Flippy - I Rant, You Read
Thursday, February 10, 2011
mid-afternoon
Idiot of the Day - thanks for the “help”, PayPal
Wrote to PayPal to get a question answered regarding an address typo. This was the “helpful” response. “I acknowledge your effort in taking time to contact us. Please do not worry because your issue will be resolved. To resolve your issue, you need to give us a call at 402-935-7733/1-888-221-1161 so we can quickly resolve your concern. Should you have other concerns please do not hesitate to send another email. Our aim is to satisfy all your needs and give you the best customer experience.”
Update - I responded to that PayPal email with, “Could you just answer my question?” I expected another canned unhelpful response, but to my surprise, a few days later, I received a phone call letting me know that my transposed address numbers had been corrected in my account. Yay! So, thanks for helping the second time around, PayPal. It was much appreciated, although it would’ve been easier (but not blog material), if someone would’ve read and answered my first email. However, I’m happy with the resolution, so I’ll hang on to that as my latest PayPal experience. You guys are still in the hole for the year, but maybe it can be fixed soon. I want to like you, really, I do.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
early evening
Cindy McCain, What (Who?) Are You Afraid Of?
Cindy McCain has been working with the NOH8 Campaign for at least a couple of years, I believe, but more importantly, a few days ago she made a video for the campaign that directly contradicted her husband’s current flip-floppy opinion (he was against, then for it, then against it) on the repeal of DADT. Cindy McCain is the one with the money in the family, she doesn’t need that bullying bastard to live a full and happy life. Anyway, Cindy’s quote from the video is: “Our political and religious leaders tell LGBT youth that they have no future,”, and then after some comments from other celebrities, she finishes with, “Our government treats the LGBT community like second class citizens—why shouldn’t they?” This makes it pretty darned obvious that she’s against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, huh? However, the very next day, Cindy tweeted, “I fully support the NOH8 campaign and all it stands for and am proud to be a part of it. But I stand by my husband’s stance on DADT.”
It’s clear that Cindy can’t believe both things, since they contradict each other. So, one would have to believe, in my opinion, that she went to all the trouble of filming the video because that is truly what she believes. Why would she backtrack? I mean, it makes her sound like an abused wife, who can only share her husband’s opinion. What does he have on her? Rumors are that they lead very separate lives, so why dioes she give a damn what he says? It’s just creepy that John McCain was appearing on Sunday morning talk shows telling people what Cindy believes. Why would she allow that? In my position right now, it’s really hard to feel sorry for a multi-millionaire heiress, but I do kind of feel sorry for Cindy McCain. She did was she felt was right, but has her opinion stomped on by the stupidity of her husband’s current opinion. She knows that he only has a problem with gays in the military because of his political office, because he used to be in favor of lifting DADT. So, she’s the honest one, yet she has to backtrack? It’s really a sad reflection on their marriage and on John McCain as a husband.
Sunday, November 07, 2010
late evening
Wow, Michelle Branch is Back
Geez, we saw her open for the Dixie Chicks when she was like 16, and she’s probably close to 30 now or something. Oh my, I was just joking, but she really is 27 now. Anyway, she’s finally released a new EP. I can’t recommend it highly yet, as I’ve just started listening to it with my free 25 listens on Rhapsody, but so far, so good. I’ve missed her, and I’m glad she’s back, even if she’s old now. I guess she was probably off living some sort of life while I was waiting for her to come back. Okay, not actively waiting, but passively. Two songs in now, I approve. Those of you with money, buy it and make Michelle feel loved.
I apologize for the “weaning week”, as I was very, very, very grumpy. It was a pretty terrible week, even without my (LOL!) “addiction”. I really did think that I’d lost all semblance of a sense of humor, except every so often, the lines from “Airplane” kept popping into my head. You know, “I picked a bad day to quit sniffing glue”, et al? It always made me chuckle a bit to myself, so I knew that beneath the stress of the dogs getting out, having to empty our stuff out of storage, the unexpected rain (hello, what the heck does ZERO PERCENT chance of rain mean to you, Pahrump???) on our stuff in our side yard, getting my period unexpectedly (look, I’m NOT going to have kids, I’m 46 and know this, so please tell my body to quit bleeding randomly), on top of the weaning was just, well, to put it midly, kinda crappy.
Hey, I really like this Michelle Branch EP. I would totally buy it if I had any money. I’m sorry, Michelle, I’ll try to make up for my free listening by asking other people to buy it. If you liked old Michelle, The Wreckers Michelle, you’ll like the new EP just as much, I would think. Especially you hardcore Buffy fans. I mean, what’s Willow/Tara without Michelle Branch? It certainly doesn’t make you want to cry as much, does it? No sirree, Bob.
