Special K and Coffee
I don't really know why you'd be here. I mean, I know I'm the single most interesting person, but don't you people have lives? Really, it's quite sad.
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Monday, April 25, 2005
Recipe Roulette
I enjoy cooking, but I haven't really done much of it in quite a while. Paul has been getting on my case to cook more, especially since every time he asks me what we should have or if I want to cook, I try to get out of making the decision and figuring out what to throw together. Part of this is my indecisiveness, part of this is the fact that I haven't cooked in a while, and part of this is that I'm currently used to running off of recipes.
So last night right before he went home from my apartment, he said I could cook supper tonight because he will have been in surgery all afternoon and it would give me all day to think about what to make. I got so engrossed in working on the May newsletter that I didn't remember to think about supper until about an hour ago. I tend to need recipes at least to get my mind going on ideas, so I turned to the internet and found this really cool site: All Recipes You can search by type of dish, ingredients, time it takes to make a dish, etc. OR, if you're finding it difficult to make a decision, you can play "Recipe Roulette" and it will randomly select 10 recipes for you. Cool? Cool.
Monday, April 18, 2005
The sanctity of marriage
Paul and I were talking last night about how sad it is that so many people anymore have no respect for the sanctity of marriage and don't take their vows seriously seemingly at all, and how the divorce rate within the Christian community is no different from the population as a whole. This brought him to a very interesting question. [No, Steve, he did not propose! ;-)] If a couple is married by a justice of the peace or a judge and say their vows, could that, technically, be considered equivalent to an oath in the court of law and, therefore, if the couple gets divorced after only a couple of years, could that be considered purgery and they could be punished for it?
2nd Lieutenant Paul Norman Hester, United States Army
A few months ago, Paul applied for a scholarship with the US Army that would pay for his last year of vet school, help pay off his loans, and pay him twice the average salary straight out of vet school for a 3 year minimum obligation. After completing the insanely long application and waiting for a month, he was offered this scholarship last Friday. On Wednesday, he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the US Army. He's hoping to do his 6-week active duty training during a 6-week rotation that he has off in February next year, then will have 12 weeks of Officers Basic Course after he graduates in May. And when he graduates with his DVM, he will be a Captain.
We're both extremely excited about this and I'm so proud of him for doing this. We are also not sure how long this Army thing might be for or where it might lead, but there are definitely a lot of benefits--not that there aren't drawbacks, but we'll just have to see how things go after 3 years. It's new territory for both of us. For him, it's something he's thought about and the monetary aspect is just very rich icing. For me, it's something I've never thought about until now and a little bit at Patty's Navy training graduation this summer--not thought about as me enlisting, but thought about in general and, actually, it being a part of everyday life by association. It should be fun ride, no matter how long it lasts, and it was the last thing I expected 6 months ago, but that's life with Paul in it. :-D
Thursday, April 14, 2005
It's just kind of a, wow I can't believe this is happening to me kind of a mindblowing moment.
Paul did something BIG yesterday. Was it:
a) buy an Austin Healey Sprite
b) dye his hair
c) get a job after graduation [2006]
d) propose
e) buy a house
f) join the Army
g) change his residence to Texas
h) both a and b
i) both a and c
j) both c and d
k) both d and f
l) both c and f
m) c, f, and g
n) c, d, f, and g
o) all of the above
p) none of the above
q) too many choices--you're hurting my head!
The first person with the correct answer wins a brand new Hummer (H1, of course).
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
A lesson for trusting souls
Barb (one of the ministers here) was getting ready to go home yesterday afternoon because things just weren't seeming to go right all day. It started with her computer not turning on while everything else on the power strip was completely fine. That was solved when I suggested trying a new power cord. Then she couldn't find where she'd written down some information for me about the whole 2005-2006 Christian Education year, so she had to do it again. And the power kept going out. So she was giving up and going home, but she couldn't find her wallet. Her keys, her laptop, her cell phone, everything was there, but her wallet had gone AWOL. We all started looking around her office, around the main office, asking if anyone had seen her set it down somewhere, and Larry (interim pastor) went up and looked upstairs where they had eaten lunch together. That was about the time she started to remember something: she swore she shut her office door when she and Larry went to lunch, but it was standing open when she got back downstairs. I had been gone to lunch and Jennie (administrative assistant, basically equivalent to Jeanne's job at Memorial) was the only person around and her office is as far away from Barb's as you can be in the office area. Jennie said that there had been a homeless man who came in during that time asking about assistance and if we were the church that provided lunches, which we're not. At that point, Barb called the police, then headed home or somewhere. About ten minutes after she left, she called to tell us that she'd talked to her bank which said that someone had tried to use her ATM card at Hy-Vee, but didn't know the PIN, and then someone filled up with gas on her credit card in Altoona (down by Des Moines, for those who don't know, which is not most of you :-)).
