Last Monday (actually, two Mondays ago now, as I’d forgotten I was drafting this) the annual meeting of my condo association took place. There was NO WAY I was missing that meeting, considering that since I have moved in they have raised my monthly condo fees by over $100, and they currently have a lien out on my property. Yeah, you read that correctly; when I refused to pay the additional fees (and by refused, I mean, didn’t pay them because I WAS NOT MADE AWARE OF THE INCREASE AT THE TIME OF CLOSING WHEN THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO TELL ME) they sent me to a lawyer for collection, who after ONE letter (that they received no return receipt on since I DID NOT RECEIVE IT – the bookkeeper for the lawyer admitted she had not only NOT received my signature, but – after three months – not even received the original back from the post office) put a lien on my property and started the process to sue me for foreclosure.
When I called our board member/bookkeeper (after receiving notice I was being sued) she was VERY rude to me on the phone. I asked her, “well Lori, how much do I owe? I don’t even know. The suit papers don’t tell me. I never received a bill from you to alert me to the fact that I owe money!”
And you know what she said? “Well, we don’t SEND LETTERS! WE ASSUME PEOPLE PAY THEIR FEES EACH MONTH!”
……………let that sink in a little. They don’t send letters to inform you that you are not paying the correct amount of condo fee. A condo fee which was provided BY THEM – TO YOU – AT YOUR CLOSING – AND WAS THE WRONG AMOUNT. Instead, they refer you to their SHADY LAWYERS for collection, who trump up THOUSANDS of dollars in various attorneys fees that – guess what? – according to my condo docs, I am stuck paying, or else they will continue to pursue foreclosure. (more on those nasty condo docs later)
So now you know the back story on why I had a very VESTED interest in being at the board meeting. The board is, as far as I am concerned, NOT acting in the best interest of its owners, not providing due notice of changes and fees, and NOT making sound and ethical business decisions.
Another reason why I was very vested in attending the meeting was on January 3rd (dated January 2nd) I received a letter from the board informing me that our boiler had not “passed inspection,” and had cost over $1,600 in repairs in the past three months, and as such the board had decided to buy a new system – for the low cost of $70,000.
SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. After only $1,600 in repairs.
What that meant for owners is the following: depending on your percentage ownership (mine is just over 2.5%) you will pay an additional montly special assessment fee – mine being $231. A month. Extra. For six months. For work that won’t be done until June.
Now my condo fees when I purchased my condo were $195. Those fees were one of the reasons I bought the condo where I did – if I had wanted to pay $250-$300/month I could have lived in a high-rise in downtown Hartford and had a pool and gym and garage and tennis court at my condo! But I decided to save money, and the trip across the river each morning, and bought my place in East Hartford with the much lower fee (and more importantly, NO GARAGE). Since I have moved in, my condo fee has gone from $195/month to $308/month. Add on this $231 special assessment, and I’m now paying $539/month in condo fees.
Let me put this in perspective:
My mortgage payment is $516/month. I would be paying more towards monthly condo fees than my actual mortgage payments.
My 3-year car loan on my 2007 Honda CR-V is only $510/month. I would be paying more towards condo fees than my car payments.
The sum total of my car insurance, homeowners insurance, Blackberry voice/data service, cable bill, CITY OF EAST HARTFORD PROPERTY TAXES, and average monthly electricity bill is about $450/month. I would be paying more in condo fees than all of my regular monthly bills combined!
Now I don’t even live on a “fixed income,” while most of the owners in my building do since they’re all much older than myself, and some even older than my grandparents. So you can imagine what kind of impact this would have on THEM, who have NO opportunity to say to their boss “hey, times are tough, do you mind if I work some OT this month?”
Now before you think I’m totally overreacting and remind me that special assesmnets are a necessary evil in times of dire circumstance and emergency repairs, allow me to explain to you what I found out at my over three hour condo association meeting…(yes, OVER THREE HOURS)…
They received three quotes, ranging from around $40,000 to the over $70,000 quote. They went with the over $70,000 quote because “it covered the most work.” My response to the board? “Why didn’t we receive three quotes for 90-95% of the same work so we could do an actual comparison of the costs associated with this work? Comparing three quotes for three different jobs is not making a good ‘business decision’ for the association.”
