Namaste, Bitches

I'm freaking tired, though. Got up early for the doctor follow-up. All systems normal - low blood sugar (well, it was a fasting test - you try not eating anything for 15 hrs before getting your blood drawn. I was awfully cranky that day, too)... cholesterol w/in acceptable ranges except my good is low and my bad is normal, which makes its ratio high compared to the good. 'Eat more avocados and fish' she tells me. If she only knew about the mighty guacamole spree I've been on for the past coupla weeks... Oh, my white blood cell count was high, and I've got some signs of inflammation. My knees look like cantaloupe most days - ya think? She wants me to go through another stress test for my heart & I'm gonna go ahead & get tested for Turner's Syndrome. I'm also being sent to a sleep clinic if the insurance approves it. See if I have sleep apnea. Rob says I don't sound like I stop breathing - I just snore & ramble on about work in my sleep. Tomorrow we begin the infuriating process of having bars put up on the windows w/the in-laws. Garh.

They have been coming out w/some remarkably funny commercials lately. My two favorites right now are for Eclipse Gum & something about Cox Channel 1. The Eclipse commercial has an onion watching a scary movie - his phone rings & when he answers it, a voice says, "Dead onion says 'what'. The onion, of course, goes, "What?!" in this distressed tone of voice, and promptly disintegrates. 'Eclipse Gum: when we find bad reath, we kill it". My other favorite has a man & woman in a gym, & she's watching the guy dressed up as a big #1. The guy w/her is a bodybuilder & asks her what's so special about the #1 anyway, so she gives the sales pitch & the bodybuilder says, "Oh yeah? But does he have tickets... to the gun show?" & kisses his own arms.

Rob & the detectives recovered the PS2 & the games, along w/the power cord for the speakers he threw away when he thought he'd never see the power cord again.

Disorder	Your Score
Major Depression:	Very High
Dysthymia:	Extremely High
Bipolar Disorder:	Very Slight
Cyclothymia:	Slight
Seasonal Affective Disorder:	Moderate
Postpartum Depression:	N/A
Take the Depression Test

Aside from the bit of good news today, my world has been fraught with frustration & irritation...

1) Trying to get a taxi today to go to the doctor was unsuccessful, largely because I spent about 20 minutes per cab company trying to get someone to answer the damned phone. And the buses out here are not even moderately inconvenient - they are completely inconvenient. When Rob first came home on Tuesday & said the tranny was blown, I suggested a rental car. U-Haul only wants $19.99 a day but Rob balked at .59c a mile. He also balked at $150 for a 3-day rental. So I had to postpone my appointment and I've been stuck at home, except for walking to the bank. If the truck is still out of commish over the weekend, we're renting a fucking car because I'm not going to rely on the bus system out here to get me to work.

2) My doctor finally faxed my birth control prescription to Wal-Green's today. For a three-month supply. I'm going to have to have the pharmacy fax him a request again in July to get the pills refilled for another 3 months. I have 6 months to find a new gynecologist, because this 3-month-at-a-time is not going to work out for me.

3) I tried to give half.com my new bank account info for my seller's account with them. They want all the old bank account info to do this. I don't have a clue as to what any of it is because, well, those guys may have stolen checks, so I destroyed the ones that remained in the house. I didn't have my account info memorized, either... so in order to be able to give half.com a new bank account # I have to go through an enormous amount of verification so they can shut the security on the account off so I can enter my new account number. And if I cancel my seller's account with half.com, it also cancels my buyer's account w/half.com, my buyer & seller account with e-Bay AND my accounts with PayPal. What kind of fucked up shit is that, especially considering that PayPal let me go in & delete the old bank account & put the new one on file without a hitch?

4) World of Warcraft is seriously pissing me off. Granted, we have dial-up so if there is an update associated w/their weekly server maintenance, I may not be able to log in for 2 days while it uploads. Such is life w/a 56k modem. However, they shut the servers down 2 - 3 times a week in the early mornings... tonight I was in an instance w/Rob & got bumped off line, & when I logged back in - they say they're having 'authentication problems' that can prevent the user from being able to log in. At first, right around 10:40pm, the message said '11pm'. At 11:10pm, it had been extended to 1am. I only get to actually play maybe 1 evening a week, maybe 6 - 8 hours a week before or after work. This week has been kind of nice because I called in sick Sunday night. But I still seem to spend less time in the game world than I am waiting for some kind of update or maintenance to take place.

Blizzard is a great company, and I love their games. WoW is very cool, and I haven't gotten bored yet, which Rob is happy about. But, I am paying $14.99 every month for the pleasure of this game, and nights like tonight make me wonder why. I mean, I've played Diablo II for a long time on battle.net with nary a server maintenance problem, and Diablo's free. If they can keep a system like Diablo running w/out a hitch (and not just Diablo, but Warcraft in all its various incarnations and Starcraft, too) - why are they having so many problems w/WoW? Right now I could log into Diablo & there will probably be well over 100,000 games going on, which is anywhere from 1 - 800,000 people. It makes absolutely no sense to me. I'm trying to find a customer service e-mail addy for Blizzard & not having much luck. I am going to start keeping a 'down time' log just to show that I am being inconvenienced by their incompetence. I do appreciate their need to constantly add new content to keep people interested and playing, but I think I am not alone when I feel they should put the new content on hold for awhile & work on permanent fixes for their existing problems.

