Friday, October 31, 2008

the wee hours

Early Voting

I went out to vote tonight, and I thought I could just whip through it really quickly right before they were ready to shut down for the night at 7p.  Boy, was I shocked to see a busy parking lot and a long line.  I’d say that about 150 people voted while I was there for about 40 minutes.  It was the first time I’ve ever voted in Nevada and encountered a line longer than 4 people.  It felt, I dunno, hopeful.  Also, I live in a pretty pale whitey kind of neighborhood, but it looked like every black voter was deciding to make their voice heard, considering the ratio in the line.  It was nice to see.  So, go Barack & Joe and Shelley Berkley and Dina Titus and Larry Brown and...well, the rest o’ them.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

the wee hours

NJDC: A Yiddisha Take on 2008

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

late at night

I’m just effin’ sick of making lemonade

To save yourself some boring reading time, jumped to the bottom of the blog entry and buy yourself a jumpstarter for your car.  You’ll thank me someday.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow or next week or next month, but someday you’ll be thrilled to own that thing.  I promise.

Today was going to be a good day.  We had an offer for each of us to make a little extra cash for about ten seconds of work (okay, ten seconds for Leigh-Ann, maybe two minutes for me because I had to look it up to make sure I did it right), then we were going to the doctor for our clinical study, which pays us each a whoppin’ $45.  Still, $45 is $45, and this visit didn’t even require the three or four hour treasure hunt for blood in Leigh-Ann’s veins, nor did it require peeing in a cup.  Just blood pressure and chatting about side effects - ugh, I have a high dose of the meds and it makes me sweat for no reason.  My face starts to sweat and it drives me crazy.  I hate sweating and I’m normally not a facial sweater.  Heh, a facial sweater - sounds like a sweater for your face.  We’re doing a clinical trial for a new Fibromyalgia drug, Reboxetine, which is basically reformulated Strattera.  Why it helps with Fibro pain, I dunno.  I get why it helps with the fatigue because it’s like taking uppers every morning.  All in all, I think it’s a pretty good Fibro drug (hear that people who haven’t yet approved it for use in the U.S.?  It works, so let everyday people have it, instead of them trying to buy it from Canada or the UK), but the sweating is super annoying to me.  It’s especially annoying when you’re stuck outside with your car that won’t start.  We’ll get to that part of the story eventually.

So everything’s fine & dandy - we leave the doctor’s office to go, well, somewhere to get financial help.  I left Leigh-Ann in the car because I figured why should both of us feel like deadbeats.  It took about ninety minutes to be seen (note to self: next time, bring a book or iPod - don’t second guess yourself when you always bring your iPod to the clinical study visits because they have a wireless network that you access to listen to Pandora or read blogs.  I once commented on a blog, but the keyboard isn’t easy for us old folks with fat fingers, and I signed my name as Floppy, oops) and then about twenty minutes being interviewed.  The interview didn’t go terribly well, as the person I was talking to was internet illiterate, so she didn’t understand why I didn’t want to just up and cancel all of our domain names.  “But, it would save $300 right off the bat.” Yeah, lady, but then those domain names that are worth hundreds would be given away, not sold, not used, just dumped.  [redacted and moved to my Vox blog]

Now, we get to the title.  We had big plans for the rest of the day:  free tacos at Taco Bell (because of base stealing in the World Series), half-price slushes at Sonic during Happy Hour (we needed to go to the library, which is a block away from Sonic), a coupon for half-price ice-cream at Cold Stone, stopping by the vet’s office to pick up Pinto’s ashes, and finally...voting.  The agency saw people between 1-2:30p, so I figured we should be able to make the 2p-4p Happy Hour at Sonic no problem, and everything else needed to be done by 7p.  However, I got out of there after 4p, and when we got ready to leave, THE BATTERY WAS DEAD!  That was totally and incredibly sucky, on top of missing Happy Hour, but yay, we were prepared with a little car safety kit and it had jumper cables.  A nice guy from the agency came out and moved his car so we could jump mine.  It didn’t work.  Crap!  Oh, and my cell phone battery is DEAD.  So, I have to go back to the place of humiliation to call my insurance company and I find out that I cancelled the emergency roadside service (I added it again, just now) and it’ll be $45 for someone to come out and jump the car, but it’s okay, I think it comes with my super extended car warranty.  So, I call the service phone number on the business card with my “important car papers” - it goes to voice mail.  I call the main service number also to see if maybe they can tell us something we didn’t do right with the jumper cables (my car doesn’t have a negative terminal) and maybe there’s a special trick to it.  The phone rings and rings and rings and rings.  It’s 30 minutes before they close.  Thanks a lot Vista Chevrolet.  Useless.  In the meantime, it’s hot outside, we’re both exhausted and sweaty.  Remember, the meds make us sweat, even when it’s cool.  So then, I call my dad - dads can fix everything, right?  He’s not home, the answering machine picks up.  Finally, I have to call the insurance company to have them call Pop-a-Lock to come out for $45.  While we’re waiting, another guy from the agency comes out and says that he’s jumped lots of cars, no problem.  He hooks up the cables - the dreaded click, click, click.  He even knew what to expect with the no negative terminal deal.  Finally, the Pop-a-Lock guy gets there and he uses one of those jumpstarter thingies.  At first, it doesn’t work, but then, SUCCESS!  By that time, it was too late to get the free tacos, too late for half-price anythings, the dogs needed to be taken outside, and I was afraid to shut the car off anywhere, but home.

So, I go through the humiliation of asking an agency for financial help and it COSTS me money.  I have no idea if they’ll help me at all, but I know for sure that I didn’t have a good time there.  We did, however, discover a cheap restaurant (where we went to buy a soda...that was not half-price, nor a tasty raspberry slush from Sonic) that serves Mexican & Salvadoran food.  The next time we go to the doctor, we’ll get some cheap food, too.

I’m not sure what lessons I learned, except not to cancel roadside service.  I have a lesson for the rest of you - buy one of these, and make sure it’s always charged and in the car with you.  I promise that you won’t be sorry.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

the wee hours

Buy 2, Get 1 Free…psych!

Isn’t it awful, the bad apostrophe placement, compounded with the two different fonts on top of each other?  What’s even worse, kinda maybe sorta, is that this coupon led drooling cupcake wanters to an empty store.  Ha!  Joke’s on you, cupcake lovers.  However, if you drive up the street a bit, to Farm Road, get thee to the 7-Eleven sign (just when you thought they weren’t going to build any more of them, one shows up almost on your front porch)...then scooch yourself to the left a few doors.  All your cupcake needs will be met, and no one will assault you with an extra apostrophe.  I can’t swear that the sugar and the cute kid faces (after school and on weekends, maybe) won’t give you that weird salivary gland pain though.  But, deal, okay?

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

late at night

Filthy, filthy earworms

I have dirty lyrics of Liz Phair’s cycling through my head.  “Rock...me...all...night” “I am looking good and I’m feeling nice.  Baby, you’re the best magazine advice. (ack!)” Clearly it’s time to rotate out the Liz Phair cd in the car.  It’s kind of funny that when we decided to listen to cds for a while, what got loaded up was the Parents’ Advisory Council’s listening nightmare - P!nk & Liz Phair.  I’m generally not a lyric listener, but both Pink & Liz Phair kind of force you to listen to their lyrics.  Which reminds me, Leigh-Ann found me the new P!nk album being leaked on MTV.  Yay!  I’m sure that the rest of you cool kids already knew about The Leak, but it’s new to me.