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LAST CHANCE for Name-the-Pup Giveaway!

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Corgi Cute-ificationw00t! We’re picking up the baby corgi the day after tomorrow, Sunday afternoon. By Sunday morning, I’d like to have a name for this pup. Over at the great Pup-Naming Diet Book Giveaway, we already have quite a few kewl, adorable, clever, ingenious, brilliant and smokin’ proposed names.

It’s NOT TOO LATE to get a shot at a FREE prepublication copy of How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months…Without Hardly Tryin’! The thing has four chapters of diet advice and about 125 mouth-watering recipes from Funny about Money, some of them deliciously dietetic and some of them appropriate for the occasional splurge.

To enter, go to the Name-the-Pup post and, in a comment, tell me what YOU think this little cutie’s natural-born name really is.

The decision will be announced on Sunday morning…before 9 a.m. Mountain Standard Time.

P.S. After you post your name at the giveaway, check out this amazing moment of corgi cuteness.

 

 

Change of Banking Institution…ABORT! ABORT!

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Okay, so I get this bright idea.

WHEREAS my otherwise excellent credit union is a 40-minute round-trip from the Funny Farm; and

WHEREAS my pretend-employer, a certain Vast Community College District, waited eight (8) months to let us know it had released all of our personal information (including our names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, bank routing numbers, bank account numbers, employment histories going back to our first jobs, and every single college-level course we have taken from freshman year all the way through the Ph.D.) to hackers who put said information up on the Internet for sale to the highest bidder; and

WHEREAS I don’t trust the bastards to direct-deposit to my NEW! checking account without forking the relevant data over to their crook friends;

WHEREAS the last time I tried to deposit checks electronically it took 40 minutes to upload a $20 check from Medicare and I gave up after an hour of trying to upload the community college’s piddling $350 paycheck; and

WHEREAS at $60/hour I can NOT afford that kind of opportunity cost,

THEREFORE I decided to move my checking account from its present home in a local credit union, whose nearest branch is on the way to nothing anyone in their right mind would choose to visit unless they were employed by the Great Desert University, to another local credit union that has a branch right in the middle of my beaten path.

Oh, how grand (thought I) it would be to have an account at the Desert Schools Credit Union, where I could deposit the endless flow of stupid goddamn paper checks as I’m running my regular errands.

Sounds almost reasonable, doesn’t it?

heh heh heh heh heh…. It does, if you’re not living in a Monty Python Show.

You will recall that because of the community-college-district fiasco referenced above (second WHEREAS), I had to put a freeze on all three credit bureau accounts.

Now, you know and I know that to open a bank account these days, you have to subject yourself to a full-blown credit check. Right? For the prospective banker to accomplish this, he/she/it has to be able to access your accounts at one or more (preferably all three) credit bureaus. This makes a certain twisted, Big-Brotherish sense, right?

So, I go over to the Desert Schools Credit Union, explain the deal, and remark that if they want to proceed with this, I’ll need to go home and remove all the freezes on the three credit bureau files. I ask if this is REALLY necessary, though I believe I know the answer.

But apparently they don’t.

In Trip to the Credit Union the First, an exceptionally gorgeous CSR (o god, black curly hair and sapphire blue eyes and the sweetest manly smile: hevvin help us!) says ohhhhhhhh NO problem. No, we don’t need to do a full credit search. All that needs to happen is you give us a phone number where we can reach you and if we can confirm that then we can move ahead.

But alas, His Gorgeousness is not a permanent employee of the branch but is only standing in because the regular dude in that office is out sick. He says I should come back with the amount I would like to deposit in cash and checks and see a young woman we shall call Ms. Greene. On this particular day, I have not shown up with either money nor checks, but these are easy to marshal.

The next day I present myself to Ms. Greene with $3,000 worth of undepositable checks and cash rebates from the Costco Amex. She says that since I don’t have a cell phone, she must call my land line at home to confirm I’m who I say I am.

