my boyfriend

Me and @bonenado irl last night.

Ok, j/k, I didn't neck pinch him. My carpal tunnel is too bad for that now.

Had a chat last night with the nicest Best Buy / Geek Squad account support EVER. One of these days someone will figure out a way for us all to have everything centrally tied to just one ID so I don't have to go chasing down how in the world I have two packages of the same thing on autopay on two different dates between two different entities, all based on one of my accounts being under an old email address and therefore not showing up online in any form for me to see even though my equipment and credit ID cross the line into both accounts. One little ancient email address prevented associates from helping me with this problem for nearly 3 years. This genius woman last night was patient enough to dig around a little and help me sort out what was actually going on.

How can this even happen? Well, thanks to BLOGGING, I can go back and look up what was going on the day of the replica purchase. Apparently in September 2012 I dragged my laptop into a Geek Squad line sporting a nasty pain level in my neck during that ASTYM therapy and on antibiotic for something that was making me feel very ill. The next day I picked the laptop up from routine maintenance. I vaguely recall trying to ask questions back then about my Torch browser having fits over Google hangouts and must have gotten a big hype sales push from a yappy caffeine addict who couldn't see I was already paying for Kaspersky and sold me a protection plan bundle that included it, and I apparently plunked down my debit card. Ever since then I've been trying to untangle what in the world happened, to no avail. Last night a very kind person with apparently a mountain of experience excavated all my info, sorted it, assessed it, and helped me understand it.

Told you guys my brain was glitchy for awhile. 2012 seems to have all kinds of mysteries tucked away for me to find.

That was tedious. I'm really good at filling space with tedious material. Years of blogs...

Heh, guess I'm not always that yappy. On this day in 2007 all I posted was pictures. Here is one of them.



One line from 2008.

    Someone found my Duck Lords site through a search for 'blow my load vids'....  Aaaaaaaaahh!!!!!  *gag*

A short paragraph from 2009.

I really don't know how Scott turned out so calm and collected with all that crazy DNA from his parents.  I always thought he was so spontaneous and hyper and stuff.  He's a marble statue compared to what blew through my house for 20 minutes this afternoon.

Fun stuff from 2010.

Belmont Stakes this Saturday, woohoo!  This is the shirt I'm getting.

Chickens could probably use a little watermelon in this heat.    Spencer's occasional eggs are getting ginormous.  Dooney is still plugging out little ones every day, pretty much saves the day so we don't run out.  Macy should be laying nearly daily but for some reason has slowed down to about 2 a week.  Jaizzy completely stopped several weeks ago when she got so sick, and Bean is Bean is Bean, just a weird little pet with mixed up hormones.  Told Scott next time I buy more chicks (in some distant future), I'm sticking mostly to smaller breeds that are more consistent layers.  Dooney seems to handle the weather changes better, seems overall more healthy all the time, less inclined to let every little thing bother her.  Odd that she was the one bred to tolerate the stress of cage life, but she outdoes the others at freedom.

2011 was the big year that started changing everything when I found out I was diabetic.

So, I've broken the 200 barrier, which I haven't done in prolly 5 years, and that makes 38 pounds lost now.  Two more pounds and I'll be where I was at when I turned 40.  Weird factoid- I had put on 40 pounds since I was 40.

2012- THIS is the day that I made the decision to come back public again. That tiny sentence fragment represents one of the most hair-raising moments I've ever been through. Scott and I both assumed within a couple of microseconds that we wouldn't be living through it and braced for impact and nasty death. I still don't know how it didn't happen.

we just missed being in a nasty head on collision last night

2013- I'll never forget being on vacation when I got the news about Xanga. And I didn't yet know I am allergic to dogs.

Also found out we're in a pet friendly hotel. Being extended stay guests and hanging out the do not disturb sign, the air fresheners have worn off, and now this beautiful room in this really nice hotel smells like an old man with his cat and small dog used to live here. It's not nasty, but the litter box smell pervades, like a memory of days past.

Over $16,000 has been raised for Xanga so far (I joined a couple of Xanga facebook groups), and there are hopes running through the little crowd of regulars that they can pull this off.

2014 and everything is public now. And Mom is still showing up in a lot of my dreams.

*wow* o_o My head was so full of stuff just getting out of bed at 6:15 that I had to log onto all my twitters and go through motions just to get some focus. The dreams about my mom are getting cool. Maybe she's joining me in having fun instead of all the fretting she used to do.

2015 (That's now!)

Nearly killed Scott last night. Let him live. For now...

once you free your mind

I Need A Plan. This is the time of year I get weird until I get past the Fourth of July. Everything in my head gets mixed up, time skips around, I wind up in weird places for unknown reasons, and no one knows what to do with me. I need FOCUS!!!! >=l

I probably need some breakfast. Just realized I haven't eaten anything yet and I've already written hundreds more words, started laundry, called the Geek Squad, and got a grocery list going.

It's really throwing me that my protection plan expires on the 15th and will no longer be renewable. Even though this is probably the real case- Wait, Best Buy Replacement Plans Don’t Fix Or Replace Discontinued Gadgets?, I blame myself. I know NOW that the root of the problem is third party plan purchasing, third party tech rep assistance, and me being unable to to handle phones well. I don't yell or anything, I'm just obnoxiously persistent. I also know from providing customer support on phones myself that after a certain amount of obnoxiousness, a customer can be blacklisted. The current 'reason' I'm being auto-bumped is because my laptop is 'too old' now to be serviced under a protection plan. I have a pretty rockin' laptop, so I'm pretty sure the real reason is I finally just pissed the wrong person off and a strongly worded notation was made on my account, because the rep assisting me today seemed awfully hesitant to say anything to me beyond yes and no.

