July is the longest month for mini-rants

The BBQ Pit
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Also many historic districts - except for upper and upper middle class neighborhoods, which usually had some sort of carriage house and/or barn for horses, most urban housing wasn’t designed to store any sort of transportation until the twentieth century.

Mini-rant: The Boy giveth, and The Boy taketh away. For Mother’s Day, he gifted me with a hydrangea for the front yard. I’ve babied it, and watered it, and (miraculously!) kept it alive. Yesterday, he ran it over with the lawn mower! (I may be able to coax it back, because there is one little pair of leaves remaining. But I’m not a skilled gardener.)

He offered to replace it for my birthday, but it’s too hot to try to plant anything right now. Maybe I can keep one alive in a pot for a few months until planting time…

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Is downtown NORMALLY zoned for residential? I’ve always tended to think of it as a commercial thing.

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Commercial works best on the ground floor. Upper floors can be apartments. Older buildings = no parking. Remember, the idea that a car should be affordable by the average person is a new idea.

A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage - Herbert Hoover (1928)

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Try finding parking around the Music Circus that doesn’t require you to park in a parking lot and wait half an hour to get out after the show is over.

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And architects in Minneapolis are busy building it. They’re putting the finishing touches on a building near where I work downtown. Apartments outnumber available parking spots in the building 3-1. They expect you to rent a space in a parking ramp. In Uptown, I watched them build a 3 story condo building with NO available parking. That’s madness. You really have to live the car-free lifestyle to live in some of those places.

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There are portions of what’s called downtown (aka Midtown, the public transit system also used to call it Central City) that are quite residential, others that are commercial. I lived on a relatively residential street (with some small businesses) just a few blocks from a commercial section that did include a lot of bars.

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Posting while I can, before I lose service yet again:

Frontier “Communications” can kiss my generous, shiny white ass. I pay entirely too much to lose phone and internet service every time a cloud invades my goddamned area code. I understand if satellite TV gets gone for a few minutes during afternoon thunderstorms, but phone? Internet? Those fuckers are just too cheap to pay to maintain infrastructure. I’ve now sent a formal complaint to the state public service commission, since this involves my home phone service (which I wouldn’t have, and don’t need, except that Frontier insists that we can’t have internet without phone service - because they think I don’t understand how this shit works.) In addition to losing internet service each time we have an afternoon thunderstorm (hello, subtropics,) we randomly lose service for several minutes to an hour daily, usually after ten pm but before 3 am. I’m done with this crap.

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Also, the list of people who can kiss my generous ass now includes my husband’s boss/former boss. We received notification in today’s mail that, if Tony can’t return to work by July 31, he is formally released from employment.
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Yeah, after more than five years of active duty, 2.5 years of treatment for a horrendously mismanaged dispatch, hellish pain, physical therapy, fighting for the most basic medical coverage, etc., a ten-day postal notice is the trick to getting a fellow back to work…

(I get it. His agency is obliged to cover his shift - and this changes nothing about Tony’s legal protections. And everything requires notification in writing to be official, in state government. But dammit, the boss coulda picked up the phone and called. That would have made all of the difference in the world between “You are a useless dead weight on our agency” versus “We know you can’t help this, but we must fill your position.”)

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It’s midnight. I just got off the phone with our attorney. Bless him, Tony isn’t really processing the current information. I’ve tried for more than two years to deny that he suffered long-term brain damage from the wreck, but I can’t really deny it any more. He flatly doesn’t understand the repercussions of his medical situation, beyond the fact that he can’t go back to work. I feared this, and didn’t want to accept that it was any more than a man who stubbornly wanted to return to the job he loved. Between his short-term memory losses, his refusal to accept that he isn’t the person who was driving before that wreck, that he can’t remember very basic information and facts? He may want a divorce if I seek conservatorship, but he isn’t able to take care of little details. I had to go today to take care of a past-due bill - the only one that Tony is in charge of, since the wreck. It was due on the first. He had no idea he’d forgotten, but he thinks I’m unreasonable to not let him spend several hundred that we don’t have to take a four-wheeling vacation next month. He can’t even sit up in a recliner for an hour, but he’s certain that he could go off-roading for several hours per day all week.