Reflecting silently on the idiocy of this (THINK about it! 😀 ), I say fine. She says “Call me this afternoon at your convenience and I’ll call you back.”

I do call her; reach her voicemail; she doesn’t call back until after 5:00 p.m., and, she informs me, she has the following day off. Will I come in the day after that (today, Wednesday)? I say OK, and find a place to hide the cash and checks.

Today I show up there and, after another 20- or 30-minute wait, once again she claims her computer doesn’t work. I point out that this is probably because the credit bureaus have a freeze on my (totally unasked-for) accounts. She says she will talk to her manager.

Another 15- or 20-minute wait ensues, during which I am painfully conscious that the bank probably has a camera staring at me, since we are supposed to not be bothered that privacy is a thing of the past.

Finally she drags back into her office, looking like a whipped puppy. Now she says that because I have a freeze on all three credit bureau files, they can’t do anything until I unfreeze them. She looks so woebegone that I refrain from remarking that I’ve now been told not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES that it’s unnecessary for me to do this.

Time to cut my losses.

I drive to my existing credit union, 20 minutes up the freeway, and deposit the cash and checks I’ve been dragging around for the past week or 10 days. I ask the teller if she could please remark to management about the despair caused to at least one customer by the stubbbornness of their online check deposit software. She cheerfully says she’ll pass that report on to the IT department.

Really.

By the time the third meeting with the Desert Schools Credit Union people was wrapping up, I realized none of them could tell their bung from a hole in the ground. Ms. Greene seriously thought I was going to traipse back to her precincts for the FOURTH time, sit around for 20 minutes for the FOURTH time, and take  a FOURTH chance that maybe she could manage to figure out how to open an account for me.

’Bye!

Sometimes other people’s incompetence makes mine look good.

😆

The Sky Is Blue Again…

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…out of both eyes!

Yesterday it dawned (heh) on me that suddenly the sky no longer looked like a smoggy day when viewed from the right eye — the one with the weird flashes. In spite of being declared free of retinal detachment, ever since that episode it’s felt like someone smeared a microscopically thin film of Vaseline over the lens of that eye. And when I look into the sky, it’s blue out of the left eye but kind of brownish from the right.

The optician — glasses dude — speculated that in addition to whatever is wrong inside the eye, I may be developing a cataract, too. Nice.

But suddenly, yesterday morning the sky was BLUE blue through both eyes! If anything, it looked even brighter blue from the right than from the left.

Hallelujah.

Most of the annoying floaters had disappeared, too.

One of the websites I stumbled across while mining the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest for information on whatever ailed me said that sometimes the floaters reabsorb after one of these incidents, though it could take three or four months. But the vision was so badly hazed — to the extent that if this had happened in both eyes, there’d be no way I could drive at night — and it seemed so unchanging that I figured I was just going to lose that degree of vision permanently, and that eventually I would pretty much go blind in that eye.

So. It’s reassuring to have the sky come back.

Image: Mohammed Tawsif Salam. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

On the Road

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Friend of mine, a lively lady who happens to be a long-haul trucker, sends this entertaining story of life on the road:

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I used to write letters to people when I was sitting at loading docks. It was not uncommon to be parked for 4 to 6 hours at grocery warehouses, so I had plenty of time.

One letter that I wrote to Bob and Roberta began innocently enough.  My truck was in the shop at a Kenworth dealer in Fort Worth, Texas.  The mechanics told me I could hang out in the truck while they worked on it. This was cool.  I love mechanical stuff, car/truck stuff, and especially mechanics doing manly things in the vicinity of cars and trucks.

I was writing the letter from the bunk and the curtains were open.  Did not want to ruin the view!  I had just placed my pen to paper when the passenger door opened and in popped the handsome face of a greasy mechanic.  In uniform and everything.  Did I mention I love things like that?