One of our board members is demented. Everyone says “he ain’t right,” but after being around enough old people in nursing homes I recognize demented when I see demented. He was strong-armed by Lori to vote for the $70,000 after she told him “the boiler might explode.”
The $70,000 bid was pushed through by our management company in under 72 hours, and the company whose contract they signed JUST HAPPENED to be company of the brother of the guy who ran for (and lost, I didn’t vote for him) the board with the support/approval of Lori. Everyone mentioned kick-backs. Even the old blind lady from C12.
Our condo docs are woefully out of date, a subject I brought up and really made people realize how much they needed to be updated by saying “these condo docs have not been touched since BEFORE I WAS BORN. Isn’t it time we should update them to reflect a less powerful board and a more powerful association?” I’m now in charge of the committee to fire our management company and shady lawyer and hire a new, non-shady lawyer to re-write our docs with us. Docs which will allow cats, and other indoor small non-offensive pets. Docs which will NOT allow the board to authorize a foreclosure suit against an owner for under $1,000 in unpaid condo fees. Docs which will NOT charge the owner for unecessary attorney’s fees like $250 letters that get lost in the mail. Two $250 letters. Letters which supposedly let me know I owed money. $250. For a letter. One. Letter. That I never received. Which they never received the return receipt on. $250 for a fucking LETTER. Twice. Times two. $500 in unreceived letters. In the course of two weeks. After which…they sued. SHADY.
The budget presented at our budget meeting was NOT the finalized budget. It was just ESTIMATES of what we had spent, with additional estimates for what we would spend this year. There were many multi-thousand dollar items that the management company could not explain. My next door neighbor and I are also on a committee to go through the budget line by line and cut all unnecessary expenses. For example, we spend over $6,000/year on “misc. indoor maint.” but considering since I’ve lived there the light bulb on the left side of my storage room has been blown, I see no reason that money should be approved and padded into our monthly fee. I could go on for paragraphs on the suspicious budget items we haggled over during this meeting, but lets just say, this management company is GO-GO-GOING.
Lori, who has been the bookkeeper for many years and gave herself quite the pay raise last year, is also going. Bye-bye, Lori! It’s been great! But we’ll be doing our own bookkeeping from now on!
So I went to this meeting with the intention of getting people to admit we need to rewrite the condo docs, getting Lori fired, getting the shady lawyers fired, and generally shaking things up…and I believe I managed to do all of that. ::pats self on back:: Oh, we also got them to put a stop payment on the $26,000 “down payment” they put on this work to be completed in six months, and they are no longer holding us to the special assessment fee as a result.
I did not get my flu shot this year. Why? Because when they were giving them out, I had bronchitis. They won’t give you the shot if you’re sick, you see. So here I am, post-giant-q-tip-up-my-nose (rapid flu test) propped full of prednisone and tamiflu and hydrocodone cough syrup (which I didn’t want but now am REALLY REALLY glad I took, because I actually slept for an entire three hours straight before waking up coughing. I tell you what, I haven’t felt this sick in…years…why, since the LAST tiem I had the flu. I think the flu is officially the worst virus ever, but I think having the flu with asthma is like worstX200. Because they put me on prednisone so I can breathe again, but prednisone and me have a long history of not getting along. It makes my face swell and turn red, it makes my joints ache, and it causes mania…which means, it makes me feel really good, like I’m fine to go back to work and all, when I am really still sick and need to be in bed. Like right now, sitting up at the computer for the first time since I left work on Monday. I’ve not left the bed but to piss and get more ginger ale since Monday night, until I broke down and went to the doctor today. So now I think I will have more of that wonderful cough syrup that makes me nice and sleepy, and go back to bed for another three hours.
I actually had to say the following to someone this week: “Please do not do that [fart] in my face. If you need to do that [yes, fart], please remove yourself to the bathroom, where that [he was doing it in my face!!] is considered appropriate. Or at least walk a few feet away from me to be polite.”
“Yeah, she’s a GIRL! A GIRL is the new BOSS!” – my coworkers amazement that one of the new model managers is actually a WOMAN. My response was “oh, is she younger than I am? When you refer to a professional working woman as I girl, I picture some little tween sitting in a cube wearing her mother’s clothes.”
“God, someone needs to give him a blow job or something, he’s wound so tight. Any volunteers?” – said at the lunch table by a very high-level manager. I was, of course, the only woman at the table, and everyone looked at me and giggled.
