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I was able to make a quick side trip to NYC Comic Con this week and walk the floor of the 2025 convention.

Was a lot of fun seeing so many interesting things! It seems it's become about so much more than comics. I was a little suprised bt the amount of people in costumes, some of them great. One of my favorites was a guy dressed as Master Roshi from Dragon Ball - that would be an easy one for me to pull off as well, and he looked great.

And, we are in the Halloween Season already, goes so fast. Nicole did a fabulous job of decorating the house and the yard as usual, and I am responsible for our lighting. We have a series of landscaping lights on the front yard that I change to an orange glow, and then the pole on the front yard can also change color - the 3 bulbs.

All in all it's looking pretty good!

I don't do very many vendor/website reviews, I prefer to do product reviews which are more fun, but in this case I felt a vendor review and warning is in order.

Turns out I ordered a few sets of blinds for my house from SelectBlinds.com, and they failed to deliver them. Kind of unsual in this day and age, the site is supposed to be well-liked and trustworthy. Alas, a month went by and nothing. They charged me for the blinds immediately but could not deliver them. When I contact them, they revealed they were having trouble with customs. They do not reveal this when you purchase from them, but their blinds are made in Vietnam, and they cannot get them through custom easily anymore. It's going on 6 weeks, and I have not received mine. They apologized but failed in 3 ways:

- They did not get the product to me in 30 days - I view this as a "worst case scenario". nothing and nobody ever takes that long, but these guys are going on 6 weeks and nada. I believe it might even be an FTC requirement, I don't think they can charge my card and not deliver the goods for this long. I get it that they are having supply chain issues, but that is not my problem.
- They failed to communicate proactively as soon as they realized there was an issue. Big problem here. Transparency is key to trust. They completely lost my trust.
- They failed to offer me a refund. I have initiated a challenge to the charge.Their website still offers not delivery date and the clock keeps ticking.

For all these reasons I am issuing a consumer warning: DO NOT buy from selectblinds.com, they are unable to keep their promises and they do not take care of customers.

Communication, transparency and a refund would have been in order here. As of right now, I am still out of my money and they do not have a delivery date for the product for me. Unacceptable.

It is time to aerate and seed our lawn. Every year around mid September we go through this process to keep the lawn healthy and green and prepare it for next season.

I think the timeclock for the sprinklers also changes to twice a day and shorter interval each time.

I have been shaving my head for probably 30 years, so I've learned a thing or two. I have tried many machines of all sorts, in the end I prefer regular old-school shaving blades, usually from Gillette.

A friend recently recommended the Freebird shaving machine, which I had seen pop up on social media all over the place. I ended up ordering. The shipping was a bit slow, took a surprising amount of time.

Two weeks later, I eventually got the machine which comes nicely stocked with a lot of accessories and can do trimming of the nose, ears, etc. All that is pretty nice, but I consider it secondary.

I will cut to the case, as to the device's performance for cutting hair: I was disappointed. Two main shortcomings:

1) I tried it first on my facial hair. I had 4-5 day long beard, and the Freebird struggled mightly. It started pulling and tugging at my hair, was unpleasant and I had to stop. Sadly, this is a common issue as the spinning blades cannot physically handle the stubble. It's not exclusive to the Freebird, but I was somehow imagining that with all the hype and after decades of research, it would do better that my old machines from 30 years ago. It did not. It was painful.

As a corollary, this picture they have on the homepage of the website where they show a guy shaving his full head of hair with the Freebird, hahahaha, that is absolutely ridiculous. It would take hours and many stops to clean up the machine and a lot of pain from tugging. It does NOT do that. And if he tried on his beard, which I feel the image suggests, that would be devastating and SO painful.




2) Turns out when you shave, all the hair goes inside the heads. And they fill out very quickly, of course, because they are tiny. And so, for my typical shaving every 3-4 days, I had to stop mid way and empty the shaving heads which is a messy, tedious and time-consuming process.

So, net, net, by the time I got done, I took longer than using foam and a regular shaving razor.

Also, the finish was not anywhere nearly as close as a real razor, that is another downside.

Now, I don't hate the Freebird, it's a fine machine. The battery lasts a long time, and if you use it frequently, say every other day, and have the discipline of constantly cleaning it, it works OK, it's an acceptable solution.

But, for me, it fell short of expectations. I would give it 3 out of 5 stars, being generous.






PS: After I wrote this review, I discovered that Freebird started charging my credit card without my permission, and sending me refill blades. Absolutely not needed because I've only used the machine maybe 4-5 times, I would expect the 5-blade head to last longer than that in any case. I tried to understand why they were doing this. I went into the website, and despite not having account and not having signed up for anything, sure enough, they had me listed as a "subscription". I immediately cancelled it. I looked for information and found a thread on reddit with people complaining about the same. Apparently, and deceptively, it's hidden in the terms and conditions when you make the initial purchase. Very sneaky, and borderline scam/fraud. No startup with deceptive practices like this will succeed long term. I cancelled immediately and will never buy from the again, and I will warm all my friends to stay away.