that rosebud girl

why me? why a snag?

just when i think things are going well, i hit a friggin’ snag.

so i checked on my earthlink dsl order today while i was online….and there was a message saying there was some sort of problem with my order. so i called customer service to see what the problem was and after being put on hold forever, the guy i spoke to said the technicians checked the line and we don’t live close enough to the central office. so why was i shown as being eligible for dsl in the first place??? i tried asking the guy that, but didn’t really get a straight answer, and he didn’t really sound like he knew what he was doing anyway. he tells me i might have other options, but in order to determine that, he has to transfer me to someone else. feeling rather annoyed and not wanting to get into a hissyfit at work, i let him transfer me to another person.

i’m talking to this other woman in sales and asking her what my other options are, and she says dsl is already active on the line. well, that’s news to me! because as far as i know, i don’t have dsl yet. i told her what the other guy told me (about the whole central office thing) and she was totally stumped. so i said i would wait a couple of business days and call back. my problem baffled everyone. and i don’t know what the hell else to do.

grrr….i am going batty now. why can’t anything go smoothly at our new house?????

the joy of dsl …

i’ve got a beautiful feeling….everything’s going my way….

(okay, so i absolutely hate the musical “Oklahoma.” but those lyrics — which i’m not even sure are correct — are exactly how i feel. but i digress.)

so why am i happy today? because i am finally able to get DSL. awwwwwyeeeeeeeah! no more stupid dial-up for me. after a couple of weeks of waiting, i can punch my high-speed internet ticket. i even ordered the equipment and asked for overnight shipping (despite the $40 cost) because i was so damn excited. i don’t care about the $40 bucks. i can handle that. $40 is worth the three years or so i’ve waited to get DSL. and i don’t even have to dump my earthlink account. awwwwwwwyeeeeeeeeah again.

now this might seem silly to some people. but i am a computer nerd. and it drives me nuts to wait around five minutes because my internet pages aren’t loading. and i was thisclose to calling comcast and opting for cable internet. but that’s not what i wanted. i wanted DSL — less hassle, in my opinion. i’m glad i checked it out when i came to work. my patience has paid off for once. (wow, i have patience. that is a minor miracle.)

the rest of my saturday has gone well. i had my first tap class today. i was surprised that i remembered all the basic stuff from my (short) three-week stint in tap class at USC. holy crap. but it was so much fun! i’m the dancer i never was when i was 12. it’s awesome having enough time and money to take all these classes — ballet, skating and tap. sweet. i get to do everything i wanted to do as a little kid. better late than never, you know? i didn’t want to be 30 and thinking to myself, “you know, maybe i should have taken all those dance lessons and things i wanted to do.” so i’m happy as a clam that i could do all this stuff (well, except the ice skating) at the YMCA for a relatively cheap price. i think i may take on a second ballet class since it’s right before tap. but we’ll see.

i am a dancer now. sort of. whee. i’m a wannabe rizza. ha.

i also got a call from the guy who runs the soccer league i coach in. he asked if i was interested in coaching older kids. hell yeah i was. so he asked if i wanted to coach a u-15 girls team. sweet. it’s like being a JV coach. well, maybe not. but close. he did say though, that they play on saturdays, and my tap class might interfere with that. but carter said he’d check on the schedule and if it jived with my sked, then he’d get me to coach. sweeeeeeet! i’ve always thought about coaching on the high school level. this is similar. though dealing with 13 and 14 year olds could get a little sketchy. and i’d really have to coach them. kinda scary. but i’ll see what happens with that. if i get to coach them, i’d be totally excited. i’d have to go look up some drills (or remember the ones i did in high school). cool.

and finally, we got chinese food at work (although the delivery guy took his sweet ass time). that deserves another awwwwwwwwyeeeeeeeeah.

settling in.

so things have finally settle down here a little bit….our electrician came on friday and saturday to change some outlets…so i can finally plug in everything that i own….hahaha. i’m going to have some other work done, but i’m going to wait a couple of weeks until i actually have money again. *sigh* i’m so, so broke. well, not really broke, but my financial picture is all out of whack. i need to sit down and figure some stuff out. *sigh* again. but at least i get to pick up some OT this week so that will help…and maybe i’ll be able to pick up even more OT again the following week…mmmm….cash….

