About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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April 29, 2008
In a singularly daft move, I sent off my signature authorization form off to Treasury Direct without my SSN. In trying not to advertise my SSN while obtaining the authorization, I forgot to write it in after I returned to my desk, and just blithely sent it off. A nice lady at TD called me two days later to let me know, and I didn’t even question it. I just called back and gave her my SSN.
Now, it’s unlikely that someone would know that I was signing up for an account, know my cell phone number, and time the call so it’d sound entirely plausible that I’d forgotten such a detail, all to steal my SSN, but there’s a very paranoid part of me that thinks, You fool!!
I didn’t even check the TD website for a general contact number to verify that there was indeed a Nice Lady working there who was processing my paperwork.
The nice lady followed up with an email to my private account letting me know that the hold was removed and to expect an Access card soon, though, so I’m probably ok. Really, stupidity does come in threes.
*Note: Rats. I should expect the Access card in ten business days. š I wonder if I can get to a bank during business hours today or tomorrow ….*
April 28, 2008
Every so often, I forget that I’m writing a PF blog, and completely leave out the financial aspects of whatever I’m posting about. Sometimes, it just doesn’t occur to me, and it seems like a fine thing not to be obsessed about the money instead of the experience.
But, this is a PF blog, and I’d be remiss in skipping over the costs of the weekend, few though they were.
Gas: $58, round trip. I still had a quarter tank of gas left, so it wasn’t quite the whole $58 for the trip. Thank goodness my car gets great gas mileage! BF even insisted on giving me some gas money, but we’re to consider it a deposit on the next trip up š They’re so weird.
Meals: $1. Saturday’s dinner and Sunday’s lunch were BF’s husband’s treats, and I threw in a supplemental tip but that’s all I was allowed. Breakfast was muffins and cake at home.
Beach: $0. Parking cost a couple of quarters since we got a late start on Saturday. There weren’t any beach fees, and the tidepool beach was free on Sunday as well.
Movie: $0. We watched a DVD they already had, and have a few more movies lined up for my next few visits.
Snacks: $0. We brought our own water and granola bars, but were having enough fun, and it was cold enough, that we didn’t even need them.
Souvenirs: $0. Didn’t need to buy a darn thing. I did pass several really nice outlets on the drive … but that’ll be for some other trip, some other time. It’s such a long drive that all I wanted to do was get to their house to hang out, and then get home the next day. Stopping to go shopping doesn’t sound appealing in the least.
All told, the weekend was plenty cheap and totally worth the gas money.
So Best Friend suggested last night, as I nattered on about savings bonds and other financial minutiae. Heh. Yeah ….. uh … about that. No, I didn’t tell her, but I almost started giggling which would have been a bit suspicious. I’m preserving my anonymity as long as I can. I don’t want to have a debate about ending my blog because I have to be even more careful about censoring myself.
Ironically enough, a friend accused me of not being able to keep a secret last week. I’m not the source of the leak, but I almost wanted to defend myself by pointing out that I’d kept my pf blog, to which I post nearly everyday, a secret for nearly two years, and if that’s not keeping a secret, I don’t know what is.
Finally! I’ve finally visited Best Friend and her husband!
I was feeling rather low and lonely on Saturday so BF urged me to come visit them. They are two hundred miles away, so I felt my usual reluctance to splurge that much on gas with prices bounding ever closer to $4.00/gal, but she pitched me a sell I couldn’t resist.
It’s hot? We’ll go to the beach.
You have laundry? Bring it with you.
You’re bored? We’ll take you to the Strawberry festival, watch movies, and hang out.
I also still had their wedding gifts and anniversary cake that I’d been keeping in our freezer for them. And magazines for her to read (recycling my Lucky mags). And … I hadn’t seen them in three months. Hadn’t seen their puppy since I puppy-sat.
I threw a bag of overnight things together, gathered my laundry (hey, it’s got to get done somehow!), gathered their gifts and cake, and went to take my hit at the gas pump. $31 later, I was on my merry, spontaneous way up to the Central Coast! The funniest part of the drive was not really knowing anything about where I was headed: I’d just asked her to email directions so I could check them on my iPhone, but I’m crap at geography so I never did really know where her new home was in relation to everything else.
I left at 1pm and got there after 4, so we played with the dog and cleared up some mess in their backyard before heading out to dinner. They had clam chowder in bread bowls and I had a calamari steak sandwich with a salad. I wish I liked clams, their chowder smelled great!
We walked the pier, and then on the beach until sunset, and her husband took about a dozen pictures of us, our dirty bare feet, and the ladybugs that were swarming the tideline and festooning our hands and feet.