“You’re not allowed to complain about a colonoscopy in front of me. I’ve had to have my vagina cranked open and examined every year since I was 18! You don’t have anything to complain about!” – ok, I said this one at the lunch table, and am still a little shocked that I said such a thing. Really though, I’m so tired of all the guys who are turning 50 whining and moaning about this procedure, especially in front of my boss who had cancer down there and gets really upset when they talk about skipping their check-ups. Anyway, we have a saying, “What goes on at the lunch table, stays at the lunch table.”
How hard is it to spell my name correctly? When you send an email, you see the following:
Why is it then I get emails with my name spelled “Sydney,” “Syndy,” “Syndney,” and – horror of horrors – “Cyndy/ie?!?” Learn to read, people!
OMGWTFBBQ MICROSOFT YOU SUCK. Why did you decide that when copying and pasting data into cells in Excel they should attempt to retain their original formatting!? Because I have to say – NO ONE wants them to retain their original formatting. We just want to alt+tab ctrl+p alt+tab ctrl+c alt+tab etc., but we can’t do that because we have to click on the stupid fucking input bar so whatever is in our paste buffer is pasted as plain fucking text. You seriously screwed the pooch on this one, AMONG OTHERS…don’t even get me started on your automatic text formatting that tries to turn my parameter names into exponents, ARGH.
DO NOT forward me non-work related emails, ESPECIALLY if you’re my boss! It is just completely inappropriate to forward anything with a prayer, “advice” on how to save gas/money/baby seals, or any stupid/incorrect histrionic warning that ends up on snopes the next day debunked as a total farce.
Seriously learn to listen. If I tell you “we cannot have x, y, or z until the IT department releases a, b, and c to us” do not then go to your boss and say, “hey, paperhurts is holding up our ability to have x, y, or z!” I do not work in the IT department, and I’m pretty sure the Lotus Notes group has an office in Hells annex. It would explain why they never answer their phone and only randomly respond to email.
Learn to read (part deux!)!!!! If the title of one powerpoint slide says:
Requesting a Lotus Notes Domino Web ID
And the title of another powerpoint slide says:
Requesting access to [Proprietary System of The Man and Big Brother, Inc.]
Do NOT do the former, and then get pissed when it doesn’t achieve the latter! You sent a request for access to a system that I OWN to the Lotus Notes group – we’re not even sure if they exist, or it’s just one drunk monkey tapping on keys who occasionally gets a request correct – so don’t be surprised/pissed off/complain to your boss that “access to [Proprietary System of The Man and Big Brother, Inc. is taking too long!” while pointing your non-literate finger at myself. I just might accidentally add you to every standard distribution list, and see you complain later when you’re receiving 400+ emails/day on every single entry in that database!
I really hate it when I’m on the phone with someone and they go off on some ridiculous tirade against some perceived injustice by the world at large – usually an injustice caused by being offended at how people are running their own lives – a “railroad” argument as I like to call them, when someone is so wound up they start ranting and no one can get a word in at all because the person arguing doesn’t even take a breath and all you want to do is derail their whole discussion because they are just going off on you at this point but unfortunately for you and anyone else stuck listening to them they are convinced that they are passing along some enlightening wisdom to you and they really need to express their opinion and anyway your opinion does not really matter since you’re just peripherally involved in this conversation and not a participant in the actual debate at hand because there really IS no debate and you’re just here to listen to this person lecture and not disagree with them at all and just smile and nod OK? (take a breath now)
The most asinine argument I have never had with someone recently was about the following: “America is a consumer culture to the point of ridiculousness.” Now initially I would agree with this statement, but the person making the argument went on to lambast the following “over-consumers:”
Anyone who buys a book instead of using the library. Specific example cited from that twatty book “Twilight” where the main character researches something on Google and then goes to the bookstore to buy a book instead of going to the library. GASP! How dare she! Doesn’t she know she could easily and for free do all this research at the library?! This is the railroader’s primary example of our over-consuming culture.
Citing an example from “Twilight,” now really. I roll my eyes at ANYONE who cites “Twilight” as an indication of current societal trends, unless they are lamenting the apparent lack of literary culture required for such a piece of tripe to make it to bestseller status. Is there anyone who read that book who would argue with me that it’s nothing more than teeny-bopper masturbation manual with no redeeming qualities AT ALL??
