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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November 9, 2007
Sign that making retirement contributions might be old hat
Seeing that my account has lost $431 in the last two weeks, my first thought was “Well, that means now’s a good time for the contributions to go into my account. Better prices now. It’ll go up later!” It’s great that I’m not panicking, especially since I see the fluctuations every day but I sure hope I know when it is time to panic.
Sign that I’m losing my mind
I’d sorted through Coworker C’s set of work, and set it aside. Asked for Coworker A’s, and set that aside. Ten minutes later, I looked down and thought, why the heck are these out of order? Oh, they’re from Coworker A. Wait, when did these get here? How did they get here?
Me: “A, did you just sneak over here, put this on my desk and not tell me!? How did you…. how did I not notice??”
A: “No, I handed them to you. You’re crazy.”
Me: “Oh. Ok. Huh.”
November 8, 2007
I just wasted half a cup of rice, or half a POT of brown rice if you’re a pessimist like I am. Struck by a craving, I put a pot of brown rice on the stove to cook while I ate my boring white rice. Instead of using my sports watch, I foolishly used the microwave timer to keep track of the 35 minutes. I checked on the rice after 20 minutes, added a little water, and went back to my room. Brilliantly shut the door to keep the warmth in, and completely forgot that I couldn’t hear the timer through the door.
25 minutes after THAT, I raced out to the kitchen to find that there was a small bowl worth of brown rice cooked perfectly, nestled in the sad, smoking craters of burnt rice. Dangit!
Paducky likes crispety, crunchety burned white rice, but doesn’t like brown rice at all, so I couldn’t even salvage it. Did you know that burnt brown rice smells like burnt popcorn?
Now you know.
*yawn* That’s about the best reaction I can muster for United’s response to my recent grumble about their flight attendants’s behavior on my red-eye flight to NY. They had started the beverage service when I was in the bathroom, and refused to back up two lousy rows for me to get back to my seat. They made me wait until they served 17 rows, ie: 45 minutes, of passengers before I could sit down again.
No happy flier was I. After the outrage had somewhat subsided, I wrote a complaint letter admonishing United for their poorly trained flight attendants and was offered a piddly 2000 miles to soothe my irritation. Meh. Are you kidding? In any poor customer service situation I’ve ever encountered, I’ve never been offered less than 10,000 points or miles as restitution. I mean, 2,000 miles? I wouldn’t even be a quarter of the way to a discounted, short-haul award flight. Even those require 15,000 miles, much less a standard 25,000-50,000 mile redemption.
Yes, I do think that offering someone points or miles in the case of poor customer service should be a means of encouraging them to easily return to the business in question, not a pittance! It’s not like they have the ability to do-over, they should at least make a serious offer.
I’m going to ask for more. It probably won’t happen, but at least I’ll have asked.
November 7, 2007
They say, (and I don’t know who, but I’m going to quote, roughly, from David Weber), “If you have one problem, a solution may be difficult to find. If you have many problems, often, they will solve each other.“
My real life application isn’t tied up with a ribbon or anything, but it sort of worked out that way.
Little Boss and I had a chat outside today. It was more a ranty-rant at him about the workload and difficulties in accomplishing certain tasks uninterrupted. I hadn’t even mentioned the problems with trying to schedule my doctor’s appointments.
He offered to allow the office to take two work-away-from-office days so that they could fulfill their parts of my project! The benefits:
1. Getting a good amount of work done in one concentrated swoop. That puts the pressure back on me to pull together their parts of the project the following day, but the work would be done!
2. I can spend my day catching up on the whole chunk of project that’s been piling up on my desk without interruptions.
3. Finally, I could schedule my doctor’s appt on one of those two days and not “miss” any work because I’m saving 3 hours of commute time a day just by working from home!
Now, how is THAT for good news?
And in the mail this evening? A letter to MaDucky scheduling her follow-up MRI scan. *big sigh*
Item C [work] has an action plan, check. Item D [Ma’s medical] has a next step scheduled, check. Item F [my medical] is on the calendar. And I just spoke with my brother who promises to have the car back here tomorrow afternoon, so I will have transportation on Thursday to accomplish the above tasks, check, check. Hallelujah, praise Heaven. Well, not just yet, but I will if he shows up. Item G [wedding stuff]… I will print out at work, having received permission from Little Boss to do so.
Bills were paid last night, I’m scheduled to get the ‘brows groomed tomorrow and booked my ticket, using my two Southwest credits from previously cancelled trips, to see BoyDucky for some good ole couple time at the end of this month. It’s a shame I won’t be able to fly up a third time this year to claim that freebie award ticket from their Buy Three (in CA), Get 1 Free! promotion, though. That would have been really nice.
