes, I like it when things have more than one use. It is extra useful! And here is a sneak peek inside.

And now we arrive at the Shoe Cupboard. It is usually closed, to keep Dust away from The Shoes.

The big green bag on the outside is a Kipling backpack – I have a matching suitcase which also resides in the Accessory room.

And now, back to the shoes. Let us open the Shoe Cupboard.

Before we get an overview of the shoes, I will take out the Handbags, which have found a home in between two shoe racks.

That is a lot of shoes. Many of which do not get worn as often as I would like.

Rack one – there is no order in which they are stored, it is just wherever they fit they ended up.

And there are still some shoes in Other Places because they did not fit in this cupboard –

And, a bag’o’shoes which I am contemplating giving away.

There are enough shoes for a full year of shoe posts, so this will become a weekly feature and I invite other bloggers to join in as well. Everyone is welcome to join in. Just add your link by clicking on the blue add link button – I’ve also put a quick how to guide together below if you have never joined a link up before.

Add your link here!

An InLinkz Link-up

get the InLinkz code

A quick how to guide –

In case you have never done a blog link up before, I have created a how to guide and I have also made a page for the Shoes Link Up..

Join in & show us where your shoes live!

About Snoskred, Fashion, Shoe Linkup

All Right, I’m Naming Names.

Leave a comment Posted on September 4, 2014May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

CHRIS PINE.

You forced me to name names, even though I said I would not when I posted my Shit List post.

These otherwise lovely Dior ads – youtube clip here – with the incredible music, and now Chris Pine is on every single ad break on my pay tv.

Chris Pine, these eyebrows of yours are like a train wreck, I just cannot look away.

And then there is more than one Chris Pine on the screen at once – which set of eyebrows should I look at? How to choose?

Whatever I am doing, I have to stop and watch the entire thing, and ponder the following question.

WTF WITH THE EYEBROWS, CHRIS PINE.

Why are there caterpillars, perching where your eyebrows normally reside?

Especially when the lovely female in the ad has perfectly groomed eyebrows.

I still haven’t forgiven you, Chris Pine, for Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit yet.

I mean I have no freaking clue what the heck happened in that movie, all I could see were the Chris Pine EYEBROWS OF DOOM, and occasionally Keira Knightley. And on the big screen those things are absolutely enormous. It is impossible to escape them.

Clearly you are not completely adverse to eyebrow grooming, or else that would be one heck of a mono caterpillar eyebrow instead of two separate caterpillar eyebrows. So why can’t you continue with the eyebrow grooming and tame those things!

Tidy them up, please, Chris Pine.

These eyebrows might be ok on the small screen.

On the movie screen they are GI-freaking-GANTIC.

You can’t take over from Harrison Ford with these eyebrows, Chris Pine.

Not on my watch!

celebrities, movies, wrong world

Ball vs Bawl

1 Comment Posted on August 25, 2014May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

Oh dear. I sincerely hope you did not. So many images come to mind.. netballs, baseballs, debutante balls, bowling balls, stress balls, those little plastic balls in ball pits, man balls otherwise known as testicles.. NEEDLE SCRATCH wait what?

I don’t know about you, but when I find something terribly upsetting, causing salt water to leak from my eyes, the last place I am intending to put my crying eyes is in a man’s crotch area. Maybe it is just me. :)

Please tell me it is not just me. Pretty please?

Bawl vs Ball

Two very different things which should never be confused for each other. Dear Baller, here is your Fail Whale. It is much prettier than your fail. I do not think I will ever get tired of the beauty of this art. In fact it almost makes fail whales worthwhile.

~ Image credit to Neoyume on Deviant Art ~

Now if only this gorgeous art could wipe out that mental picture of testicles and eye balls..

My work is done here, kthx!

Fail Whale, wrong world

My Shit List

1 Comment Posted on August 22, 2014May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

Sunrise at Sandy Beach in Hawaii – I’ll be using some of my Hawaii images over the next few months, FYI.