Anyone who BUYS A DVD. Why do you need to buy a DVD? “Unless it’s your favorite and you’re going to watch it over and over,” she quickly goes on to exempt, seeing as I’ve seen her DVD collection and she owns the complete series of “Lost,” among others. Well, I manage to get a little explanation in here while she takes a breath, sometimes it is just better to buy. Both my parents and myself are horrible about remembering to return movies, and always end up with late fees more expensive than had we just bought the movie to begin with. So we usually buy a movie if we have a pretty good idea that we are going to enjoy it, and then we can lend it around to folks. If we don’t end up liking the movie, we can just donate it to Goodwill. Her response? “Well that’s just stupid, how hard is it to return a movie, that’s just a basic life skill, and you can get them free at the library, anyway.“
I apparently lack basic life skills, because I can never remember to return movies on time. As such, I am contributing to our bloated consumer culture, putting independent bookstores out of business, or maybe it is libraries I am offending, I’m not quite sure.
Example #2: “Americans are entitled.” Well now there is one argument I would NEVER want to argue with, right? WRONG. Her examples for “entitlement” include the following:
People who expect their health insurance to pay for any “non-emergent care.” She supports this by citing her elective surgery that was eligible for partial coverage by insurance, but paid for out of pocket (really because she didn’t want that surgery on her “health insurance history file,” and not out of any sense of duty to not “abuse the system” in my humble opinion). She goes on to complain about how “the few” (meaning herself) pay for “the many” (meaning me) and it’s not fair. SHE doesn’t have any chronic illness, yet HER premiums go to pay for MY care.
I would like to point out that from what I understand the point of insurance is the following:
“…the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for a premium, and can be thought of as a guaranteed small loss to prevent a large, possibly devastating loss…”
So she is guaranteed small loss, in order to later prevent a larger loss. She interprets this in a very narrow way, claiming that insurance should only cover emergency situations (“catastrophes”), and that we should just pay out of pocket for routine medical care. In her mind, this would “significantly lower premiums and the cost of health care in general.” Fuck the huge percent of our population who cannot even afford premiums, let alone out of pocket medical expenses, because they’re just another example of “entitled Americans who abuse the system.”¹
People who expect their health insurance to pay for any PREVENTATIVE MEDICINE. I made the mistake of saying “I hear that some insurance companies will pay for gym memberships since it’s preventative care, so I’m going to submit my Pilates lessons and see if I can get any of that money back,” which started a rant very similar to the previous one, but directed venomously at me in particular and at “insurance scammers” in general.
I’m sorry, but I think that PREVENTATIVE MEDICINE is something that is very much undervalued in our culture, because people would rather put a band on a cut then spend the time training someone to avoid getting the cut. Honestly I think Pilates and AIS should be covered by insurance because it has significantly lowered the frequency of my visits to the doctor and chiropractor for miscellaneous back issues, and essentially works as physical therapy. I in no way support insurance fraud, but no matter how I tried to explain that, by the fact that I would DARE to submit a “NON-MEDICAL” claim to my health insurance company means I’m “abusing the system and ruining it for the rest” of the world.
Anyway, </therapeutic rant>.
¹ I should note that I think there are tons of people who – as a result of not having a job that provides them with health insurance – completely abuse Medicair/etc. I’m not talking about them right now. If I think about them, I will get sad that we do not have an economically conservative – yet – socially liberal political party in this country.
A few days ago I had some minor QL spasms and worked with my trainer to get the kinks out. Despite doing awesome stretchy-spine exercises, which did help quite a bit, they progressed up my back to turn into a total neck crimp; I couldn’t turn or tilt my head to the left. After my boss made fun of me for about four hours for the fact I couldn’t turn my head to look at people when they came to my desk to speak with me, I visited my very awesome chiropractor and had an adjustment. He warned me I would still be very sore for a few days, but after e-stim, heat, and a ton of cracks, I felt immensely better and could move my head again!
…and then a few hours later I tried to pick up a heavy box and fucked it all up again. By this time I could not get to either trainer, chiropractor, OR doctor (as they were closing) and ibuprofen was just NOT cutting it. I broke down and went to the hospital…despite the fact that it was Friday afternoon and I was essentially going in there to say “I’m in lots of pain and ibuprofen and heat aren’t relieving it, please give me something stronger” aka “I’m drug-seeking.”
