Category: Daily Life

I’ve recently had a lot of opportunities to talk to friends and relatives who keep up with me by reading this blog. Some of their questions led me to realize that I’ve neglected to post about the resolution of various events. Thus, I’ll do it now.

The computer. For a while there, it looked as though the Apple Store had given up trying to find a hardware explanation for the problems my husband had been having. In fact, they had a support guy specializing in our recording software call him. Then a tech happened to notice that one of the computer’s processors spiked to 100% capacity whenever anything was plugged into a USB port. They replaced the processor and now the studio is back up and running. Hooray!

 My limited influence. Our fundraising luncheon went better than I had imagined and I ended up selling 15 tickets. We raised more than $5,000 for the battered women’s shelter.

BlogHer. It looks like I’m not going to make it to BlogHer Business in
New York this month, but I will be at the BlogHer Conference in Chicago
this July.

That’s probably more than you cared to know about any of that stuff, but at least it’s now on record. Enjoy your Tuesday!

I had the best time on Saturday night when a large group of my friends came over to play board games. It had been several years since our last game night and I really missed getting together with everyone and trying hard to kick their asses be a good hostess.

There were nine of us, so I brought up the long plastic table that usually resides in the basement unless we’re having an outdoor barbecue. I don’t have a dining room or even a kitchen table, so I always have to make do with whatever flat surface is handy.

For snacks, I made a run to Costco and bought hummus, a small wheel of brie that I baked with brown sugar and pecans, brownie bites, and mini quiches in phyllo pastry. I picked up two 1.5 liter bottles of wine (an old vine Zinfandel and a Riesling) and then stopped by a Mediterranean bakery to get pita bread. My guests brought wine and beer and the ingredients for caramel apple martinis, as well as additional snacks. I had to bring out the bottle of Tums around midnight because, well, we’re all getting old.

We started with several rounds of Scattergories as guests arrived. After that we moved on to Apples to Apples, which was so much fun that I want to buy a copy immediately. We then played a round of Cranium Pop 5, but everyone liked Apples to Apples so much that we got it back out and played again.

My guests ranged from my sister and one of her friends, to people I worked with in the 1990s, to people I’ve met in jobs and through other friends since then. My massage therapist was there, too. Five of us had worked at one particularly horrible company (not all at the same time), and still had war stories to share. Two of my friends are teachers, so they got to chat about ridiculous certification requirements.

My sister provided a giant handful of pharmaceutical company pens for
us to use in score keeping. While she was pulling promo materials out of
her car, she stealthily brought in a thermal coffee mug in a box. I
didn’t find it until she had left and I kept wondering where it had
come from until I saw what was printed on it: the logo for a drug
described as "Diazepam rectal gel." Mmm! Just what you want to see when
you’re having a nice cup of java!

Cagey was there, obviously not drinking because of NewKid on the way, and I’m sure we all got on her last nerve. Sorry, Cagey!

All in all, though, it was a blast. I think I definitely need to have game nights more often.

My niece plays with Xena until they’re both all worked up and crazed.

At first I thought this was a "bad" photo. Then I realized that it conveys what the world looked like to both the kid and the kitten while they were playing.

Speaking of cats, Velcro is recovering nicely from her mastectomy. I predict that it’ll only be a matter of days before she’s back to her usual self, as seen below.

When I went to bed last night, I thought that a few rain-catching bowls on the living room floor would be the worst symptom of the storm. I was wrong.

My husband woke me up from a deep sleep around 2:30 a.m. Through the haze, I heard him saying something about an alarm and electricity and buzzing. It took me a while to realize that he was insisting that I get up.

When I finally stumbled out of bed and turned off my bedside fan, I could hear a loud, insistent buzzing sound from the basement that reminded me of the sound the dryer makes to indicate that its cycle is over, except that it didn’t just buzz and stop.

I looked down the basement stairs and saw a good three inches of muddy water covering the floor. The cat box had floated to the base of the stairs and was gently bobbing there. The buzzing noise was definitely coming from the other side of the wall, but I could envision all of the electrical appliances in the laundry room and was thus unwilling to touch the water in the course of trying to find the source of the noise.

I looked online (of course) to see if I could Google up any clues. It was possible that the sound was a water sensor that I didn’t know I had, but I really doubted it. My husband and I had absolutely no idea what to do. We’d had a bit of water in the basement before, but never this much. We guessed that the combination of the heavy storm and the lack of gutters on the house due to the roof work had overwhelmed our already porous stone foundation.

Finally, my husband called the contractor, who had already told him that he was available 24/7 if we had more problems with the rain. Still exhausted and completely unhelpful, I crawled back into bed and let the men deal with things.

This morning the alarm was silent. My husband woke up long enough to tell me that his buddy had stood on the stairs, reached over and opened the door between the sides of the basement, which caused the sound to cease. We still don’t know what it was.

The basement floor is now damp and dirty, but the standing water has subsided. I need to get a plumber out a.s.a.p. to clear our slow drainpipe.