The only reason this is noteworthy is that I had not had a date or boyfriend in ages as a result of having sworn off of both.  Unfortunately, my resolve had been slowly wearing down.  A clear indication of this was the giant poster of Green Bay’s golden boy Brett Farve, pre-scandalous behavior, with a milk mustache displayed prominently in my bunk.  I could gaze at it every night before going to bed.  That poster brang me back to life.  Thank you Brett – and USA Today – and the Milk Producers Association.

So here is this hunky mechanic sans wedding ring (I checked) with his torso draped across the passenger seat just a couple of feet from me.  He was fiddling with some wires in the dash.  For some reason my pen would not move.  I am not sure how long I sat there, frozen, unable to break the spell this dude had on me.  But I enjoyed the experience completely.  He apologized for being in the way – are you kidding me?? – and I assured him that it was not a problem.

Only after he exited the cab area of the truck was I coherent enough to begin my missive.  I had recently completed a disastrous run from Wisconsin to Los Angeles (or somewhere out West) and was eager to share it with my bro and his wife.  It ended up a 13-pager.  Don’t remember how long I sat in that shop, but it must have been a while!  After I signed off, I added a title to the first page.  It was called “A Christmas Story”.

Thanks again for the story.  Brings back fond memories for me!

XO,
Connie

PS  The Brett Farve poster was eventually replaced by a calendar of hunky priests given to me by my sister.  She found it in Italy when she was there with the choir.  That was one “attractive” calendar.

Priest October

NINE HUNDRED DOLLARS for a 20-minute visit????

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Bill came from the Mayo Clinic, whose ER I visited a few weekends ago at the urging of my doctor’s office. You may recall the flashing lights: possible detached retina, possible pending blindness. Off to the ER.

The Mayo has made itself into an avatar of efficiency. Literally — this is not an exaggeration — I got in there and out in 20 minutes. The doctor, who was not an eye specialist, spent a good 7 or 8 minutes with me. He turned off the lights in the room, shined a light into my eye and peered in there, said he couldn’t see any sign of bleeding and therefore believed I did not have a detached retina, and advised me to call a specialist the first thing Monday morning.

For this, the Mayo is billing Medicare, my Medigap insurer, and me over $900!

And they did almost nothing.

No joke. They checked me in, they sent this guy in, and they said good-bye.

Damn. If I could charge that much, I’d earn $2,700 an hour.

PUPPY NAMING GIVE-AWAY: The 4-Month Diet Cookbook!

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So… Soon, before we even know it, Pup will be here. Lindsay, our Pup Breeder, wishes to know what we wish to name this dawg. We have no clue.

BUT…we have a blog. We have clever, creative, and brilliant readers.

Let us call upon them.

My latest book, How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, is about ready for publication. It soon will be available on Amazon.

As a special gift to FaM readers ( 🙂 ), I propose to give away one (1) advance copy, in the form of a PDF, to the person who comes up with the cutest, most appealing, or most appropriate name for this tiny li’l corgi:

Saydees Pups 6 Weeks 017

By “cutest, most appealing, or most appropriate,” we mean “the one I subjectively like the most.” 🙂

No guarantees that this will be THE name that sticks with the pooch for life, since I usually end up naming a pet after I’ve come to know it. But we do need something to start with.

The full title (speaking of names) of the diet/recipe book is How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months…Without Hardly Trying: Diet Advice and 125 Killer Recipes from Funny about Money. Not all the recipes are dietetic — those that shouldn’t add too much fat to the frame are tagged with stars. But all are pretty darned good to eat.

30 poundsThe winner will get page proofs for How I Lost 30 Pounds, in PDF format, complete with four chapters of detailed diet advice (largely unscientific) and about 125 recipes, some but not all of which have appeared at Funny about Money.

To participate, submit a comment to this post with your suggested name for this magnificent little corgi pup.

The contest will be open for ten days, starting today: Thursday, February 27, 2014.