After sorting through the rest of the mail, I found the dispatch from the county’s insurance that says “we don’t owe any more, take it up with social security, we’ll see you in court in late September.” They’ve overlooked that Tony’s doctors haven’t signed off on maximum medical improvement. They just seem to think that it’s copacetic to say “oh, we’re done, you don’t need any income until you’re approved for SSDI.” No weekly income replacement until/unless the judge says so in September. But their settlement offer included a clause of “we’ll give you X amount, but we won’t pay any more toward medical treatment.” The X amount was laughable in the face of the medical treatment still required.

Five fucking hundred per week - maximum under state regulations. Five mother-fucking-hundred, twenty-six mother-loving thousand per year, maximum, for a man who worked damned near twenty years on the streets, and the insurance will deny that without notice?! “File for Social Security Disability,” like that’s gonna come through next week, like we can even reasonably claim before Tony’s doctors sign off that he’s reached maximum medical improvement. He may well qualify for SSDI, but not until he has reached his full coverage under workers comp - maximum medical improvement, and comp payments until the doctor signs off.

Meanwhile, I guess we pay our bills on our good looks? Offering blow jobs down at the ports? Most times in my adult life, eight of ten weeks without a paycheck was do-able. Not now. The fellow’s disability has stretched us to our financial breaking point. The only way we can manage several months without income is to mortgage our land, but the only way we’ve been able to manage bills at all lately is that we own our land, and have only a smallish loan against the house.

Pardon my language please, but these god-damned, mother-fucking sons of bitches can kiss my ass. Twice.

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She did it again…supposedly had a seizure during a teleconference meeting two days ago…and mid seizure asked our team leader to call an ambo for her?? Bwahahahah…my understanding is that if you’re in the midst of a grand-mal you don’t have the faculties to ask someone to ring an ambo for you. If it wasn’t so pathetic, it’d be funny. However, it’s still funny because I’m an evil bitch. :smiley:

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Good thing you’re planning on using a knife and not a spoon as lot of spoons have been reported missing.

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If you don’t want to say it then I’ll say if for you. Fuck them!

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At work they’re reorganizing again (current average: every four weeks, no really, but that’s not my rant). So, we’re on the phone and our boss is explaining to us what’s going on as far as she knows it and she jokes that I’m her “little conspiracy theorist” because I knew something was going on and predicted it.

Those words were no sooner out of her mouth than I was getting an IM from someone on our team who gushed about how happy she was to find a fellow “Truther” who didn’t believe the moon landing happened and also thought Jackie O had shot JFK. What the fuck? I’m friends with the person who got promoted, for god’s sake. She was in the office a lot with the executives. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make the leap that she got a promotion. It takes a giant leap, however, to go from “paying attention to people in the office” to “believes that the government is lying to us” (yeah, I’m sure they are about a LOT of things, but not that).

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Seizures are also not an emergency unless they don’t stop.

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What a month. June 30th was full of amazingly good news! We found a new place to live, so we could stop imposing on family, with a landlord that promised there would be no problems getting Comcast service (we work from home, it’s a necessity that isn’t negotiable), no problem getting the power turned on (the whole building had had no service for well over a year), my husband received fantastic news about his budding business…

Then July happened. July 1st, my grandmother who seemed to be winning her fight against lung cancer died suddenly in her home. We signed our lease and discovered no cable outlets in the apartment, but we were assured that would be no problem since the rest of the units have been wired, so clearly ours could be too. I go from the apartment walkthrough over to Comcast’s local store, where they spend over an hour just trying to determine if they can even provide service to my building since they can’t find my address in their system (the address had been changed by the city at some point, which is causing problems with other services as well. I’ll figure that headache out later), then they don’t know if our concrete walls will be a problem for installation but they’re almost positive it will be perfectly fine for their tech to work around. However, since there is evidence of cable service but nothing in their system they need to send someone out to inspect the property to verify it’s all good. Great! It should only be a few days. Fabulous!

We already had a moving van scheduled, based on all of the assurances that things are gravy, so we proceed… then find out our apartment has no power, several days after service was supposed to start. I need to be up at 3am to take my parents to the airport for the funeral, and now this. I call the utility company at around midnight, they say the problem is on my end and they can’t help. Thankfully my landlord came out ASAP the next morning and fixed it.