Thanks to Boob In A Box – incidentally one of my favourite recent blog finds – for this one. :)

10 – The fact that Breaking Bad is over for good. It was finished with such perfection, it better win some Emmy love next week.

9 – There is a front end loader constantly running just one street away from me during the day at the moment, and I am losing my marbles. What few marbles I had left, anyway.

8 – My recliner needs welding. If one of the cats sits on top of it, I can’t get balanced right! But to get welded, it has to be carried out into the shed.

7 – Taylor Swift leaving gyms in New York in totally not gym appropriate outfits, with obviously empty handbags on her arm. Tom and Lorenzo (my favourite celebrity fashion bloggers btw) have nicknamed it Taylor Swift’s Empty Bags Tour.

6 – Male movie stars who refuse to groom their eyebrows. Hey, dude, I paid good money to watch you on the big screen, the least you can do is make sure your eyebrows are not taking over your face and/or temples. All of you somehow manage to not have a monobrow, what is so wrong with tidying the rest up? I’m not at the point of naming names but you’re driving me in that direction!

Thanks to Darylisms Tumblr for the gif – I searched high and low for one photo that would do proper justice to the well groomed eyebrows of Christian Slater and none of them did, but this gif image does. :)

5 – People on Facebook when someone they do not know passes away in an accident. I want to bang my head so hard. Here is an example of some recent comments when two people died in a head on collision near where I live. This little example will supply us with numbers 4 and 3 as well.

Why do the beautiful peoples lives have to be taken away from them, indeed? What about the not beautiful people, or is that more ok?

4 – My heart goes out to – I sincerely hope your heart remains in your chest pumping blood around your body which is where it belongs. Since when did this become the new meaningless thing everyone says when they cannot come up with something real to say? Peoples, when you hear a politician say this, remove it from your personal list of things to say to those who are grieving. Your thoughts can go out, your prayers can go out, your internal organs should go nowhere, ever. Unless you are donating them to someone else.

3 – Rip? Rip what? It is R.I.P. – there are dots in between the letters for a REASON, people. You can’t take a moment to put in full stops for this person you are writing a tribute to? You couldn’t maybe use the whole words, like Rest In Peace?

2 – The media and their apparent lack of care for anyone who might not want graphic images on the front page of their newspaper. Yes, some of the papers here in Australia and around the world published unedited images of bodies and body parts after the MH17 tragedy. Disgusting.

Media Watch did a good piece on this and I will put a link to the *transcript* here. If you click through you will NOT see any images but there are links on the page to the graphic images and they are all clearly labelled, and the video itself does contain the images. If you are lame like I am, you can cover your eyes but still listen. :) Link to Media Watch MH17 episode.

1- {rant mode on} Paul Mercurio in those manipulative Insuranceline ads. Sorry people but the ads are so terrible they are not to be found anywhere online. I am very lucky this is the case because if I put the ads here and you watched them, you’d want to dead me.

Seriously Paul, what were you thinking? You were in Strictly Ballroom, dude. You are not wearing a gold sparkly jacket in these commercials – they have you in the most ugly and ill fitting shirts I have seen in a long, long time on a man in the world. Was there a mirror where you filmed this? If so, how did you allow this fashion crime to be committed?

If you had the sparkly gold jacket on, maybe I wouldn’t resent it quite as much.

Okay, that is entirely not true. You could be dressed in sequins from head to toe and I would still be mad as a cut snake.

The levels to which you have sunk – to now be the face of ads trying to convince elderly people not to “be a burden” to their families by purchasing “final expenses insurance” so that their families do not have to find money for their funeral..

Even worse, I know this advertising works amazingly well. :( Those people who buy it would more than likely be better off putting aside the money they’d pay for the premiums each week and leaving that to their kids. But they don’t want to be a burden so they’ll pony up the cash and by the time they do eventually go on to greener pastures they’ll have paid 3x what they would have paid up front for a funeral or via a pre-payment plan with their local funeral company.