After talking about it, we're not sure the guy Jennie dealt with was the guilty party because would someone like that really have a car to fill up with gas? And if he were just planning to steal and acting like he was homeless, it wouldn't make sense to give someone a chance to take a mental picture of your face.
Anyway, the storal of the mory: don't trust your valuable belongings to be safe in a church. Other examples of this: My mom had her wallet stolen at church when I was little. I had my laptop stolen at church almost two years ago from the custodial closet that is usually locked and most people don't know what's behind the door.
As much as we'd like to say that a church is a safe place where you can trust people, it is, sadly, not true. The majority of congregation members, you can trust, but it's the people who often walk in off the street that you never know about, and it happens quite a bit. A few years ago, Molly's church here in Ames had to deal with a homeless man who came in before a service and asked if he could recite a poem--naked. He was told no, but he stayed for the service and several guys in the congregation were watching him, ready to take action if he tried anything.
Monday, April 11, 2005
I now know around half a dozen people at Best Buy
But my favorite, and the one I won't forget for a while--and the one who knows me by name now--is Dustin. Dustin was the Customer Service Manager that I dealt with for 3 days straight trying to get this whole thing figured out. It finally came down to him saying, "we have two options here, you can either try returning the phone through GetConnected, or we can give you store credit for this phone and sell you the new one." I told him what GetConnected told me and he agreed that it was stupid, so he returned my phone without a receipt and sold me a pretty Motorola V265 that they had run down to Des Moines Thursday morning to get especially for me. I don't know if that was entirely what he was supposed to do, but he knew all the crap I'd been through and they'd gotten that phone specially for me, so he fixed it for me.
Friday morning, after calling Verizon's customer service several times and explaining that transferring me to the local port center does nothing because I hadn't set anything in motion to actually port my old number, I was finally told that I had to contact my current wireless provider first. So I looked around on the VirginMobile website and found the answer to that question: "if you'd like to port your number from VirginMobile, please contact your new service provider first." The second time I explained that to a representative with Verizon, he finally got a real, live person on the phone to get my number ported. They said it would take anywhere from 3-24 hours...it took about half an hour (not counting all the time on the phone trying to explain a simple situation to stupid people). :-)
So I now have a pretty Motorola camera phone and no one has to learn or program a new number for me. :-D
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
"So what I'm understanding here, correct me if I'm wrong, is that you're not giving me any money so now I'm left basically with nothing. I'm left with zero. What can I do with zero, y'know, what can...I-I can't do anything with it. This is my life here, we're talking about we're not talking about something else, we're talking about my life, y'know and it's forcing me to do something I don't want to do. To leave to go out and just leave and go home and say make a clean cut here and say 'no way, Corky. You're not putting up with these people and I'll tell you why I can't put up with you people--because you're bastard-people! That's what you are! You're just bastard people and I'm goin' home and I'm gonna, I'm gonna bite my pillow. It's what I'm gonna do."
About a week ago, I ordered a phone and VerizonWireless contract through bestbuy.com. Monday afternoon I picked up my phone from FedEx, charged it and activated it. Yesterday morning I started trying to port my current cell phone number to this new account. Thus began a day full of run arounds and frustration. VW customer service twice connected me to the "local port center" which then asked for my ten-digit phone number, which I entered, then was told there was no port information for that number and to please call customer service.
Then Eric pointed out to me, after asking what phone I'd gotten, that the phone I ordered is digital only, which is very much NOT what I wanted because I have that right now and hate it. When I realized he was right, he told me it was ok because Verizon lets you return or exchange items within 15 days. So I decided to try Best Buy in town over my lunch break. The guy at the door who marks returns before you take them to the counter, after explaining the situation, told me to try calling Verizon Wireless customer service and see if they say I can bring it back to a Best Buy store. So I called when I got back from lunch and was told that I should be able to take it back to a Best Buy store, even though I'd activated the phone, and that they weren't sure why they sent me away when they should have called Verizon.