It was, amazingly, the most pain-free ED visit I have ever experienced. I walked in, explained to the triage nurse the issue, told her it wasn’t an emergency but couldn’t get in to see my doctor, and got sent to fast track/zone 3 where they send the people who aren’t in imminent danger of dying. While in the waiting room I enjoyed the exciting company of three drunks, two migraineurs, and someone with a “sprained ankle” who couldn’t remember, after talking to me about how bad it was in between text messaging her boyfriend, which ankle it was that had the injury. Despite getting there AFTER all of these (obviously frequent flying) patients, I got in before them, was poked once by the PA, and given a scrip for 12 hydrocodone and sent on my merry way…all in under 2 hours.
I should have asked for ultracet and skelaxin (both worked wonders last time I had neck spasms), because it turns out the vicodin just really eats up my stomach, and so I’m back where I started, in pain, and advil not cutting it. I’m going to go for a massage on Monday, and back to the chiropractor, and remind myself next time that any drugs that require a DEA number to prescribe just fuck up my stomach.
Anyway, this wonderful ER visit (props to Manchester Memorial for having such a well-run fast-track program) reminded me of the LAST time I went in there, when I had pneumonia.
I was waiting in the waiting room for almost two hours wheezing, sent over from my PCP’s office after I had an O2 sat of 82, before even making it back to triage (despite telling the RN at check-in that I couldn’t breathe), and in that time an old woman came in via ambulance, accompanied by a friend. The EMT driver checked her in with the check-in RN, and then she and her friend sat down right across from me. After waiting a whopping five minutes the two old biddies started complaining.
“Sick” old biddie: What’s taking so long? I came in by ambulance!! That’s supposed to get me straight in!!
“Sick” old biddie’s friend: I know! God, these people don’t know what they’re doing. You could be dying out here!
“Sick” old biddie: Maybe I should tell them I have chest pain?
“Sick” old biddie’s friend: That ought to get you back there! You should tell the nurse that!
Over the next ten minutes this “sick” old woman – who arrived via ambulance, probably paid for by medicare – got up three fucking times to essentially complain about the wait. Her thinly disguised entitlement was wrapped up in questions such as, “do you need any more information from me?” and “did the EMT check me in already? should I sign something else?” Finally I hear her tell her friend, “that’s IT! I’m going up there and telling them that I’m having chest pain!” when they triage nurse comes out and calls my name. I stand up to follow the nurse back, and in my peripheral vision I see “sick” old biddie rise and walk towards the triage area as well.
She can’t possibly be following me in. She’s just going to ask the check-in RN another question. No one would be so bold as to follow someone else into triage! I naively thought to myself. No, that entitled bitch surely did follow me into triage – as I was walking in the nurse I was following asked me “oh, is she with you?” to which I responded “NO, she is NOT, and she is planning on telling you that she has chest pain so she can cut her wait time short, just so you know!” They forced her to leave the triage area, and as soon as she was gone the triage nurse told the check-in nurse “oops, did you just accidentally misplace that nice old ladies paperwork so she loses her place in line?”
Yeah, suck it, entitled bitch. One day you’ll have a REAL emergency, but there will be no money left to pay for it because of all the many times you and people like you abused the system.
With the exception of my few posts on best and worst first dates (and I plan on writing a few more of those, in case you’re wondering), I don’t really talk about my sexuality here. That also goes for real life as well; it’s not something that comes up in general conversation, excepting my repeated reminders to my friends that not everyone in the room is straight when they start saying things are “gay.” Maybe if I start dating a woman with more regularity I can stop having to remind people…anyway, on to the topic at hand.
All of a sudden lately it seems like everything bad is “gay.” “Gay this” and “gay that” and “that’s so gay” and it is really starting to get on my nerves. In vent chat with my guild last night, I heard no less than five people call something/someone “gay,” and I was offended and annoyed. In the same way I was sick and tired in middle/high school when everyone was a “fag.” “God, you’re such a fag!” I remember Tommy calling Josh in 3rd or 4th grade, and there began my first steps to being a social pariah when I decided to correct Tommy and lecture him on why he shouldn’t be calling people fags.