We had a truly lazy Sunday: we watched her husband play video games, I played with the dog, BF read her magazine and drank her coffee. Eventually we had breakfast and headed out tidepooling. I made the mistake of dressing for the real beach in my bathing suit, tshirt and shorts, and darn near froze to death out on the rocks! I chased the dog up and down the dirt track for a while to warm up, and huddled in my beach towel for a while until the sun warmed up. We found half a dozen starfish, and the dog pissed off an entire colony of hermit crabs when she went splashing through their pool. She didn’t land on them, just on the rocks they sheltered under, but they all started scurrying around, some waving their claws as though they were scolding her. It was cute.
We had delicious Cajun Bacon Cheeseburgers for lunch, though I couldn’t tell you what was Cajun about it, and spent part of the afternoon cleaning up our mess, the dog’s yakked up lunch because she’d swallowed so much salt water, and going through junior high and high school notebooks. We had good giggles over how silly we were as kids, and ruminated about how things have changed over the past fifteen years. We’ve been together a loooong time …. it’s so weird to realize that we’re old enough that she’s married. With a house. That she lives in with her husband. I know it seems an elementary concept to most people: you get older, meet someone you care about, get married and move out. Or some variation on that theme. But consider the oft-dramatized notion of the best friend as collateral damage of weddings; there’s at least a little grain of truth in that trope. It’s not quite that traumatic, but I have been within walking distance of her/parents’ home for as long as I’ve been social enough to have friends (5th grade). We walked home from school together, went riding, went on field trips, went through all kinds of childhood and pubescent drama, we did everything together for years. We even went to college together. And now she’s two freaking hundred miles away and I have to drive at least 3 hours just to see her in person. I really miss being able to just drop in at her house up the street and hanging out until she got home from work, or knowing that I could call her in a crisis and that she’d be there in less than ten minutes. Now … now we’re adults. It’s definitely taking some getting used to. She’s got a great husband, bless his heart, and there’s no one I’d rather have “lost” her to.
Whoops, this started out as an ode to the weekend, and has transformed into a rather maudlin ode to the passage of time and friendship. Oh well, it’s part of what made the weekend good; remembering our journey up to this point as we both enter new stages in our lives. We talked a lot, and it’s been a while since we’ve been able to do that.
April 25, 2008
I certainly didn’t see that coming. Sitting in my old spot by the window, but not with my back to it, exposed me to the unexpectedly worst aspect of this space: acute senioritis.
O Summer!
The catchall drawer. Does anyone remember it? The one drawer in the house that seems to suck everything into its depths, and some things never emerge again? All the drawers in my desk are starting to go that way, but the middle drawer is the worst.
Digging out the contents revealed: about nine hundred fifty pens; twenty highlighters; twenty pencils, wooden or mechanical; fifteen Sharpies of various shapes, sizes and colors; solid and liquid white-out; staples; tiny little folding papers to make those puff-up stars; two jade bracelets; a Masterlock the combination of which has been lost for all time; a tiny magnifying glass in a leather case; my Discover-to-go card that expired in June 2006; a half dozen sheets of really cute but juvenile stickers; 7 AAA batteries, two of which were dead, two which are questionable; two old pagers; old house keys to my best friend’s house, but for the door that her brother broke about 7 years ago; and a one legged compass. That’s just for an example!
Whew! I can’t believe that all of that could fit into one drawer, two inches deep! Granted, it’s about two feet across, but my goodness! That’s way too much stuff. I checked every pen, pencil and highlighter and threw away about a hundred, divvied the pens up into “good-keep” and “good-give away” piles, and now have a sack of perfectly good pens that I don’t want. I’ll take them to work, there’s always a need for pens there.
I can’t bring myself to throw away that lock. I know I’ll never remember or figure out the combination, but it’s such a good solid lock, I just can’t do it.
Likewise with the pagers. I know no one uses pagers anymore except the doctors I work with, but I’m pretty sure not a one of them will want my teeny tiny light blue pager. It’s really cute, it fits in the palm of my hand! It’s only 1.5″ x 2″, and still has the original silver chain/clip, and matching light blue belt clip. The only reason I stopped using it was because I finally got a cell phone back in 2001. Huh, I wonder if that’s why I had that box of AAA batteries? It does use a AAA battery …..
April 24, 2008
My desk is about 15 years old, and it’s kind of falling apart. It’s a pretty decent size, something like 5′ across, and 3′ deep, with an equally large hutch sitting on top. I use every inch of space on my desk and hutch, but often get annoyed by the clutter. I spent over an hour clearing off just the top of the hutch. Things like old business cards, phone cards, eons-old lip balms, old medications from when I was trying different drug regimens for my various ailments, photos, Lone Wolf and Cub, envelopes, notebooks, pens, pencils and mailing supplies had all accumulated into an army perched atop my desk.
Bit by bit, things were tossed out, or cleaned up and replaced. I’d call it a 75% success. I might be able to get rid of a few more things, but only if I get even more organized. It could happen!