I hope they are paying you big money for this, Paul. Any respect the majority of Australians might have once had for you has long since evaporated with us having to sit through these terrible ads over and over and over again.

{end rant} – Sorry that was long but those ads have been irritating me for a very, very long time now. Even worse they are on Foxtel which I am PAYING for. Like Pay TV! Why are there ads – very long and obtrusive ads – on my Pay TV?

Well, that feels better.. anyone else want to play?

If yes leave me a link in the comments. ;)

And pop over to Boob In A Box – and leave a comment with a link to your shit list post as well. :)

Annoyed Snoskred, death, negative thought, wrong world

Allowed VS Aloud part 4

Leave a comment Posted on August 21, 2014May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

~ Image credit to David Pache on Flickr~

Now let us clear out a few of these and wrap up our Allowed VS Aloud series, at least until some more of these appear to me as a surprise in my facebook feed.

There is a new holiday in town! Hollerween! Where kids holler at each other aloud for hours on end while going around knocking on doors and hoping they will open. No candy involved, by the end of it you’ll need headache tablets. Sorry bout that!

Yeah my cat gets real aloud making those miow sounds. So help me, I can’t even with the rest of this. I get irrationally angry when cats are involved.

I don’t know the difference between no or know, nor do I know the difference between there or their, nor do I know or care if I am allowed to post these complicated instructions for the rest of you to follow in order for you to like a photo of some kid you never met and never will meet, nor am I going to bother telling you *why* you should do this. Like Nike said, Just Do It. Kthx.

Plus, above that, let me spam your group with a link to my new group without bothering to check the rules to see if you’ll be fine with it.

I weep for the future. Aloud. And I know I’m allowed to.

Fail Whale, wrong world

Fowl Behaviour

1 Comment Posted on August 17, 2014May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

Oh dear. Please explain how one gets big words like complaints, management and tolerated right, and yet epically fails on especially, foul, language and customers!

Community groups on Facebook are an endless supply of hilarity, combined with far too many moments of DOH forehead slap.

Fail Whale, wrong world

Allowed VS Aloud part 3

2 Comments Posted on August 8, 2014May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

~ Image credit to Neoyume on Deviant Art ~

Is that the most beautiful Fail Whale you have ever seen? I love this Fail Whale so much I am going to put it on my desktop. :) Unfortunately not as pretty are the fails I have to share today.

So once again can’t be bothered working out if there are group rules or if this fits within them, imma gonna let you have your classifieds group but just let me post this kthx. Someone stole something from me, not that I really care about that, but can you give it back for the sake of my poor sad child. Aww..

Hmm. Let me try and answer this. If your hubby does not know the rules for having the license *and* it means so little to him that he totally forgot to renew it for a number of months, maybe this license is not for him. Best save the boat licenses for those who actually want and need them. :)

Fail Whale, wrong world

An Epic Story Of Failure.

5 Comments Posted on August 3, 2014May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

If you lived in the USA, you could subscribe to a huge and fascinating assortment of subscription boxes. Mail that comes to you as a surprise, perhaps once a month, or once every so often, or as a once off. There is even a great blog devoted to the topic of subscription boxes – Subscription Addiction – this is one of the blogs that often has between 5-10 posts a day in my feed reader..

But if you live in Australia? There are bugger all subscription boxes, the ones that do exist are generally expensive or beauty related. I’ve put some links right at the bottom of this post if you want to explore what is available to us.

So along comes a little company who named themselves RedPawPaw. They decide to launch a box for just $5 a month – no postage or delivery fees, you pay for 11 months and get one free, as long as you provide feedback on the products via a survey. Sounds great, says I. Do they deliver to my area – a lot of things do not being slightly rural – Yes, they do.

Fantastic says I. Let me sign up. And so I did sign up to receive the June box. They charged $60 to my credit card and I am still not certain why as it should have been $55. If it had been GST, then I should have been charged $60.50. But why quibble over $5, I thought at the time. Big mistake, Snoskred. Clue number one was right there.

