Another gray day. No depressing movie for tonight, just a depressing baseball game. Red Sox are playing the Yankees and coming into the game tied for first place in the division and the Yankees scored 5 in the first and so far 2 in the 8th making 7 to 1. The Sox are bringing in another pitcher and I’m turning it off.
Purchased Today: $13.50
Money spent since 03/03/03: $222.48
Started up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 93
Went out to grocery shop – top up. Went out for an evening drive – top up. After supper Donna wanted to go get an ice cream cone. Last Sunday when we headed into downtown Aiken, it was looking like a ghost town, but the ice cream shop was open. Tonight that’s where we went and we were an hour too late, they were closed. We took the umbrella and strolled through the empty streets and looked in shop windows. On the drive home the skies opened up, man we are glad we have a garage.
It will be amazing if I can get out of bed tomorrow, it is so depressing here now. The on and off rain that started Thursday is slated to continue until at least that day this week. Today was the third day in a row for a downer of a movie, White Oleander was on tap for this evening. I’ve got to go move a couple comedies up to the top of my Netflix rental queue.
Purchased Today: Nitso
Money spent since 03/03/03: $208.98
Started up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 93
Still no mug from Cafe Press. No Thumb Drive from Wolverine. both supposedly shipped from California via the USPS. Next time I order I’ll pay extra to go UPS, this way even if it takes a long time at least I can follow along.
Managed one little trip out in the car today. Minor running around errands. The top stayed up because of the off and on rain all day. Worked out that the lull we went out in lasted for the duration, so we could have had the top down, sigh. The thunder is rumbling right now, the radio station I am listening to has had a few weird pauses and I’ve been booted off line a couple of times in the last half hour. The signs are there, I shouldn’t even have the PC on, but the blogging must go on.
Never did watch Last Man Standing, but instead watched Reign of Fire. I like sci-fi, I like dragon movies, but this sucker shoulda never been made. All through it, I couldn’t but think that the millions spent to make this movie would have been better used to feed a mid-sized African nation for a week. I’ve never seen Battlefield Earth in it’s entirety, just a few snippets on the cable, everyone said that movie was so dark it stank, well this thing makes BE look like the Music Man. Just a couple of days ago I was on a good movie roll, seems to have gone 180 on me…
Purchased Today: zilch
Money spent since 03/03/03: $208.98
Started up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 93
According to Yahoo Maps it is 2825.7 miles with an approximate travel time of 43 hours and 28 mins. If that is true why has the mug I ordered from CafePress not arrived yet. They say it was shipped on 5/9 at 8:40 in the morning. That is about 97 1/2 hours ago. Had I known it would have taken this long I would have driven out to get it and I would be back by now with my mug.
I went shopping for my new USB Thumb Drive on the net. I started with the Lockergnome version of a price grabber search and then tried yahoo shopping. At Yahoo I found a good deal on a 128MEG Apacer drive with a neato docking station/extension cord thingie for $49 from here. I placed my order using the info in my Yahoo Wallet and within moments received a confirmation email. So far, so good.
Later that night I got an email informing me that for security reasons they won’t ship to a different address than my billing address. I am informed, in a way that lead me to believe that English was not the author’s original language, that I need to fill out the attached form and fax it back to them. The them in question is a outfit called SuperMediaStore.com not the dvd-rw media .com I thought I bought from. The return email address is supermediastore_annie@linkyo.com, so I type in www.linkyo.com into the address bar of IE and I get a generic “we haven’t been built yet” page from yahoo/Geocities hosting. Now things are not so good, the warm and fuzzy I felt on originally ordering is all but gone, but being a red-blooded American consumer, the low price offered kept me in the game. It was too late to call the phone number in the email, even with the West Coast time difference, so I figured I’d wait until I get to work in the morning and fax the authorization in.
This morning I checked my email before heading off to work and I discovered an email from DVD-RWMedia.Com AKA Selvi@linkyo.com promising me a free pen drive if I bought a 25 pack of DVD-RW discs. Jeez, spammed already, I don’t remember any place to opt in or out of email offers during the checkout process from these folks.
Still intent to go through with the purchase, I went down to the fax machine and loaded up my form. After several rings, I could here the announcement in the background, “The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again.” I check the number on the paper against the number I dialed and they match. Well, that was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, I’ve got to find another place to get my drive from.
When I tried to call the number that was listed on the web page for canceling, I got the same “no longer in service” message that I got when faxing. Then I went to Annie’s email and below her name was an 888 number and a different fax number (it probably works.) After listening to the 8 branches of voice mail tree I selected Customer Service and was connected to probably the same person who would have answered any of the selections. Judging by the voice, it was probably Annie Ang, author of the email. After seeing that the order was on hold in her system, she told me, “No problem, I’ll cancel it.”
There was a place that was close to getting my business yesterday, so I hunted them up in the history file and went back. Ordered a 128 MEG drive from a place called Wolverine Data. No fancy docking station, but it does come with a couple of different color covers so I can match it to my wardrobe or mood. 🙂 Like yesterday, I got an almost instant confirmation email. So far, so good.
Today I got an email telling me the drive had shipped.
I’ve always had a short lived loud lifter clatter when ever it was time to change the oil or the level got kinda low. But the last few mornings I’ve gotten a very quiet little tick that sometimes takes several miles to go away. Hmmm, wonder what this means?
We watched Igby Goes Down this evening and now I seem to back on a hot streak of picking good movies again from Netflix. Tadpole, Playing Mona Lisa and The Business of Strangers to name a couple of others worth looking for at Blockbuster when whenever you find the shelf with the latest new mainstream Hollywood offering is empty.
Purchased Today: zip
Money spent since 03/03/03: $208.98
Started down, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 88