It is rude and wrong to use the word “gay” with negative meaning; it’s homophobic and it makes you, the user, look uneducated. You want to tell someone they’re stupid? Tell them they’re a raging ignoramus. Someone’s a total asshole? Just call them a Richard Cranium; it’s fun watching people try and figure out what you’ve just called them.
Q. Why do people not realize how homophobic it is to use the phrase “that’s so gay” with a negative connotation!?
A. People are ignorant, lazy and ill-witted buffoons would rather use slanguage than actually stop and think about how to properly express their feelings/opinions.
I’m [not really very] sorry to play “the race card,” but would you use a racial word in such a way? I can just imagine the outrage if a bunch of white suburban yuppie-offspring started saying “that’s so NIGGER” or “that’s so BLACK!” What about religion? How about “that’s so JEWISH?” So why is it ok for people to say “that’s so GAY?”¹
***** In which I liberally use HTML tags for ordered lists to debunk lazy arguments, and try my best to avoid fun words like “heterocentric” *****
People claim it’s so widespread that it’s become deconceptualized. Well, if I’m here and I’m queer and ifI’m telling you repeatedly to stop calling things gay, maybe it’s not so fucking deconceptualized.
People claim it’s harmless; it’s just WORDS, right? Sticks and stones and all that?? Well, it’s homophobic and emotional bullying; it’s a cultural disease that reinforces the “mainstream” (OK I’m going there; the heterocentric) idea that being gay is bad in some way, and it will keep spreading as long as people don’t say something. I’m especially worried here about kids still in school that will be afraid to come out because they don’t want to be that bad thing.
I also think this reinforces the otherness of being gay. The queer community is already completely marginalized within the greater culture in the US. How many men have you seen kissing on TV? Not that many? I think I have only seen two men kissing “Will and Grace” – a show that only made the GAYNESS of it’s two male characters OK by making them comical, bumbling, chronically incapable of keeping a romantic relationship. And even then, it was a “for show” kiss, between two friends – granted, to “make a point,” but at the same time, not a real in context of the show and the characters being gay kiss. If I go into women kissing on screen, I’ll get off on a completely different topic (the fetishizing of lesbian/bisexual women in our culture) so I’ll skip that…for now.
It supports the idea that gay people are less than and as such undeserving of the same rights and responsibilities of non-gay individuals. With all that’s happened with Prop. 8 these past few months, this is the exact opposite of what should be happening. I want to see more people complaining about this actively and visibly, because these two phenomena are just parts of the whole of homophobia in this country.
It undermines queer community, especially with my favorite group to cite, the kiddies. When the majority of the kids at your school are repeatedly telling you that being gay is bad, why would you want to be out? Who wants to be a part of the stupid community?
Honestly, I can more easily forgive Obama for picking that pillock Rick Warren for praying at inauguration than I can a friend next time I hear this ignorant phrase come out of their mouth. Obama made his choice, I think, in the hopes of showing he was interested in true diversity, even in the kind his voter base isn’t a fan of, and I suppose that’s OK as long as he publicly bitch-slaps Warren if he crosses any lines with his prayer.
I’ll leave you on a light note; in an email conversation with my favorite activist (and leading expert on the religious right) Frederick Clarkson, he says, and I quote:
saying it’s so gay is so passe (and has always been so offensive) that it is so gay to say that it’s so gay. ;-)
¹ I understand that most minority communities experience ongoing discrimination in this country, which is why this argument works. A great read about this particular topic can be found at The Bilerco Project.
The year before I that went to GirlBar in Las Vegas with my fabulous girlsistergirlfriend Jocie.
As you can see, my NYE events seem to be getting tamer and tamer. Granted, this year I was supposed to have a Giant Party at my place – but everyone but one friend of ours canceled due to the massive snow storm (read sarcastically; we had 4″ of snow). Is it surprising that as we get older, we get lamer?
The idea that what you do on New Year’s day says something about what the rest of your year will be like is interesting…not sure I believe it, but here’s what I did…
Woke up sometime after noon, put on pajamas (I do have a roommate now…he is very cool, but I’m not sure he’s interested in entertaining my desire to run about the house in slippers and panties). I then played WoW…not my level 80 warlock, but a new druid I rolled on his (alliance) server, for four hours, before calling Ploman and demanding his presence for dinner. I made delicious “homemade” spaghetti sauce, frying up green and yellow squash, green and red peppers, onions, garlic, asparagus, spinach, stewed tomatoes, and a can of tomato and basil Costco sauce…and while Mike (vegan) and I (semi-vegan) loved it, Ploman picked around the plethora of veggies and complained about the lack of meat. After he went home, I watched the new “Elizabeth” movie, which wasn’t half bad, and did some house cleaning.
