When I got to work, about 20% of the lights were on. Apparently, we’re on the same electrical grid that the stoplight two blocks away is, as that was also out. On the plus side, this was the first time in YEARS I’ve even seen an officer directing traffic. I guess the fact it’s a five-way intersection that’s full of fail to begin with necessitated it. I did think it was funny that the police officer stayed in his car, while the traffic cop had to be the one in the middle of the street. Hierarchies everywhere.
So while my computer was on, nothing else was – servers, email, internet, or really the heat, as far as I can tell. My fingers and toes and nose are all frozen solid. I used the time to go through some mail & toss some stuff.
Then, the power came back on! Glorious! And within seconds, a jackhammer started up, right outside my wall. I don’t think this day is really going my way. But all I can do is laugh…I’m waiting for the sprinklers to come on next, and a swarm of locusts to attack on my way to the garage…..
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When I was a very young child – 3 or so – I would stand in front of my father’s speakers (big, boxy speakers) in the living room of our home in Knoxville Iowa. He would crank up the volume to the Edwin Hawkins Singers, specifically on the song, “Oh Happy Day” and I would get up close to the speaker while my sternum vibrated from the bass, and dance.
While I was getting ready this morning, I broke into song, that song, and while I lacked a choir behind me, I felt the song swell in my heart as I experienced a wonderful rich moment of connection to my father, on this day he would have loved to live to see. My tears have many sentiments today, but the overwhelming one is joy.
And I couldn’t help but obamacize my photo. :) It’s been a long 8 years and I deserve one day of dancing while my sternum vibrates.
Well, I can’t take any credit for the negotiation process, it all goes to my sales rep, who may be petite, but can also be quite fierce. She was rather astonished that the person who first responded to me only cut our bill back by $25 (taking the rate hike to 40%, vs. 60%). So she found the right person, and from the results, I can see she went in swinging.
I got off the phone this morning and this is where they stand, my new long-term friends at Time Warner Cable: I get my old, nice, shiny, cheap rate back. For a whole ‘nother year. And then I have a $5 increase. (Plus a 30-day window in which to change my mind & go with someone else.) This happens for the next FIVE YEARS. Always one to boil it down, I said, “So, in five years, my rate has increased only $25?” “Yes.”) This I can live with.
Oh, and you bet your ass I asked to get credited for December’s overages. I was all ready to pull the plug on them (and to see what their best offer to keep me would be), which is necessary if you’re going to threaten them. That they fixed it didn’t completely surprise me? But that they fixed it for five years did, so, with that, I grudgingly give them some props. (And await my credit, kthxbai.)
Yes. I am covering a wide swath of ground these days. And through it all, I am bizzy bizzy bizzy! I always love being busy, but sometimes it pushes the edges and boundaries of normalcy, and I find that’s when things like …oh… “politeness”, or … “consistency” start to fall by the wayside. Work’s been really busy & I have had some great conversations with my bosses about goals for the year & I already hit a couple balls outta the park, so I feel like th year’s off to a very good start. I’m behind on sending out presents and holiday greetings but hell. Isn’t it better to get a thoughtful note from me when I get around to it, than nothing at all? Or just my signature in a timely manner? That’s my approach & I’m stickin’ to it, dammit.
I joke about the rage-a-holic part, somewhat – I’m still PISSED at Time Warner Cable, because even using my connections, I got a VERY disappointing solution yesterday. Instead of our bill going up 60%? She could knock off a little and make that increase just 40%. FORTY percent. People, this is not gas, or milk, or any other commodity that is finite in its production. Yes, the internet has bandwidth, I understand. But TWC is still going to have to buy MTV and HBO whether or not I’m in their customer base, and there is absolutely NO reason I should stick around for a rate hike so substantial when there are other options. Options that involve hassle on my part, but what’s the best salve for hassle? Nostril-flaring joy that the fuckers over :there: aren’t getting your money any more. I’m not quite at that point yet, because I emailed my contact again with less-florid language describing the above, and it’s now gone on to a different department, presumably one higher on the food chain. I shall keep you updated, because if I’ve picked up on one thing in this life, is that folks out there have some shared rage against The Man, who sometimes comes in the form of The Cable Company.