A little while later I received the June box, and it was pretty awesome. My box contained –

Gravox Creamy English Wholegrain Mustard finishing sauce
Zumbo Choc Raspberry Macarons
Ovaltine Crunch
Finish Tablets
Nivea Q10 – 2x tiny sachets
Henry Jones Chia Jam
Berry flavoured Mentos
Mentos Spearmint chewing gum
Taylors Pea and Zucchini Soup
Greens Pancake Mix
Uncle Tobys Oats

I did not blog or take photos but you can see a couple of posts from other people here – Raising Misters – Caddie’s Journal.

I enjoyed the products I tried and actually bought some more of some of them which I normally would not purchase – eg the Mentos gum was brilliant and I do not usually chew gum but I liked this enough to start. Plus there were a lot of new Mentos flavours I had not tried and I picked up a couple when paying for petrol because I tried the Berry ones.

So, one box down, 11 to go, right? Wrong. Wronggity Wrong. On the 30th of June, Redpawpaw subscribers received an email titled Important! – No Redpawpaw payment in July. It went exactly like this –

So we are asking you, our subscribers, to hassle companies on our behalf to get them to send us samples so we can send out samples to you.

Oh, ok, this sounds like a brilliant idea with a couple of logic exceptions – if we know of a company in order to hassle them, does it not follow we already use their products and then why would they need to send us a sample – and two, people are potentially going to hassle the same companies over and over which could get really annoying and then nobody is going to want anything to do with this company.

I personally was not a fan of this idea nor did I participate – why is it up to me to find companies – that should be the job of Redpawpaw? But a lot of people did help them out and ask companies to participate – not knowing that the companies would have to pay a fee per sample to send any samples to the subscribers. None of us knew that until later, though I guess it is a logical concept and potentially a good idea if your business model is for the companies to cover the postage fees.

Apparently some people did have some issues with delivery. Me personally I did not. But those who did apparently kicked up a huge stink on the Facebook page, which is what supposedly led to this change of delivery partner.

On the other hand, it could also be that the company did not have enough samples and enough companies paying money to cover delivery to send out a July box. Given what happened later I am going with the second option being the one that really happened.

Second clue there – we hope you will stay with us on this journey with us? What kind of English is that? Sounds a lot like statements my manager at work comes out with that mean absolutely nothing but involve a lot of words, so they seem complex and like the manager has done some work when really she did zero all day because she does not actually know how to do anything. Oops, tangent, lets leave that there. :)

So.. a couple of weeks go by. Then Sunday the 20th of July, the following email arrives. Titled – Relaunch – The Redpawpaw Tribe has Spoken!

Translation – prepare yourselves, because you are expendable. If you do not like what the tribe has said, there are plenty of people waiting to take your place.

Wait, what?

I’m paying $5 a month to receive this box, and now you want to charge me a minimum 150% of that each month to get it delivered? And I never had a problem with delivery previously? But hang onto your hats people..

Err, excuse me?

Firstly, you owe me 11 boxes, not 10. I never got a July box, and you promised everyone they would receive an extra box to compensate.

Secondly, if people do not opt out, say for example they are on holidays or do not check their email in the short window of 8 days you have provided them, you are going to just whack a charge on their credit card as a surprise to them? Popular concept. I’m going with this is a fabulous idea! NOT!

Thirdly, this is an obscene amount of postage. I guess I should consider myself lucky as some people got the full $18 charge. But still, nearly 3x the cost of the box each month to get this delivered? I don’t think so.

As you can expect, there was an enormous uproar. On the Facebook page of Redpawpaw – you can’t see it now as they deleted a lot of posts and comments – the “tribe” spoke up and they were very unhappy, in particular re the having to opt out option – people felt it should be opt in – and rightly so.

