I had no plans on going to Disneyland but caught the tweet on Twitter of one of my local friends, Michael Carrera indicating he was on his way up to Disneyland. I sent him a post back saying I wished I had known he was going because I would have gone. So he said, just come on up, and after thinking about it for probably the briefest amount of time possible, I wrote back saying I would be on my way up shortly. My Twitter conversation was picked up by another friend, Chuck Salerno, who was at Disneyland helping out with a “Flat Stanley” project for one of his family members. (If you’ve not heard of “Flat Stanley” (as I had not) essentially it’s just an elementary school project consisting of a cardboard cutout in the shape of a person (aka Stanley) that gets sent to people to photograph in random places to create a photographic travelogue of the cardboard cut out. Essentially a neat way to travel vicariously through photos and the creativity of the people Flat Stanley gets sent to.)

As I arrived at the Disneyland resort, I notified both Michael and Chuck that I had arrived. Michael sent back a text saying he and his friend were just finishing Tower of Terror in Disney’s California Adventure Park and would be crossing over to Disneyland right afterwards. Chuck indicated he was on a park bench near the central hub of Disneyland. I was going to wait outside for Michael and his friend outside Disneyland when Michael sent a text saying he and his friend would be making a quick stop to the car, so I opted to go into Disneyland and meet up with Chuck and would catch up with Michael and his friend later as the trip to the car would add at least half an hour to the wait time for them.

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While out and about on some errands, I came across this public transit bench ad for a San Diego realtor named Mary McTernan, who has elected to promote herself as a “hassle free” listing to sell your home with the tagline “You Can Fire Me Anytime!!” But one has to wonder if this is sending the right message to prospective clients.

I can understand what Mary is trying to accomplish with the ad by indicating that she wants to be one less hassle in your life by making it easy to sell your home. If she’s not able to accomplish it, you can fire her and be on your way, no messy breaking of a contract, and the other messy stuff when you find yourself stuck with a listing Realtor who isn’t living up to your needs as a seller.

However, what the sign could also indicate is that Mary isn’t going too work to hard at selling your property because you can get rid of her anytime and it’s better if she doesn’t . Or it could mean she will work very hard because you could release her at any time. In a way it’s a very mixed message. Personally, I feel the message she is sending out there is that her name is synonymous with disposable. She’s destroying any perceived value of her services and that she’s about as useful as any broken product that is not worth trying to fix and keep.

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If you can find a way to make something most people don’t want to do, fun and pleasant, people will do it. Recycling has certainly caught on in San Diego, but Waste Management has teamed up with Greenopolis to offer a new and exciting way to expand their recycling options. Recycling “vending” style machines (although they’re collection machines, not vending machines) can be situated outside of stores and allow for easy recycling. But what’s the incentive to use these machines? It’s actually a rewards program.

The machines offer little barcode keychain tags that you can get from the machines to help you establish an account to track your recycling. When you step up to a machine, you touch the built in screen and it will ask you how you want to log in, you can scan the barcode on the keychain tag or enter your email address or not log in and get a receipt that you can enter a code from online later on. For simplicity, it’s easiest to use the keychain tag. Once you establish an account to tie your keychain tag to an email account (you can add more account details at home later) the machine asks you start scanning your recyclable materials. One machine handles aluminum containers and glass bottles, the other will accept plastics depending on whether they are PETE or HDPE plastics. Most of these containers the machines will accept will be from beverage containers that deposits were paid for. The machines give you a chance to not only recycle the containers and get the deposit money back, but also earn points that can be redeemed for discounts at local merchants.

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On my way out of Palm Springs along Interstate 10, I found an A&W Restaurant just outside the Morongo Hotel And Casino. This was not a combination A&W store with another one of Yum! brands like Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), Taco Bell, Long John Silvers, etc. This was an A&W restaurant that was just an A&W restaurant. This was exciting since all the San Diego A&W’s were combination stores and all of them withdrew the A&W portion of the stores, it means the only chance to sample A&W is on the road outside of San Diego.

When I got there, it was about a half hour before they opened. I was surprised they weren’t opened earlier as it was 10:30 am when I stopped by. I didn’t want to just find the next A&W because I might not see another one on the road ahead, so I went for a quick fill up on gasoline at Morongo’s gas station and then just waited for the A&W to open. At about 10 minutes left to go before the placed opened there was a line forming outside the door. Apparently I wasn’t alone in my want for A&W Food. Sure it’s not what I really should be eating but it’s an out of town treat.

Once it opened, I opted to get a burger combo and removed the bun, like I usually do at burger joints. But I was interested in the upgrade of the fries to Wisconsin Cheese Curds. Thanks to my friend Caroline Bender for introducing me to what Cheese Curds really are, I was anxious to try these. I had never tried Cheese Curds until Caroline introduced me to them because I didn’t know what a curd was and it sounded disgusting. So now that I’ve been corrected and know that cheese curds are delicious plain, let alone deep fried like they were here at A&W.

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When it comes to ABBA Tribute Bands, Arrival from Sweden is the world’s best. It is the most authentic recreation of an ABBA concert you’ll ever see, and Vicky Norbäck-Zetterberg, founding member of Arrival, has gone to great lengths to ensure the most authentic show possible, including enlisting the help of ABBA’s costume designer, Owe Sandström, to recreate some of ABBA’s signature costumes and choreography that’s be researched to match how ABBA originally performed the songs live. All the music is created live, unlike some ABBA tribute bands that actually bring recordings to sing to their shows. And who can resist authentic Swedish accents as they are real Swedes who are able to accurately sing the songs the way ABBA did.