Woke up New Year’s Day the Second to Ploman calling – he bought me a few of my favorite pastry at the Cuban bakery and was on his way over. I quickly showered, and hung out with him savoring my pastry while he wolfed down not one, but TWO foot-long multiple-dead-animal subs…I wish I had that man’s metabolism. It just ain’t fair. I decided to go to Ikea and pick up a table for the new giant printer I purchased (not realizing just how Huge and Giant the thing is) and stopped by the Honda dealer to get my oil changed and buy Ploman some all-weather mats for his car for Christmas. More house cleaning, more video games…all in all, a pretty relaxed and boring holiday. Maybe this will be a relaxed and boring year, full of good friends and good times.
Now on to other house stuff…have I mentioned yet how much I LOVE having my roomie? Some interesting things that have happened this past week:
Woke up from a nap hearing a deep, scary voice; start freaking out thinking we’re being burgled, or worse. Turns out it’s a video game roomie plays; the voice of the boss is scary to me in a half-awake state.
Watched roomie play another video game, this one involving killing lots of zombies. Some of the zombies explode bile all over you and make it hard to see the screen. That night, I had nightmares…about zombies. Over-active imaginations FTW!
Meeting up in the kitchen at 2am to cook vegan goodies. Nom, nom.
Being nagged to do dailies. Yes! I need to be nagged to do dailies! Who doesn’t?!
Hearing him talk to the cats amuses me. Now I’m not the only crazy person in the house who talks to them. He also loves playing with the kitten, and teases him with the laser pointer and plays fetch with his woobie all the time. It just warms the cockles of my heart.
Roomie is a very kind soul, but if he dies a lot repeatedly in-game, I start hearing the fuck bomb every other word being yelled into his microphone. This amuses me greatly.
Next weekend we’re having a potluck and gift exchange with friends. It should be fun! Until then, I’m back at work, and missing my four-day weekends greatly.
The Man & Big Brother, Inc. strives to maintain a safe workplace…objectives: eliminate injury; reduce pollutants; conserve natural resources; yadda yadda.
Every year in order to get a new sticker on my badge for access to the plant, I have to take a refresher EHS class. What’s EHS you might ask? Environmental Health & Safety. Now, I do think it is important to know what to do if someone falls off a lift, or loses a hand in a machine, or spills caustic acid all over the shop floor…but the questions I have to answer in order to “pass” the test are a little ridiculous.
Some include (sanitized for obvious reasons):
Which of the following are not permitted at The Man & Big Brother, Inc. facilities?
Horseplay
Fighting
Gambling
Stealing (oh yeah? tell that to the jerk who stole my redbull from the fridge)
All of the above
Access shall not be blocked to emergency equipment, exits, telephones, safety equipment, fire extinguishers, and other fire equipment.
True
False
In which of the following areas are safety glasses NOT required? (ooh, trick question!)
Office work area where employees are using tools
All shop areas
Outdoor work areas where employees are using tools
Cafeteria while eating
Which of the following may occur if you are found to have violated an EHS rule?
A violation report will be filed
You could be suspended
Your supervisor will not be happy with you
All of the above
You can see these are real brain-taxing questions. I especially love the answer “your supervisor will not be happy with you,” but it’s true; the few times I’ve violated some policy (such as forgetting to input my time at the end of the day) my supervisor has, indeed, not been happy with me. The safety handbook also specifically mentions we must “communicate in English with the level of proficiency necessary to ensure our safety and the safety of others.” You don’t need to be able to communicate about anything else in English; just know how to say “excuse me sir, but you really should be wearing a hardhat and safety glasses on that forklift!” or “beware of this spill, it will make the skin of your feet fall off and your children look like lobsters!”
I do a lot of dorky stuff, but I think WoW is probably the dorkiest.
I started playing WoW because Ploman bought me “Burning Crusade” for my birthday this year (May 24, and yes I have an Amazon wishlist, hint hint) and nagged me for months before to start playing with him and another friend. I already had picked up the original version after much nagging from another friend, but had never actually gotten past the multi-disk, multi-hour install.
