Entries for month: August 2008
Occasionally I find myself stuck for inspiration to blog. Despite all of the bright spots in any given day, when I sit down at the end of the day to write something, sometimes nothing comes out. I think that may partially be my fault for trying to force something out when I'm not in the mood to think about anything other than some oreo's and a cold glass of milk.
The above picture (click on it for a larger view) is courtesy of Wordle — and although it only represents what I've written about recently (uses your rss feed — last 15 posts in this case), it still says something. In particular, it says that I write about nostrils less than I write about Holidays (that's a good thing, right?), which is still less often than I use the word, "like." That's kind of scary — I've never thought I overused the word. Do I? It would be cool if Wordle had the ability to go through your entire post history, but it doesn't…
Obviously the overarching topic of late has been Nublet, split between "Baby" and "Nublet." Were you expecting something else? Think about how big it would be represented there if you were to combine both of those words into one.
And speaking of Oreo's, is there a doctor in the house? My beloved, beautiful, baby-mama does not like Oreo's. At all. Seriously. I think something is wrong with her.
And speaking of Nublet, we've got some practice coming up. This weekend we're keeping our neice and nephew overnight while their parents, Sue and Ed, move into their new home. We've been preparing for Nublet's arrival by yard-saling for toys and books, so they get to be the first benefactors of those finds. And of course, when I say "we" I mean "Megan." I don't do yard-saling. I just don't have the patience.
Over the weekend we (finally!) finished up our new built-ins. I think they look pretty good for a couple of amateurs:
I don't know how much we spent on them, but I guarantee you it was way less than what we would have paid to have them installed professionally. The cabinets are pre-fab, and were about $100 each (~$600), and the rest of it is from 3 sheets of plywood (~$150). Add another hundred dollars or so for paint and supplies. Then, oh, I don't know… 7,000 hours of work. Also a big thank you to DadR who gave some most-excellent guidance and even helped us make a few cuts and assemble the shelves.
Now I can be lazy in my free time again.
A couple of months ago, I got a letter in the mail from my bank. They informed me that one of the online merchants I had used was compromised, and my card number had likely been acquired; which is why they were blocking that card and issuing me a new one, included in the letter. My bank is pretty cool. I do wish they had disclosed which merchant had screwed up so that I could avoid them in the future (or call and chew them out), but what are you going to do? (Call and ask? Pff, that would take effort.)
The bad thing though, was that I had given that card number to various companies to automatically charge me for recurring services. Things like my gym membership and my FiOS internet service that I love so much. This didn't occur to me until I started getting letters letting me know I was behind on my payments. Whoops!
Except Verizon never mailed, never called… made no apparant attempt to contact me. They just shut my service off in the middle of the night, about 3 weeks ago. I called and explained what happened, gave them my new card number, and had the service turned back on within a few hours.
They called on Wednesday afternoon, at least 3 weeks after the fact, to let me know that my account was behind and if I didn't rectify the situation, my service was in danger of being shut off. And it wasn't like something got lost in a paper trail somewhere, this was a computer recording. How a computer calls you a month late is beyond me, but it happened.
Thanks, Verizon!