I spent a good chunk of my weekend making more DPN Holders for The Loopy Ewe, and my local yarn stores, so I’m chipping away at my cost to go to the LE Spring Fling at the end of April! Woohoo for cottage industry!
I’m off to a blogger meet-up tonight – should be fun & interesting, since I didn’t get a chance to meet everyone at the last one. I’ll be the one with my knitting, but I promise, I am oh-so-far from dowdy, shy & retiring.
OK, I received a message both at home & at work from a Time Warner Cable CSR, complete WITH a direct, local phone number, to return the call & discuss my aggregious billing situation. Only downside is that said CSR agent stopped working at 2 today, and I didn’t get the message in time to resolve things today. So I am leaving it until Monday, and have set down my ashcan of white hot coals. (I will not throw out the lighter fluid yet, though.)
Oh, man. I started my day with Kiefer Sutherland on NPR, and looky here, here he is on Letterman. Pitter-pat. Oh, but a very strange suit, Kief. Huh. You make me want to adjust the vert alignment on my screen. (Gah, remember doing that?) Anyway, Jack Bauer’s about to embark on yet another Very Bad Day, and gotta love Fox, they’re really kicking this season off – two hours on Sunday, two hours on Monday, before settling into the regular Monday 8p (CST) timeslot. It’s fascinating how the show has actually influenced … our world. They touched on that in the interview this morning, that West Point was consulting with the show, out of concern for how their soldiers were behaving due to what they’d seen on “24”….which makes you think perhaps the ol’ idiot box has gotten too influential? Though a couple years ago, I read something about how the show paved the way in Americans’ minds to accept the notion of a black president. Whatever the parallels to other happenings in our world, I do know that the show does require a LOT of reality jumps, but Kiefer is a great central figure, and he’s a great, gritty hero who doesn’t back down from a fight. I firmly believe he could kick Chuck Norris’ ass at this point.
And, if things don’t go well on Monday with TWC? I may be drawing upon my own inner Jack Bauer.
bip BIIIP bip.
If I didn’t use auto-pay for the majority of our bills, I’d be in a constant state of scramble, and probably missing payments, garnering late fees and angry phone calls. As it is, the things that still get paid ‘manually’ require a little reminder in my calendar, so my palm pilot will dee-doo dee-doo at me until I pay attention.
So, imagine my surprise when, I go into my Time Warner Cable account to get the account number, so I get our holiday movie credited back (via a coupon), and I see our last payment was, oh, like, $75 more than we normally pay. A rate hike of 60%. ooooooooh my god, talk about a short fuse. See, I spent over a week, wrangling and hassling with Time Warner Cable last year, because we were being plagued with programs being deleted on the DVR, annnnd they raised our rates. I was fractions of inches away from going to DirecTV. So, they gave me a nice rate. Great. I think a rate hike, when you’re pretty much the only game in town, in an economic downturn, is pretty shitty, but I understand cost of living needs, etc., so I would have even been willing to accept a 5% increase. NOT 60%. NOT when I can put together my bundle of services as if I were a new customer and have a rate plan LOWER than what I pay now. No, no, and NO.
And of course, they no longer have CSR agents available later in the evening, so I have to re-stoke the coals in the morning until I’ve hit white-hot again. But I’m going to utilize my resources, and see if I can skip the first tier of CSRs and get myself some elevated service. And if that doesn’t work out? Well, I guess we’ll be discovering the exciting world of satellite!
I hate having to go to bed on an empty, unresolved anger. Splutter. Stay tuned for the next chapter! It’ll be broadcast in digital!
Wow, two days back into the work routine and it’s Hello Stress! Good thing I didn’t resolve to give that up….
Anyway, last night, I was downstairs & had opened the pantry door where we have stored an interesting mix of sundry appliances, canned goods, annnnd the paint that came with the house. The items are grouped by shelves, at least. Anyway, an empty mason jar fell, and instead of hitting the carpet, it hit the inside edge of the wood cabinet, and shattered. Lovely.
