…SOME SORT OF A MIRACLE!
Today (Friday, December 13…how apt!) has devolved into a day from Hell extraordinaire. I’ll refrain from describing the fiasco at Experian, the fiasco at the community college, and the fiasco with the car (which may mean having to buy a new car) and cut to the chase. To wit…
Pretty much in shock, after having untangled the mess at the college and rescued a lovely young student’s financial aid package (don’t even ASK!!!!!), I stopped by the Costco on the way home, there to purchase some dog meat and some dog veggies and a package of Campari tomatoes and…oh WTF, why not, a bottle of wine.
Friends have speculated that the size 10 jeans into which I have shrunk may yet be too large. And it has to be said that after while they seem to fit OK when they’re freshly washed, after one or two sittings-down they’re mighty loose.
So while cruising through the Mother Purveyor of All Impulse Buys, I picked up a pair of size 8 Gloria Vanderbilt Unquestionably-Your-Mother’s jeans.
Flew in the house and before even popping the cork on the cheap Pinot noir tried on the pants.
And holy mackerel. THEY FIT!
Not only do they fit, but they look pretty damn good.
Well. I don’t look like I looked when I was 22. Because I don’t have buns anymore. And neither will you, you crazy young pups, when and if you succeed to my state of agèd majesty. But I do look, incredibly and astonishingly, like a person who actually does fit in size 8 jeans.
Dayum.
Do you know how long it’s been since I could fit into a size 8 anything, to say nuttin’ of cheap pants made in Asia?
Thirty-six years!
Thirty-six years: THAT is how long since my body would fit gracefully into a size 8 of any shape or definition.
Who’d of thunk it?
Congrats! Congrats! 🙂
Congrats on the weight loss….BUT “holy crud” what happened to the car and this whole “identity theft” craziness has the markings of a best seller….Inquiring minds would like to know ….”the rest of the story….”
The weight’s back after yesterday’s horror show and then going out to dinner with a friend: up four pounds in three days! {sigh}
I was supposed to meet some friends for lunch at a favorite restaurant and shopping in Tempe. Just as I was about to jump in the tub, get dressed, and fly out the door, in comes an e-mail from the department’s redoubtable admin: Where the hell are you and why have you not responded to this student who got an F in your class because (she thinks) you have not read her paper?
She didn’t turn in a paper. Or at least, so I thought.
I call the kid on the phone and discover that she did turn it in; as a matter of fact, she submitted it early. But what she did was effectively to try to overwrite a paper that she’d already incorrectly submitted in the column for the final paper. And that didn’t work.
Earlier in the semester, she had posted one of the stupid little “reading response” busyworks in the place on Canvas for the final paper. I gave her credit for the busywork but could find no way to remove the attachment from the final paper slot. At the time I pointed this out and said she probably would need to e-mail the thing to me.
Well, instead she went to the final paper thingie and apparently thought she had successfully posted her paper there. What I saw there was just the old reading response squib.
Financial aid is telling her they’re cancelling her funding because she failed my class. The kid is beside herself.
I’m still determined to go out with my friends. To change a grade in the system is a half-day project: it requires the instructor to get a form from the admin or from the Registrar’s office (where at this time of year lines are out the door), fill it out with data that can only be obtained online, go in person with one’s college-issued ID card, stand in line for a good long while, prove to a factotum that you are who you say you are, and hand the form over.
I say I will do this on Monday, claiming the stuff I want to do today is a “business meeting” in Tempe.
Meanwhile, the kid wants to go in today and beg Financial Aid to wait until they get the change of grade before cutting her off. I say I will write her a letter explaining the situation.
This now requires me to crank out, as fast as I can, something on my letterhead and insert a JPEG of my signature and convert the whole thing to a PDF so the JPEG will be less easily stolen (not that it matters, since the college district has already handed my signature over to its hackers, along with my SS number, birthdate, address, and entire work and educational history).
By now I’m running late. I call the restaurant and defer our reservation; then call my friend, who isn’t answering. But while I’m typing as fast as my fingers will work, she calls back; I tell her I’ll be late.
