Yesterday ended up being hell. It took me until about 8:30pm to finish the entry. I broke down crying at one point and had to miss going to Rand's new house with my Love because my hands and my left wrist/elbow were hurting so bad, it was shooting constant lines of pain up-and-down my arm, but I knew if I stopped, I'd never start again. It was hell and I officially can NOT do massive, hundreds of items, fifty-five pages worth of info data entry anymore. My hands just can't take it.
Today, we had a hell of a time trying to get my Love his glasses. First we changed the appointment from the Lenscrafters to the doctor in the Super Wal-Mart (it was $44 instead of $59), then we went back to the Lenscrafters to get them made up. He picks out what he wants and the lady sits us down to enter the info. He gives her his insurance and she says it allows for 80% of the total cost. (I can see the screen from where I'm sitting) So, then she starts entering all the info and gets a screen that says "Authorization Required." Well, it's Saturday afternoon at like 3:30pm; no one's around to authorize something like that. She's poking around at the options and there's a place for the authorization number and below it, a box to check for no authorization and a drop-down menu with options why. There's a ton. Everything from "busy" to "no answer" to the exact perfect fit of "After Hours." So, instead of choosing that, she instead suddenly says, "Oh, I don't think we carry that anymore" and calls over some other lady. She tells the lady the insurance provider and says, "We don't carry it anymore do we?" - totally leading her to agree. The other woman (who was supposedly the manager, but was all of 17) says, yeah, no, we don't. The first woman then changes her mind again and says that we'd need to pay it all up-front and then get them to reimburse us back. Uh, yeah, no way. We were looking at like $350 for frames and lenses. Big no. I should note that a guy he works with got his glasses like two months ago from Lenscrafters and most certainly did not have to file a claim to get his money back. They were total assholes and utterly unhelpful.
So we leave. His eyes are dilated and he had planned to get them today. We go to the Pearl Vision in the mall and they don't take it at all. By this point, it's like 4pm and there's slim hope of getting it done today. He remembers the place that his other friend from work got glasses like two weeks ago and we head over there. It's a Visionworks.
They have a lot of glasses (though they didn't have the pair that he originally picked out from Lenscrafters), but all the designer ones are in the case. You have to put your name on the list and wait to be helped, so we do and finally, we go through them and he finds a pair of Ralph Lauren ones he really likes. (They're sharp.) So we go through all the paperwork and turns out that they'll give 30% off the complete glasses with his insurance, but their $19.99 discount card will give 50% off so we end up going with that instead. Only problem is that the glasses won't be ready until Monday after 3pm, but at that point, we just wanted to get it over and done with.
I never ended up going to meet up with our friend this morning because he wanted to meet at the art store (45 minutes away) AT 9am. Yeah, no way. It's a cool art store, but it's not worth getting up that damned early. He and my Love stopped off for breakfast after and I slept in. He brought me home some really uber cool Egyptian rubber stamps though. Awesome. Comes in a wood box, inkpad and 29 stamps (both the letters and symbols). Too cool.
Tomorrow, we still have to go to Cracker Barrel - which will be a nightmare full of people to be sure - to meet his folks for Father's Day breakfast at 10am. Ugh. Another 45 minutes away. Can't people ever do things at a decent hour?
Beyond that....nada much. Hungry, but my stomach is hurting really fucking bad. Started hurting yesterday after I ate dinner. Went to bed whimpering and woke up with it just as miserable. Started to feel better, but then I was hungry, so I ate a pretzel at the mall and it immediately hated me again. So, for the moment, I just can't eat. *ugh* Perhaps I'll make myself a bowl of Chicken Noodle Soup. It is the magic cure-all. Hopefully, I won't get doubled over with pain from it. *crosses fingers*
So my friend Rand successfully closed on his home yesterday. He's now a proud, first-time homeowner. We're going to run over there tonight and take a look at it all empty and his. Way to go Rand!