WoW is not an easy game to get into. To begin with, when people start talking to you about the game, they tend to speak in wowspeak – and when you’re first starting out, you have no fucking idea what half the things they are saying mean. Ploman used to regale me with tales of “uber healz” and “ganking” every time we got on the tennis court (I think to make up for the fact that I consistently kick his ass) and I would spend most of the time smiling and nodding and not understanding 75% of what he was talking about. Catherine has complained to me quite a lot about this, since a few of her friends in library school play WoW and are constantly harassing her to sign up. I tried to get her to do refer-a-friend with me, but she wouldn’t. Sigh.
Then when you first play your character – in my case, a little baby undead warlock – the quests seem stupid: go kill eight bats; go kill eight skeletons; go kill eight zombies. But eventually leave the shitty undead starting area and move over to the Blood Elf starting area, where everything is pretty and the quests start to get more interesting. Then at some point you end up in Duskwallow marsh for what seems like an eternity, and you again question your sanity for playing the game because let’s face it, Duskwallow marsh just plain sucks. But finally you make it to 70, and start doing heroics, and maybe a few raids and dailies on the Isle and you start getting gear and stop being a walking target for Alliance rogues and the game starts to get more about theory and tactics and less about grinding mobs and running back to your [dead] body all the time.
And once you’re there, you find out that one of the most challenging things to do in WoW is to get a decent PuG going… I swear there are only four tanks in LookingForGroup at any given time, and three of them suck. And don’t get me started on the varied and vast ways a healer can repeatedly wipe a group – even just on trash (note: crappy healers will inevitably blame the tank, and crappy tanks will inevitably blame the DPS).
I think, however, the most difficult part of WoW is figuring out what kind of gear with what stats you need in order to best play your class. Followed by figuring out what kind of rep you need to grind to help along your gear objectives. Followed by figuring out how to best spend those talent points. This weekend I broke down and hit up the Elitist Jerks forums and printed out some information on Affliction, raiding, specs (believe it or not, there is serious math that goes into people figuring out which talent points will eventually yeild the most damage), DoTs, gems, glyphs, etc… It almost felt like work, it made me question my sanity, as does the fact I’m even writing this post.
So now that you’re probably thinking to yourself “man, this lady is mad nerdy, why am I reading her blog?” allow me to talk a little about why video games are awesome – in no particular order.
Video games are one of the few things not tanking in our economy. It seems that video game purchases tend to be immune to the waxing and waning of our fragile economy. The “biggest-spending customers are typically young men (the average gamer is around 30) with high disposable incomes who regard gaming as an important part of their lives, rather than a form of discretionary spending.” Also, video games are [relatively] cheap entertainment, that you can do at home, even with friends (who hasn’t played Rock Band with a bunch of folks?). Compare going out for drinks with friends and having two key lime martinis at $9 each, versus a monthly subscription to WoW; $18 for two drinks, or $12-$15 for a month of WoW subscription.
Video games help keep your brain young. “In a study of 40 adults in their 60s and 70s, researchers found that those who learned to play a strategy-heavy video game improved their scores on a number of tests of cognitive function.” The study “suggest that strategy-based videogames can enhance reasoning, memory and other cognitive abilities that often decline with age,” which makes me think that I really should nag my grandfather a little more about accepting that refer-a-friend invitation.
WoW makes people smarter. A “study of 33 laparoscopic surgeons found that those who played video games were 27 percent faster at advanced surgical procedures and made 37 percent fewer errors than those who didn’t.” Scientists found that WoW players utilize “scientific thinking, like using systems and models for understanding situations and using math and testing to investigate problems.”
Everybody else is doing it. Or at least, over half of the adult population of the U.S. is playing video games; one in five play at least every day! I’m in the other four, but many of my friends are that one in five…which supports the survey’s assertion that “a college education means you’re more likely to play” video games. The majority of my friends have at least an undergraduate degree, and the majority of my friends play video games.
So if I have somehow managed to convince you to come play games with the rest of us, you can find me on U.S. server Burning Blade, Horde side. Look me up; Criphyrursol.
, hint hint) and nagged me for months before to start playing with him and another friend. I already had picked up the original version after much nagging from another friend, but had never actually gotten past the multi-disk, multi-hour install.