Wish I earned four times what a senior editor makes, as young Fabulously Broke is doing as an independent IT guru. If I did…well, then I would.
😉
Last night I learned that the person I hoped would take care of Cassie the Corgie in October, when I’d planned to go to a reunion of my dearest college friends, can’t do it. That leaves me with no babysitter for the dog, and so that means I can’t go. Darn it. I was really looking forward to getting together with these women, only one of whom I’ve seen at all since we graduated from the university forty-two years ago.
Besides the fact that I can’t afford to put the pooch up at a kennel or at the vet’s, I’ve developed a real flinch reflex about that strategy. During my adult life, I’ve had seven dogs and seven cats. For twenty years I was married to a man who loved to travel and who could afford to board the dog while we were in transit. Not once, EVER, have I boarded a pet (dog or cat) and brought it home healthy. Every single time, the animal has come back from the vet’s or the kennel with some ailment or parasite infestation: kennel cough, enteritis, ear mites, ticks, fleas…you name it. What this means is that after you’ve paid the vet to put the dog up for several days, you then get to pay the vet to treat the dog for whatever it picked up at the vet’s kennel! And I really can’t afford to pony up another $100 to get Cassie well on top of the boarding fee, the $100 my car will burn in driving to Sedona, the cost of eating out four days, and the cost of a gift for the hostess. If I earned IT guru money, I could afford to have a petsitter come to the house. Because Cassie won’t use a dog door and won’t go out and do her thing unless you go out and stand there with her, such a person would have to show up twice each day to feed her and then come back and let her out another four times. Or so. We won’t be doing that.
Oh well. I’ve lived forty-two years without seeing old friends. Guess I can manage to get through however many years remain without it.
Then there’s yesterday’s bêtise: I stupidly bought a beautiful little table on megasale at Pier One. It was already marked off a substantial amount. Then I got another 20% discount for taking the floor model.
And then I let the sales dude load it in my car. If I’d done it myself, I would have done it right. The thing fell over at the first turn I made, splitting the pretty painted top. This might have been OK, because the broken part is in a corner and doesn’t show much. Or it wouldn’t, if the table fit in the place I planned to put it. But it doesn’t. It’s two inches too wide! And because I took the extra discount, I can’t take it back.
So now I have a $170 Goodwill item. Bad stupidity!
Yesterday another of my little stupidities came home to roost: I’d agreed to accept a guest post on the uses and misuses of the one-em dash for The Copyeditor’s Desk. This magnum opus arrived yesterday morning. Duh! WordPress won’t do a one-em dash! So now I’ve got a very fine essay full of examples requiring a character that doesn’t exist, as far as I can tell, in the blog’s publishing software.
Then I realized, along about 11:30 last night, that I’d forgotten to go by La Maya’s house and pick up the newspaper, they being out of town. They’ve probably been burgled by now.
Well, I’d better get up, feed the dog, and see what new disasters I can commit.
Funny – I wish I could volunteer to help you out with your pooch, but we have four of our own and I don’t know that adding another one into the mix would be the best idea. 🙂 On the one-em dash, can you enlarge the symbol in Word and take a screenshot and post it? Any chance the table could be trimmed down to fit? Are you POSITIVE they won’t take it back? Maybe you might get a sympathetic manager, no that’s right, customer service is dead, lol. Happy Labor Day. I have to work from home today so I can get caught up for tomorrow at work.
Don’t be so sure about your Pier One situation. A few years ago I bought a dining room table and an entertainment armoire from a Pier One about 200 miles from my home. Their helpful young man loaded the furniture into the back of the truck for my friend and me. The back window of said truck was completely obscured by a big chair my friend had bought. About 20 miles down IH-20 we pulled off to get gas. We were absolutely dumbfounded to discover that the big entertainment armoire was no longer there! Evidently it had “caught a little air” and flew out somewhere! After getting over our initial shock and the horror that a major pileup on the interstate may have occurred in our wake, my friend got really angry at the kid who had loaded the furniture.
She pulled out her cell phone and called the store and really let them have it. They took total responsibility and refunded the entire cost of the armoire!
Your issue is not what you paid for the table but that it was improperly loaded by their staff. Give them a call – you never know!
P.S. We did scan the paper from the town where we had been shopping and also called a friend who lived there to determine if we had, in fact, unknowingly caused an accident. Evidently, someone was looking out for us and for the people on the road behind us because we never found anything.