Have some work to finish up for Rand's mom with her ACT database and as soon as that's done, I'll be able to get the car registration taken care of (yeah!) and get it nice and legal again. My Love's also going to get his long-overdue glasses he's been needing. We have an appointment for tomorrow for the eye exam and his insurance will cover 20% of it (wow. so. generous. *cough*) but at least, we'll have the money to get it done. I need to get mine redone as well - August I think it is will be two years (eep!) - as I'm starting to have to squint through my glasses. Dammit. I hate the fact my eyesite's gone downhill (and continuing). Grr. Used to have 20/10 vision - literally perfect vision. Where did it all go? Anyway, I'm trying to get that done for her today, but it's hard and slow and boring going, but I'm plugging through. Wanted to work on it the other day but my hands were just hell. I really think I'm getting joint/arthritis problems in them. I couldn't use them for anything Wednesday, so I got a little behind. Need to get it done, though I'm anything but motivated. *laughs* Oh well. Lazy me will get it all done somehow.
Have a busy weekend coming up - we have breakfast plans with a friend tomorrow monring, then Love's eye exam after that. Sunday we have breakfast with his father because apparently, it's Father's day this Sunday. I had no idea; I certainly don't keep track of these things (though I suppose this means I need to remember to tell Jef happy Father's day. His daughter afterall, is my Goddaughter and she's coming to stay the summer with him starting her birthday, June 19th. Ugh, another thing I need to remember! *lol*) Rand's family also wants us to go with them to Busch Gardens on Sunday, but they are probably going to go early, so we most likely won't make it because of breakfast. Either way, there's a lot of scheduling going on.
Alright, stalled enough. Time to get some work done. Ta for now.
This is Mika. She's the kitty that I brought home from my local SPCA in April. A three-year old, female, tiger-striped tabby, she was abandoned by her previous owners when they moved. I can't understand that mentality - you wouldn't leave your family behind and your pets are part of your family - but, they did and I brought her home with me. She's a loving, playful and wonderful addition to my home.
Won't you help one of the millions of unwanted cats out there? They need love and families too and they give back a lifetime of unconditional love. Studies have shown that a pet improves your quality of life and helps lower blood pressure and ease anixity. They give you a happier life and they give you their heart. Support your local no-kill, SPCA, or Humane Society shelter and bring home a new member to your family. Many shelters around the country - and into Canada - are reducing the adoption fees for a cat. Now's the time to save an animal, gain a new friend and companion and bring more love into your life.
Mothers and Computers - When it's bad to be the daughter I hate being my mom's tech support. She has problems with her computer (which she just doesn't understand how to use in any real fashion) and she immediately calls me with some very vague explanation of things it's doing that fail to include any nouns so I know what she's talking about. Now apparently, she's getting some error when Windows tries to boot up about her having to run her system configuration. So...most likely, a driver got corrupted or Windows did, though the potential is there that her hard drive has bad sectors and is taking a poop on her. I need to go over there and try to re-install Windows and see if I can fix the problem. The thing is, I'm not a computer tech. I am an advanced user and I know my way around troubleshooting a pc, but she calls me in a panic and expects that I will know immediately what to do and can tell her in five words or less how to fix it over the phone. I can't. Even if I always did know exactly what she's talking about - and rarely do I - most often, it involves things that she just wouldn't have the understanding of computers and software to get into. She can't go explore through settings and figure out her attachment problem in her emails and she certainly can't navigate the re-installation of Windows. So she calls me and then when I fail to call her back, she has my sister call me and tell me to call our mom. Ugh! It may not always appear like it from the outside, but I do have other things going on in my life and I can't always be on her beck-and-call to just stop what I'm doing and rush to her house (forfeiting an entire day because there's no quick trip there, especially not when she has to come get me, take me there and then bring me home after) to see if I can solve her problems. I have my own computer problems and I can't always fix them, so why she thinks I can wave my magick wand and always instantly fix hers, I don't know.
