A Book About Rabbits

April 30, 2010 7:06 pm

Jess and I both happen to have copies of Watership Down which neither of us had read yet. So we decided to read it at the same time. Turns out, it's a book about rabbits. And as the author states in the Introduction (which Jess' book has and mine does not) "I want to emphasize that Watership Down was never intended to be some sort of allegory or parable. It is simply the story about rabbits made up and told in the car."

Regardless, I enjoyed it. I think it's a fun story. It also leads to some interesting thoughts on the practice of trading freedom for security (in the case of the Efrafans) and trading one type of security for another (in the case of Cowslip's warren).

Anyway, I'd recommend it. It was a quick read. My only complaint is when the author writes speech in a manner to convey the speaker's accent. It mainly becomes hard to read and understand. If that's the point, great, but if I'm supposed to be able to figure out what the character's are saying, please just write it in normal English and say the character has an accent.

:)

April 18, 2010 7:57 pm

It's absolutely gorgeous outside today, and some families from the ward got together at a park after church for the afternoon. It was nice to sit around and talk in the nice weather. Kyle tried to fly our kite, but it just wasn't windy enough. We proclaimed it a lazy turtle. Nothing really exciting happened, but it was a very pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon/early evening.

Something to look forward to in July!

April 17, 2010 7:05 pm

I know...we're lame and haven't blogged in a while. This is all I've got for you:

It has recently been brought to my attention (no thanks to CNN's news feed!) that I'm going to have to get a new birth certificate. Apparently, if you need to commit identity fraud, you just buy a Puerto Rican birth certificate floating around the black market, for there are tons. To solve this problem, all the current ones are being nullified as of July 1. New ones (supposedly with anti-fraud measures built in) can be requested starting then.

How lame is that? I'm sure it'll be a breeze. I'm sure the Puerto Rican bureaucracy is totally capable of re-issuing birth certificates for everybody in a timely and non-irritating fashion. Thanks again, Parents, for having me in that wonderful territory. (Why did you go there, anyway? Probably just for stuff like this. You got to have all the fun of living in sunny paradise (which I don't even remember), and I get the paperwork mess. Rude.) This will make the second time my birth certificate has caused me grief. SO FAR.

I only heard about this because Kyle's mom read about it in her newspaper. Neither Kyle nor I saw it in our feeds of national news. So I could easily not have found out that my birth certificate was invalid until I applied for a passport or something. Which would have been even more awesome. They probably would have looked at me and said it was for sure one of the fakes still hanging around.

A day off.... sort of

April 5, 2010 2:48 pm

For whatever reason, today is a Lab holiday. So, what did I get to spend the day doing on my day off? Waiting around at the DMV of course. Trying to finally get the title change done for my car I went and waited for 2 hours. 2 hours so that I could hand the form to a person who looked at it, printed out something, stapled it together and said, "Your new title will be mailed to you." Awesome. Well, at least they didn't tell me I had to get some other random form signed.

I did manage to get some additional problems taken care of during that time though. Remember how I thought I had actually won when I called AT&T to complain about raising the price of our DSL? and then ended up with phone service which magically would lower our overall monthly bill? Well apparently the CSR I spoke to was 'mistaken' when she told me there was no activation fees. We got our first new bill last week which had an awesome $40 activation fee. Also, got a bill for our previous account which said "Final Bill", but wasn't pro-rating the DSL price for the partial month. So, based on the bills I had in hand, we were getting double-charged for the DSL service for 2 weeks.

So I called the customer support number listed on my bill. After waiting on hold the person I talked to asked me what state I was in and then said she'd have to transfer me to some other department that has access to California accounts. [Really? well, why don't you list this magic other office on my California bill?]

Then I get to wait on hold for another 10 minutes. This person answers and says she'll have to transfer me to the department that handles California Billing. [COME ON!]

Then I get to wait on hold again! So when Brandon picks up I ask what number this office is so I can avoid getting transferred in the future. He says he's just at the regular nationwide customer service center at the number I originally called and has no idea why I was transferred twice. [Holy Crap AT&T! Get your act together!]

Brandon tells me that the CSR who made my accounts changes shouldn't have told me there'd be no activation fee, but agrees to reverse the charge. He then tells me that the other bill I received that said "Final Bill" was really an "Initial Final Bill" and that I'd received a "Final Final Bill" with the pro-rated charge on it. And that even though the bill says my automatic payment will be debited on April 12, that it actually won't. So we'll see how that goes.

Then I got to call our insurance agent to change the policy to reflect the new title information. But Amica is quite good and I didn't wait on hold and our agent had it taken care of very quickly.

So that's been my day.

Jess got to go to U.S. Bank to try and determine why she keeps getting charged monthly fees for a free checking account. However, neither the people here nor the people at the branch that 'owns' her account in Utah had ever seen these charges or knew why she was getting them. So, how do you solve such a problem? Close the account and open a new one at the branch here in CA! Which will supposedly solve the problem.

Wooo. Fun times all around.