Looooong, tiiiiiiring day.

March 28, 2010 6:40 pm

We started off Saturday by going to the Primary Easter Egg Hunt at the ward building. Mostly, we hung around and watched, and then helped point out ones the kids couldn't find. After that, we stayed because Kyle had signed us up to help clean the church. This is where the day started to get long and tiring (and I'll admit that since I'd cleaned the apartment on Friday, I was tired of cleaning before we even started). We cleaned for about an hour and a half and then came home for some much-needed lunch. When we did, we discovered that Kyle had a voicemail from the furniture store: our nightstands were in! Huzzay! (Okay, I just looked, and it seems that we never blogged about our nightstands. But we spent an epic trip at a furniture store in mid-Feb. picking out nightstands, trying to find ones we liked that would match our bed. But we were told they would take 6 weeks to arrive, so here we are.)

All we had to do now was find a truck to transport the furniture in, right? (We had opted out of having it delivered, as the store is in San Leandro, half an hour away and that tends to make delivery ridiculously expensive.) We'd planned on just going to Home Depot and renting a truck ($20 for 75 minutes) like we'd done previously, no big deal. So we told the store we'd be down, though it may take a couple hours (just to be safe), had some lunch, and took off for Home Depot. It was then 1:00 p.m. My only explanation for what ensued is that the weather out here is starting to get really nice, and everybody and their dog wants to take advantage of that (and for a lot of people, that means doing outdoorsy projects that require big trucks? I dunno). Home Depot's truck is unavailable until Wednesday or Thursday. Lowe's does the same deal, but their truck was being used for a delivery (and no, they don't know when it'll be back or even where it's being taken to. (Really? No managers keeping track of that? That seems odd, especially when they could be making additional money by renting the truck out, but whatever.) And no, they couldn't take our name or call us (of course, a store that doesn't keep track of their own property or personnel wouldn't do anything as service-oriented or sophisticated as a reservation), but we could call them back later and see if the truck was back. So we came back home. FAIL.

Kyle then started to look around online and make phone calls, and the results were extremely frustrating. Most moving companies will rent you a truck a day at a time, for something like $50 plus mileage. U-Haul will rent a truck or a van for $20 (I think) plus mileage, which would have made it around $60. The HD and Lowe's in Dublin had both rented out their trucks. The Lowe's in Pleasanton had rented out its truck, but the HD there had its truck available. So we hurried over. Of course, in the ten minutes it took us to get there, somebody else had showed up and rented it. By this point, it was a little after 3:00, and Kyle knew that the truck from Pleasanton's Lowe's was due back at 3:45, so we decided to camp out there and wait for it to come back. By 4:15, we were sitting on the floor in front of the Customer Service desk (out of the way) and all the employees at that desk knew what we were waiting for. (They were pretty nice about it.) We were still just worried that we would miss it and it would get rented out to somebody else while we weren't looking. Finally, at 4:30, the guy returned the truck and we got on our way. It only took 3.5 very frustrating hours.

I guess the good part is that Kyle was so tired by this point that he couldn't get all worked up about having to maneuver the big truck on the highway. He handled it much more calmly than last time. 😀 Anyway, we got the nightstands and brought them home. Of course, we got stuck in the evening highway traffic we'd been hoping to avoid by doing all this in the early afternoon, but whatever. We were glad just to get back home again. And now, pictures!

So, here they are, all wrapped up. Well, mostly wrapped up.

IMGP1465aAnd now, unwrapped (I'm just wiping out one of the drawers):IMGP1472aAren't they pretty? I love the color. They match the bed really well (it's not perfect, but it's dang close) and I have always enjoyed wood with reddish hues. So warm and comforting. So then we got to put them back in the bedroom and load them up, which was great. I like to have a lot of stuff within reach of my bed (y'know, in case I need it (yes, it's the pack-rat tendency!)), so I've just had a huge pile of stuff on my side of the bed. It's all sensible stuff, though--water, music, books, scriptures, drugs, etc. Anyway, here are my and then Kyle's nightstands all loaded up. ('Cuz I know you care!)

IMGP1478a IMGP1479a

I don't know if you noticed, but the floor lamp is on Kyle's side of the bed. Since that's the only light in the room, we're both very excited for me to finally have a place for a lamp, given my tendency to stay up reading. Yay! And lastly, the overall effect:IMGP1477a

I swear, it's starting to look like a real bedroom in there! Y'know, for grownups!