I FLY around, blow-dry my hair, throw on some makeup, throw on some clothes, shoot out the door, and jump in the car. Turn the ignition key and get…
bdr-bdr-bdr-bdr-bdr-bdr-bdr-bdr-bdr-bdr-bdr-bdr-bdr-bdr-bdr-bdr-rrr-RRR-rrr-RRR-RRR-KA-CHUG-hummmmm
Uh oh. This does not sound good. The car has been hard-starting for the past few days and I’ve suspected it needed a new battery, but I just have NOT had time for one more extra hassle. Sounded like that was about the battery’s last gasp. But the truck is running so I head toward my friend’s house.
And realize…
I’m supposed to meet another friend for a concert this evening, and we need to go out the door by 6 p.m. It’s a half-hour drive to the present friend’s house and a twenty-minute drive out to Tempe from her place. The two friends I’m on my way to meet do not yet know that I have to be back at my house by 5:00 or 5:30.
If my car craps out in Tempe, we’re all going to be stuck out there. If we go in one of the other women’s cars and my car won’t start when we get back to Present Friend’s house, I won’t get home in time to meet Concert Friend. Present Friend lives in a mixed part of town; even though my car is an old junker, I still don’t want to leave it parked on the street in front of her house. I’ve paid $44 for this concert ticket and do not want to miss the planned evening.
So, I turn around and go back to my house. Figure to leave the car sitting in the garage idling while I call my friends to tell them I won’t be there (no, I do not have a cell phone and so have to return to the house to contact them), because I’m afraid to turn the engine off because I think (correctly, as it develops) that once it’s off it won’t come back on. Then I’ll take the car down to Chuck’s Auto Service.
However, the house keys are attached to the ignition key with one of those fingernail-breaking metal ring things. I can’t get the house key off with the car key in the ignition.
So I go get the spare house keys from their secret hidey-hole outside the house. The magnetic box where I’ve stashed them has corroded shut. I have to throw the damn thing down on the concrete as hard as I can smash it to break into the box. But…it DOESN’T CONTAIN THE KEY TO MY OFFICE! I don’t have a spare key to the office — I’ve given my only extra to my son. Fortunately, Present Friend’s phone number is on the speed-dial, so I call her from the phone in the kitchen.
I tell her my car is dead, a slight exaggeration (only slight, as it develops). She proposes to come up and get me. I demur, because I have to hassle with the school on Monday and do NOT want to have to deal with the car on Monday and most certainly do not want to go without a vehicle all day Saturday and Sunday and then have to get the roadside people up here on Monday.
Now I can’t get the secret outdoor keys back in their box. The lid jams in the open position. Have to smash the thing onto the concrete to break it loose again. Finally get it shut, but bashing the magnetic holder on the ground several times seems to have demagnetized it. I have NO idea where else to hide the keys where the burglar, who no doubt has been watching all these antics from across the street, can’t easily find them.
Eventually I find a spare magnet box. Decide to put some lubricant on its little runners before sticking the keys back in their spot. So of course get this oily shit all over my hands, adding a little extra layer of hand-scouring hassle.
But at least the car is still idling.
Drive down to Chuck’s, where none of the guys are thrilled to see another layer of work about to be foisted on them. Fortunately Chuck himself is there, so he takes over trying to figure out what’s wrong with the car.
We assume it’s the battery, but when he goes to test it, he can’t get a reading out of the alternator. Once turned off, the engine shows no interest in turning back on.
He now says he thinks the problem may be the alternator, and that’s an expensive fix. I say if that’s the case, I’ll need to buy a new car, because the Dog Chariot has reached a point where it’s not worth pouring a lot more money into it. He agrees, but says let’s not jump the gun.
After a great deal of effort he decorrodes the connections and places a battery from his shop into the vehicle. It takes some doing, but he gets the engine to turn over. During this process I remark that I could walk over to the Honda dealer from his shop. He notes that I’ll need the car to trade it in, but if he can get the damn thing running, he’ll drive me over there.
He now thinks his testing gadget ($1500!!!) may be going kaput. He’s disgusted. He pours more decorroding stuff on the various connections and continues to scour.
Now at last the car is running. We get it to start several times before I leave the shop. He tells me to come back today or Monday so he can put an actual new battery into the thing, and he remarks that he thinks the Chariot will run another two or three years.
I now fly up to the campus, where I figure I’d better get the grade change done, especially if I have to go back to Chuck on Monday. This chore gets done more uneventfully than expected — the college has improved its crowd control at the Registrar’s office. But of course they’ve also MOVED the Registrar’s office, so it took some doing to find the damn place.
