AFK

Pukka & I are currently at my parents' and will be leaving Sunday to spend a week with his folks in OR (where there's only dial up! The horror!). So don't expect to be hearing anything in the next week or so.

Uno, dos, tres . . . . . catorce!

So Pukka's got the TV on SNL and U2's on singing "Vertigo". If you haven't heard the song yet, Bono leads it off by counting, "Uno, dos, tres, catorce!"

Pukka and I had discussed this bizarre method of counting earlier in the week, and I decided to turn to my friend Google to see what the internet had to say about this nonsense. So, in a momentary French-Spanish confusion, I search for "uno dos tres quatorze". The first thing Google has to say?

"Do you mean uno dos tres quatro?"

My freaking question exactly!

Ubiquitous

This morning when I got up, Tony was watching The Care Bears Movie. He was telling me he thinks this was the first movie he ever saw in the theater, when I asked, "So is Cree Summer in it?"

You see, we've come to believe that Cree does a voice in every cartoon we watch. But, as Pukka pointed out, she wouldn't have been very old in '85.

So I head to IMDB, not because I disbelieve him, but because I was trying to remember somewhere else I had heard her recently. And lo and behold, she was in The Care Bears Movie!

I'm telling you, the woman is in everything!

Election wrap-up

Prior to the election, I frequently said I didn't know what I would do if Dubya was re-elected. Then he was, and somehow life went on essentially unchanged. I still wake up in the morning, go to work, come home, watch TV and play video games with Pukka, and then go to bed. And the next morning I wake up and do it all over again.

A few weeks back, I read this article about how people underestimate their ability to deal with emotional trauma. Basically, people tend to believe that adversity will impact them more than it actually does. For example, people imagining missing their train predicted it would upset them more than people who actually missed the subway reported being upset.

I thought I couldn't live through another four years of a Dubya presidency. And while the man causes me an extraordinary amount of stress, I'm coming to realize that he's (probably) not going to kill me.

Still, some things have changed. We'll be bucking up the money to join the ACLU here soon. And I'm working on a letter to our Senators and Representative outlining where we believe their priorities should lie. I'm sure there'll be more before the next four years are over.

Because apparently, I'm going to live through it after all.

Sharing

This morning I got this email from a co-worker:

I have some salt water taffy, peanut butter chews, a piece of the Berlin Wall (no joke), and other stuff if any one is interested in stopping by my cube.

I like it because I now have this mental picture of people in his cubicle chomping away on a piece of concrete! "Mmmmmm . . ." *chomp* *chomp* *pained expression* "This is the, um, best, um, piece of wall I've ever had."

Choices

I wrote the ritual we did for Samhain this year. And at its heart, it was a decision making ritual. We invoked Hecate, because she's goddess of the crossroads. She's also old, both in history, and in aspect, and she doesn't really mess around.

(She's also associated with dogs, especially the ones you hear barking in the night, so I like to call her goddess of bitches. Pukka thinks that's disrespectful, but I think it's just the truth.)

The idea was that you've come to this crossroads in your life, and Hecate's there. Everyone had two pieces of paper. One had one "half" of a decision on it and the other had the other "half". You were supposed to go down to where Hecate was, and throw the half you were giving up into her flaming cauldron. For example, "I'll go back to school this year" vs. "I won't go back to school this year".

I, in my infinite wisdom, picked my choice ahead of time, since I knew what was coming, having written the ritual. And I was going to use having kids as my choice. Because Tony and I are currently agreed we'd like to have them, but it's probably not going to be a good idea in the next year for practical reasons. So on one piece of paper I wrote "have kids" and on the other I wrote "don't have kids". I figured this way, in a couple of months when I see a baby, and I think, "Oh, I want one of those" then I can tell myself "Not this year -- we already decided, remember?" And then I marked the paper I wanted to throw away, so I could find it easily by the firelight.

In the ritual, I found the paper I'd marked, walked down to Hecate's cauldron, knelt before the goddess of the witches, said "Please take this from me" and threw the paper into the fire.

Fast forward to Thursday night. I'm cleaning the living room because we're having Gaea's Feast on Friday, and I find the bag full of stuff leftover from the ritual. I'm sorting through it, because some of the stuff in it lives in the kitchen, and some of it lives in the back room. And I find the paper I have left from the ritual.

The one that I kept.

The one that should say "don't have kids".

Only it doesn't.

Yeah, so I just wanted you all to know, so that if I get pregnant in the next year, you can be sure to laugh at me.

Customer Service

This hasn't been a very good week. To give you an idea of what it's been like, you should know that my car blew a head gasket, and then got a flat tire so I couldn't take it to the mechanic when I had planned. But today wasn't about the car. Today was the day I had to deal with the bank.

Friday, I went to my former bank and withdrew essentially all of the money in my old account. Then I walked across the street to our new bank and deposited that money in cash to our joint checking account. We left the bank, ran a few errands, came home and I logged onto our new bank's online banking service.

Now, note that my deposit had been made in cash. Also note that when I logged in that night, the balance presented to me indicated that the money I had deposited earlier in the day was present in my account. I proceeded to transfer two-thirds of that deposit to our joint savings account, which is where it belonged.

Yesterday, I logged onto the online banking service. Lo and behold, we have an overdraft charge. I clicked on the link that says "Customer Service". I called the number that is listed there. The phone rung, picked up, then immediately disconnected. Thinking I had dialed the number wrong, I tried again. Same thing. Fine. I clicked on the link to send them webmail, which assured me I'll get a response within 24 hrs now. I explained the situation in their form and submitted it.

Today after work, I checked my messages. No word back from the bank. It's been over 24 hrs. I try calling the number again. This time it doesn't hang up on me. I get to be on hold for awhile, and then I get to talk to a man who's lucky I was busy folding laundry at the time and didn't get to write down his name.

I tell him we have an overdraft charge, and I don't understand why it's there. He pulls up the account info, then tells me that it's because I made a transfer on 10/29 that overdrew us. I ask him if he also sees a deposit on 10/29. He says he does, but that it didn't post until 11/1 because we made it after 2 pm. There's some debate about dates, because apparently the info he's looking at on his computer and what I'm seeing via their web interface aren't the same. After about five minutes of going back and forth, I lose my patience.

"Let me tell you what happened in real life," I begin. "On Friday, I walked into your bank and deposited XYZ amount IN CASH. I came home and made a transfer that you showed I had enough money to cover, and that you allowed me to make. Can you understand why, based on that, I have a problem with you charging me an overdraft fee?"

"Ma'am," he says, "Any deposit made after 2 pm is always credited to the account the next business day."

"Fine, then," I responded. "We'll close our accounts and go to another bank."

And I kid you not, he then said, "Is there anything else I can do for you?"

Fuckers.

If Kitties Could Vote

Last night Pukka and I discussed who we believed the kitties would vote for.

I figured Twiglet would vote for Nader, even though we live in a swing state, just to be a bastard. Tigger I was fairly certain would vote for Kerry.

Pukka disagreed, saying Twiglet would probably vote for himself as a write-in and also convince Tigger to vote Kitten Party.

We're uncertain what Grayboy would do. On one hand, he's very concerned about security issues. But he also believes passionately in gay rights. So he's a bit of a toss up.

Fortunately for this country, our kitties don't get a vote. If you do, you should be sure to use it.