My Own Computer Woes Speaking of computer problems, my system is riddled with bugs. I've needed to change my OS for months now, but I'm dragging my feet to do it. I just hate having to not only re-do your pc and settings, but adjust to a new OS (I've been on Win98SE forever now and need to make the jump to WinXP) and try to re-install everything that you ever use to be sure you have it when you need it. There's compatibilty problems, there's learning curve, there's re-arranging your files since I'll be adding a new hard drive as my new primary so I don't have to back up all the stuff on my current drive...blah. It's just so much work. So, in the meantime, I have all these bugs that drive me up a damned wall. Sometimes, my copy/paste just won't work. Period. Some times, when I go to bed and turn off my monitor (but leave the pc on, not "asleep" or anything), when I wake up in the morning, it's frozen - even though it's on for more hours during the day then overnight without freezing. Sometimes it crashes. Sometimes it just freaks out on me. Right now my mouse is fucked up and keeps rolling way down to the bottom-right of the screen (there it goes again) without anyone touching it for no reason. ARG. Fucking thing. But at the same time.......I drag my feet. Better the bugs and problems I know then the ones I don't? *shrugs* It drives me up a wall and yet, I just don't want that week or so of change and re-adjustment, so I stall and stall and get more and more annoyed.
Ok, it's definatly fucked up. I have a trackball and I just took the ball out and it still moved itself way down to the bottom right corner. Arg!
A Place to Call Home My friend Rand closes on his house tomorrow. He's so nervous. I think it's cool that he's getting a house though. I know he is too, it's just really daunting. The people move out Friday, so he can get in there for the first time as it's owner on Saturday. He's not moving this weekend - has painting to do first (the people were older and had the sitting room in sea foam green for example) - but it'll still be his. He had off yesterday and we ran to the furnature store to look for a dinning room table for him and Best Buy for a tv (he didn't buy anything; he's waiting until he has a move-in date to know when he needs delivery) and he still has to get all his stuff out of storage. It's going to be a lot of work, but I think he's really proud. I'm proud of him too.
Damn the Devils to Hell - oh wait, NJ is Hell. Nevermind So, by now, everyone knows the NJ Devils won the Stanley Cup. Boo. Hiss. I hate the Devils. I never thought I'd root for Disney On Ice...er, the Ducks, but I sure was rooting for them over the Devils. NJ beat out Boston in the first round (my Love's favorite team) and the Lightning in the second. We had plenty of reason to hate them this year. Then the crowd had to go and be a dick - they actually had the fucking nerve to boo when the Ducks goalie was awarded the Conn Smythe Trophy. They had already won the Cup, and they were so nasty as to boo because the other team's goalie was given a much-deserved award? This was like the highlight of this man's career - a great achievement - and they booed him.
The announcement that an opposing player had won the Conn Smythe, which had gone to Devils Claude Lemieux and Scott Stevens in past Devil championship seasons, wasn't greeted warmly by the sellout crowd of 19,040, but the reception warmed considerably when the fans saw the members of their team, waiting to receive the Stanley Cup, applauding Giguere.
Yeah, if you consider the ENTIRE CROWD BOOING AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS not being greeted "warmly." What asses.
You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here Well, my fingers are bothering me again (they hurt a lot lately and I worry that there's joint problems like arthritis - which can happen at any age. An added frustration to the fact I have a ton of data entry work to finish for Rand's mom so I can get paid, but my hands hurt SO MUCH when I type right now, I want to cry.) and the mouse issue is frustrating as hell, so here I close. Ta ta for now.
Idiotic Ex's Don't you just hate morons? Those people who don't clue in to the real world - ever - and realize that they're just shitheads? Let me tell you a story...
About five years ago, I was in a going-nowhere relationship. He was a complete loser who couldn't hold a job for anything, leaving me to support us both on a crappy $7.50/hour salary. When he finally did get a job, it was a night-shift one which left me without a car (I had to get a ride home from a co-worker) to come home to an empty house without cable, internet (nor computer), or interaction with people of any kind. I had to entertain myself with two fuzzy channels of broadcast tv and make something to eat if I wanted dinner (pending there was anything in the house, I also couldn't go anywhere to get something if I needed it). I also went to bed alone only to repeat again the next day. It was hellish.
