Apparently there’s an Apocalypse level wind storm afoot, with winds over 100 freaking miles an hour, and it’s hitting Seattle and really nailing Vancouver Island, and yet somehow all is calm here in the GVRD.
And it’s spooky. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, meteorologically speaking. Ever since yesterday morning, I have been bracing myself for the wind howling around our building and make it sway just a tiny bit.
Or worse. That’s just what normal high winds do ’round here.
I don’t want to think about worse.
A small victory
Got my monthly banking done today.
Well, technically, it’s a credit union, but if you going around saying you got your credit unioning (credit uniting?) done today, they’ll lock you up.
It went quite smoothly, as always. I might have trouble with the fact that Van City does not offer Visa Debit, I cannot fault their customer service and overall relaxed vibe.
And vibes are very important to me. They are the water in which I swim.
Anyhow, as always, after the crediting of union, we went to Price Mart and Julian went in to buy me the usual monthly prepaid VISA card.
All went well until I tried to activate and register the dang thing online, and it just would not work. Kept giving me the generic, “we cannot process your transaction at this time” spiel that makes it sound like it’s just a temporary outage when the real problem is that you transposed some digits or whatever.
But I did not. I went over every digit involved very carefully over and over and typed them all in and it still barfed up that message.
So I sighed and resigned myself to having to call the toll free number.
Which got me a frigging automated “Press one for… ” type system.
Don’t those seem anachronistic these days?
Anyhow, I went through the menus and they gave me the runaround but I stuck with it and that’s when my small victory occurred.
Namely that I found the secret option to let me talk to an actual person.
It felt like, in my small way, I beat the system. Hooray!
The nice lady on the line was able to register the card for me.
Or at least I hope she did. The website for my card still does not recognize the card, so I wont know for sure until I order myself some KFC tonight.
It’s going to be a rough month financially. Not only do I have to cough up $65 for my eye appointment tomorrow, I will also have to pay for new glasses (cheap when bought online) and, of course, Xmas gifts.
Which I am going to buy on this month’s disability payment because the next one is not until December 18, exactly one week before Xmas, and I am not going to bet my Xmas giving on Amazon’s ability to get things to me in less than seven days at the heart of the Xmas season rush.
Although they do say they guarantee one or two day shipping…
Nah, better not risk it.
Plus there’s my yearly payment to Postmates, the lovely people who sell me Xmas cards and send them to my family each year, complete with my little message
To be honest, I probably shouldn’t even be ordering KFC tonight. But I’ve already promised my stomach some Kentucky Fried goodness,
So that’s not negotiable.
I guess holiday stress comes for even us weirdo loners who spend every Xmas Eve alone because their family is far, far away
I’m getting an early start on being depressed about that.
I want to beat the rush.
More after the break.
Everything gets worse
Example : KFC’s four piece dinner doesn’t include a small salad any more.
You mean you expect me to pay and additional fee for my coleslaw?
How dare you, sir. How DARE you.
I knew things were going south when they switched from giving you cans or bottles of pop with your meal to giving you a fountain drink instead.
Way to boost the profit margin at our expense, COLONEL.
Plus I thought I had ordered a “Biggie” fries but I got a regular fries instead.
I’m not sure enough of that to make a complaint, though. I might have checked the wrong little circle on the Door Dash menu.
Oh, and speaking of menus, check this : I heard on the radio today that in the US, for the holiday season, they will be selling their McRib sauce by the half gallon jug,
$20, and you could have the cure for all potentially bland Xmas dishes in your arsenal.
“I’d love more of your squash soufflé, Aunt Margaret. Just give me a second. ”
Today’s been all right. I installed a patch to my Steam version of Morrowind that I hoped would make it stable enough to play without it crashing about 20 mins in.
I wanted this because the official version of the game supports MGE, the Morrowind Graphics Extender, and it makes the game so much prettier.
But alas, no. I think in order to get that working properly, I would have ot somehow make sure it doesn’t try to use my graphics card, and that’s such a depressing thought that I would rather use the less pretty but more stable OpenMW version of the game.
Right now I am playing an archer/summoner. The idea is that I would summon various critters to fight the enemy up close while I hung back and plucked arrows at them.
Pretty sneaky, no?
But I am finding that I don’t need the summoned monsters. I am getting good enough with the bow that I can take enemies down without them.
Which technically means that I wasted a skill slot on the Conjuring ability. And unfortunately, there’s no way to change that when you’ve already started playing, so I would have to start yet another new character to fix it.
And I’m already on, like, my sixth or seventh character!
What can I say, I get restless and want to try a different character build.
I can be quite fickle.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.