Amber and Our Review Blog in The Past

I’ve been really behind on everything lately, but I do have a good excuse. Last Wednesday I woke up with a really bad headache, an earache, throat ache and even my jaw ached. I was cranky as hell, hell, I’ve been cranky for the three or so days before then too, but who’s counting? So, I thought that I had an ear infection. I mean, ear, throat, head, jaw, has to be an ear infection, right?

I went to the doctor after calling into work and what did she say? Ear’s perfectly fine. No, I don’t have an ear infection, I have TMJ. The joint that connects my jaw to my skull is inflamed on my left side because of stress and/or god knows what else. I do know I’ve been clenching my jaw a lot and I’ve been more stressed than normal but I didn’t think it was -this- bad. I have some muscle relaxers and some pain killers/anti inflammatory meds. I still have to force myself to relax my jaw… I don’t know why it’s so damned bad recently, but gah.

What else has been happening? Quite a bit, actually!

After Steve and I had our heart to heart in Seattle, I agreed to meet Amber, his girlfriend. She and I have been chatting a lot and I find that not only do we have a lot in common, but that I honestly really like her. She’s a couple of years younger than me, but she’s funny as all hell. Once I gave her a name and a face, and after watching Steve’s face light up when he talks about her, I finally decided to not hate her… lol It wasn’t hate, it was jealousy. She sometimes says that she’s worried that I’m faking it. I told her that it was part of my master plan because I Know that she’s actually just a younger me from a parallel dimension where I met Steve first and never fell in love with Ben. She just shook her head. I think she shakes her head at me a lot ^__^

I brought her up for two reasons. One, being the fact that I showed her this journal. We were chatting about stuff and I brought up the word “journal” when I meant “blog” and that got us talking about online journals and how good it is to have a place to vent and talk and the like. She asked if I had one, I said I did, and sent her the link to here. I forgot I wrote so meanly about her (Steve’s skirt) before meeting up with Steve… luckily she laughed and told me that she’s happy she read that, because it shows that I’ve been honest with her from the get go. I told her I didn’t like the idea of her when I first found out. And now that I think about it… Some of my best friends were people I hated originally, and pretty much for the same reason – they took away another friend of mine. Hell, I hated the mere thought of Ben’s existence for a long time, because he stole Harley’s attention away from me. Then when I got to know them, instead of just seething about the idea of them, I realized that my friends have some awesome taste in dates. Heck, I don’t talk to Harley anymore, and Ben’s been one of the lights of my life for almost two decades. And I talk more to Amber on a daily basis than I do Steve. Oh how I’m a finicky person.

The second reason why I brought Amber up pointedly, is because we came up with an amazing idea, she and I. I’ve always been fascinated with getting things in the mail… love getting presents and stuff. A while ago I found Graze, which is a subscription box where you pay 6 dollars a month and get 4 individual sized, healthy snacks. I loved it. I loved the novelty of getting a box of snacks in the mail every month… the biggest problems I had with it is that I found that I wasn’t eating a lot of the snacks so it was a waste for me, and the fact that as soon as my Mom realized that the brown box that came in the mail for me every month is food… she would raid it before I’d get to it, taking all the really yummy treats for herself. But all in all, I did enjoy it. When we were hitting a really bad crunch time with money, I canceled my subscription. :(

The other day, I was hungry and decided to look online to see if I could find any other fun subscription based snack boxes… that’s when I realized that not only is there hundreds of different boxes, but that a lot of them overlapped in what they provided. For example, not only is there Graze for single serving snacks, but there’s also Nibblr, which does the same thing, pretty much. I’ve seen a couple blogs that had reviews of different boxes, but I haven’t really seen any that had reviews and comparisons. And that’s what I want to do. My blog, Third Box’s the Charm (www.thirdboxsthecharm.com – nothing’s on it yet, I’m still working on getting everything up and running ^__^) focuses (is going to focus?) on reviewing Subscription (and one time) based mystery boxes. What I’m looking at doing, as of now, is to do a 3 month subscription to the boxes… where I go through every month and write out a blog post. I figure the post will have various information like the website (of course), when they ship out, if they’re only US or international, when you have to order by, if you’re able to order back-boxes, if you’re able to customize the boxes, how long they take to get to the West coast, how much they cost. I’m also going to try to figure out about how much the retail on everything is, and how they do on the whole value vs cost. Along with that, I’m going to discuss value not only with the whole money thing, but with how close it is to the theme (if there is one), how close it matches what I told them about my preferences, if it’s something I’d buy for myself, or if it’s something that I actively like. There will be pictures, lots and lots of pictures, of course. After the three months of these reviews, I’m going to do a recap where I take the important information from all three months and come up with an overall perspective on the box, whether I think it’s worth it in the long run, if it’d be a good gift idea, etc. etc.

Two other things I’m going to do on the site that’ll make TBTC stand out from other reviewing blogs I’ve found are 1) I won’t be the only one doing reviews on the boxes. Not only are we going to find friends and family who are the closest matches to the perspective audience (I don’t have dogs, so the Barkbox would be worthless for me, while Amber has a mid-sized dog that would love to get presents), but multiple people might take the same boxes at different times, to get us not only another person’s perspective on the box, but to make sure that the value holds true. I.E., I might get the Graze box for January through March, with the three months of reviews, and Amber might grab it October through December to do her reviews. And 2) We’re going to compare and contract different boxes with the same general ideas… I.E. Lootcrate and Nerd Block. After we do reviews on both of those, we might do a Comparison by getting one of each of them at the same time and do a double-opening where we discuss what we got in each one and what we liked and disliked about them and the like.

I’m really excited about this undertaking. I’ve already ordered the boxes for my first few months… I got a something from www.somethingstore.com which is a one-time-buy service (as opposed to a subscription) where, for 10.00 you get a “something.” It could be anything, and it’s totally random. I also got a Booty Bin (www.bootybin.com) ordered, It was 35.00 or so with shipping and it’s also a one-time-buy service, but it focuses on geeky items. I’ll have the website up and written on before I get those boxes, I know it.

Btw, we’re looking for a couple more people to help with the reviews. Neither Amber, LeAnna, or I have any clue about fashion, makeup, hair care, or jewelry. There’s also snack boxes that offer Gluten Free or Vegan assortments, but since I’m not on either diet or partial to either type of food, I don’t know if what they’re offering is better or worse than what you can normally get on those diets, snack wise.

So yeah, that’s what’s on my mind thus far!

I’ll talk about more later ^__^

Last updated December 24, 2016