I cannot recommend this product and/or service. I think it was just a bad cold (not enough aches and fever for flu), but the coughing and coughing and coughing and coughing was kind of unbelievable. Thankfully, that seems to have died down, finally. Also thankfully, it more or less happened over a weekend, so I only missed work today and last Thursday.
Anyway, The Plague is highly overrated. Avoid it if at all possible.
I’m home today. I got Teh Hamthrax vaccine on Monday evening and started to feel like crap yesterday. This is why I never get flu shots. I always feel yucky for a day or two afterward, so I’d rather gamble on not getting the flu than take the guaranteed option of getting the shot and feeling tired and achy. I decided not to take chances with H1N1 though, because the potential secondary infections scare the crap out of me.
So here I sit, harassed by kittens and too unmotivated to even watch TV. I did take a picture, though!
Chilly Willy might be more appropriate. The poor little guy survived at least two hard frosts and was drooping from the cold.
In other news, I ordered jeans from two different vendors, both via Amazon. Vendor 1’s package was delivered just a few days after ordering. Vendor 2’s package has yet to arrive, despite the fact that I placed the order on 11/23. That’s kind of ridiculous, I think.
I didn’t get anything accomplished today except dealing (again!) with the cable company. I finally got fed up enough with how high my bill was that I called and complained. Apparently, doing so while wearing your crankypants is an effective way to get your monthly bill lowered. It’s still kind of outrageous, but it’s $40 less outrageous than it used to be. Huzzah!
Other than that, the only exciting thing I did was to drive all over town in pea soup fog this morning. Oh, and I actually found a few cute shirts at Target. I probably would have bought a new bag, too, except they all had hellish velcro. Why the hell do manufacturers have to ruin perfectly adorable bags by putting velcro on them?
I’ve been listening to The Decemberists in the car, so this song has been stuck in my head for days and days and days.
The cafeteria folks put up their Christmas tree over the weekend. Today, they’ve added Christmas music. I am appalled.
Also, there is nothing that makes me panic like not being able to get to my blog from either the front or back end. I thought it had been hacked. Aieee! But it seems to have just been a weird network glitch or maybe a temporary problem my web host was having.
There will likely be more connectivity issues tonight, because my hosts are doing some sort network maintenance. If you have trouble getting any of my pages to load after 11pm EDT, that’s why. They’re estimating that they’ll be finished by tomorrow morning.
On the bright side, I upgraded Akismet and that seems to have stopped the spam-trap problems. No spam is good spam, yes?
ETA: I’m still having intermittent outage problems. Got the dreaded “server encountered a problem” message, which makes my stomach hurt, because usually that means there has been hackage. After refreshing, though, the page loaded fine, so I’m still assuming that whatever the problem is, it’s on my host’s end, not mine.
gel pen in steno pad
4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches
We are hoppin’ mad this evening! I paid my cable bill last week, and the charge has hard posted to my account, so it went through. I came home to find that cable, internet, and phone were all disconnected! So I called Comcast, and they gave me no explanation. The customer service person told me that they would put a trace on the payment, and then she asked if this was a good number to reach me at. I tried to explain that no, it wouldn’t be, if it’s disconnected, but she’d already hung up on me! Aaaaaaarrrrgggghhhh! CUSTOMER SERVICE FAIL!
So they’ve apparently turned the interwebs and TV back on, but the phone is still off. I’m trying to count to a million before calling them back, because I’m afraid that will not go well if I don’t decompress first. But, I’m not going to decompress until A) this is resolved and B) I get an apology.
Pedantic coworker got on the freight elevator after me this morning, so I was forced to make horrible small talk with him. He went on a long, rambling rant about how difficult chip packets are to open, to explain why he had to open his Fritos bag with his teeth. How the hell do you respond to something like that? I told him I use scissors. I mean, duh.
The bank I have my car loan with “upgraded” their website about six months ago. In doing so, they completely broke it. I was no longer able to make payments through the website, because the default payment amount was the pay-off amount. Um, I don’t think so! That meant that I had to pay by phone, which I hate, hate, hate. Every time I had to call in a payment, I complained about their broken website. And every time I complained, the customer service rep told me that they’d never had any complaints before. Yes, you did, from me! One of them told me that the box to change the payment amount was there, but I must have missed it. Uh, no, I’m really not brain dead. Another told me that there must be something wrong with my browser, despite the fact that I told him I’d tried it in Firefox, IE, and Opera.
It’s been frustrating. They really shouldn’t make it difficult for me to give them my money.
So, today I log into my account, expecting to see the steadily-shrinking-but-still-much-larger-than-my-bank-balance pay-off amount. But no, they’ve (finally!) more or less fixed the problem. I can now pay the current amount due, and I can even edit the payment date. I can’t edit the actual payment amount, which is kind of a pain in the ass, because I usually round up. I’m not complaining, though. At least I can pay online again, and that’s the important part.
What boggles my mind even more than the fact that this appears to be an image of a multi-stage rocket preparing for separation, is the fact that at least two people–the image creator and someone at Tampax–thought it was a good idea to use it on a tampon package. WTF were they smoking?
I suddenly decided, at about 1am, that the fridge needed to be thoroughly cleaned. I have no idea what possessed me. Now I have a bunch of yucky food containers to wash. I also have bleachy spots on my kitchen rug, because I was too lazy to move it out of the way while I was washing out the fridge. Oopsie!
Before cleaning out the fridge yesterday, I tried to make roasted vegetables, since I had stuff I needed to use up (wrinkly potatoes and very tired carrots). Tried, I say, because my oven died. Again. This is what, the 4th or 5th time? I ended up dumping my half-roasted veggies into a crock pot, which was not at all what I wanted to do. I re-seasoned them and added some veggie broth, so now it’s soup. Or stew, or something like that. Whatever it is, it’s not roasted vegetables.
So now I have to decide if I should call the maintenance guys tomorrow and miss most of a day of work, babysitting them, or if I should wait until Friday, when I’m already off work. Waiting does not sound like fun, because as soon as you cannot bake anything, baked food is all you want to cook. On the other hand, I’d rather not miss work tomorrow.
And a total non sequitur: I can hear the wind blowing crunchy leaves around. I love fall.
And another one: I am kind of irritated that Criminal Minds is not available through On Demand. Nor is it available on the CBS website or Hulu. If you miss an episode, because your DVR is smoking crack, you are SOL. Thankfully, ION and A&E have been showing re-runs of the show, and I’ve managed to catch a few I’d missed.
(That pizza cutter? Came out of the dishwasher looking like that. It’s clean, but covered with water spots and dark, tarnished areas, from where tomato sauce sat on the blade. Time to buy a new box of Jet Dry.)
red paper boat 