There was a sneaky change to the terms and conditions and also a pesky little wording about receiving over $30 in value which went away, but thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine, the initial terms and conditions can be seen in their entirety. Changing the terms for a monthly subscriber is one thing, but changing it for annual subscribers is quite another. At least, as far as Consumer Affairs and the ACCC are concerned, who thanks to all the outcry are investigating this.

During the next couple of days the story changes on the Redpawpaw Facebook page and we find out that the changes have little to do with delivery issues and more to do with an unsustainable business model. EG they do not have enough money to carry on, and they do not have enough money to send out the next lot of boxes. Plus now people are unsubscribing in droves, and nobody is seeing any refunds, and concern begins to arise that not enough money exists for these refunds to be given.

I mean if there are 1000 people like me who paid $60 who want a refund, they have to pay out $60,000.

So after all the outcry, just 2 days later this email arrives – in the really big text so you know this is serious.

Yes, because every company needs to be to be financial viable. Missing a ly there, are we?

Bit more honest about the reasons for the delivery fee – they do not have enough money.

Suddenly they decide to *advise* people of the changes to the terms and conditions – though they say nothing about sneakily removing all reference to the value of each box people will receive. But fear not, our intelligent crew on the Facebook page spotted it, and they posted about it continually until Redpawpaw banned them from the page and deleted all their posts.

But wait, there’s more.

So now, people have to opt in, or else their subscription will be cancelled. Hmm.. Yeah that seems like a plan. I’m sure it will work out just fine.

And we wrote it in the REALLY BIG TEXT so you know we mean it!

Whatevs, RPP. Imma gonna let you finish, but this is me unsubscribing right here. So I sent an email. No reply. I posted on the Facebook page. No reply. Days went by. I started to get worried about my money returning to me. I sent another email. I clicked on the submit button you see above. I cancelled on the website.

It wasn’t until I sent them an email saying I would start a chargeback via my bank that they finally decided to get back to me and issue the refund. I checked my credit card and the refund was there. Whew. Case closed. Game over. Done.

Or so I – and many others – thought.

On the 1st of August, a lot of people who had unsubscribed found money taken out of their credit card as a surprise to them.

This is a level of epic fail that not many companies can compete with. You’ve upset all these people, you’ve had them unsubscribe and leave very unhappy with your company, and THEN YOU STEAL THEIR MONEY AS A SURPRISE!

People were unthrilled. Let us look at a small sample of their un-thrilled-ness. I’ve removed the personal info of the people involved – some of the posts seen on the Facebook page still remain, many have since been deleted.

Epic Fail.

There are not enough fail whales in the world.

That is only a small sample of the outcry – much of it has been deleted and is now gone forever.

I’m not the only one who thinks this is an epic fail, many people expressed it via the Redpawpaw facebook page and many of those posts were sadly deleted – I did find one blog post – FFS Friday Business Edition.

And now, for those of you who made it this far, here are the lists of Aussie subscription boxes I promised at the start of this post, many eons ago now. :)

Australian Subscription Boxes – Joy In The Post – Box List

customer feedback, Fail Whale, what not to do

Allowed VS Aloud Part 2

1 Comment Posted on July 31, 2014May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

~ Image credit to DoodleWithGlueGun on Deviant Art ~

Perhaps you have noticed our Fail Whale art has taken an angry turn. That is because the following post makes me see red. Allow me to rage momentarily..

So, you got a kitten and loved it all through the cute kitten stage, and now you are going to turn the life of this poor kitty completely upside down, take it away from the home it knows and send it.. who knows where as long as they pay you $200.

Perhaps you were not *allowed* a cat to begin with and now you have been found out, the poor cat is the one who has to suffer.

I wish the best to the poor kitty. I truly hope you found a home in which you will be loved the way you deserve.

To the owner, I wish you never, ever have another pet. Plus, I wish some other bad things for you which cannot be printed out loud on the inter webs or even spoken *aloud* in the world. :( Typing Aloud instead of Allowed is the least of the bads you have done here.

Angry Snoskred, animals, Fail Whale, wrong world