This part of my blog entry is for those of you on pain meds. Last night I had the weirdest dream - I dreamt about an Asian guy (why Asian?) wearing a bright pink t-shirt, and he was using a blender to mix up something he was calling “Master Bind”. Kinda funny, no? Seriously, is it common to dream about side effects when you’re weaning off meds? I know people talk about brain zaps from weaning off anti-depressants, but I’ve never really been on anti-depressants, except to try them for pain relief. Cymbalta helps lots of people with Fibromyalgia - it didn’t help me at all. I took it for a month, then quit cold turkey. When you’re able to quit lots of things cold turkey without weaning, you get kind of cocky. “Hey, I’m superhuman, I can quit any med and not feel a thing.” Well, silly me, I just kinda sorta expected a pain mgt doctor and his fee and the cost of the meds to appear out of thin air, so I didn’t plan my wean too well. Since my dosage is none of your business (actually, I’ll tell anyone who asks and cares, but not those people who thought they saved my life by trying to get me stop taking my pain meds…I didn’t stop then, and I wouldn’t have stopped now, if I could’ve afforded the very pricey first doctor’s fee plus the meds), let’s just leave it at, I develop a tolerance for meds very easily, so my dosage was fairly high. On the bright side, it also usually means that I don’t suffer from the same side effects that other people do, like being able to quit Cymbalta cold turkey without even noticing. Now, what was I talking about again? Oh yeah, not planning my wean. I did great going from Oxycodone to Methadone, but Methadone’s half-life is a pretty crappy thing when you want to just be done with it. I’d never had any problems going back and forth and adjusting my dose on the fly, but quitting altogether was another thing apparently. Instead of doing it in itty bitty increments (like Leigh-Ann would have told me to do if I’d maybe consulted her - I admit it, she’s smarter than I am), I thought it would be as easy as dropping from, let’s just pick an outrageous number for the looky-loos (you know who you are…and so do I, with your repeated IPs) and say that my Oxycodone dose was 1000mg/day. It wasn’t, but it’s a nice round number that means nothing to people who don’t take pain meds. Anyway, let’s say it was 1000mg. So, I effectively went from 1000mg of Oxycodone plus 60 mg of Methadone to just 60mg of Methadone, then after a week, I went to 30mg, then 10mg, then nothing. That was dumb. Don’t do that with Methadone, unless you have enough to spare in case you start feeling really lousy. I thought it was super easy to drop my Oxycodone completely, and it was, it really was, and even though it wasn’t 1000mg, it also wasn’t like, uh, say 30mg. I still had pain, so I was huffing Advil, but that’s besides the point. Droppng the Oxycodone was nothing at all. I didn’t even notice it. No half-life, or very little if there is any. I’d never previously had any reason to really comprehend half-lives, but now they’re very very clear to me. Heh. Anyway, the FM pain sucks, but hey, now I’m a cheap Oxycodone date. Those of you “worried” about my “drug addiction”, no need to fear anything, my intention is to get back on my meds as soon as I can afford it. Now that I’m past the worst of the side effects (blech, upset stomach), I can honestly and sincerely STILL say that I need pain meds. It’ll be a little cheaper for a while, until my tolerance does what it does, I’m sure.
Second listen to the Michelle Branch EP. I really like it. See, isn’t it nice when everything comes back full circle?
Monday, May 17, 2010
late afternoon
The Move Is On
Well, it looks like Freddie Mac doesn’t want to sell our house back to us at fair market value. They’ve even gone so far as to take it off the market. So, we’re now looking at homes in Pahrump, NV. It’s a smallish town about 90 minutes outside of Vegas, where most houses have an acre or more of land, and where the only big shopping to be done is at the grocery store (they have two chain stores), Wal-Mart, or Lowe’s. Oh yeah, and they have a pet/feed/gun store, where we can get some of our pet food, and our, uh, weapons, I guess. We’re hoping this works out, because Freddie Mac’s representatives are very unpleasant to deal with. We’re being evicted for not paying rent…so they’re returning the rent that we last paid. Yeah, sure, that makes sense. They say that we didn’t cooperate with the agents trying to sell our house, yet we let them in every time they knocked at OUR door. They said that we didn’t cooperate because either someone went to the wrong house or they were just setting us up for eviction because it’s easier to “show” a house that’s vacant. When you have dogs that yap at every sound someone makes in front of your house, you KNOW when someone supposedly spent 30 minutes knocking on your door. The dogs would’ve told us, plus WE WERE SITTING HERE WAITING FOR THEM! We cleaned up for them and everything. We wouldn’t have done that and then sat still for 90 minutes to see if the person was going to show up, if we were going to cancel. When we wanted to change one date, we asked. Once. We agreed to every other date. Funny though, they don’t want to sell the house to us. They’d rather it sat vacant, without even renters, than sell it to us. Why on earth would they take it off the market, if they wanted to sell it? It’s all so very, very weird. So, we’ll go buy a cheaper house that’s newer and has more land, and more opportunity to rescue animals. I hear there’s a family in Pahrump that takes their goat with them wherever they go. I like goats. 
Monday, February 08, 2010
early evening
Daily Rituals
Aw, isn’t it sweet, someone checks my blog almost every single morning around 8 am. Nothing says “time to wake up” like a cup of coffee and a dose of Flippy. Keep checking, I still have some blog entries in mind for you. In the meantime, why don’t you get started reading here and see if you can find yourself. For those of you who are less obsessive about me, you should check out the link, too, but only for pure entertainment value.
