Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
I've been terribly apathetic about my blog lately. I think it's pretty much run its course. It's time to move on. I'm ready for something different, something new. I'm closing the place down. All the content will remain until my advertising obligations are complete, but no new posts will be published. All comments are disabled.
Thank you for laughing and crying and sharing with me. Thank you for reading.
From The Bunny's Friday morning Sopranos buy…
DVD
19.96
DVD
19.96
DVD
19.96
DVD
29.96
DVD SPRNO 5
29.96
DVD SOPR 6.1
29.96
GIANT MONKEY
19.97
I'm not sure there's ever been a cooler store receipt.
So I got home from work yesterday to find a small pile of mail waiting for me on my desk. Three letters. I opened the first, a credit card offer from Bank of America. Shredder. I opened the second, more credit card checks from Chase Manhattan (or are they just "Chase" now?). Shredder. I looked at the third. Hm. Something from a PO Box in Marshfield. Something from the local hospital?
No, but close. It was a letter from a fucking collection agent. Ain't that a bitch?
Probably at our wedding, and probably from my niece Typhoid Melissa, I contracted strep throat at the end of May. Strep doesn't just go away on its own, so off to the doctor I went. Apparently what I was suffering may not have been strep throat. The culture came back negative, but the doctor said that the quick, cheap test they do is only around 90% accurate. She treated me as if it was strep and the problem went away, so… probably strep. It sure felt like strep anyway.
I certainly wasn't expecting to get sick, so I didn't have any money available to pay that hospital bill immediately. My clinic visit was in early June and the bill arrived in my mail box in late June. I didn't have any money to start paying them until late July.
My total bill? $173.18. I sent them $50 at the end of July, then again at the end of August, then again at the end of September. I mailed my final payment of $23.18 on October 31st.
The hospital turned me over to a collection agent on November 2nd. Bastards!
Ok, here are the problems I have with this:
I was paying them regularly. $50 a month on a less-than-$200 bill is pretty good, I think.
They never warned me they were going to place the bill with a collection agent. I know they're not required to do that, but doesn't everybody do that anyway?
It's $23.18. Twenty-fucking-three dollars and eighteen fucking cents. Isn't it going to cost them more in processing fees than they'll recover from the agent?
I fucking paid it! I don't owe them shit!
Cum-guzzling whores! Now I have to write a letter to the collection agent disputing the validity of the debt. Of course it must be in writing because phone calls just don't count.
The Bunny tells me none of this would have happened if I'd called the hospital and established a formal payment plan. But I never figured that really necessary. All one would need to do is look at the account history to see I'm paying more than 25% of the debt every month. Apparently, this is not good enough. One needs to specifically tell them "You see what I'm doing there? Yeah, that's what I'm doing."
Assholes. As if I needed one more reason to bitch about health care.
I got my first Christmas present of the year last night. Little early? Yeah. But some people are really impatient. (Like me.)
The Bunny and The Chicken went shopping yesterday and Chicken found something he decided I absolutely had to have. He was all set to save it for Christmas. That lasted about 30 minutes. He was SO excited to get my reaction and for me to start enjoying it right now.
So, with a touch of ceremony in taking it out of the bag (Clark W. Griswold would have asked for a drumroll, but that's just not how we roll), it was revealed to be a snow globe. A snow globe? He thought I'd like this? Then I saw what was in the globe.
Aw! How cute. He knows I loves me some penguins, and the parent and child image is so sweet. That is a pretty good gift. Unlike what my Sister gave me for my birthday.
It's not a bad gift. Not at all. Really, is there any such thing as a bad gift? My point is that those books are a gift designed to yank my chain. It's the kind of gift that really hits on "the joy of giving," and she certainly did enjoy giving them. The little shit.
And since the subject has been broached… yes, I like Hannah Montana. The tv show can be retarded, but I think she's as cute as a button (and Emily Osment is even cuter). Plus, the music is actually pretty good. As soon as you're done judging me over this, you should give it a listen.