some people have been bugging me about photos of my new house…i just haven’t had the time…i feel like i’m constantly working, even on my days off. i haven’t been able to chill out. there’s always something that needs to be done with the house. or i have to work. or i’m going to work out (thank goodness i’m getting back on the wagon again). at least i finally vacated the old place…so i don’t have to worry about that anymore. but now all the stuff is all over our new house. so i need to clean (still). and unpack. i think this will be a six-month process. holy crap.

a couple of days ago at work, jill sent out an email saying that we were having an intern from the u of kansas and she needed a place to live. so i offered our house up. the girl emailed me back a little while ago and sounded agreeable to it. that’s cool. she sounds nice. nothing’s finalized yet, but i hope she accepts so we can make some bucks. hahahaha. but it’ll be nice to have someone to hang out with. she’s working the night news desk so we have the same hours. interns are fun. i hope we get a bunch of cool Chips interns again too.

and now, back to work….and errands….wow, my life sort of sucks right now….

oh my god, a phone!

and a minor miracle has happened….

i finally have phone service. and it happened just as i was about to blow another gasket.

i had called verizon repair on tuesday, hoping to get yet another technician to come and check out the place. this technician was supposed to check the inside wiring because no one could figure out the stupid problem. but the lady told me they could only give me one of those stupid four-hour windows for when a technician could come. and i’m busy on wednesdays with skating and ballet. so i told her to make my window from 2 to 6 because i still had to go to work. so, fine.

i was woken by the sound of my doorbell at 9 a.m. this morning and it was another verizon technician dude. the sixth one — i kept count. so he moseys on to the back of the house, like the other billion verizon guys that have come before him. he catches me just before i’m supposed to leave for my skating lesson and tells me that the problem is somewhere between the house and the box out on the main road. so another guy is supposed to come in the afternoon to remedy that. fair enough.

but i came back in the afternoon around 3, a little late because we stayed around after ballet class to look at costumes for our june recital (yes, a recital. how crazy. i’m the ballerina i never was when i was 10. but i digress). so i raced home, hoping the verizon guy that was supposed to come for repair hadn’t come yet.

so i sat around and waited. i called verizon to check up on my order, and the technician hadn’t been dispatched. so i made myself a microwaveable pizza — the only thing i could find in the mess in the kitchen. i heard the neighbor’s dogs barking outside, so i peeked out and saw a verizon truck. my pizza was done, so i went to get it out of the microwave, and lo and behold — THE PHONE RANG! i thought it was the verizon guy testing the line. it turned out to be a solicitor from AT&T.

about 10 seconds later, my doorbell rings and it’s the verizon guy — not the repair guy i asked for yesterday, but the guy who the first technician told me was coming and the seventh technician nonetheless. and he says i should be hooked up. and i tell him i got a call literally 10 seconds before. i was totally happy. and i asked him what the problem was — it turned out to be squirrels chewing up cables and things. stupid squirrels.

so the last major hurdle has been cleared. now all i have to do is wait for the electrician. and clean the house. and put together more ikea furniture. but at least i can go on the internet at home. yay.

stupid lack of phone service …

the phone saga continues….

so i’ve lived five days in my new house. and i’ve gone five days without phone service. this totally sucks. i’m about ready to shoot someone. verizon is officially on my shit list. i’ve had five technicians come to the house and i still can’t get service. grrr! what the hell is going on???? my line is supposedly active. if you call my number you get our old voicemail. but i think we’ve figured out that the problem is outside. so now i’m going to have someone come by tomorrow and hopefully i will FINALLY HAVE PHONE SERVICE.

i am so pissed. and to make matters worse, i worked out today (yay), cleaned my old house somewhat (expended even more calories doing that), and i’ve had nothing to eat ALL FREAKIN’ DAY. i am starving. we put in an order for chinese at work, but i want to eat NOW. blah. i’m ready to eat my own arm. and i feel woozy. my stomach is unhappy.

on a brighter note, i bought tap shoes today. woohoo! i’m going to start taking tap class at the Brandywine Y next week….so excited….

where is my food?????

i hate moving.

moving this weekend started off so well….and then it went to hell so quickly…..

we moved a bunch of stuff on friday, which was the first official day we spent at the house. things started off well enough — verizon came early, best buy delivered our washer and dryer early (though i screwed up when i bought an electric dryer…our house had no plug for it….but our very cool electrician will take care of that), ikea delivered a boatload of furniture relatively early, and we were cruising along.