Today’s weather forecast: a 50% chance of snow. Sigh.

Remember how I said that workmen came by a couple of days ago to start removing our roof? Guess what’s happening now? Massive thunderstorms. With hail!

Water has made its way around the roof tarps to drip through the ceiling fan in the living room. The basement has rivulets of water running across the floor and under the door to the laundry room. The laundry room drain…well, it’s not draining. It’s just full all the way and sitting there. Sigh.

The worst part about this story is that it’s happened to me before. When I was a teenager, my parents decided to have a new roof put on my childhood home. As soon as the old roof was removed, we had an unexpected storm. Whose bedroom ceiling flooded and fell in? That’s right, it was mine.

It’s after 11 p.m. and we’re less than halfway through the storm. Ooh, the weather lady says that the tornado warning has been cancelled. Bonus!

I’m going to bed.

Here are some of the things I’ve found online lately that I thought were worth sharing:

• You Don’t Know Jack – Remember the seemingly endless iterations of this snarky computer game back in the ’90s? I think I had all of them. Now it’s gone online with a daily "Dis or Dat." Yay!
• The Story – A surreal, meandering tale rendered in illustration over photo. One of the cool things about it is that you can submit a photo and be included in the story.
• 52 Proven Stress Reducers – I’m willing to try any of them that don’t include cutting down on caffeine. I NEED caffeine.
• Kid Creatures by DrawerGeeks! – This has made its way around the blogs a couple of times already, but I still enjoy it. Professional illustrators take children’s drawings and redraw them to look more 3D and realistic while maintaining the essence of the originals.

Will that hold you until tomorrow? I thought so. Enjoy your Wednesday!

Today is the only day this week where the only thing on my calendar is "go to work." Why do I over-schedule myself so?

This morning I was washing dishes and tidying the kitchen in preparation for our cleaning lady to come later today when I looked out the window and spotted a large pickup truck with a trailer parking right next to our house. It wasn’t long before another truck, this one with a flatbed trailer, pulled up alongside the yard.

I went into the bedroom and poked my sleeping husband. "Do you know why there are workmen at our house?" I asked him.

It turned out that they were here to start replacing our roof. I think it would have been nice to know that they were coming, but apparently that was all worked out after I went to bed last night. I went out in my pajamas and pulled my car out of the garage and onto the street before anyone had a chance to block me in.

Tonight I am planning on painting the baseboards in my bathroom, which is the last significant thing that must be done before that room’s remodel can be declared complete. There’s no real hurry, but I am hosting a game night on Saturday, so it would be nice to have all of the details taken care of beforehand.

Velcro is back from the vet wearing an Elizabethan collar (lampshade) around her neck. Let’s hope she does better with it than this cat. According to my husband, she is not at all happy about the collar, but she has to wear it for several more days yet. I will be giving her twice-daily doses of antibiotics. Lucky me!

Her tumor was cancerous, but the vet is fairly confident that they got it all surgically. At this point, we’ll just have to observe her closely…which we do anyway.

Ooh, one more news flash. Since we still don’t have the Mac Pro back from the vet Apple Store, we managed to use our most recent band practice session to finally choose a name. It’s metal…it’s WoW-tacular…it’s a little cheesy…it’s…Dark Crucible.

To give you an idea of how huge a geek I am, I must admit that one of the main deciding factors in the name choice was that the .com domain was available. Seriously, that’s a nerd omen. Don’t bother to go to the site just yet – I still need to transfer my Bandzoogle account to the new domain, get a logo designed, etc., etc. before I’ll be ready to do anything with it. Still, it’s progress.

That’s all I have for you today, ladies and gentlemen. Tomorrow: linky goodness. Wednesdays are like that.

I have a lot going on this morning and I stayed up really late, so I’ll make this quick.

My weekend was packed with activities, most of which involved me bringing food. I had a haircut and color appointment on Saturday followed by a viewing of "Reno 911: Miami" with the hubby, then I cooked and baked until after midnight. For the record, I made potato soup, baked ziti, two loaves of Italian bread and a pan of brownies.

On Sunday, I worked at the spay/neuter clinic in the cat recovery room from 8:00 a.m. to about 1:00 p.m. (I brought potato soup and one loaf of bread). That evening I took the baked ziti and the other loaf of bread to a Ronald McDonald House. After that, I went to an Oscar party and brought my Pan’s Labyrinth Brownies. (Hershey’s brownies with peppermint chips made in a labyrinthine pan.)

I enjoyed the Academy Awards show, particularly host Ellen DeGeneres. I can tell that reviewers’ opinion of her hosting job pretty much came down to whether or not they like her schtick in general. I do, and I thought she was funny and nicely relaxed.

I didn’t have much stake in the outcome of the show because I’d only seen a handful of the movies that were nominated, but I still got 8 out of 17 correct on the pre-show ballot the host provided, which won me a DVD of "Apocalypse Now." Woohoo!

