So I finally named the fishes the other day. The betta fish is Mufasa, and the two goldfish are Andy and The Tuna. Unfortunately, life with me was not suited for Andy, as I found him dead in the tank this morning. A sad day indeed.

When you were young, you wanted to be a Astronaut when you grew up, but in reality, you're gonna end up as a Truck Driver

Are you crazy? Staring off into space all the time does not an astronaut make. Do you really think you're up for that much physics? It's ok, though. Soon enough, you realise that not only is math hard, but that there are other ways of being a space traveler.

So after a few years of heavy drug use, your desire to 'get away from it all' still hasn't been killed off. But that's ok, there's still plenty of work out there for a person like you, and there's plenty of stars to see when you're barreling down the highway in BFE, Kansas at 3 in the morning.

What you want to be when you grow up: The fantasy...and the cold hard truth., created by Ptocheia

I got a notice from a collection agency the other day, for $9.33. Apparently there was a final bill from Verizon that I never got. After a hellish phone experience, I found out the details. The bill, plus all followup notices, were getting sent to my old address. Somehow, despite my mail forwarding, none of these ended up at my new address.

Once I get Drew to help in confirming when I start up my cell phone, it will be entirely likely that I shouldn't have to pay the $9.33 in the first place. There had been a discrepancy somehow, whereupon I had the number ported over to AT&T, but then I got another bill for an account that had no phone number attached to it. According to Verizon (back when I talked to them several months ago), this was an error on AT&T's side, since they were supposed to close my Verizon account when they contacted them to get the number over (why would a Verizon employee choose to leave open an account that had no attached number?). In any case, AT&T said they'd take care of the porting problem and have the account set so that it would have been closed when the number was officially transferred over. Sounds like that didn't happen.

Meaning that I sat on the phone for about an hour and 1/2 today. I got transferred to 6 or 7 people, and I had to explain my issue to each and every one of them despite several of the people, when transferring me to the next, saying they were contacting that person and explaining the situation. A few of them insisted I was in the wrong department before I even finished explaining my problem. One woman made me start crying, and kept interrupting me tell me she was gonna transfer me, without letting me explain my problem in full. I was made to feel like it was my fault that I never received these bills that they had (according to them, at least) been sending me. I asked if they would take off the charge, being as it was ridiculous that, as far as I was concerned, I never received a bill for it, as well as the fact that, at $9.33, it would be cheaper to just refund that to me rather then spend the money on paying the people that had to talk to me about my problem. She said she couldn't do that. Afterwards, I found out from Drew that the response I should make for such things is 'Ok, then transfer me to someone who can do it'. I hate Verizon.

Oh yeah, and two people insisted in transferring me to FIOS, despite that I never had FIOS. I pointed out that fact, but the guy(s) insisted that my account was marked as a FIOS account.

In the end, I realised that I didn't have the proper dates documented to successfully hold up my end of a dispute conversation over the charges, so I grudgingly agreed to have the final bill sent to me. Upon actually having documentation in my hands for when this alleged $9.33 was due, I can then get Drew to look up the AT&T information to see when my number was officially ported over, and therefore, when my account *should* have been terminated if everyone had been doing their job correctly, and also therefore the last date I should have to owe Verizon any money for. So I anticipate having to contact AT&T to get this taken care of, as I am quite sure that $9.33 is not my responsibility.

And the sad part is that it's just $9.33. But it's the principle of the matter. And the fact that I don't want Verizon to have a cent more then need be. And the fact that, well, it's only $9.33, and they should not make it hell to deal with such a puny charge.

Mmm cheese.

Apparently Kroger has a gazillion 1/2 off bakery discounts on Sunday. This is a good thing, as now Drew has more baked goods then he knows what to do with. It's his 28th birthday today! I ordered him something off Amazon, which shipped last Monday, that I have still yet to get. This is unhappy.

I have fishes! Somehow the process of me getting fishes expanded, and I now have 2 containers, one with a betta fish and another with 2 goldfish. Still need to actually name them. One of the bowls ended up being too small, so I just got a 2.5 gallon dealio for the goldfish. The best part is, each of them has their own Krillin figure in the tank! And Krillin's outfits match the fishes! Fun times.

Anthrocon was this weekend. Alas, did not go. There needs to be more moments in my life when it is perfectly acceptable for me to wear ears and a tail.

Drew is currently playing an Axis and Allies game he got from Big Lots for $6. He keeps making grunting noises at it, apparently the game is being disobedient!