November 6, 2007
A. BoyDucky’s father is still in the hospital, and we’re spending all our phone time discussing his father’s condition and the tens of conversations he’s having with family members, doctors and other medical professionals in the pursuit of consistent, high-quality medical care. It’s been two months after a “routine” procedure, and his dad is bedridden, hooked up to machines unable to eat, drink or get up, and delirious due to an infection that the doctors can’t get on top of. He is NOT getting better.
B. I’m supposed to be editing his letter to hospital administration, taking out the highly emotional language and replacing it with professional Take-Us-Seriously verbiage. Halfway through, I just don’t have time.
C. 8 hours is not enough time in the day to make progress on one of my work projects, much less the ten I’m coordinating or managing. So I’m tearing my hair out, rushing from one project to project, desperately trying to keep up, and maybe maybe maybe get ahead.
D. I still haven’t followed up with MaDucky’s medical appointments.
E. Financially hurting. How to get through the next several months on what I’m making? I definitely don’t have enough in the Expenses fund to cover the next three months of expenses without raiding any of the other funds. I’ve been trying to figure out how, yet again, to pare down those expenses. This means I have to confront the dang truck and insurance issue. One solution: Cut my brother out of the insurance: he’s not paying and I don’t have the money to cover his @$$. I am so frustrated with always having to deal with this, him, stuff.
F. My neck has been hurting for months and the massage therapy works for about ten minutes after the the therapist is through with me. Not a good return on investment, and driving is NOT safe when I can’t turn my head. I’m finally getting a referral to Physical Medicine for medical therapy. Except they’re only open 8:30 am-12pm, and 1pm-4:30pm Monday through Friday. If that’s not the most useless schedule for employed folks, I don’t know what is! Fine, so I could take a half day off, but that’s just going to make Problem C even worse! AND, even if I do take a half day, both Ma and PaDucky work so I have to try to work out a car arrangement so I can get to the doctor, back and to work.
G. Bridal shower invitations are still not done. STILL. It’s on Thanksgiving, and I still haven’t completed the invitations: I need to design the insert cards and address the envelopes, and print on the actual invitations. Recipe cards! I need someone to buy a box with blank recipe cards to go into the invitations!
*silent screaming*
About the only good thing I can see from that list above is that my health has moved up a grand total of one slot from the bottom of the list.
And I blog to get away from it all, except I really don’t have time to blog, I just need to blow off steam and NOT be kneedeep in all of that, all the time.
I know it could be a lot worse. It really could. But … *sigh* Can’t it be better, either?
Every time I use an ATM, I always have this almost irrational need to position myself in such a way that people behind me can’t see the screen. With a screen that shows all of the accounts to pick from, with the account numbers and account balances for each, and because all the savings accounts have between three and four digit balances, it’s always seemed wise to try and keep the screen covered up. Of course I look like a twitchy spaz when there’s more than one person behind me, and even worse when the people waiting are spread out to the right and left of me. I’m sure I make them nervous with the neurotic glances over my shoulder and such.
BoyDucky went with me to the ATM yesterday and noticed something, “You know, I’m standing right next to you and can’t see anything.” Intrigued, I looked at the screen from his angle: nothing. I looked at it from the opposite angle: still nothing! Wow, I’ve been a total dork at the ATM this whole time for nothing!
Then, he experimentally leaned over: “I can’t see anything from this angle … this angle … not unless I’m looking straight on … ” at which point he caught sight of my Expenses account balance: “and just from that one second, I can see you have FIVE TIMES more money in your checking account than I do!” *chagrin*
LOL, silly BoyDucky, that’s not my checking account, that’s my Expenses account for the year. I have $13 in checking; I’d never keep that much money in my checking account, it earns so little interest!
He takes this as proof that I’m a better money manager than he. If I am, it’s because I know better than to keep a lot of money in a low-interest bearing account, not because I have much 🙂
November 5, 2007
Highlight: Being stopped on the way to the staging portable by the security guard. *pointing to the left* “The line to take the SATs starts over there.” I couldn’t even stop laughing long enough to answer him, I could only shake my head.
Student highlight: “Are you the teacher for this classroom? Cause it says ‘Mrs. C’ on the door. [So you’re trying to say I LOOK like a Mrs. C? I know that’s not true.] Are you a teacher at this school? No? Are you a college student? No? A high school student? No?” At this point, she paused very seriously as though considering how much lower she should go.
It wasn’t fun, did you know that the SAT now has TEN sections?, but it wasn’t as nerve-wracking as I feared. I managed to keep them under relative control, and had a script to read from so I didn’t freak out when I had to talk to them. I mostly talked at them. But I made it through ok, and this might actually be a worthwhile way of getting over my speaking jitters.
It did help that I only had one cheater-wannabe. My friend had one kid who was trying to use his cell phone during the test, and another who actually brought the SAT practice book for use during the test.
All in all, if we’re being paid approx. $98, we made about $10/hour after taxes since we left at 6:30 am and didn’t get out until 1 pm.