Two days ago, I reached for a white shirt in my closet and noticed a huge orange stain in the pocket area. I saw that the pocket was a little puffy so I peeked inside. What did I find? You guessed it. A goldfish cracker. It must have fallen in and I didn’t notice it. So, two weeks later, the grease and food coloring had caused the huge stain on my shirt. The dry cleaner said it was really hard to remove and you can still see a hint of yellow if you look very closely. I never had the illusion that goldfish was healthy natural food but stuff like this really makes you stop and think about what we feed our bodies. Anyway, I better go and check on my fake veggie hot dogs before they burn. ;-)

It is so hot today. My car’s thermometer was reading 94 degrees at 6:00 PM. I have to leave for my date in 30 minutes and I haven’t even started getting ready (I did shower though). I don’t want to leave the couch since the fan is right in front of me. If I had some sorbet, I might have had to call and cancel.

Last week, when I found out I had to leave for Brazil in 48 hours, I tried to get in touch with the lawyers working on my case. My appointed lawyer was on vacation so I kept playing phone tag with his replacements. I finally got to talk to her before leaving and she was fairly helpful. However, since my interview date was sooner than what we had thought, my paperwork wasn’t ready yet. She told me they would prepare it early this week and FedEx it here to Brazil. My lawyer was due back on Monday so I assumed he would take care of everything.

Well, I just emailed him to check in and he said “We still have one more document that we sent over for them to sign and then we should be all ready to send it to you. Are you in the US?” What? My own lawyer doesn’t know that I’m already in Brazil and that these documents need to be here by Tuesday morning? This sucks and I’m in major panic mode now.

Clean bill of health
I got my exam results back this morning. I don’t have AIDS or syphilis, and my lungs are totally normal. What else can you ask for?

I have been extremely busy at work lately. Seriously, I have been working an average of 12-hour days plus weekends. The frustrating thing is that when you are working on projects, you see the light at the end of the tunnel since there’s usually an end date. But when you’re busy with just day-to-day stuff, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. And to think I used to wonder what managers did all day.

This has not been a good week.
On Monday, I came home to find my DSL down and the image on my TV all messed up.

On Tuesday, I called the DSL company and actually got an appointment for the next day. I also started thinking of how I would be able to get a new TV quickly, who would move it for me, etc. On Tuesday night, I decided to reset my TiVo and that took care of the bad image quality.

On Wednesday, I left work early since the DSL guy was supposed to be here between 4:00 and 8:00 pm. At 8:15, there was no sign of him so I called and was told that he would be here in 20-30 minutes. At 9:15, still no sign, I called them again and was told that the office usually closed at 8:00 and they had no way of contacting the technician now. The chick on the phone told me to call back the next day to reschedule. I told her to get her supervisor on the phone. He was nice. His name was Forest. He rescheduled the appointment for me and cut down the appointment window to 1 hour (from the usual 4).

On Thursday, I woke up and my house was freezing. My heater was broken. I turned the shower on to let the steam heat up the bathroom so I could gather up the courage to take my pajamas off. As soon as I got my hair wet, the water started getting cooler and all of a sudden there was no more hot water.

Thursday night, I come home and there’s a package with my Gap order waiting for me next to my door. It was soaking wet. That’s because the exterior walls of my house had been taken over by boxelder bugs and my landlord came by on Thursday to spray it. He didn’t see my package behind the bushes.

On Friday, I left work early again to make it to my 4-5 pm appointment with the DSL repairman. I get here and as I step out of my car and into the garage, I don’t detect the distinct Pine Sol scent that tells me the cleaning lady was here. That’s because she wasn’t. I tried calling her and there’s no answer. I try again and she tells me she lost the key but since I was home, she could come by in a half hour. She’s now vacuuming the living room as I type this. Now back to the DSL saga. Today’s repairman showed up on time. But he didn’t fix the problem. Now another repairman is coming out tomorrow morning. Between 8:00-12:00. On a Saturday (at least the DSL guy and the heater repairman will be able to keep each other company). And they still don’t know if they will be able to fix the problem because they still don’t know what the problem is.

