I have this sterling silver pendant that I wear almost every day, but the sterling rope chain has had tarnish issues. No matter how often I clean it, it just doesn't last. I finally decided to buy a stainless steel chain, even if I had to get one of those medical alert chains. As it turned out, stainless steel jewelry has come a long way since I last shopped. They had a very nice 30 inch box chain that I bought.

The only problem I discovered was that the clasp was rather large for the width of the chain and it wouldn't fit through the jump ring on the pendant. I tried squeezing the clasp, I tried squeezing the ring to make it more oval. The clasp still wouldn't go through and now I had a gap where the ring joined.

I didn't want to risk using a real pair of pliers so I bought jewelry pliers. With an incredible lack of skill, I opened the jump ring farther. Okay, I thought, so instead of trying to thread the clasp through the ring, I'll just open it far enough for the chain to slide through and then seal it up again. This should be easy. Or so I thought.

Forcing the ring open with the pliers was hard, but I did manage that. The problem came when I tried to close the ring again. It had become an oval and I couldn't get the two edges of the ring to match up. I know have a sharp edged piece of metal holding my pendant to my chain.

After messing around with the pliers and my pendant for way longer than was reasonable, I decided to search online for instructions. I found a video and guess what? The instructions said not to use pliers to pull the ring apart. Using two pairs of pliers, I was supposed to twist it open and then twist it closed again because if you pull, you can never get the circle back. Um, yeah. Great.

Clearly, the answer was to find another jump ring since I'm risking scratching my skin or tearing clothes with the jagged edge. They sell them online in packs of 100. Gah! I don't make jewelry, but the price was cheap--less than $4--so I bought them.

And I bought another pair of jewelry pliers because the instructions said two pliers and the rings are only 6 mm so I can't use a regular pair of pliers from the garage. Now I'm thinking, wow, since I have all this equipment, maybe I should try making some jewelry. It might be fun! I'm not kidding. Creative outlets that are not writing usually help the writing flow better and why not jewelry making?

All because I wanted a chain that wouldn't tarnish.

You know, I could see the snowball start to roll downhill, but I couldn't manage to stop it. :-/

Yesterday I saw a quiz on my Facebook timeline. Can We Guess Who You Are In Only 20 Questions? It sounded intriguing, so I did the quiz. According to this, I am a 30-year-old male who's recently become a father.

Massive fail.

As I discussed this on Twitter, a couple of us found the quiz questions problematic. The ones that I found particularly bothersome was how long do you spend getting ready? And how many times do you cook per week?

I retook it and changed my answers to the three questions I found most sexist. I figured if I switched my choices and this time it guessed I was female, I'd have my smoking gun so to speak.

This didn't happen. In the quiz's favor, this go-round made me a teenage male. Still a massive fail, but at least these three questions alone weren't the determining factors.

The quiz invited people to post how accurate it was in the comments. I wanted to check them out so I could talk about it here, but I can't find any comments. It might be my computer. I have it personalized far past what most people do to their systems and I might have a setting that blocks me from seeing comments.

I also saw on Facebook from a different friend that it was a massive fail for her as well. So far I know one person who found it accurate and three of us going, huh?

There are so many things about Facebook that drive me nuts. It's especially annoying because they don't allow any easy way to fix them.***

For an example, someone I'm not friends with invited me to three events! Three! Someone I am NOT friends with. Why does FB allow this? Who knows? Can I put this woman under block from sending invites? Hell, no, I can't because I'm not friend with there. WTF?

I don't know if complete strangers can send event invites because this woman is an author and--of course--we have many mutual friends. Maybe this my friends friends thing applies here. It doesn't matter. I hate it.

Why can't Facebook let me turn off ALL event invitations? Authors continually use the event function to spam their friends.

I'm also tired of FB dictating what I see in my news feed. A post from two days ago that I read and have no interest in was at the top of my feed again today because others commented on it. I don't care. Seriously. I'd rather see what my friends are posting today. I'd also don't think Facebook knows what I want to see or from whom.

And don't get me started about those stupid games. Those I have blocked, but Facebook throws a bazillion ads for them in one of my feeds. Every other post has another ad stuffed after it. Facebook, I'm not going to play any games. Stop bugging me with those ads.

I'm also tired of seeing every single person my friends have friended or page they've liked. I'm friends with a lot of authors who friend a lot of people. Many, many authors are also notoriously bad with computers and they don't turn off this notification being sent out far and wide--probably because they have no clue that you can, of if they do, how to do it.

I know why Facebook likes this feature--it might help people find mutual friends--but damn is it annoying. BTW, I do have this turned off so none of my friends see when I friend someone else. If only all authors would do this.

And while I'm complaining, Facebook, why the lag time when I'm scrolling down the news feeds? It's not a brief hesitation, it's many seconds before it finally goes. The farther down the feed I want to go, the slower the script is to let me scroll. So annoying.

There are many, many other things about Facebook that annoy the hell out of me, but I'll stop here.

***Edited to add: Facebook is now letting me block invites from people right when I delete their invitation! This is how it used to be and I'm glad to see it back. This will make it so much easier, even if I still have to block one by one.