From there I go by Costco, where I buy the size 8 pants. Also discover the traveling shellfish show is there, so I buy a pound of wild-caught shrimp and a bottle of wine (bad move!).
On the way home, contemplating this episode, it occurs to me that Equifax never did snail-mail me the PIN for the security freeze on my account there. This means that if I in fact do need to buy a car on short notice, I can’t: I can’t get credit, because I can’t lift the security freeze without PINs for all three accursed snooping agencies. It will take a day or two to transfer 30 grand from Fidelity to cover the cost of a car, and besides, if I can get a 0%, $0 down deal like my son did, I’ll be damned if I’m going to fork over $30,000+ in one swell foop. I need that PIN.
Back at the house, I reach a human at Equifax after endless annoying music is pumped into my ear. This guy, a very nice and very patient gentleman, has to ask me a set of “security questions” to confirm I am who I say I am before he can set up a PIN.
Well…wouldn’tcha know, one of the questions is “which of these six sets of numbers is the last five digits of your bank account”?
a) We do not know if Equifax has my new bank account number — as you’ll recall, I had to shut my account and open a new one; and b) Wonder-Accountant has my file of bank statements, because she does the bookkeeping for my personal account, long as she’s doing the corporation’s.
Fortunately, she does business out of a home office and she lives right across the street. While the guy is on the phone, I walk over there and retrieve the file.
Now I can’t find the file for the new account, and I’ve become so flustered that I overlook the bank account number that appeared in a sheet of paper that is stashed in the rapidly growing pile of paper related to the data breach fiasco. I’m verging on hysterical at this point. Finally I remember that the checks had arrived in the mail; get a knife and break into the box.
He asks the question. The answer? None of the above!
Argh.
This goes on and on and on and finally I pass the test and he gives me a PIN.
By now it’s around 3:00 p.m. I’m supposed to go out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant at 6:00, before the concert, but I’m SOOO hungry and my nerves are jangling like a gong that I decide to fix a meal so I can have a glass of wine.
So I cook up a few of the shrimp and serve them up on a pile of spaghetti (hence the three pounds of weight gain, not helped by the two spinach enchiladas I ate at dinner). And I drink altogether too much wine. Fortunately I don’t have to drive two hours later.
The concert was lovely. And we ate ourselves into a stupor at the Mexican restaurant, which serves up some ambrosial spinach enchiladas and has 99-cent margaritas.
This morning I have a sore throat, presumably picked up while traipsing around the campus or while grading hard-copy papers bearing the germs of the two students who came to the final sick as dogs. This is the same damn thing that happened last fall, when I determined never to teach a face-to-face class again, isn’t it? One kid showed up to that final, sat there for an hour sniffling and dribbling all over a piece of paper, and forked it over to me, wherefrom I got good and sick.
Jeez. No wonder I drink. Well. I’ll have to go on the wagon for awhile to get rid of the four pounds I picked up yesterday & the day before. So that’s a bright spot. I suppose.
DAMN…makes me want to take up drinking…LOL.
Yup.
Today we poured what wuz left of the wine (not much!) into the cabbage soup and we are not going to be buying any more of that for quite a while…. :-/
Ach, there’s worse things that eating and drinking in the company of good friends. A few pounds here and there don’t matter, as long as the trendline is pointing down. Cheer up, have a glass of vino!
Alas, I’ve indulged in way too much of that of late. Got myself sh!t-faced on Thursday, was a good two sheets to the wind by the time I met Concert Friend at 6 p.m. yesterday, and the (weak, but still spiked) margaritas over dinner added a third sheet. The boozie-frolicks need to stop. Like, now…
’tis the season! I’ve given up giving up booze and delicious holiday snacks and rich meals until after New Year’s Day. The selection of meat, cheese, alcoholic beverages and such really improves in our local stores at this time of year and at a somewhat more reasonable price than usual. So we do indulge at home and we also socialize more at this time of year for some reason.
And wow, did you ever have a day on Friday! Hope you have recovered.
Whoo! Congrats on the weight loss! Feels good, doesn’t it? And on behalf of all students, thanks for the financial aid help!
And the pants were only $16! I bought a purple pair.