How Icy Is It?

You have to get in the car and drive to the mail box. That icy.

Buh-bye, AT&T

So I made the switch to Vonage. No self-combusting phone yet, no irritating background noise. But as At&T was not my local carrier, but my long-distance, I had to terminate them separately. With glee.

But, apparently, not with ease. After the ritualistic entering of my phone number, I was only asked twice by different operators during the course of my 25-minute call to cancel service what my phone number was. I was transferred to a nice Indian Gentleman who was in the Internet group of AT&T, but because I’m lazy and don’t want to hassle all my pals that I’ve change my e-mail, I’m (temporarily) keeping my AT&T Internet. No, I wanted to cancel long distance service. Well, not his department, so he had to transfer me…hold….hold….hold….F>U> or whatever you call that really loud two-note insult the phone company blurts into your ear when you’re transferred between continents on their customer [dis]service line. Finally get a nice Young Woman who decides that cancelling my long-distance service is not akin to obtaining the cure to cancer. But close. It takes 15 minutes to get her to understand I no longer want her service, which she finally wraps up by confirming that At&T has shut off long-distance service for phone number 617-XXX-XXXX — which is fine, except that’s a phone number I had six years ago when I lived in another city. Aha, she’d only asked for my present 978-XXX-XXXX phone number once, you see, so of course she’d be confused.

Mohan Sawhney put this horrid mish-mash of conglomerated companies much better than me in his CIO column from a few years back.

But, oh, that wasn’t the end. This week I got a letter from At&T telling me that my long-distance service “might not have been discontinued” if I, in fact, switched to another long-distance carrier. In which case my local phone service would be the only one that could cancel my At&T long-distance service.

Wonder how quickly they’ll figure out who I am when I discontinue to pay their bills?

Where I’ve Been

Working. Jeesh. But a nice gig at a very pleasant place. After the last nightmare, this is pure bliss. Check it out: helium.com.

Oh, and check out their Demo demo.

One Renaissance Guy

So I’m brain-dead watching TV in my mother’s apartment (see below) clicking through endless, empty channels when I get caught short: There’s Anthony Weller touting his new book (First Into Nagasaki).  We only know Mr. Weller from his fantastic guitar playing (Guitar of the Americas is a wonderful album we never tire of listening to) — didn’t know he was a writer too.

ohmygod

I haven’t posted anything in 2007? Shame on me.

And, to use my 17-year-old niece’s favorite expression, ohmygod. I once wondered aloud if she’d be able to vocally express herself at all if ohmygod was surgically removed from her vocabulary. Visualize immense brown eyes rolling skyward, accompanied by a slack-mouthed head shake, and you pretty much get her response.

I’m back in NYC. Mom hit the Help, I’ve Fallen Button on Saturday night. She had a cough. Admittedly, a bad one. At least my brother got to share the 17-hour emergency room wait (funny, you don’t get short-listed for a cough in a NYC hospital on a Saturday night).  Extra, extra careful doctors decided to keep her for observation for the next 48 hours (after her heartrate soared after she was given an inhaler known for making one’s heartrate soar).  So it was my turn to hang out in the hospital for the next 2 days with her.

Can anyone tell me what the uniforms in a hospital mean? Some people wear purple, some wear white, some wear green, some wear flowery things. I ask the nearest human for some sort of help for my mother and I get met with, well, see 17-year-old niece’s reaction above. Tho I must say the nurse Jon, who worked (and I mean worked) 12-hour shifts, the waves of doctors (all from the geriatric specialty office where Mom’s a patient), and mostly everyone was very kind and pretty helpful. If anyone needs help with navigating the New York University-Presbyterian-Cornel-Weil-Whatever Its Name Really Is Hospital, let me know. Best tip: a fabulous new Indian take-out on East 68th called Tawaa or Tawara or something like that. Near the hospital.

Mom’s home now, resting quietly in her bedroom with the radio loud enough to entertain neighbors three floors away. We’re just waiting for the pharmacy, one of the most expensive on earth, to deliver medicine ordered a mere 24 hours ago.

Ohmygod.

What a Year

On just about this day last year, I was suddenly introduced to the searing pain of a slipped/ruptured disc — youch. I spent the next seven hours becoming intimately acquainted with the rug in the living room before I could crawl into the other room and, with Husbando’s help, get into bed. I couldn’t go into the office, obviously, which was okay, because there had been the sulphurous smell in the halls of Something Up. A few days later, a call from favorite boss Mr. C confirmed: substantial layoffs all around. But worst of all, Mr. C was leaving. Well, that was enough of a dead canary in the mine for me, and I determined to leave that job too.