So, even though I’m usually an optimist, I think I have earned the right to say that this was an extremely shitty week. Anyway, I hope today marks the end of this week. Or maybe I should just use the shitty week as an excuse to spend all of Saint Patrick’s Day weekend in a complete state of drunken stupor. I better get started now…

the week might be over
Right after posting this, Mandy called to see if I wanted to go get something to eat. She came over and we’re getting ready to leave when there’s a knock on the door. It’s the PacBell repairman. He tells me that he decided to pick up the trouble ticket tonight and could he come in and check out my line. We weren’t that hungry so I showed him in.

He then warns me that it will be $45 for the first 15 minutes and $60 for each hour after that or something. I’m appalled but once you’re hooked, you can’t just say no. Anyway, he checks my line and then goes outside for a couple of minutes. He comes back in, does a couple of things to the DSL wall jack and all of a sudden, I have DSL again! And best of all, he walks to the door and says, “You’re all set. Have a good evening”. Yes! That means that the charges will show up directly on the bill. And I have never even seen a bill since my company pays for it. This is much better than having to write him a check and then having to fill out an expense report.

Anyway, Mandy and I also had an awesome dinner, we got a table right away, the food came out quickly and it was delicious and we had a great time. There, if I just keep impersonating Pollyanna maybe everything else will improve too.

I have no DSL. I haven’t had DSL in the past two days. I’m sitting at home waiting for the technician to come fix it so I have DSL again. I hate dial-up connections.

I’m so swamped I don’t even have time to eat, much less blog.

And worst of all, I pulled a muscle on my back from using the scanner.

Yep. Hard to believe, isn’t it?

I guess after you get to a certain age, it’s pretty dangerous to hold an object on top of the scanner glass plate and maneuver the mouse at the same time (that is, at least when the distance between the scanner and the mouse is greater than the distance between your left hand and your right hand when your arms are stretched). And to do it for about 20 minutes straight is probably an even dumber idea.

I woke up with a sore throat. It felt very weird, I forgot what that was like. When I lived in Rochester, I was always sick but I haven’t had a sore throat since I moved to California.

Anyway, I have to leave home now so I can make it to my 8:45 meeting. yawn.

On Friday, I went to get my picture taken for my greencard application. The picture needs to include your right ear with no earrings or anything covering it (see example on the left, from this very handy site). It’s simply not a flattering pose and then you’re stuck with a greencard with a bad picture on it for the next 10 years. As if my horrible passport photo wasn’t enough!

This story is solely for Joel’s enjoyment.

When I first moved to this house, I was extremely happy that UPS would finally start leaving packages here. No more excuses about special policies for apartments. And that did happen. For about a year! Then all of a sudden, every notice I got said “signature required in person”. I was pretty pissed and I asked the UPS guy about it. His response: “they changed their policy so if anything gets stolen, I’m responsible for it. So now, I just check that box for most of my deliveries”. Unbelievable! I mean, FedEx and the USPS leave me packages all the time and nothing’s ever been stolen.

So I called UPS to complain. The customer service rep was a bitch and didn’t help at all. I then decided to take it one step further and wrote this huge long email describing the problem and telling them how I would always pick FedEx and USPS whenever possible and that I was even telling online merchants that they should offer options other than UPS and how driving 8 miles to pick up my package at the UPS Center took the convenience out of online shopping especially when the mall is only 4 miles away. Ok, so maybe I used a few punctuation marks and paragraphs on my email so I didn’t end up with a run on sentence.

Anyway, I sent my message Sunday night and the next day I got an email from the UPS customer service saying that it was up to the driver and that they couldn’t leave packages at apartments, etc, etc, insert canned response here, etc. Now, the surprising thing was that at the end of the email, they said a representative from the local UPS Center would be contacting me no later than EOD Tuesday.

And guess what? He did! On Monday morning, I got a call from John, the local UPS Center manager. We had a nice chat and he said he will come by my house this week to assess the situation and determine whether it is indeed safe to leave packages outside. I was totally impressed although the real test will be next time I get a package…