So this new guy started at my company. We chatted and laughed and joked around. We quickly became friends. He liked me, but I was in a relationship (sad and pathetic as it was, I wasn't brave enough to get out of it) so for a little while, we just interacted platonically. But, I really did like him, and so many things about him were great. We started talking on the phone in the evenings and I hung out with him after work instead of going home to my empty house. Eventually, I realized that I wanted to be with him and end the sad farce that was my relationship.
I sat down with the loser and told him it was over. That I wasn't happy, hadn't been for a long time and that I had found someone else who did make me happy and I wanted to pursue that relationship instead. I hadn't cheated on him or anything, I just wanted to break it off so I could start anew. He wouldn't accept that it was over. He went totally psycho. He cried, he screamed, he raved to my friend Jef (who he didn't even know) about how he had to "save me" from my Love. He started sitting on the front step, playing with his hunting knife and even tried to propose to me to get me to stay. When I remained firm that it was over, he begged me to give him time to find a place. He pleaded with me to let him have a month to get situated. I wasn't happy about it, but I did (foolishly) feel guilty, so I agreed. We were broken up, but still lived in the same house as I started seeing my Love. Things got nasty because we still had to drive into work together (I had just weeks before, gotten him a job at my company, instead of the night shift) and we were still co-habituating. I paid the month's rent, and we planned the date we'd move out - three weeks or so hence. I spent a lot of my time at my Love's apartment instead of being around the loser.
As all this is going on, we get a serious threat of a hurricane to hit us directly. Our company closed because of the threat as did most everything. My Love's apartment was located was in mandatory evacuation zone. We packed up a bunch of his things and planned to stay at my grandmother's house because she wasn't in a flood area. When we got there, we realized that we didn't really want to be stuck there and thought we might make a road trip out of it. So we packed up the car and headed out. We tossed around the idea of heading to St. Augustine, but my Love had the notion of going to this place called Callaway Gardens that he had gone as a kid with his family on a vacation. And that's where we ended up going. Arriving way late at night, we stayed over for two days (we ended up having a three-day weekend because of the hurricane) and had a wonderful time. We consider that to be our official anniversary.
When we come back, he drops me off at my house because I need to get ready for work the next day. (The hurricane by the way, totally and inexplicably changed course at the last moment and did almost no damage to the area.) I unlock the door as he drives away and when I turn on the light, I'm faced with a disaster. The entire house has been stripped - there's nothing but my clothes on the floor and they've been trampled on. The loser's not there. I run to the phone and immediately page my Love (in the days before everyone had a cell, people had pagers). A few minutes later he calls me back from a gas station a few miles down the road. He turns around and comes back to pick me up and I never spend another night in that house.
Turns out that the loser had planned to fuck me over the whole time. He brought in a truck that weekend and a bunch of friends and emptied the house. He stole everything. Took ALL of it. Left me with a fraction of the things that were mine and left the house a complete pigsty. He had also called, posing as my step-dad (it was his house and the power was in my step-dad's name) and had scheduled the power to be shut off for the next day (Monday) knowingly with a fridge full of food. He stole one of my calling cards (the phone was in my name) and ran up three hundred dollars in charges that I tried (unsuccessfully) to dispute while I was in Georgia. All the bills that were due - the phone the power, etc. - I ended up getting stuck paying for. We tried contacting his bitch of a mother who wouldn't talk to us - even when my mom sent a letter - and would only tell us that he had left for three months to work on a cruise ship. She claimed when he came back, we could go through the stuff he had placed in the storage unit to settle what was mine and what was his and discuss his share of the bills, but of course, none of that happened. I didn't know if he really ever left, let alone if he ever came back. I took thousands of dollars in loss because I was trying to be nice and give him the time he begged for to leave him in a good situation. He also had up and left his job - the one I had gotten for him - and sent a company-wide email detailing how evil my Love and I were and getting both of us in trouble. So much for doing a kindness for someone, hu?