Arrival’s performance in Palm Springs was part of the 2010 Evening Under The Stars charity event benefiting Palm Springs AIDS Assistance Program. The event was held on the grounds of the O’Donnell Golf Club, just a short walk away from Downtown Palm Springs. As the event was $395 a plate for the charity dinner, I was attending as a guest of the band. I had the opportunity to hang out with the band before and after the performance along with a couple of other guests the band invited.

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Would you believe, I’ve lived in San Diego since 1986, and not once have I ever gone to Palm Springs? My only excuse is that I never realized how close to San Diego, Palm Springs really is. It’s about 135 miles from San Diego, which according to Google Maps, is a little more than a two hour drive. I never really looked at the maps to see how close it was to San Diego and just always figured I’d end up seeing it sometime, well that sometime has finally come. My reason for going was because my favorite ABBA tribute band, Arrival, from Sweden was going to be performing at the “Evening Under The Stars” charity event for the AIDS Assistance Program and this event is the closest they’ve come to San Diego since last year’s appearance at the San Diego County Fair. (Click here to read my blog entry for their appearance at the San Diego County Fair). I was invited to attend as a guest of the band.

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On May 1st, Jorge Cruise introduced a bunch of his clients former and present know about a brand new version of the Belly Fat Cure, which he is calling the “Fast Track” version of the program. While I can’t get into the specifics of the details of the program until he launches a more public announcement for the program, what I can say is that the program was developed to be as a super turbo charged version of the program that in the San Diego test case group he’s been trying it out with for the first last two weeks, the results have been astonishingly good.

Some of the benefits of the new Fast Track program is that it eliminates the need to use any specialty products, which a lot of people seemed to feel Jorge’s New York Times Bestselling book, “The Belly Fat Cure” mentions as options to use but doesn’t state they are required to be used. Also the having to track sugar and carbohydrates also gets eliminated in the program making it very easy to follow. Additionally, the menu plan is very simple as all the meals are designed to be put together very quickly and easily with little to no effort. No complicated recipes, no specialty products, and no tracking. Sound too good to be true? Well it’s not.

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When I was asked to be an evaluator of the first paid Belly Fat Cure coaching group as someone who’s been in the program and had great success with it, the last thing I expected to happen was to actually make some new friends in the process. I wasn’t really looking to have regular interaction with any of the folks in the program, just serve as an independent observer lurking in the shadows. However, one of those clients, Amber, who had started a blog entitled, “Me & Jorge” to document her journey through the Belly Fat Cure coaching program, reached out to me as a fellow blogger and the rest is as they say, history.

Amber initially was very shy about photographs, so I didn’t know what she looked like until well into the coaching program. This reminded me of my early days in my blogging as the program was at that point, still a work in progress and I wasn’t quite sure what I could share or not share on my blog about the program. I worked around it by always pointing people to the free report that was available on JorgeCruise.com at the time so that those who wanted more program specific details could download what Jorge was freely making available and just recap what had been working for me. I was very careful to leave out more specific details that were not yet available to the public.

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I was originally planning on spending today at Disneyland with a friend and possibly some others, however my friend had to cancel earlier this week, so since I had my heart set on going up to Disneyland and I was going to be going by myself, I opted to go yesterday instead of today as it would just work out better for me. And while I was there I took the opportunity to play a wonderful iPhone app game designed to be played at Disneyland called “Wishing Stars.”

The concept of the game is that several “Wishing Stars” have been broken up and scattered throughout the Disneyland park. In order to find them, you have to take your iPhone to the location of the clues and hit the “I think I’m standing in front of it!” button. You can’t cheat because the app uses the GPS built into the iPhone to verify that you’re standing in the correct spot. It won’t accept your attempt to stand in front of the correct answer unless you actually are in front of it. Essentially its a GPS based treasure hunt. The game is the perfect addition to Disneyland for an Annual Passholder who finds themselves wanting something more to do within the park besides the rides.

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While one of the disadvantages of not bothering with cable or other access to broadcast television is that I don’t stay current on “hot” shows while they’re hot. So I tend to get to them a little bit late if I get to them at all because I usually wait until I can rent the DVDs of a show one season at a time or hopefully they’ll make their way to the Netflix instant streaming so I don’t have to bother with a disc being mailed. The advantage to this is that I get to enjoy the show commercial free and several episodes at one time. In a way it’s kind of like taking a crash course in show. Recently one of the shows I’ve rented from Netflix is the “How I Met Your Mother” series.

As far as I know, “How I Met Your Mother” is still on the air producing episodes, and I’m sure if I cared enough, I could Google it and and find out for sure, but in all honesty it doesn’t really make much of a difference to me because I’m not going to be watching it when it broadcasts. I had added the first season of the show to my Netflix rental queue ages ago and it finally made it’s way to the top of the list and it was delivered to me on DVD courtesy of the US Postal Service. While I was a bit reluctant to start a television series, this one actually was a lot of fun so I added all the other available seasons to the top of my list. I made my way through all four of the seasons that are presently available on DVD in about three weeks time. So instead of having to suffer through four years of waiting, I got it all in a very short period of time.

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