Well, I don’t suppose any of you missed me, but I have been offline for five days, and coming back is like a cool shower and a hot meal after a day of working in the fields. (Theoretically, I mean; I’ve never worked in fields.)
Last week was pretty hellish. I had almost no money, as I mentioned in another thread, and then on Tuesday I had no phone. Mr. Rilch paid the bill before he left, but he took it to the wrong payment center. I told him not to go there again, because they’re one step from a money-laundering business, but they’re also right across the street. So he doesn’t listen, and the phone gets cut off with no warning. Finally, on Friday, I have to go to Van Nuys and get the phone turned back on. I have nothing against Van Nuys, except that it’s highly inconvenient for me to get to and back from. I come back, all burnt out, and my friend arrives two hours later, as we’d planned, to take me up to her place so I don’t have to drive. Friday night was a blast, and Saturday I helped her clean up, and then we got tarted up and drove to Crestline (near San Bernardino) to her friend’s house. We walked to the neighborhood dive, and that was great too. Karaoke (I sang two songs and got a very positive response), cheap drinks (three tequila sunrises), pool tables (amazingly, I made more shots than I missed. But my opponents were better.), cool people (although I saw one guy with three blue dots tattooed on his hand. I made sure not to crowd him.) and a catfight!
After that, though, it turned bad. Back at the house, I was told I could sleep in the basement. I flopped down (this must have been 1:30 or 2) and knew nothing until the hostess’ husband woke me up, saying it was four am and did I know the person who brought me had left? Well, long story short, she’d gone to the house of the guy she’d met at the bar. Our hostess knew this and knew she’d be back, but the husband didn’t. He got kind of pissy with me when I asked to use the phone. Apologies were forthcoming the next day, happily. To be fair, I can kind of see his point. He hadn’t met me earlier, before we went out, and for all he knew, I could have been one of those people who translocates from place to place, hoping they’ll be allowed to sleep where they fall down. Although I still don’t know why he thought it necessary to wake me up at 4 am to tell me something I could do nothing about.
Everything pulled together around noon. To make it up to me, my friend took us back on the 2, the scenic route atop the Angeles Crest. We saw a lot of bikers, and a lot of those annoying little Japanese bikes. I don’t know who those people think they’re impressing with their stupid nylon jackets that match their bikes. They just look like gum wrappers blowing past. We also saw a guy on a mountain bike. He was making pretty good time, and when we stopped at a rest area, he went by while we were there. We caught him up again and yelled, “You rule, whoever you are!”
The mountains are soooo beautiful, especially this time of year and in the late afternoon. At one point, we went through, I guess you’d call it a pass, and both sides were that pinkish tan rock. With the sun almost overhead, it was like being between two gold shiny boards. We got all the way up to 7000 feet. After that I started to notice how steeply the road fell away, and the fact that there was no guardrail. It didn’t help that one of the other passengers kept making cute remarks like, “Hey, those skid marks go all the way to the edge!”, but I concentrated on how amazingly intricate the ranges were. Almost like being in a pinball game. Or something. Anyway, it was gorgeous; almost like being in another country, compared to the grimy industrial 5. I hadn’t realized that there was an unspoiled area so far south.
Now, about my actually being offline. I was unable to sign on on Thursday. I didn’t panic; I figured there was a general outage, since people had been talking about the Dem convention screwing up everyone’s web access. I called from work (couldn’t call at home, naturally) and they wouldn’t give me a straight answer as to what the problem was. I couldn’t get on Friday, either, but I could from my friend’s house, which was the first indication that the problem was just with my account. So Sunday night I can’t get on either, but I have a phone again, so I call customer service. Long story short: many phone calls in two days, much waffling about the nature of the problem and promises that it’ll be fixed momentarily, and it wasn’t until I called up this morning and literally screamed at them (I can’t live without my Dope!), that they finally got off the dime and identified the problem. I won’t go into details, but it was something that they easily could have researched. It may not have been easy to fix, but it shouldn’t have taken so long to find out what it was. They were just punting me around. I told them I wanted my bill adjusted, and I’m going to hold them to that.
So that’s where Rilchiam was. If anyone was wondering. Do forgive me if I resurrect old threads to reply to them.