and then the snags began. directv never came — ed called later and then it turned out they couldn’t come. then, our phone service wasn’t working by 5 p.m. so we called verizon and someone came that night, but he couldn’t fix the problem. then, we tried to put our bed from ikea and ran into all sorts of problems putting it together. so we stopped, fixed the original problem, and then found out that i screwed up by not buying a center support beam for the bed! so we couldn’t actually sleep on the bed — we put the mattress on the floor and slept on it that way. so it was quite a crappy end to the day.

saturday started off even worse. the directv came in the morning, but about two hours late. then he told us we couldn’t get directv because we had too many trees blocking the satellite waves. so that sucked. elisa and matt came over and we moved all the big stuff….no broken bones, no falling down the stairs, no back issues. it was just tiring. and i didn’t realized we owned so much crap. but, we still didn’t have phone service — apparently, verizon still didn’t fix our damn phone issues. so between having no phone and no cable/satellite, that day was a real crapper too. ed and i were really pissed about the directv thing because we don’t have NFL sunday ticket anymore, we don’t have TiVo anymore, and we have all the equipment we spent a lot of money on and is now virtually useless. grrrr…..

after hemming and hawing over the loss of our beloved satellite, we gave in and got cable. at least comcast came and installed the same day when we called them on sunday morning. and our house started to look like a house, what with some of the unpacking done.

so now it’s monday and the house is still a mess. and ed left for spring training. so sad. i am all alone for six weeks. just me and the cats.

now i have to clean up the place by myself. and we still don’t have phone service. i can’t get on the internet, and that sucks. i have to look at the internet at work. and i can’t put up pictures, can’t really do anything with my computer because an electrician has to change all the old outlets in our house and he won’t come until friday. *sigh*

why did moving have to be a giant pain in the ass???

hopefully, things don’t get any worse….

it’s our house! really.

so the momentous occasion has happened…..

ed and i finally own a house.

no picture yet, though, because i forgot to bring my stupid SD card when i had my camera this morning. so i couldn’t take pictures of the house in its old untouched state. oh, well.

but everything went well this morning. i was groggy, but we got to our lawyer in time. settlement wasn’t painful (just money-draining — i’m so broke now). ed and i moved a few boxes and all the stuff we bought from lowe’s the other day and did some work. he put up some blinds and changed a doorknob. i painted one room (sort of — all the corners and crap have to be painted still).

but i am happy. ed is happy. this is a major step in our lives. *sniff, sniff* as ed put it when we walked out of the lawyers office…i feel like i just graduated….

yeah, i’ve graduated into adulthood. eeek!

houses … so expensive …

it’s been a busy and tiring last few days. not to mention expensive.

ed and i went to lowe’s yesterday to buy a whole bunch of stuff so we could fix up our new house. we spent like, three hours there. and i almost got hit by a bunch of falling boxes of blinds. damn. it was scary. i almost had a concussion. now that wouldn’t have been fun. we also went to best buy to order a washer and dryer. my car also spent all day in the shop for some repairs — like a whole new assembly for my front brakes. it’s nice to actually have brakes. and to not vibrate so much. but i dropped a few K’s of cash. yikes. so i’m broke and i nearly got whacked on the head by eight heavy boxes. what a day.

we also went to do a final inspection on the house in the morning (before all the other fiascos happened). it looks good. but in looking at it again, i realized how much work really needed to be done. wow. but in the end, it’ll look good and it’ll be our house. sweet.

we’re settling on our house tomorrow. hopefully everything will go smoothly. then we get to move crap and fix crap over the next four days. sheesh. i’m exhausted. i’ve worked seven days straight. i just want to get in this house already. and i want my finances, my schedule and my life to go back to a normal routine. *sigh* my life is a mess right now. i barely know what day it is anymore.

but oh, the house….i’m totally stoked….

one big life event down, one more to go…..

adventures in rainy philly.

so i went to philly today because i needed to go to an art store up there….getting there was kind of a bitch, though, because it was raining like crazy. i couldn’t really see. it sucked. but oh well.

then i got turned around when i got into the city and went in the wrong direction for almost 10 blocks or so trying to find South Street. that added another 30 minutes to my search. grrr…

but when i finally got to South, parking wasn’t actually a bitch. a minor miracle in philly. and the art store was awesome. i freakin’ love art stores. so much cool stuff. i picked up the photo albums i wanted and some paint on the cheap and in a large size that just isn’t available at Michaels. so i felt productive…

and after trudging half a block through the rain to my car…i saw a parking ticket on my windshield. grrrr. stupid parking cops. i guess it’s partly my fault for not having enough change to feed the meter. but still…that’s 26 bucks i could have used for something else! i hate parking cops…