stumbled upon another cool map service… terraserver…
i’m a bit of a map freak and between terraserver, google maps, and google earth i can look at cool stuff for hours…
so another turkey day has come and gone… thanksgiving is my favorite holiday… i look forward to it all year and i’m sad when its over…
festivities are usually held at our pals the wheelers’ house but this year we hosted as d&d had just welcomed the newest wheeler, gregory, a mere four days prior…
the only downside was that the tugboat was under the weather with yet another ear infection(s)… a quick trip to our amogo the pediatrician on thanksgiving day morning confirmed this… t’was a bummer but he was a trooper… and i guess he was sorta drugged… so he slept a lot and had fun when he was up…
so we had a bunch o’ folks over… drinks were had… food was had… more drinks were had… we’ve got a great group of friends… and hey… i’m thankful for them… what an appropriate day to have ‘em all stop by, eh?…
mmm… popsicles…
friday… serious downtime recovery day…
saturday… chilled pretty much all day… in the morning we packed up the hotrod minivan and went to brunch at our friends andrew’s and christy’s place where we watched some div 1-aa college football… specifically unh vs. colgate… christy’s a colgate alum… somewhat unfortunate on this particular saturday as they got pasted 55-21… was fun to hang out though…
and sunday… watched the seahawks improve their record to 9-2… was a pretty exciting game… wish i coulda been there in person for that one… the last time i saw so many second (and third (and fourth)) chances awarded was during the beloved buckeyes season of 2002-2003… i’m hopin’ similar results await them seahawks… that’d be cool… in the eve our pals scott and kristin and their daughter montana came over… we had fun and drank wine… by the time it was all said and done i think it took me about a minute to fall asleep…
what a great weekend…
hey!!!
so after many hours of workin’ on it our pals the wheelers had they’re newest lil’ nipper gregory last night… and everyone’s doing great… and i can’t wait to meet the little feller…
congrats you guys!!!…
so i’ve mentioned in the past that i’m pretty passionate about customer service… and i’ve posted a few times bitchin’ mightily when i’ve felt hosed…
but i reckon that just as important as pointing out the bad is applauding the good…
and with that in mind i gotta tip my hat to cingular for treating me right over the last couple of weeks… k and i used to be at&t customers and got transferred to cingular during the big merger… our phone plans were never quite right and as such i figured we were payin’ too much… so i called up cingular and started asking about our options… and from my first exploratory calls through a couple weeks of ordering phones, transferring numbers, and switching plans all around i gotta say that i had nothing but the greatest customer service experience all around… friendly folks… knew what they were talking about… i’m glad to give ‘em some of our money monthly… kudos…
so i was eating some pistachios the other day… mmm… pistachios…. and i remembered being over at our pals the wheelers’ old place ages ago reading some kinda boutique pistachio catalog that they somehow had… and the description for a spicy bbq flavo(u)r included the phrase “spicy sweet nut meat”… that makes me giggle…
thanks to all who came out to see the mighty spank band on weds night… and thanks to the central club for having us back… ’twas a hoot… a few pics from the show are here…
we hope to set up another gig soon… that’s too much fun not to do more often…
been on a bit of a health kick lately… and as a result i’m paying lots of attention to nutritional info of all the stuff i eat…
i saw this on boing boing… one of my favorite websites…
something else that happened during my recent blogging hiatus was another baby shower at our casa…
this time it was in honor of the impending arrival of lil’ gregory… soon-to-be-here son of our pals the wheelers…
as always fun was had…
i think it’s kinda cool that our two families, along with amigos the laceys, all have (or will soon have) two children… we each have a boy and a girl… and in each case they’re right around two years apart… dunno what the odds of that happening are but i’m thinking they’re rather slim…
i dig babies… i’m looking forward to meeting gregory…
the scene: saturday morning… a gas station… say the one right next to our house… where we’ve filled up once or twice a week since we moved here four years ago…
the issue: low tire pressure in the hot-rod minivan…
enter bushrod and family in said hot-rod minivan… on our way somewhere to do something…
me: “honey… do we have time to put a little air in the tire?”
love-of-my-life-karen: “yep / sure / you betcha / go for it”… or something like that…
hot-rod minivan parked i get out and insert my fifty cents into the air machine…
am i upset that i’m about to purchase some air for the somewhat princely sum of fifty cents???… absolutely not… i’m not buying air… i’m buying air and renting the delivery vehicle to actually put it in the tire… i could do it with my bike’s tire pump for free if i wanted to… compared to that it seems almost like a bargain… could it be free???… sure… should it be free???… maybe… but that’s not my issue…
two quarters drop into the slot and… nothing…
hmmnn… well that’s a little less than i expected… i’m only ready to blow fifty cents on this deal if the air machine keeps its part of the bargain and actually works…
bushrod walks across the lot, enters the store, and encounters dude…
me: “hi - is the air machine working?”… in retrospect, a bit of a silly question…
dude: “dunno”
me: “well i put fifty cents in and it didn’t turn on”
dude: “i don’t know what to tell ya man”
me: “err…”
dude: “we don’t have anything to do with it”
me: “whaddya mean you don’t have anything to do with it? it’s under the big sign over there that says air/water… kinda something you’re offering as a service innit?”
dude (whose mellow is now being significantly harshed): “look man - it’s not our machine - i can’t give you your money back”
me: “fair enough - whose machine is it? you got something i can leave ‘em a litle note with or a number i can call or something?” (because, douchebag, you can rest assured that i ain’t leaving your personal space until i’m a hundred percent convinced i’m getting my fifty cents back)…
dude’s hand slams down on the register…
register opens…
dude: “damn… i don’t care man… here’s fifty cents if it’ll stop you from being all pissy about it”
me: “thank you, have a nice life”
bushrod returns to the hot-rod minivan… the story is related… love-of-my-life karen shakes her head… at me i’m pretty sure… life goes on…
oh yeah… at my new gas station… which is about a minute farther away… the air’s free…
so i’ve bitched in the past about comment spam… as i did about trackbacks before i disabled ‘em… i’d axe the ability for folks to comment but i think it’s generally a pretty good feature…
and lately they’ve kinda become a source of entertainment…
i tried switch our isp a while ago with an utter lack of success… i was met with indifference, ineptitude and overall bad customer service at virtually every regrettable step of the process… matter o’ fact i wrote about it here, here, here, and here…
the culprit - verizon… my personal verdict - their dsl team is lame… at least the majority of ‘em i talked to…
i’ve gotten a comment or two from folks sharing my pain… strangely i’ve also been getting a bunch o’ comments from folks mistaking me for some sort of official verizon dsl cust/tech service line… so every week or so, as a comment on my entry professing profound distaste for the company’s dsl division, i’ll get a quick little snippet asking me to update a billing address or corrrect a newly changed name… kinda blows the mind… but it is sorta fun…
at first i thought this phenomenon was a rather well played practical joke by one or two of my pals who wanted perversely to get me all riled up about my pathetic dsl adventures again… hah… that’d be funny… but upon checking out the site’s referral stats (which is a kind of interesting excercise just for the heck of it) i’ve come to find that a majority of keyphrases people have used to end up at my site are related to verizon dsl… i’m sure writing this post will help… kooky baby…
just had a thought… i’ve utterly ignored all of these poor folks… as much out of respect as out of contempt… wow… there’s two things that don’t usually go together… never responded… deleted their comments… nothing… and in doing so i think i have actually performed slightly better than the folks that i was dealing with during my adventures… hah…