You know how sometimes your brain is just set to “Ricochet”? Well, mine was, as I was picking up shards of glass and thinking about how I really should bring the vacuum down and yet I knew I wasn’t going to, and the rest of the process went something like this:
So, this obviously isn’t tempered glass. Or whatever sort of glass they make that isn’t supposed to shatter into really sharp pieces.
I wonder who invented tempered glass. I wonder who invented GLASS?
Probably some pyromaniac motherfucker, since don’t you have to melt things to make glass in the first place?
So, hell. Is that all of it? I think so. Huh. Well, let’s see. Would I walk on this strip of carpet barefoot?
Yes.
That’s not a good answer, Jennifer. You grew up walking on glass shards.
Hell. I did.
Well, I’ve gotten nearly all of it, and the only way anyone’s going to step on it is if they shimmy alongside the cupboard here, clinging to it like those Indiana Jones Lego characters do on that Wii game. Which would actually be pretty funny.
/end brain ricochet
After that, I went off and did some laundry, and forgot completely to tell the Wo about the breakage. (In fact, he’s learning about it through the blog. Now he’ll go and shimmy alongside the cupboard, just to prove I missed a piece.) And yes, I did grow up picking glass out of the bottoms of my feet – my father’s glass studio was just off the kitchen/dining room, and I would often walk in there barefoot, and pieces of glass often made their way out into the house. I still recall being about ten, dancing wildly to a Beatles album and landing hard on a large piece of glass, way out in the living room. Oof. That’s the only memorable gouging I recall, in fact, but the sudden sharpness cut me to the quick. And I did learn how to walk into a room with broken glass on the floor. You step carefully, you disperse your weight consciously, and if a piece of glass pressed against your skin, you instantly recoiled, to minimize the depth it would penetrate.
Sure, I could’ve put on shoes. But I didn’t. Some things I just liked to experience the hard way, I guess. It was kind of a personal challenge, to be tough, to not bleed or cut myself. I guess I still do this brevity thing, just not always with broken glass….
1. The Crazy Cat Lady across the street is having a new roof put on. I thought that was odd, and the Wo confirmed it. There’s a reason you do roofs in the blazing heat of summer, because shingles have a sticky strip that needs to melt & adhere to the one below it, and if they don’t seal, all kindsa crap can get up in there & then the next big storm comes along and poof! The roof! The roof! The roof is in your yard! But anyway, she parked herself out there in a lawn chair, behind the big-ass dumpster with a beer, and was having a cackling ol’ time with the laborers. God, she is so crazy. We are just hoping that the enormous satellite dish that came off the roof goes INto the dumpster. Seriously. It’s like the size of the ones they use to talk to the moon. You stay classy, Crazy Cat Lady!
2. The dogs are not happy with the laboring going on across the street. Nor are they happy with the new neighborhood scallywag dogs, which seem to be a pair of mutts, one resembles a pit-bull-hound-somethin’ or other, and the other looks like the progeny of an overgrown long-haired dachsund that ravished a chihuahua one late summer afternoon. Good lord that little dog is a shit, running everywhere, barking this high-pitch trill the entire time, and his ears and tail stand upright (like a chihuahua’s) but they’re fringed with long fur, so this thing just looks ridiculous. Tripper tried to clamber OVER the fence to get at it, and boy am I glad we caught him in the act, because that would have just been awful. I think he was under the impression it was new, mutant breed of squirrel, and it HAD TO BE STOPPED.
3. The Great Kitchen Re-Organization was finally completed this afternoon. There are still portions that need cleaning & sorting, but the back breakfast nook/pantry area is clean, organized and whittled down. It is beautiful. I threw away some old canisters that I liked, but knew no matter how much I lied to myself, just weren’t going to be used. And I sort of chortled nervously, like the Hoarding Police were going to come along and ticket me for Wastefulness. Now we have all the items we use the most in the most accessible places, and I discovered I have three (3) springform pans, none of which were thrown away, because they are all different sizes and they are each extremely beautiful. They’re next to the two different bundt pans, not to be confused with the mini-bundt pan muffin tin, or the daisy-cake pattern pan. I love all my unitasking pans equally, yes I do. I stood by the back door and admired my work for several minutes tonight, because it was a lot of dirt, sweat & pitching out of things.