Where I live in my remote little city is just a few blocks north of our "historic" downtown. I know it's historic because the signs tell me so. In any case, just north of downtown. I like our house and I like our neighborhood. But it's possibly the least cool place in the entire world.
Living on the south side sounds tough. You have South Central Los Angeles, Chicago's Southside, South Boston, South Detroit, etc., etc. The south side might not always be so desirable as Miami's South Beach, but it always sounds cool.
West and east sides are like opposite sides of the same coin. I can't help but think of California cool, New York hip, Tupac and Biggie-style rap wars. Both coasts are generally cool and that feeling carries over to describing parts of any given city.
And then you have the north side.
…
I cannot think of anything cool or tough or hip or edgy to say about the north side of anything. You don't hear about the jumping club scene in North Shore, or in my neighborhood. No, the north side is where dentists live, and keep office hours Monday through Friday.
Them's my peeps, yo.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the quality of bathroom stall graffiti has really declined in recent years. An example from the men's room at my local Wal-Mart:
Your a fag!
No, YOUR a fag!
You're both retarded. It's YOU'RE. Fags.
Yesterday was… uh… a day. There was cool stuff and crap stuff. I'll leave it to you to sort which is which.
The Chicken had his first day of 2nd grade. We were up out of bed early and off to the bus stop. Chicken was mostly excited about school, but I'm definitely not excited about getting up earlier again.
A little over an hour later I was leaning against the car and having a cigarette before work. An old woman asked me for directions and I was so lost in thought I could not remember my own address, either street name or house number. She went on her way before I had a chance to forget in which city I live.
About an hour after that I was at work when the hard drive in my workstation spun its last. Big pile of suck. There's nothing like a key piece of hardware breaking to stop you dead in your tracks. If only I knew someone who could fix it. Oh, wait… that's me. So, yeah. Spent most of the day getting my own workstation up and running again. The process will continue today.
Did you know we have a rental property? Yup, I am an evil scum-sucking slumlord. I would not suck so much scum, nor would I do it so evilly, if our tenants weren't so goddamn frustrating. However, after yesterday my frustration is not quite so intense. Some loan officer of some sort called me at work for a reference. Apparently our tenants are trying to get credit for something or other. The woman on the phone wanted to know about their payment history. It was wonderfully and maliciously fun to be able to truthfully tell her that my tenants are not current on their rent and haven't paid anything on time for years.
Lists are fun!
Yeah, so… little of this, little of that. I still haven't quite decided if yesterday was good, bad or "other."
If you're anything at all like me, you're constantly prowling the internet looking for examples of other people being really, really stupid. Stupid people make me feel good about myself. Miss Teen South Carolina makes me feel so good, I'm like Superman on heroin.
I feel like now I need to celebrate or something. Public assery like that comes along less often than holidays.
Props (and love and sloppy kisses) to Bunny for encouraging me to look for this.
My house is apparently a nexus of death today.
There's a squirrel squashed in the street in front of my house.
The Bunny ran over a toad (or maybe it's a frog, I don't know) in the driveway.
My neighbor killed a chipmunk in his garden with a rat trap.
Some of my neighbors across the street have a fluffy white cat that was clipped crossing the street. (S)he limped the rest of the way across and died laying next to my porch.
If any of you should ever visit me, I might make you sign a liability waver. I'm no longer convinced I can guarantee your safety.
It's مجلة الفاتح, the Hamas for kids website! Ok, actually… don't look. It's completely boring.
Several times before I'd heard about how the editors of this website (intended for elementary school children) will occasionally publish something truly bizarre, like fawning write ups of missile attacks or flowery praise for those young people who blow themselves up in Israel.
For a few weeks I've had a draft post sitting around with little more than a link to that website. Every couple of days I'd check the site to eyeball a little more content in my quest for freaky. This quest was seriously hampered right from the start by two things. First, I don't know how to read Arabic, and second, the damn website barely works. No freaky for me.
But I'm not letting that stop me. I'm posting the link anyway, because Arabic text looks really cool.