This morning I’m dropping Velcro off to have surgery on a mammary tumor that the vet found a couple of weeks ago. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that she’ll be okay.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Enjoy your Monday and I’ll try to write something of substance for tomorrow.

Lately, the advertising and marketing blogs are abuzz with articles about customer service. It seems that businesses are coming to the realization that no amount of cool branding or advertising will help a company that doesn’t take care of its customers. I know, duh.

Recently I’ve had two very positive customer service experiences. The first was my trip to the dentist on Tuesday afternoon. I’d chipped a tooth at lunchtime the previous day, and I was pleased to be able to get in so quickly. The quickness didn’t end there: only about 20 minutes passed between the time I sat down in the chair and the time I left with a new filling. In that time, the hygienist took an x-ray, the dentist greeted me, looked at my tooth, drew me a diagram of what the filling would look like, gave me a painless Novocaine shot, removed my old filling, put in a new one, and sent me on my way with a nice sample-sized tube of toothpaste for my desk drawer. I still had time to stop and get a sandwich before I had to be back at work.

That evening, my husband and I visited an Apple Store with our Mac Pro in tow. Our appointment with an Apple Genius (that’s what Apple calls their service desk folks) was at 6:40 and we were there for more than an hour as he talked through the digital recording problems he’s been having. My husband was once a Mac tech, so he’d already gone above and beyond what most consumers would do to try to fix the problem.

While my husband and his Genius talked over the Mac Pro’s problems, I listened to the other Genius talking her customer through a very basic user issue. Both Geniuses were extremely professional, respectful and patient, and fluidly adjusted the level of tech talk to correspond with each customer’s level of proficiency.

I’m still keeping my fingers crossed that one of the techs will be able to figure out what’s wrong with the Mac Pro, but I must say that our experience in dropping off the computer left me feeling optimistic.

Of course, then there are the negative customer service experiences I’ve had recently. For example, a lunch at a local Thai restaurant that dragged on for almost an hour and a half (at lunchtime!), apparently due to low staffing. The staff members who were on hand didn’t seem at all sensitive to the amount of time we’d waited for everything from drinks to our check. As much as I love the food there, I may never go back and eat in the dining room again. (Carryout seemed to go much more smoothly, we noticed.)

Sometimes it’s less about customer service and more about value. After we left the Apple Store the other night, my husband and I went to PF Chang’s for dinner. After we ate and paid, we discussed it and decided that another Chinese restaurant we frequent is just as good, gives you more food, and is considerably cheaper. As my husband put it, "I feel like I paid for an extra dinner that I didn’t even get to eat."

The other restaurant doesn’t have quite as nice of an atmosphere, but the service is good and they give you little extras like marinated cucumbers as an appetizer and orange slices for dessert. When you weigh all of that, it looks like we just had our last PF Chang’s meal.

Do you have any good or bad customer service stories to share? Is there a place you frequent or avoid simply because of the way you’ve been treated when you go there?

Believe it or not, my life hasn’t been 100% cat drama lately. At the same time I’ve also been doing other things.

I’ve rediscovered high-end makeup. I blame Amalah’s Wednesday Advice Smackdown for leading me down the path to ruin. I was intrigued by her recommendation of Bourjois Coup de Theatre False Lash Illusion Mascara, so I went to Sephora.com to order some. Well, of course you can’t just buy one thing from Sephora. I ended up getting a collection of Bare Escentuals products, too. Then my order came with a sample of Too Faced Magic Wand Foundation, which set the stage for two pricey trips to Nordstrom for an eventual total of three Too Faced products.

The good news about my first Nordstrom trip is that the makeup artist did such a nice job on my face that I didn’t have to make myself up for an industry awards function I attended that evening. I just got dressed, put on some false eyelashes and a purple, green and yellow wig (it was a Mardi Gras-themed party), and walked out the door.

I’ve sat around with the band in our studio, NOT recording. After about a month of working perfectly well, the new Mac Pro decided that it doesn’t want to have anything to do with MIDI. That means none of my husband’s drum tracks will play back correctly. It’s also balking at recording bass tracks. My husband has spent hours and hours and hours trying to get it to play nice, but it refuses to do so. He’s been proceeding with the assumption that it’s a software problem – possibly a driver that’s incompatible with the Intel processor. Tonight we’re taking the CPU to the Apple Store to see if it’s a hardware problem instead. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it all gets sorted out soon. I’d really like to get our CD finished.

I’ve wracked my brain for a band name. Since we can’t record, we’ve been trying to come up with a band name in our copious spare time. Finding something cool that nobody has used before is extremely difficult.

I’ll wrap this up because I have a very full day planned at work and I need to get in as early as possible. I cracked a tooth at lunch yesterday, so I have to plan around my 12:30 dentist’s appointment as well.

Thanks for all your words of encouragement of late. I’m hoping to have only good news from here on out, at least for a while.