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    Thursday, November 29, 2007

    It's The Happy Killing Time Boys & Girls!

    So...

    Um...

    Yeah.

    *clears throat*

    Today really sucked.

    It all started when I woke up.

    Well duh!

    Anyway...

    I meant to wake up at, like, oh, let's call it, morning. Instead, I didn't get out of bed and mobile until about 1pm.

    My mom needed me to drive her all over town to get medical records for her and the kids so we could turn them in to the insurance company of the other (at-fault) person involved in the accident. We got out of her house about 2:30pm, mostly due to my sleeping too late, and partially due to my mother's bizarre need to not get up & dressed until everyone else is there and waiting for her.

    No, I really have no clue why she does this, but it's a constant.

    The car's been having trouble starting, was burning antifreeze, smoking a bit, had the battery light on, and we've been planning to take it to a mechanic as soon as we had a moment.

    Yeah, like that was going to happen.

    With much griping, cursing, and a generalized, yet heaping dose of angst for everyone in the car, we managed to get most of the records. Some had mistakingly not been prepared, so there is some scanning, transferring, faxing, and mailing that will need to occur for her to finally get all of her things in order. I need to get Ladybug to a chiropractor to take a look at why her leg is hitching and locking since the accident so that we can get that covered too if it is going to be a continuing issue for her. My mother was about to leap out of the vehicle because she was so angry, and I was nearing readiness to drive into a tree.

    Nobody had eaten by that point, but that was about to change.

    Despite our high expectations, eating did not change the day for the better.

    We went to Shoney's on Battlefield road and National avenue for their dinner "Backyard Barbecue" buffet. The food was pretty good, but the chocolate pudding had chunks of pumpkin pie in it, because someone had caused a spill at some point, and it hadn't been cleaned up. There were moldy grapes in with the good ones, and the sliced kiwi was slightly overripe. Now I don't usually complain about stuff in a restaurant, but this was, at the very least, something that needed to be brought up to the wait-staff so that it could get fixed. Being the type of person to help out whenever I can, I let them know discreetly.

    Then I had to let them know about the fact that the pork steaks were pink in the middle, and I was seeing pantry moths all over the place. I even killed one and presented them with the corpse to prove it, nestled close to a spoon which held an artfully molded and rotting grape. It's not my fault that when I went up to the buffet, I had to pick up two plates and set them to the side before I found a third, and finally clean one that I felt safe putting my food on. After all of that, they sent out the employees to temperature check all of the food with a special thermometer, and they watched the bar like hawks, swooping in to rectify any little mistake or spill.

    Methinks they thought I was an inspector or some such.

    Not that I got anything out of it though. Not a 'thank you for telling us', not a 'we're sorry', not a discount off our meals, nothin'. After all that, a decent place would have thanked the customer profusely for noticing the flaws, and given them their meal for free, but not this place, not Shoney's. I should have told them that the cherry tomatoes and honeydew wedges were over-ripe or going bad as well, but I didn't bother.

    Maybe some other customer will complain about that. I can only hope...

    While we were eating, Keeb got a call on his mobile from the hospital. They said he'd left his wallet. Good thing they'd had him write his number on that information release form. We planned to go pick it up right after mom went to look at her possible new car.

    Onward to the car dealership so my mother could look at the car she thought she might want. Upon coming close to the used car area of the dealership, our poor car Eeyore just died, right there in the driveway. Was it all finally too much, or was it that he didn't like being in a car lot, and decided to protest? The world may never know, but he was good and deadski. Luckily for us, the potential new car also had a dead battery, so they needed to bring the jumper box out anyway. They were happy to give us a jump start. The new car was beautiful, fabulous, more than she had ever wanted in a car, and she looked good in it. She said it felt like home. Meanwhile, my little junkbucket was idling it's little gas tank out, waiting for her to seal the deal.

    She hasn't received all of the payments from the insurance companies yet.

    But after the short test drive, she did manage to get them to hold the car until Monday, when she plans to talk to the fellow at the other insurance company. Then Eeyore died again.

    Battery kaput.

    We cleaned the terminals as best we could, and we got him jumped again, whereupon we drove to the horrid big box store to get some fuzes we desperately needed.

    Oh, I forgot to mention that we didn't have breakfast because the fuse that serves the wall where both the stove and the refrigerator reside blew, and so all of the perishables were slowly dying.

    Whoops, silly me.

    After much lurching and complaining on the 1/4 mile drive to the store, we pulled into a parking space intending to let the car run while Keeb ran in for the one vital purchase of the evening. Eeyore turned himself off again, just as we pulled in to a space. So we went shopping like we had planned to do before he died. Might as well, right?

    Of course, this is my mother, in a large store...

    Over an hour later, Keeb had managed to wrangle a person from the auto shop to test the battery and try to jump the car. No deal, so we ended up buying a new one just to get us home (a battery, not a car). Lucky us, we met some good friends at the store, who we have been missing terribly these past few weeks, and we managed to fit in a good chat. It didn't hurt the mood of the day at all that she offered to give us a ride home if we couldn't start the car either.

    Man, I'd be truly lost without my friends, and random encounters. Roll me another 20-sider deity!

    But the car started *insert holy choir here* and we got home. Keeb replaced the fuse, and now the wall works. The kids cleaned the eew-food out of the fridge and it's now all outside in the bin where it belongs. The morrow brings an adventure in auto-repair, involving an actual professional in a shoppe with hourly labor fees, a return to the hospital to rescue Keeb's poor ailing wallet, and a trip to the copy place to make a few hundred last-minute business cards before the party on Saturday.

    I'm in a mood.

    Can ya tell?

    Update: Tried to look at the disc of x-rays we got from the hospital as a more personal version of an anatomy lesson, and burn a CD of the pictures of the injuries from the crash for the fellow at the other insurance company, but my I-paid-extra-cash-for-an-upgrade-on-the-most-expensive-thing-I've-ever-purchased-that-arrived-broken-so-I-had to-send-the-whole-computer-away-for-two-weeks-to-get-a-new-one-installed DVD/RWCDs! Seems the "new" part they ordered (new?) and installed was malfunctioning worse that the one they replaced (which worked great, but was literally falling apart). I didn't really check the drive a lot when the computer returned to me like I should have, because I was just so flaming overjoyed to finally have my computer back, and now the measly 6month warranty is probably over, or would be half-way through them waiting for the part to arrive. (see here, here, here, and here in order, for the previous saga of laptop computer repair.)

    To get it repaired again, I will have to send it back again. That includes removing all of my data from the hard drive again, and with no CD writer, that's impossible. So I'm either forced to risk all of my valuable data, or I'm stuck with a bad machine.

    Whatever happened to quality testing these things before you send them out to the public?
    Know how much the part costs if I want to replace it myself? About $200. *growl*

    I am SO not amused.

    I am a participant in NaBloPoMo.

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    1 comment:

    Todd said...

    SO sorry to hear you had such a badc day :-(