A week later I call Comcast to check on things, since nobody has called me, just to find out it could actually be 10 business days before anyone goes out there. Seriously? Our stuff is already moved because everyone we spoke to promised to resolve this quickly. The only reason it wasn’t a bigger issue is my husband took his work computer to a friend’s house to use their internet, and I was house/dog/greenhouse-sitting for my parents so they could go to my grandma’s funeral (so I was stuck by myself for a week trying to deal with everything).

So… fine. Could be another week almost. I finally get a call (hurray!) and am told everything looks great and I can schedule installation. I do that, which takes several more days, just for the tech to come out and immediately say he can’t help me. Comcast techs do NOT have tools to deal with concrete walls, and it was also clear to him that nobody had checked the exterior wiring in a very long time, so the inspector (a contractor) was full of shit or incompetent.

So… yeah, he’s the first person to say the concrete is a problem. What’s more, it could be another MONTH before their rewiring contractor can come out. Great. My husband is still several hours north, I’m freaking out and still alone… I hate July. I’m now with my husband, staying with our friend up north, unfortunately too far away to get back to our place for any kind of quick-schedule appointments.

Tuesday I finally get a phone call from a contractor to schedule rewiring. He’s free all week but isn’t working Saturday, the earliest I can be there. But he has a guy that’s on duty! He’ll call me back with a time! He doesn’t call me back. I call him last night to confirm my appointment and actually get a time. Hurray! Progress!

Now to just figure out starting service with Comcast. I hate talking to their service people, so I always prefer to go the self-install kit route, but I don’t know if the new wiring will be an issue and make my unit ineligible. I’ve learned that dealing with them through online chat is less frustrating, so I start talking to the idiot Chris, who refuses to answer my question (new wiring, can I self-install or do I need a tech?) and insists on instead trying to walk me through ordering service online and having a self-install kit delivered to me. Well… if I’m eligible for that I’ll need to pick one up locally due to the timing of things. Yes yes, just go through the order process and look at the installation options. Eventually I give up on him and start chatting with someone else, who is friendly but can’t help me, so she transfers me to Lavinia, who I’ve spoken to before and is awesome.

Lavinia actually looks at the notes on my account and explains that I’m NOT eligible for self install and will need to schedule an appointment. She also strongly recommends waiting until the rewiring is completely done before scheduling anything further, which is fair but adds at least another week onto this mess.

I can’t help but feel that if they’d fucking listened to the problem and scheduled a rewiring contractor from the start, instead of just handwaving it all away, I might be living in my own goddamn home by now. We’re grateful for having such an amazing support system, so we’re able to keep working during all of this, but this is getting ridiculous.

TLDR version: My grandma died, I was completely alone for the next week, and Comcast customer service is mostly incompetent.

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You don’t need the “mostly”, I’d replace it with completely.

The reason I don’t have Comcast Internet service is because they scheduled a time for a person to come in to install it, the installer never showed up, and when I called, I was told that there was no scheduled appointment on record, and they couldn’t have made such an appointment because things are not done that way. They also would not send out a person, but would instead send a kit for me to do it myself. Nope, I am not an electrician, I want a person who knows what they’re doing. Nope, we don’t do that.

Well, fuck you then, I’ll stick with the old system, even though it’s more expensive.

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Some truly vile comments on an article I wrote after my dear friend Kolga was banned from Facebook temporarily. There’s a crazy loon there quoting all kinds of shit about Jews and threatening to harm me personally.

Yes, I know the pic is awful and terrible and unflattering. No photoshop here.

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Her father was a WW11 vet? Did I miss 3-10?

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We lease a car through my workplace. The first one we had came with a fuel/services card that we could use to cover all the vehicle expenses. Our new lease car came with a card from a different provider. Not a problem. I took the car in for its first service today and the dealership just contacted me to let me know that they don’t deal with the new service provider.

After a few calls it turns out that none of the local dealers will accept that card and very few of the other car repair places will either!

Fucking brilliant!

Issue a service card for new cars that dealers won’t accept, what is the bloody point of that?

We’re now being issued a new card that the local dealers will accept. Fucking idiot lease company.

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They’re also just fine with the group that is trying to put a price on our President’s head, called Reward for Capture of Obama. They’ve been reported for hate speech and for credible threats of violence, but FB says the group doesn’t violate FB’s community standards. Ya gotta wonder.