I had this brilliant idea for Drew's birthday that involved driving to North Carolina for hiking, and so he could eat at Steak and Shake. Tonight, I realised that this would be a 4.5 hour drive, which is completely not doable. No good at all! This park looks really neat though, we might camp there this August for a long weekend at some point!

This next 1.5 weeks looks busy as hell. Tomorrow is Vanna's baby shower, which should be interesting as I get to see all the old coworkers I haven't seen in like 2 months. Next day we go to Williamsburg to watch 'The Handmaids Tale' with Julie, for Drew's class (he just read the book). Day after that is Adventures with Drew on his Birthday, which will now be (sadly) much less hectic, as no adventures in driving far away this time! Monday is dinner with his mom, Tuesday may or may not be a picnic (waiting to hear on that one), Wednesday? Hmm. Dunno. Was that dinner with Drew's dad? Apparently there are parental obligations that are all getting met at once. Thursday is a meal of some form with my parents.

Friday is 4th of July, whereupon there are rumors from John of some sort of party. I'm rooting for enough people involved for a ball game, or at least some volleyball. That's the worst part about not being in school, there's no convenient classes of students to make up ball games of various sorts. Mind you, I probably appreciate playing such games much more then I did when I was actually *in* school, but that's beside the point. I am also rooting for charred hot dogs of some sort, as there's nothing tastier then a burnt wiener.

Saturday Drew will have a DnD fiesta, whereupon I will attempt to run away to the river with Carolyn for swimming adventures, then that night Drew and I go out to dinner (maybe Couscous?) for our 2 1/2 year anniversary. Yes, we totally celebrate partial years (sometimes), this is because we like excuses to eat things. And Sunday may be blissfully empty. Yay!

Neck hurts, no good at all!

First off, apparently I might have made fusion empanadas. I'm not sure, really. I used empanada dough, shaped them like empanadas, and then dumped in some filling that's more east Mediterranean then anything else. They were pocketey and delicious, though. Here's a link to their process with pictures.

The tastyniblets experiment thus far has been a mixed bag. I like having separate place to babble about crap that I make, and I've been good at updating on a regular basis. Some of the experiment has simply been to have a blog dedicated to a specific subject, to see how it fares. I'm sort of going for a 'food blog trying to be funny' dealio. It would be nice to increase readership, but I'm not all that sure how to go about doing that. I'm consistently posting, which is good. I'm not looking to troll forums or anything just to plaster the link everywhere, and I don't have a blogroll aside from linking to my own sites, as I don't really read any food blogs aside from a few on lj where I just look at the pictures. Part of my problem is that I'm just not interested in the whole 'macro closeups of gourmet intricate dishes with recipes" thing that many food blogs possess. I'm more interested in the process, and in making fun of it somehow. Or at least that's what I'm going for. I suppose the best thing is to just try to write well, and not slack off and the swipes at bad humor, and eventually the internet will propagate it somewhere. And if not, well, it's still good writing experience and I find it entertaining.


In other news, don't use Globat.com for your web hosting. So I'm almost finished with this one site, see. And I need to contact their tech support for something of the sort of complex nature where I need to submit a support ticket. This will be done via email. Said email is currently not mine, but the actual owner of the company whose site I'm building. So I go into the control panel to change the email. It won't update. Very frustrating. So I contact their 'online chat window' support, using the 'tech support' option, since I'm thinking this is a technical issue for them. They redirect me to billing. The person I chat with in billing takes forever, along the way asking why I need to change the email address, which is weird enough since why would it matter? And I end up figuring out this guy doesn't have much more access then I do, since I give him my email, and soon after he tells me 'it says the email address isn't valid'. The email address that I've been using as my main email for like 6 years now, which is to replace a yahoo.com address. I inform him that it is indeed functional, and ask him why it isn't valid, as he's supposed to be the one with the answers here. He tells me to contact tech support. I tell him tech support already sent me to billing. So he says he needs to send this up to his manager, and that he's gonna write me a support ticket for this issue. And I'm thinking 'Great, a support ticket that I won't get because it doesn't go to my email address'. I tell him this in less cranky words, and ask him to send it to my email. He says it will also be sent to it. I last heard from them, via an initial email, at 6 pm. It's almost 11 now. I suppose I should log into the account, and *hopefully* I'll have access there, and it's not just via email, as otherwise I'm at the mercy of my client (who isn't the most frequent of email checkers) forwarding me these things. It's just ridiculous!