So, my day has been filled with technical support issues, or a lack thereof. I am just wondering who I pissed off now, or who else I pissed off?

AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! Woooo!!!!!!!!

Recently returned from seeing Train at Rain. Very awesome, if somewhat short, concert. It was a Mix 94.1. Underground Lounge. I think I needed 2 hours of cathartic screaming - I feel quite relaxed. Roadies came out starting around 7:45 - we screamed at them. Jason Rooney from Mix came out around 8:10 - we screamed at him. More roadies - more screaming. And finally, when the canned music stopped and the lights went off, the real screaming started. It's an act of magic, really - you scream really loud, start stomping and clapping and shouting the band name to summon them.

And we were so fucking close to the stage!!!!!!!! They didn't look like minatures of themselves, they looked like full-sized rock guys! And as an audience, we probably spent more time singing and screaming on command than the band spent singing & playing music. Pat Monahan is a very interactive person - he told us to scream incoherent things, and we screamed our freaking heads off. We all put our hands in the air & hopped up and down when he sang about doing the hokey-pokey. We really went berserk when he took a camera from someone in the pit & scanned it across the crowd. Concerts aren't just about the music - they're about the band, onstage, live & in person and that whole concert experience, making the forked horns (I couldn't explain it to Sheung Yee - she asked, "What's that?!") & swaying your arms back & forth & holding up lighters (only now it's lighted cell phones) during ballads. It's about stomping & whistling & chanting to summon the band for an encore. It's the banter the lead singer engages in with the audience. It's about being deaf & sounding like the Godfather when the concert is over, so you're yelling in a whispery voice.

But of course, the music is the biggest part, and weirdly enough, Train's sound is too big for Rain. Seal has that kind of bluesy jazzy sound that goes well in a small, intimate club, but Train is too old-school rock for that venue. Especially when the guitars and Pat's vocals hit those screeching high notes. Or when, before launching into the Mighty Zep's 'Ramble On', Pat opened with the beginning from 'Whole Lotta Love'. They mostly played their new stuff, but they had to do the standards - 'Drops of Jupiter' (entire audience in song), 'Calling All the Angels' (once again, everyone sang), 'Meet Virginia' and 'She's On Fire'. Sheung Yee kept asking me 'Who's Led Zeppelin?' - she's my age, but she was raised in China... not that that's an excuse, but oh well... and the very last song was 'Dream On' - Sheung Yee said, "Aerosmith did this?" The drum solo they did during 'Free' was absolutely awesome. I could feel myself trying to go places, but I didn't have enough booze in me to let go completely.

Let's see - there was an apparatus in the center of the club that spewed fire everywhere, which was weirdly inappropriate for 'Drops of Jupiter'... someone from the balcony sprinkled everyone in my immediate area w/wine... and now I'm sitting here eating leftover chicken gizzards & livers.

In other news, no prints came off the flashlight we found from the robbery, but I traded our treadmill & AbLounger for a PS2 - it's one of the old ones, but o fucking well. I've got two tests on Monday, one for my management class & one for pre-Algebra. I had a cardiac ultrasound done today (technically an 'echocardiogram'). It was pretty interesting to watch & listen to my heart beat. It sounds very watery compared to listening to your heart beat through a stethoscope. Sort of like listening to a washing machine on agitate - it's got a rhythmic swishy thumping kind of noise.

Literally. Rob came home from work last night to interrupt a theft-in-progress.

He's alive, and the snakes are alive, and Bob is still in his sort-of one piece.

They stacked a bunch of pots up under my bathroom window...

They were very selective and sort of weird thieves, though. They went through every freaking drawer in my room, took one knife from my altar & left the other... took a jewelry box full of junk jewelry & left the good stuff hanging from the wall... took Rob's hairbrush... Of course, they got the guns in Rob's room but only went through half my closet & missed the shotgun - and Rob ran out in the street & shot in the vicinity of some guy walking up the road. They left the tv's, the stereo, my radio, my computer... but Rob interrupted them in the middle of cutting the wires on his computer. They got his PS2 & the games to go w/it, though, and they had boxed up all our DVD's & his swords. They didn't rifle through our medicine cabinets in the bathroom, but they picked through the pill drawer we have - which was the only thing in the kitchen they messed with. Suspicious, huh?

They had paperwork strewn all over the house - Rob scared me & said they took my address book, but the thing he found in the street wasn't mine, but my address book was in my room - the charcoal from my altar was in Rob's room. I don't know what the fuck these Stooges were doing, but they made a mess out of everything. They pulled all my dildos & various other implements from my drawers & they were tossed about my room along w/every single deck of Tarot cards I own.

And now my bathroom is covered in graphite fingerprint dust. It doesn't come out of grout.

I dunno whether to laugh or cry, really. They took what remained of our tax return, which means no more work on the truck, no new tank for Ed... they took credit cards that were pretty well maxed out. Getting in touch w/some of the credit cards was impossible - 'Please press 5 to report this card lost or stolen' :::presses 5::: 'Please call back during regular business hours'. Oh, thanks a freakin' lot. I finally got in touch w/our bank & when Rob went to see if he could pull cash from the ATM before anyone else got to it, it ate his card - he gave the security camera a big thumbs-up.

Oh, and if anyone happens to see a nekkid picture of me on the internet that doesn't seem like I put it there myself, please contact me. I was wearing Christmas raindeer antlers in said photo - and nothing else.