Yah, definitely stolen

March 26, 2010 7:45 pm

This evening I was cleaning raw chicken so we could bag it and freeze it. When I was done I went to throw away the remnants and to my surprise found a suspiciously new-looking laptop, slightly busted up and sitting in the dumpster on top of everything else:

The protective plastic on the top of the lid was still adhered, and it has fairly decent specs with a "Windows 7" sticker. It doesn't look worn, just busted. The little pink sticker on it has the date 3-21-10, the words "Best Buy", and the number 134 (the enhanced image of the sticker is on the left):

It just so happens that the closest Best Buy, in Dublin, is store number 134. Seems to me that someone stole a display model laptop, managed to bust it up, and decided to throw it out (which is illegal in and of itself due to the e-recycling laws). The thief destroyed the screen, but was apparently not smart enough to take out the RAM, or hard drive, or DVD drive, or battery and try to sell them.

I called the police department and reported it. They were supposed to be sending an officer by to pick it up sometime this evening, but it's 10:00 now and I don't think they're coming (** Update: The officer came by and picked it up, and it was the same officer Jess did a ride-along with for her training. **). It looks like this model is currently retailing for about $500. Jess won't let me mess with it anymore (after looking to see if the RAM and hard drive were there), but maybe the person was also stupid enough to take some pictures of themselves with the integrated webcam before breaking it.

[shudder]

March 25, 2010 2:10 pm

I hate getting out and unfolding a blanket and getting all snuggled into it, only to find a HUGE spider on the floor. 'Cuz you know it came from the blanket. Not only do you have to kill the spider, you have to shake out the entire blanket for several minutes before you can be sure there aren't any more in there. Blergh.

Also, I'm never doing a Google image search for "spider" again. I just wanted a cute cartoony spider to put down here. Now there are horrible spider bite pics in my head! And even worse spiders than the one I killed (which was really quite large and nasty looking). Bad idea.

Wait. You mean... I... I won?

March 15, 2010 10:08 pm

Lacking any other choices than evil Comcast and slightly-less-evil AT&T for Internet service at our apartment we signed up with AT&T. Having cell phones with more minutes than we can possibly use we had no interest in getting land-line phone service. When you look at prices online the DSL prices AT&T offers are cheaper if you bundle it with phone service, but the overall price is always higher. So, when we moved in we signed up for just Internet service.

Our most recent bill has some fine print labeled "Important Information" that informs us that beginning this month our bill would be increasing by $3 a month. I was annoyed with this and called to complain, see if they would leave it at our existing rate, and if necessary downgrade our service to a lower price point (we're already paying ridiculous amounts for the service we get when compared with the fiber service I had in Utah which was both cheaper and incredibly faster). So it was the principle of the thing.

After fighting my way through their obnoxious voice-only prompts (I would much rather push buttons than try to "explain in a few words why [I'm] calling today"), and waiting on hold for 10 minutes, I got a live person who had no idea what I was talking about. They had never heard of this price increase and apparently couldn't see anything about my account that says it was happening. So he conferred with someone else who had no idea what I was talking about. Then they discovered that I had originally ordered my service through the AT&T website, which is apparently an entirely different department. So he tried to transfer me to someone else, and I was greeted with, "We're sorry, this number is not in service..." Awesome AT&T, way to transfer me to a non-existent phone number.

So I called back (voice prompts, + 10 minutes on hold) and got someone else. Who also had no idea what I was talking about at first, but pulled up by bill and read the text. Then she suddenly knew what I was talking about, but said she didn't think it applied to my account. So she put me on hold. After a few minutes she came back and said she could offer me the same DSL service plus local phone service for $5 cheaper than our current monthly amount! The magic of AT&T's system. I asked, if this was the case, why did they bother selling DSL without phone service? Her answer was to claim that some people just really didn't want phone service. This is despite the fact that I can't find any such deal like this on the website, but I'm not going to mention that to her.

So, she gives me the exact price quote. To be absolutely clear on the matter, I ask directly, "Is this an introductory offer?" - "No." "Is there an activation fee?" - "No." "Will I have the same DSL speeds I have now, 6.0 Mbps down, 768 Kbps up? - "Yes."

Ok, well, why wouldn't I do this? We might not even bother hooking up a phone. But somehow we can get the same DSL service plus local phone service for cheaper than the DSL service alone. And there's still no contract.

As odd as the notion seems to me, I'm pretty sure I actually won that phone call. We'll see if it actually pans out the way it was sold to me. But if there's any trouble I made sure to get the CSR's name, so I'll know who to blame.

[Update]

No, of course I didn't win.  The answers I was given were outright lies.  There was an activation fee that I had to call and get reversed.  And it was an introductory offer and after 6 months my bill went through the roof.  Filthy lying useless company.