Oh man, so you know what you should do? Get some pudding cups, freeze them, and eat them with a spoon. It's like a pudding pop! I actually had little sticks with handles designed for making pudding cups into pudding pops, but the wee bastard slit right out. Spoon works just as well, though.

So I went to the Vegetarian festival this past weekend with Christine, Scott and Nikki. I saw random fun people and got free samples, some tastier then others. Oh, and italian ice! Good stuff. I heart coconut flavor. Also, got lunch from CousCous who was there. I'd heard mixed reviews about them, but I rather liked what I got (some sort of mock chicken in sauce with vegetables on couscous, plus a little pocket type thing), so I'll have to eat there sometime now.

And today I made exciting empanada/pocket dealios! I've not attempted making any pie type thing like this before, and I was quite pleased with how they turned out. Not really sure what to call them, as the dough was for empanadas but the innards were more eastern mediterranean (chicken + spinach + feta + cinnamon + almonds + raisins + other stuff). They are quite delightful.

More Perfect Strangers tonight! Boy that Balki is one wacky guy! I kinda wanna beat Larry with a wet sock, though.

I updated my browser to Firefox 3 the other day, and I have mixed feelings about the new toolbar, aka the "Awesome bar". Kinda bulky in look, and when I type in a url, it's autocomplete is generally not what I'm looking for. So I did some fixin'.

First off, I added the Oldbar addon, as it debulkified things. Still all the same information, but in a cleaner layout. I don't like having every bookmark and every url in the entire universe show up, not convenient. I've got the bookmarks in the bookmarks folder (and not, say, sitting directly on the toolbar) for a reason: I like them there for reference and remember they're there, and don't need them popping up all the time. Also, bringing up every page I ever visit is really crappy in some cases, as in Drew's birthday is coming soon, I'll probably make a purchase on the internet, and would rather that not come up the next time I type something into the url bar while he's at my computer with me. That's just no good at all.

So to fix *that* behavior, you type in 'about:config' into the toolbar, then changed browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to true. Also, to make the dropdown a little smaller, I changed browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 6, i.e. only 6 urls pop up rather then 12.

Seems more functional for my needs, now.

I suppose some of this might be the 'fear of the new' and all, but me and the so-called 'Awesome Bar' just don't seem to be clicking.

So this past weekend, I made some coconut rice with mango. I hacked together a few different recipes, and it ended up being so-so: pleasing in a slightly bland way. Anyhow, I ate some for breakfast today, along with orange juice. I start filling up, and spent the next hour picking at it as I do work. I start feeling stomach discomfort, but attribute it to the zinc pill I also took for breakfast, as I'd woken up feeling slightly under the weather and wanted to fight off any potential cold. Well, stomach discomfort evolved into full-blown nausea and pain, and soon enough I was writhing on the toilet. Diarrhea fun times ensued. I also threw up, albeit this was slightly induced, but it helped none, as the food was already far too digested. The pain has been going away gradually ever since. Comes and goes in waves now. Crackers for lunch seemed helpful, until they made my stomach get all upset afterwards. Same with impulse buy granola bar cookie. So I'm just gonna stick to water until this all passes. I'm not sure if it's from my breakfast (which was only like 2 days old, and had been in the fridge) or some sort of bug I picked up. I just want it to be gone!

Livejournal is good for complaining!

My watermelon plants are growing quite well, this pleases me. I hope they actually produce watermelon. I'm rooting for them a bit more then the tomatoes, I must admit, as the tough and thick skinned watermelons would stand a much better chance against the birds, squirrels and chipmunks. I'm be pretty dang happy if I got tomatoes, though, as fresh tomatoes are quite delightful. Oh, the BLTs that would be eaten.

The people at msn.com are cruel and confused bastards.

( Large screenshot under here )

Soo... am I supposed to learn to love my non-bikini body or should I want a bikini body? MAKE UP YOUR MIND MSN!!! I mean, really. This is like all those horrible magazines in the checkout line at the grocery store that proclaim "10 New Ways to Trim Dem Thighs!" or something like that, right above a delicious thigh-building cake. I mean, I know the economy would fall apart and all if people weren't simultaneously spending money on junk food and weight loss products, but still. It's kinda ridiculous. Ricockulous, even.


You know what's really depressing, though? Drew and I were at Kroger the other night, and he pointed out to me something interesting. In one of the cases at the end of the aisle were displayed frozen meals on sale. On the left side, all white with delicate lettering, were the Lean Cuisines, and on the right, all blue and manly, were the Hungry Mans. Yes indeed, 'His and Hers meals'.