sey061

Today at 1:22 p.m. I sent this email to Glenn Lurie, the new President of AT&T Mobility. Just to make sure all my bases were covered, I sent copies to Ralph de la Vega, who had that job before him, and to Richard Lindner, CFO and Senior Executive Vice President. I decided not to bother the CEO unless these guys proved to be useless:  Dear Mr. Lurie, Congratulations on your promotion! I hope that dissatisfied customers such as myself aren’t sucking the fun out of your new job. I took a guess at your email address since Google doesn’t know what it is and you probably want to keep it that way. I’m having issues with my wireless service that your company is not able to correct in a way that reflects good customer service. I’m sure you hear this daily but I hope you will hear me out. I will try to be as concise as possible out of respect for your time. My family moved from NW Houston to SW Houston on August 25. We failed to verify whether or not AT&T provided coverage in our new...

I sometimes order light bulbs from Amazon, right? Especially the decorative CFL globes for the bathrooms. They can be hard to find and Amazon has good prices on them. I order from Amazon pretty regularly and usually just include the light bulbs with my order. Amazon ships the light bulbs with the rest of my stuff and when they arrive, there is at least one broken bulb. EVERY time. In the past I've gone through the return process where they send UPS to come pick up the broken bulbs and they ship my replacements usually within a day or two. The replacement bulbs always arrive in tact because they're the only thing in the box. They're Amazon. Surely they ship out hundreds if not thousands of light bulbs every day. You would think they would have realized by now that shipping them in the same box with my computer paper is a bad idea. I guess I need to start ordering them separately or ask for them to be shipped separately or something. Bless Amazon's clueless heart. So this...

You know how when you buy cheap seed beads at Hobby Lobby they come in the clear plastic tube with the twist-off cap?   You know how there's usually a paper label that covers the cap and part of the tube which can sometimes make it difficult for (arthritic) hands to unscrew the cap? You know how you sometimes use your teeth as tools even though you know you're not supposed to but it just takes too much dang effort to get up and go get the right tool you need? So last night I was taking seed beads out of their plastic tubes and putting them in little zip bags to consolidate them and make them easier to display for my upcoming garage sale. I had been unscrewing all the caps with my teeth because my poor little hands are angry with me about the work I've made them do over the past couple of months. Everything was going fine until I came across one particularly stubborn cap that wouldn't unscrew. I tightened my grip on the tube then bit down harder in an effort to get the d...

I finished the last of the yard work today and I'm too exhausted to write a narrative so I'll just give you my stream of consciousness. These are the thoughts I thunk while I worked: Great, it's early and it's already hot.  Where are all these wasps coming from? Oh yeah. Now I remember. On moving day some home security salesman guy came to the door which irritated the snot out of me since clearly we were JUST MOVING IN and a little preoccupied. He made a comment about how the wasps almost got him and there was a nest under the porch overhang. I made mental note to find out what wasps like to eat then give them a treat for at least trying to scare off a salesman. Then I forgot about them. Oh well, I'll just spray their nest so they'll go away. I sure hope I don't kill these sago palms by trimming them too much but their pokey fronds are painful for people trying to get to the front door. People like home security salesmen. Okay, I'll leave a couple of pok...

This morning I managed to finished the yard tasks I started yesterday with minimal injury or incident. My goal was to get rid of 3 pots of junk trees in a back corner of my yard. One of the pots was full of weeds and grass but the other two had small hackberry trees growing in them. I don't like hackberry trees and consider them just an overgrown weed so I had no problem helping them to meet their demise. Yesterday's fire ant treatment worked well since I only saw one today. He stung me on the top of my foot but when I looked down I saw that he was alone and carrying a suitcase so I assume he was just expressing his anger at being evicted. There's also a slight chance I was hallucinating from the heat.  Other than that, the only other critters I ran across were some worms and a cute tiny frog that I shooed out of the way so he wouldn't get hurt. Before he hopped off I told him to tell his Dad to knock off the late night chirping right under our window since all the nic...

We have one of those rainwater collection barrels that attaches to your gutter downspout. Today I decided to clean it out even though we will probably never ever use it. But it's clean.  During that process I angered a family of yellowjackets whose home I accidentally destroyed when I cleaned out the section of downspout below the diverter using water from my high powered hose spray nozzle. They came after me but I valiantly fought them off by running in circles with the hose nozzle wide open and spraying like Old Faithful. I managed to avoid any wasp stings but I did step in fire ants which is pretty normal for me. In fact I'm surprised that I only did it once. After that, I tried to take an old spray nozzle off a water hose that was here when we moved in and that we planned to throw away cuz it's cheap and yucky. The nozzle wouldn't come off. At all. Not even after soaking it with Liquid Wrench then trying to pry it off with a hammer and chisel. The hose was a cheap p...

We recently hired Two Men and A Truck (the Northwest Houston franchise) to move us 35 miles from our old home in Cypress to our new one in Richmond. I chose them not just based on the price they quoted me but also because I felt like they were reputable, knowledgeable, and truly cared about what they were doing. Because of the size of our home we actually had Four Men and Two Trucks: double the capacity, double the manpower, double the body odor.  We packed our entire house ourselves and meticulously labeled everything according to which room it belongs in. I even put neon sticky notes on all the furniture to make it as easy as possible for the movers to get stuff into the correct rooms. This turned out to be a huge waste of time since they either asked me where stuff went or they put it in the same room where it was in the old house even though it was clearly marked to go to a different room in the new house. I would estimate that 80% of our stuff was placed where it should have ...

I broke a CFL bulb today and just learned that I didn't clean it up properly so now our house is contaminated and we're all going to die. Or something like that. If you freak out about the dangers of mercury exposure, just look away. When I was a kid I had a dime-sized blob of mercury that I kept in a baby food jar and played with. For years. And look how normal I am! Ahem.  I cleaned up my broken CFL bulb just like I would any other broken bulb...I handed my daughter the large pieces and she carried them to the trash can in her bare hands. Then I vacuumed up the rest. Later, I remembered the whole mercury issue with the bulbs so I Googled it and discovered that I did pretty much everything wrong. From what I understand, here is the procedure for cleaning up a broken CFL bulb: 1. Open all your doors and windows then move your family and your pets out of the house for about a month. And for the love of God, whatever you do, DON'T use a broom, vacuum cleaner or your hands to ...