4. Speaking of stopping to admire your work. When I taught Amy to knit, I told her that when she came to the end of the row, to stop and admire what she had done. A little bit later on, she asked me why I said to do that. I tell all my knitting students to do this, as they’re trying something new. Even though it’s just a row, it’s progress, often combined with an advancement of skill, and it should be recognized and rewarded. Even after all these years of knitting, I still love to stop and look at the fabric, hanging from my needles, to see what I have created with sticks and string.
5. The black-eyed pea dish from yesterday? Beans were still crunchy this morning. After 24 hours in a crock pot, on low. So I cranked it up to high and hoped for the best. They did finally cook, and were spicy & savory, but man, there was a lesson learned there, not a day into the new year: BUY CANNED. Or at least do the boil-soak-overnight thing.
6. I’m going to try and tackle a little bit of organization up in the craft room this weekend; that was my original goal for my vacation, but with the acquisition of the fryer & french-fry cutter, the mess off the kitchen got bumped up the list. I’m glad it worked out that way, because the craft room can still be attacked in smaller chunks of time, but the kitchen area, with the dogs going out into the yard, needed to be finished – and gives me great satisfaction, since I do see it every day. Sigh. I don’t ever get as much done as I hope I will.
7. I always have over-ambitious (unrealistic) goals for what I’ll accomplish – I’ve done that with knitting projects, too. Going out for dinner & hanging with friends? I simply must bring at least two projects, and perhaps a third, JUST IN CASE. Just in case we’re held hostage? Or snowed in? Or perhaps I fall headfirst into a large pile of cocaine, and consequently find myself knitting at warp speed, confused (but delighted) by my pratfall. I have, at long last, resurrected the Rambling Rows afghan – I’m on block 30, out of 46, and I realized from my Rav queue, I started this sucker over 2 years ago. So I’d like to finish it up while it’s still chilly in the house (it’s very cumbersome as a take-along project, and it’s also made of wool, so summer knitting on it doesn’t fly). Of course, I’ve also started a scarf, and committed to starting another one (and finishing it by the end of the month) in a Loopy Ewe KAL. Suddenly my Scarface scene doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, does it? (J/K! No-no up your nose.)
Tha’s all I’ve got for now! Enjoy the weekend!
….Same As The Old Year….to paraphrase The Who, singing about something we ALL wish for ourselves, not to be fooled (again).
I rang in the new year by calming down three extremely pissed-off, barking black labs, who were certain we were under siege from The Enemy, as fireworks and god-knows-what-else exploded near and far from our house. I also was tending to the largest batch of crack Chex Mix I’ve ever made. Actually, the only batch I’ve ever made, but since the Wo was eating it for breakfast this morning when I stumbled out, and immediately asked me what in the hell I put in it to make it so full of WIN, I can only say, hey, I rocked in the New Year’s Chex Mix, baby. (The “secret”? Uh, half-again as much Worcestershire sauce as the traditional recipe calls for. We love us the nummeh brown winegar sauce.)
I followed up that winning first act with a breakfast of homemade Prune Cake from the Pioneer Woman, and do not let the name fool you. You will get on your knees and pray you’ll get another piece after you try the first one. I served it with a tall glass o’ milk, and a shot of Reddi-whip on the side. Startin’ the New Year off RIGHT!
Then I threw together a batch of slow-cooker black-eyed peas, and that recipe lied to me about using dried beans. I thought I was in good shape, but 13 hours later, those suckers still have some crunch to ’em, so that’s going to be dinner tomorrow. Fortunately, we weren’t particularly hungry, because we got together with the Wo’s immediate family & ate at Ted’s Montana Grill. Deeeelish. My brother-in-law got the Kitchen Sink Bison Burger, and good lord, that was the craziest damn sammich I’ve ever seen. It had ..well, yeah, everything on it, including a slice of ham and a fried egg! He loved it.
