I didn’t think anything could top last year’s forgetful Christmas when my family left a crockpot of meatballs on the sidewalk. But someone in my mom’s apartment complex is in competition to beat us for the best humorous short-term memory lapse. See exhibit A:

Yes, that is a bag of trash. Sitting on the trunk of a car. A car that we followed out of my mom’s apartment complex, up and over a hill, through a traffic light, and then another half mile before they turned off into a random driveway, presumably because they finally realized they were driving around town with a bag of trash on top of their car.

There is only one trash compactor in my mom’s complex, so people who live at the far ends of the development sometimes put their trash on top of the trunk of their car and drive it over to the dumpster. Why not put it in the back seat? Because it’s trash. It smells nasty and could possibly stain the seats. I’m guessing this person forgot they’d [...]

• Continue reading "Taking the trash out…way out"

The street date for my upcoming book Chocolate & Vicodin is February 22, 2011—exactly two months away! That’s the date that bookstores are officially allowed to start selling the book. (They can get in trouble if they put it out earlier.) But it appears that the publicity portion of the book release has already started to kick into gear. This week Publisher’s Weekly posted a positive review of CHOCOLATE & VICODIN, calling it “lively” and “entertaining.” And LibraryJournal.com recently reviewed the memoir for the BookSmack newsletter, saying I’d be “fun to meet.” (Totally true by the way.)

I don’t want the blog to become all “Chocolate & Vicodin” all the time (though that sounds like a hell of a party!). So if you want to keep up with the latest news about the book or anything I’m up to, go to news.jennettefulda.com and/or subscribe to my RSS feed there. Those announcements are also blasted onto my Facebook fan page and I’ll try to remember to Twitter about them too. You can also sign up for my [...]

• Continue reading "Early reviews for CHOCOLATE & VICODIN, and how to keep up with book news"

Ok, I’m at the end of my rope on this, so I’m going to beg. This is me begging. Is anyone out there a tax adviser or tax attorney who can give me free advice? Last year I rolled over a 401K into a traditional IRA. This year my old employer sent me a letter saying that they can’t do math correctly and they rolled over an extra couple thousand dollars because of a vesting error, which they’d like back now. I have talked to several people, from my IRA custodian, Marketplace Money, a free legal-aid pension lawyer, and even the IRS. Yes, I voluntarily called the IRS. That is how crazy this shit has made me. I have Googled and researched and asked for help and wasted at least 8-10 hours of my life trying to figure this mess out, but I still have no fucking clue how to remove this money from the account with little or no penalties or excess fees. Can anyone help me on this? Please, Dear God. The end [...]

• Continue reading "Is anyone a tax adviser/tax attorney who would give me free advice?"

I’ve gotten a ridiculous amount of compliments on the photo I’ve started using for my icon on Facebook, Twitter, etc. I’m not an ugly person, but I’m not a serious contender for Miss America either, so getting this much attention over my photo is kinda weird. You’d think I’d bathed in buttermilk and hired a stylist or something, but all I really did was hire my friend Kyle Hepp, who’s a professional photographer, to take my picture. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to thank her and pimp her services.

Kyle is a girl (with a boy’s name, yes, she knows) who I met through our blogs. She is a US expatriate who lives in Chile for most of the year with her husband, Seba, who she met there during school. When I heard she’d be in Nashville last summer, I decided to trek down I-65 to meet her. I hired her to do a photo shoot too for several reasons.

I needed new promotional images of myself because everyone thought my hair was much shorter [...]

• Continue reading "The time I was shot (with a camera, not bullets)"

Photo by pin add / by NCND 2.0 CC

Last week I had a mad craving for cookies. After fighting it for hours, I decided to just give in instead of obsessing about it. So I drove to the grocery store at ten o’clock at night, grabbed a box of Lofthouse cookies (with pink icing and sprinkles) and headed to the self-checkout lane. This is when it occurred to me that although the self-checkout lane has saved me hours of time I would have spent in longer, slower-moving lines, it’s also been bad for my waistline.

Before the self-checkout, a cashier had to scan all your items for you. I would always imagine the cashier was judging my purchases, silently snarking at my choices. It’s more likely that the cashier didn’t care how many bottles of soda I was purchasing, but was more fixated on the wall clock and how many more minutes were left in their shift. Still, the possibility that they were judging me always made me slightly uncomfortable.

The self-checkout machine does not [...]

• Continue reading "The self-checkout and a shame-free shopping experience"