So basically, I have ten days left, should I care to take advantage of them, to take my laptop in and have everything in it serviced and updated. Which would wipe out all my cool settings and possibly even block me from being able to open crucial weird work folders because updates make it stupid trying to open outdated files. I think my plan is to just keep working, get my stuff cranked out, and then buy a new laptop before I start the rest of my projects.

This is my brain right now. I'm spacin after a bowl of cereal and now everything in the world is right again.

can tech support get any stupider

*3 hours later...*

1- Email from Geek Squad- "Don't let your Microsoft Office 365 membership end" Well, isn't that awesomely convenient, one-click subscription renewal. They took my money. The click over to MS wouldn't work. I tried many things.

2- Geek Squad tech support on the phone- Language interface problems galore. After 20 minutes of saying stuff over and over to each other I was advised to check with Microsoft, which I was actually already doing (see number 3).

3- Logging into my MS Office account- Today was my lucky day. I had to jump through hoops for 20 minutes getting codes and changing passwords and shoving my eyeballs through the screen and my fingers through the keyboard before I finally got into my account, but that was ok because I was still trying to understand the Geek Squad tech on the phone, gave me something to do. Hmm, my Office account didn't seem to have any idea I just renewed my subscription. I gave up on Geek Squad and said I would check with MS support to see what was going on.

4- MS online tech support- The only easy thing in this whole venture, but possibly a terrible mistake. Yes, she was puzzled, too. Nothing we tried worked. She agreed my plan to just go ahead and renew through MS and then cancel through GS would be the better idea. I renewed & got a $25 gift card. Awesome. She couldn't understand my logon probs though. She suggested another tech support session with someone else, but it was great talking to me.

5- Before I say this next part, we must know that the only way I can talk on my phone now is through speaker. It's been fine doing that up to this point. I pretend I'm using a Star Fleet communicator.

6- Geek Squad again- Tech support can't make heads or tails of what the crap is going on in my account, even though this guy spoke my language just fine. Why does it look like I have 2 MS Office subscriptions? And why was one canceled last May while I was on vacation? The more we looked over my billing, the deeper the mystery grew. After 30 minutes of breaking it down into manageable understandings of what neither of us could understand, I was transferred to billing.

7- Geek Squad billing's phone connection was dismal, plus a whole new dialect from another part of the world. That call lasted just under an hour. The only new information I picked up was that the email prompting me to renew a subscription I already had in fact created a whole brand new subscription, and every time I said I wanted to cancel the purchase I made, the billing rep asked me repeatedly if I wanted to cancel the subscription. Since I only have one subscription showing up in MS Office (yes, I kept checking), and since Geek Squad says I have 2 but one is already 'gone with the wind' (as per the previous tech), and since half our sentences are cutting out and we have no idea what each other is saying, I literally had to yell "NO! DON'T CANCEL!" several times. This tech couldn't understand what *my* problem was, and obviously couldn't understand that this was a Geek Squad issue and not a Microsoft issue. She advised me to go back to Microsoft for answers, even though clearly Microsoft can't undo a Geek Squad billing problem. (I felt really bad for that billing tech, it wasn't her fault that whoever set up the email incorrectly coded it to the wrong product and didn't interface with Microsoft itself at all.)

8- I will be going to Best Buy tomorrow to see for myself what the account number is on that subscription that got purchased instead of renewed before I tell them to 'cancel' anything. I will take print outs of my emails showing that they offered to renew a subscription for me, and I'm going to ask them how I got that email if billing and other tech support both say I didn't have that subscription to renew in the first place because it had been previously canceled, even though it still shows up in my MS Office account.

And this is why I blog. I don't blow up on the phone, I don't gripe on facebook, I don't slam my feelings all over twitter, I don't call unsuspecting victims on the phone and dump my day in their laps. Well, Scott will hear a little when he gets home, but by then I'll be so tired of it that I'll just say "Go read my blog", and he'll get on his fantasy teams instead. :edit: I should add that the 10,000 word emails have stopped, too.  Some people appreciate this.

Other things Geek Squad tried telling me-
-I purchased my laptop in 2012. Nope, it was 2009.
-I've heard 3 completely different descriptions of what Black Tie really means in the last 5 months.
-My original package has somehow broken apart into different billing cycles, and when I ask point blank if I'm paying for parts and labor protection on someone else's Toshiba, they go silent.
-Whatever my Kaspersky package entails, it has somehow reduced by about $85 a year, so whatever plan I was enrolled in to begin with has somehow corrupted down to 2 different "software security" and "tech support" services, which are basically handled over the phone, because online billing support for that has ever worked right and seems to be gone now.
-Black Tie may or may not apply to any of this at any given moment. I used to be able to get through immediately on the phone, but they've apparently remodeled how that works.

The sweet thing about having all this protection racket plan stuff is no one can push me to buy more. Just want that $104.21 back, thanks. And an audit of my account. Maybe some reward points or something. Free upgrade. Whatevs.