Before the Wo crashed last night, we spent some time playing our newest Wii game, Lego Indiana Jones and the something or other. Oh mah god, it’s pretty damned fun for a two-person game. We have to work co-operatively, though initial observations showed we were utterly incapable of it, as he would whip me into pieces, and I, once rebuilt, would attack him with my shovel. I noticed, playing the role of sidekick, that I got stuck with a lot more grunt work. Mostly because I had the shovel. Which is quite effective on enormous spiders, too. Anyway, we laughed our heads off, which was the goal.
End the year laughing, begin the next one with Chex Mix and Prune Cake.
We rock.
Happy New Year. Actually, I’m pretty sure this one will be a lot better than the last one.
For about a month now, I’ve been mentally composing a post. It was roughly titled, “Things I’ve Learned This Year”. Here are the notables.
1. Quite a bit of learning happened at work. Since we like to keep our job, we won’t write all that out. But I learned a lot about people, about being a manager, and about what is necessary, even if it isn’t always fun. Kind of like life.
2. I learned who my friends are. Some walked away, some set the ramparts on fire, some just drifted. That said, many stayed, some new people showed up, and I made some new friends. There was lots of learning. As I discover each year, I love my husband even more than I knew I could.
3. I finally pulled my shit together and got my own server for my web domain. Oh mah god. Quite the process! But I really am happy to have my very own spot on the net, and how much the process taught me. The Learning. It is a veritable theme!
4. I feel like I’ve reached the next level (of which I presume there are countless) in understanding my grief, understanding the why and what and an acceptance in general that I’ll never fully understand it. I’ve also reached, just recently, a very significant point of understanding in my life, as I look back on the years, the things my parents did and didn’t do, how those choices shaped all of us, but particularly me. Enlightenment is not always easy to climb to, but oh what a view. I also revealed the secret to understanding women.
5. I lost my post-holiday shopping craze. I didn’t go out the day after Thanksgiving, and I didn’t go out the day after Christmas. I did, however, go to both CostCo and Target today, New Year’s Eve, and thought I was hallucinating by the last leg of that journey. These trips only serve to underscore just how much I love the internets.
6. I spread my wings and started selling some crafty things – namely, DPN holders through local yarn shops & The Loopy Ewe. I also produced some “knitter” decals, and learned that buying in bulk is great at CostCo, but not always with new business ventures! (Feel free to buy 15 or 20!)
7. Speaking of wings, I got back in the swing of flying this summer, for work, and most everyone agrees, flying isn’t the most fun thing to do these days, especially as a plusher individual. Another fear faced & conquered!
8. Discovering the joy of Social Networking. Not only for my job, but as a labeled social butterfly at an early age, I do love Facebook & Plurk & even a little Twitter. I love trying out new things, and yet there is always the need for balance, since all of those little devils will suck your time like nobody’s business. Through Facebook, I also became highly addicted to PackRat, until the devs changed the entire game so they could make a buck off it. On the plus side, I got hours of my life back!
9. The older I get, the more torqued I become about political things. Between the election and our mayor, my electoral college of nerves reached a frazzling point. I wrote my city council member, I voted, I fought with my husband. My guy won, but much remains to be resolved here in Kansas City. Grrrrr……
10. I’ll end with a recent, fantastic experience. I teach a lot of knitting, and always learn something from my students in return. I’ve taught a lot of people to knit over the years, but this week, I had the honor of teaching my dear friend Beth’s daughter Amy how to knit. She is a bright, quick study, and it was fantastic to see the moment of comprehension, as the movement and process clicked in her head and her hands. I understood two things in that moment – the fleeting but motivating experiences my husband must have as a teacher, and a smidgen of the journey parents experience. Just one tiny slice in time, but richer by far than most.
FYI, she doesn’t want to stop knitting. We went to lunch and she couldn’t wait to pull her yarn out and continue. (Apologies for the cameraphone pic…)
Happy New Year.
Thanks for sticking with me. I love your comments, and I appreciate the kindnesses, shared laughs and understanding you give me.
May next year bring you learning, wisdom, joy and happiness. If you’re a knitter, may there always be plenty of yarn and other knitters to laugh with you. If you don’t knit, well, you should learn. Learning, it seems, is what it’s all about. :)