Which I did, with help from Mr. C, in May as I landed at a tasty start-up.Things looked rosy, things looked grand. I got to waggle my fingers and toes in a new subject area, I was building a website from scratch. Years ago, an art director looked me square in the eye while we were picking covers for a new issue and said: “I know you: You get bored really easily.” I protested prettily of course, but he was — and is — absolutely right. So here I was braving new territory and feeling good, and just, just when I’m getting the contacts, the writing, the site headed in the right direction, Big Boss comes to me and, saying the most he’d said to me in four  months, pops out with We’re an ecommerce site now: I don’t need content, I don’t need traffic and I don’t need you.

Best thing that ever happened to me. I’m realizing now how much I like the projects, the consulting, the energy of the start-up as opposed to the plodding, well-oiled machine. And I don’t mind taking the time to work on abs, hamstrings and core to get the spine and body back in shape. I’m reading more, started another novel, got the rudiments of a Businessman’s Reader’s Digest started (here).

And although the path ahead to 2007 looks a little scary and uncertain from this vantage point, I’m not bored.

Happy New Year to all my pals who read here.

Wreath Extravaganza

It finally dawned on me this year that as I am surrounded by pines, spruce, cedar and juniper, perhaps I can make my own wreaths instead of paying $20 each. So I did:

One on the back door:

 

One on the shed:

One on the barn:

Okay: the reason this one looks nice is I bought it from the Boy Scouts.

And one silly ribbon on this silly deer thingie that came with the house and I have no idea why someone hasn’t swiped it yet:

Lessons in Eating Humble Pie

So, a condition of getting unemployment checks absolutely free in the mail each week (whee!) is mandatory attendance at a “Career Center Seminar.” I could hardly wait, as I was promised “services that can help you with your job search – such as…computer access to job listings….”

Computer access? Well, sign me up! About 22 others were in the room this morning (I opted for downtown Boston, as I was really afraid of hanging out with fishermen up near home). I would say everyone’s demeanor was not so much deer caught in headlights as the resigned look of puppies and cats too long in the pound. The instructor filled us with such basics as “Send thank-you notes,” and “Don’t use LOL or language like that in a cover letter.” I see that one of the courses offered in the Work Place Center is “How to Use a Mouse.”

Okay, it’s easy to feel smug. As we went around the room, introducing ourselves and saying what we did (overtones of AA), there wasn’t a smirk or hint that every one there wasn’t taking being unemployed very seriously. And more: that they felt a real pride in the jobs they’d had. There was:

• a nurse
• a landscaper who didn’t think he wanted to go back to that again next summer
• an organic chemist
• someone in food services with 17 years experience
• a bookseller
• a product manager
• someone who worked for years in a real estate office that moved to Waltham, “…and I don’t have a car, so…” shrug, resigned smile.
• a tourist trolley driver

My cell phone rang as I was leaving – my niece to tell me she just got accepted to the college she wanted.  A nice antidote to an hour of sad endings.

Question for all

Any of you using Vonage? It looks like half what I’m paying now. Worth it? Not?

Why I’m Not Churbuck, V. 1

I always feel so guilty that I’m not a blogging monster like my pal and erstwhile boss Churbuck — he must blog in his sleep. So, I’m trying to figure out why I’m not a blogging monster.

So, like fer instance, today: First I had to do my yoga, cause my back’s all tight and I can’t bend in half like I used to.  Then I started feeling guilty because every year I come up with some damned excuse not to clean the vegetable garden of debris. (Of course, one gardening book says, “Clean it: otherwise icky bugs overwinter,” and another says, “Good bugs like to overwinter in garden debris, so don’t clean up.” Ai-yi-yi.) The cussed cutworms have gotten so bad, that maybe a good cleaning was in order this year, so I had to tackle this:

And I did — I double dug the whole garden, ‘cept the chard, arugula and broccoli. Exhausted, I stood back and yelled: “Come on, birdies, get your nice tasty cutworms!”

Then, Husbando and I had to put the Xmas lights on the blue spruce, which is now about 20 feet high, so round and round the tree we went.

Okay, then I had to admire the work on my new playhouse….

No, I’m not doing the work, but I have to oversee everything, right?

Then I had to roast the 19 peanuts I harvested from the great Growing-Peanuts Experiment. We ate one at 15 minutes at 350 degrees, then another one escaped when I took the baking sheet out of the oven after another 15 minutes. So hors d’oeuvres tonight will be 17 home-grown, oven-roasted peanuts. Husbando’s already wondering who gets the ninth one.

And if you had any idea how long it takes me to get pictures in my blog….

Well, you can see where the day goes.