Category: pet peeves

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TUESDAY Rounderp

(Due to the long Labor Day weekend, Monday’s Rounderp has been rescheduled to today.)

Hey there, kats and kittens! Did you notice that I skipped out on Thursday’s and Friday’s posts last week? You see, Thursday was supposed to be a progress report on how far I’d come with the race team’s hero card, and I simply hadn’t gotten very far. Trying to determine the appropriate size turned out to take far longer than I’d expected, as it turns out there isn’t really a “standard” holder available for these things. Well, Pit Pal makes a telescoping hero card stand, but at a price that will make you choke. An image search for other team’s stands turned up a whole lot of custom-built jobbies. That’s the problem with racers: they can’t stop hot-rodding stuff. 🙂 Anyway, I’d wanted to finish the web site before working on the hero cards, but that’s been held up because trying to get content from these guys is like pulling teeth. However, I discovered over the weekend that one of the drivers has been giving out the web address (which once pointed to a half-built site filled with misinformation and FPO photos, posted only for my own testing purposes and since taken down). I’ve asked repeatedly for content, so aside from physically standing over a team member while watching him gather files and info for me, I’m at a loss as to how to move forward with that project. All I can do for now is put up some lame home page, which roughly outlines what should be there, someday. Heck, I was putting the site together as a favor to them, so if they let the domain registry expire without ever posting a thing, it’s not really my problem.

Does it look hot? Because it’s about 104° out. Give or take 1,000 degrees.

Speaking of the weekend, and the race team: it was another race weekend, this time in Kearney, Nebraska. It appeared to be a charming and fairly vibrant town, but the race track is never in town. Surrounded by corn and soybean fields, sizzling under oppressive heat during the days, and our nights punctuated by the continual passing of freight trains. The guys got in a few good passes and impressed the crowd. While I do love watching them make a pass, I am so tired of the long drives, the heat, the bugs, and the stench of Portalets. I’ll go to the last race this season, but I think that may be it for me. The bloom is well off the rose.

After years of glowing reviews from friends and family members, I made an impulse purchase and bought myself a (refurbished, therefore half price) Dyson vacuum to replace the Phantom which has been sitting in a non-functioning state* since mid July. Now, while I realize that’s a whole lot of weeks to be collecting dust and cat fur, I am certain that the first pass with the Dyson pulled up stuff from the last decade. I am both impressed, and grossed out.

Here’s where I’ll try to take us this week:

WEDNESDAY – Summer is quickly fleeting, and I’ve made exactly 0 batches of ice cream. I’ll remedy that with…baklava ice cream! That sounds good, right? I sure think so!

THURSDAY – I got a new (to me) bike last week! Woo! Read all about it, and my related glee!

FRIDAY – Fiiiine, we’ll take a look at how much I can cobble together for this race team web site that I was once so excited about, before I realized that I was the only one who cared.

_______________________

*The Phantom ingested its belt. I have a replacement belt, but the boyfriend, who promised that he’d help me remove the pieces of the old one and replace it, has been slacking in his extramural helping-out duties. Note: the dishwasher that has been sitting in my back yard for over a year. Could I have politely left out this footnote? Yes, but while I’m tickled by the favors being offered in the first place, my disappointment and frustration at the lack of follow through is growing exponentially. It is a surface sign of deeper problems that are no longer going ignored. I know I don’t usually blog about this stuff, please pardon my inappropriate venting.

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Un. Buh. Lievable.

Perhaps you read my post a few weeks back wherein my health insurance provider intended to DOUBLE my monthly premium because of a serious and chronic condition…which I don’t have. And the only way that I could get my premium adjusted back down was to have my medical records, and a letter from my doctor, sent to the underwriters for their review. No promises, of course. But they’d review it. Again. Of course, it was their initial review that had determined that I have a serious and chronic condition in the first place.

Because they are, apparently, morons.

Hopefully, you’ve never had to get a copy of your medical records. They’re yours, and yours for the asking, but in this day and age of HMOs and PPOs and feedlot-style health care providers, you have to find just the right department and pay a small processing fee in order to get them. To obtain a letter written by your doctor should be easier, if he or she has the time, but in my case the doctor in question is a colleague of my usual GP, who was on vacation the day of my visit, and so I was bounced around from office to office until someone figured out who needed to write exactly what on my behalf and then where to send it.

By the time I made all of the phone calls and got all of the paperwork, I’d also applied and been approved for health insurance from a different company. Yay!

Today, I called my “old” provider and requested that my insurance be cancelled, effective immediately. When asked why, I explained that I didn’t like having to jump through all of these hoops to prove that I didn’t have the chronic condition they were accusing me of. The rep apologized, and then informed me that I can’t cancel over the phone. I have to fill out a form. A-ha! More hoops! To speed things up, he can email me the form. Well, that’s a relief! Also, I confirmed that I can return the form via email as well, although the rep seemed astonished that not only do I not personally have a fax machine, but I also haven’t worked in any office with a fax machine in a number of years. Because this isn’t 2001.

A couple of hours later, I received the email. It contained not the form in question, but an attached HTML document which I was instructed to download and open. I did, and was directed to a secure Web page that required me to create a password- and secret-phrase-protected account which I then had to sign in to in order to get to the page where I could finally download the Disenrollment Form. The Disenrollment (is that even a word?) Form which contains precisely zero personal information. Not an address, not a member number. Not even my name. And therefore, requires precisely zero security.

It’s as though they’re BEGGING me to leave.

 

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Why am I up?

Why am I up?

Because I’m sick with a cold, and occasionally awaken because my nose is running or my breathing is labored or I’m coughing. Or any combination/all three.

Because one of my smoke detectors has a sporadic low battery chirp, but I can’t tell which one without getting out of bed and standing in the stairwell, by which point I may as well get the spare batteries and a ladder and change the damn things, but then I’d be AWAKE. The chirp inexplicably stops during daylight hours. This has been going on for three nights.*

Because I’ve never been able to find the switch that turns off my brain, and its chatter is deafening.

Because the ghrey kitteh thinks that my sole purpose is to provide a lumpy surface upon which she may sleep. And she is kind of heavy.

*Since I’m fully awake anyway, I finally did this. Turns out the batteries in the chirping smoke detector test at full strength, so I put them back in. The chirping has stopped, for now.