So I went back to Best Buy after work, picked out an Audiovox phone that had everything I wanted and the sales clerk helping me was sure it was tri-mode, but I asked him to please double-check because that's why I want to exchange phones in the first place. So he looked and said that it was, but while I was waiting for them to figure out how to do my exchange/return, I noticed something written on the box of the Audiovox phone that was also written on the box of the LG phone: "This phone and applications require Verizon Wireless digital service. Digital service is not available in all areas and when not available you phone will not operate or be able to make 911 calls." So I pointed this out to him and he said, "yeah, that just means that it has to be in a digital area for it to be activated." Yeah, right. I don't buy that for a second.
I went back later in the night with my email confirmation of the order and the decision to get the Motorola V265 phone, even though it's more expensive. The people working then looked at my information and said, "you actually bought this through GetConnected, which is a subsidiary of Best Buy, so you probably have to go through them and that's why we can't find you in the computer." They advised that I call GetConnected's customer service first thing this morning, which I did and explained the situation to them and was told that it should be no problem and to email them at the address included with my order. And THEY told me that since I'd activated the phone, I couldn't exchange or return it. Which I, personally, think is crap.
So I'm going to try calling a Verizon store in Des Moines and seeing if I can get help in person down there, otherwise I'm gonna try to get the same customer service manager I had yesterday after work at Best Buy because he was going to do a return without receipt and program/activate the phone for me.
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
"I shouldn't have changed my underwear"*
Illinois should have won last night. I was very disappointed that North Carolina didn't get their butts kicked into the Atlantic. After this tournament, I have to respect Illinois for the way they made it as far as they did while the refs were trying to throw the games to their opponents. That's one reason I wish they'd been able to shove it in not only the East Coast's face, but also the refs' faces that despite unfairly called games, they could still be the champions. Even so, though, despite unfairly called games, they made it to the Championship Game, which is farther than any Illinois team in history has ever made it.
*Paul is not the quoted Illinois fan
Monday, April 04, 2005
Church Windows
Collegiate has this really nice database created especially for churches to use to keep track of their members and create mailing lists and such. This afternoon I got to watch the hour-long training video on the program, which is easier than Access, which I've worked with before. It was, overall, painfully boring, but there were a couple of really funny things written in the example entries that I know they stuck in just to give us all some comic relief if we were really paying attention:
Previous Church's City, State: Writerscrampsville Englande
Email: Rene@Widow.makeupyourmind.com
Email: Bob@DOA.com
Reason for Termination: [termination of the active member record, that is] Got really, really mad!
That last one was my favorite. At least it entertained me a tiny bit and I got paid for it. :-)
What a weekend for deaths
Yesterday my parents told me about a horrible news story that happened right in our neighborhood at a spot where I love to spend time: the railroad tracks. Apparently, a man committed suicide by laying down on the tracks in front of a train. Articles are here and here. I think about all the hours I've spent at those tracks watching and waving at trains and it just creeps me out to think that someone did that. And I think about how much I love trains and would love to learn how to drive one and thinking about how horrible it would be to be the engineer who was completely helpless to do anything to stop someone from stepping out in front of you because it's not like you can stop in time to not hit the person.
And Paul Hester hanged himself in a park in Melbourne.
And, of course, the big ones everyone knows about: Terry Schiavo and Pope John Paul II.
Wow...hopefully I'll have time for a non-depressing post later today.
Friday, April 01, 2005
Moving up in the world
I feel like I owe you all a post of some kind, but I am just not feeling terribly inspired right now. I can tell you that my new apartment is on the 3rd floor of an old house and we're hoping to get most of the rest of my crap (like the things from the storage unit) moved in there tomorrow, although Paul's days keep getting crazier and crazier. And we took my car to be looked at by the guys at Mitchell Transmission because it's been acting up more than we can shake out of it and they cleared the computer's error messages to see if that would help, otherwise it may be a $1000-1400 fix or.....a new car. And the little Paul and I have driven it, it's been fine in drive, but it still has to take a bit to decide to shift into drive in the first place, so we're not taking that as a really good sign. But the good news is that I found gas for $2.01 when I've seen places in town with it for $2.09. And it's the weekend and Paul brought me some Thin Mints at work today. :-D