Flash-forward five years. I've not had any contact with the dickhead in all of that time. Nor have I wanted to. The piece of shit made such hell of things that I never wanted to see him again. So then, last month (May), there's a message in my journal feedback.
Long Lost Friend Hey M = = noticed the date the other day - just wanted to pop in and wish you a happy belated birthday (better late than never, eh?) - you've an incredible site! Drop me a note one of these days, will ya? Take care . . . =D= --ps - condolences on the kitty :o(
Turns out it's from the dickhead. I can't believe it. The audacity of thinking I'd want to "drop him a note." I rave a bit to my friends about it but just ignore it. I (obviously) don't contact him and I certainly don't want to be friends with him.
So then yesterday, there's a new message in my feedback.
Derek Phipps Hey "M" - - - again, happy birthday - I want to send you a cordial invitation to the Orpheum in Ybor ((corner of 8th and 14th))this Sunday. My band will be headlining the "Battle of the Bands", show starts around 6pm, though we won't take the stage till somewhere around 10-10:30. If you can't make it out, check out www.mp3.com/Tie_Breaker - we'll post the newest song (not tracked yet) when we get it. Take care, hope all is well, and I hope to hear from you (it's only been 5 years, eh?). Best Regards, Derek
Is he fucking brain dead? Why the hell would I want anything to do with him? He's 100% pure asshole with a side of dickhead thrown in for good measure. In fact, I don't ever refer to him as "Derek" (those rare times I ever mention him), I refer to him as "dickhead." Every one of my friends knows who I mean and call him the same. People who have known me long enough to have seen the shit he did hate him utterly for his selfish tantrum and the fact I got so fucked over by him.
And thus, I am replying to his message with an email of my own:
Are you stupid?
Seriously. What makes you think that I have any interest in being your friend? Was I supposed to just forget how you stole everything I owned, left me with hundreds of dollars in bills and took off? Was I supposed to ignore that you turned off the power and left the house in a state of absolute disaster that I had to clean up? Or that you had sent a company-wide email detailing how terrible a person I was? After you begged me to allow you time to find a place to live and to do you that last favor, I gave you that time, you stabbed me in the back. Did you honestly believe that I am would rejoice in your asinine attempts to be buddy-buddy and act as if we were, in fact, "old friends?"
It was over and you couldn't take it like a man so you had to be a dick. And now, suddenly, you want to act like that didn't happen. Clue in: it did. And unless you're planning on repaying me for what you broke/stole/damaged/ran away leaving me responsible for, you've got absolutely no right to speak to me. How dare you.
Contact me again with your idiotic niceties and you won't be hearing from me, you'll be hearing from my boyfriend. You remember him, right? The "knuckle-dragging Neanderthal" (as you so eloquently put it)?
This was over and done five years ago. Run away again with your tail between your legs. You're very good at it.
I am also going to be blocking his IP from my domain (gotta love the .htaccess file) and hopefully, this will be the last time I ever need to hear from him again. This, then brings us back to where we all started...don't you just hate morons? Especially when they're idiotic ex's.
I went out today (ok, technically yesterday now as it's after midnight) and spent $65 of a $100 giftcard a friend's mom gave me at Nordstrom's (ooh la la; all fancy-like). Got two shirts and a kick-ass pair of stretch-jean capri's. They rock. And I still have $35 left on the giftcard. Yeah, $65 is a lot for two shirts and one pair of pants, but you know what? Who cares! It's a giftcard and I can't turn it in for cash, so I might as well spend it. Beyond that we're dead broke until Friday. Ugh.
That'sreally about it.
Oh yeah, I'm supposed to put this in my journal to help get indexed or something. *shrugs* This is my new blogchalk: United States, Florida, English, MissM, Female, 26-30, mail art, reading. :)
