Lane Bryant loses a customer.

For those of you who don’t know, Lane Bryant is a clothing retailer for ladies of the Rubenesque sort… Zaftig per say… curvy ladies. I fall into that category; and I happen to love to shop there on the most part. It’s one of the few places I can find that carries bras that are of proper size to contain my rather generous heaps of womanhood.

Recently, I got a Lane Bryant credit card. It had a minimal balance, which is good because it was easy to pay off in one fell swoop at the end of the month if need be. We were good about it, hubby had it in the bill-paying rounds, paid it off in full every time I accrued charges, and it was never an issue…

Until…

FIVE DOLLARGATE.

Apparently, we made a payment over the phone once, and in part, were charged $5.00 for an over-the-phone fee. That’s okay… Fine. The automated system asked us if we were aware of this charge, we agreed to pay it with the billed amount, and we pressed the requisite buttons (or so we thought) and larked along on our way, happy in our delusion that we’d paid off our bill in whole and there was zero balance to worry about.

Some time goes by and we get a bill in the mail and a nastygram threat to close the account. We look at it, and there’s $5.00 on the account. I call LB, pay it immediately over the phone. Frankly, at that time, we had no idea what the $5.00 was. We thought it was some sort of finance charge or something. I just paid it, no biggie; going through the same process of paying the additional $5.00 for an over the phone fee; making the total $10.00 (or so I thought).

The next month… ANOTHER BILL WITH $5.00!!! OMG!!! I’m miffed, but I’m not quite furious yet… I was going to call LB today to find out what the heck this recurring $5.00 is about. In my mind, I’d paid those extra fees so what was this extraneous $5.00 charge doing there each month?

Just before I am about to call, I get a call from my credit union loan department (we’re looking into getting a small loan)… and she wants to go over something on my credit report. “There’s a late fee… for a charge with Lane Bryant.” At that moment, I feel like those veins on my temples are about to burst, and I’m about to do a crimson lawn-sprinkler all over my desk. We are trying SO hard to keep our credit clean and improve it, and to hear this, well, cranial-explosion was nigh.

So I call Lane Bryant ‘Customer Service’. I put customer service in quotes because I really think it should be ‘I hate My Job and I’m Tired Of Listening To People Bitch At Me Day In And Day Out; So You Can Hear the Attitude In My Voice Even Before The Barely Navigable, Time-Wasting Automated Answering System Eventually Sends You To My Line, And I Am Only Going To Infuriate You Further By Not Listening A Thing You Say, And Instead, Talk Over You, Interrupt You, And Then Do Nothing But State Policy And Then Segue You To The Payment Process So I Can Get You Off The God-Damned Phone And Never Hear From Your Sorry Ass Again Service (While Loudly Typing With My One-Inch Painted Solars)’.

I find out what the fee is, and to put it... mildly, I was annoyed. In all honesty, it feels like extortion. We’re paying phone-payment fees on phone-payment fees. But what really lit my rockets and sent me careening into Lividsville was Miss I-Couldn’t-Give-A-Bigger-Sh*t About Your Tarnished Credit; who delighted in pointing out in her grating, mannish voice, that we as customers, were given an opportunity to add the charge into our payment (??? Uh.. wha…?) and that it’s MY fault the charge wasn’t applied. Can you believe the brass barbells that one’s got? Apparently, when automated Sally is asking you to confirm that you are indeed aware of an additional $5 pay-by-phone charge; it’s not really adding it onto the payment you are making, as implied, but instead, just tacking it onto your balance without your knowing. You’re thinking; “Ahh… bill paid...” as you hang up the phone... They’re thinking: “NOT! Psych!… Ahahahahahhahaha.”

And that about sums up the experience with LB Customer Service. I paid the final five dollars (my preferred payment method of taping $5 to the toe of my right shoe so the snotty CS repo could take payment when break my foot off in her ass wasn’t really feasible, so I used my debit card instead) with the assurance that they weren't going to add a pay-by-phone charge again without telling me. I was so disgusted by the whole thing, and how cold and uncaring is that my credit was unnecessarily damaged by their crappy payment system, that I wrote them the nastiest letter I’ve ever written to date (and I’m a practiced complaint-letter-writer, trust me), and have decided that I will no longer shop at that store. Their people and policies show that they have not even the slightest respect for long-standing, really good customers. I can’t believe my credit took a hit for Five Freakin’ Dollars. And LB Customer Service isn’t in the slightest bit interested in hearing why customers might have a problem with their non-intuitive, ridiculous phone-payment system. Unbelievable.

As a result, I chopped up the card and activated my Avenue card instead. They have cute bras in my size too, and they’re less expensive anyway. Adios LB. And Bite Me.

(Can you believe this is the same person who draws pictures of chipmunks and cutsie things, and who dreams in Regency....? It's like Jekyll and Hyde. You don't need potions to turn me into Monstro-Steph tho... just really crappy Customer Service, treating children or animals badly, or invoking my road rage''ll do it.)

A weekend of colours.

I hate it that the weekend goes by so quickly. We had such a lovely weekend; even if we didn't really accomplish hardly any of the things we'd planned and instead took up other projects. Saturday morning we woke up for a belated breakfast, and then Hubby took off to take his grandma to the store--which is always a time-consuming thing. I spent 90% of that time outdoors, puttering around the garden with "His Illegal Self" playing in my iPod. I was nonplused by the book to be honest. I found it neither horrible nor really very intriguing. Either way, it kept my mind busy for the early afternoon while I mucked about outside.

Hubby returned at length, we ate dinner. I finished my half-started project of water-blasting the deck, and moved onto giving the windows a nice bath of vinegar, surfactant and water, and then flushing it all away with the power-washer. Of course, once washer fell into his hands; as it is with all boys and mechanical equipment, the whole house was cleaned of every cobweb or pine needle, the propane tank is now shining white again, the adirondacks took the next turn, and then the new log headboard we bought.


By the time the chairs were dryish, he decided to light a nice fire in the brazier (which he also powerwashed) and that's how we spent the rest of the evening... by the fire, talking, sitting in the worn, slightly rickety adirondacks. We came in at about 10:30 PM.





This morning I was roused early by Hubby, and when we walked outside to go to breakfast yet again, I saw the glorious morning light, and grabbed my camera to catch some shots of what's blooming in my garden. We are about 2 weeks behind the Willamette Valley and the Portland area due to our elevation, so it's like we get a prolongued Spring in some ways. I shot some of my favourite things...

The ferns have come back gangbusters this year, and they are unfurling as we speak. They are thick and leafy this year.

A peeping Jeep.

A flower basket of annuals my husband bought me a couple of weeks ago.

Flag lavender flowers are just beginning to bloom.

This is the first year my seathrift is actually blooming decently. They still look pretty skimpy though, plant-wise.

These are bleeding hearts; blurry but pretty. A variety I'd never seen before, and planted last year. I was delighted when they returned; because I'd forgotten I'd bought them.

One of my many columbines... So beautiful.

These are particularly pretty hostas

My Nootka Rose is blooming! How exciting. The first flower is kind of ugly... but let's hope the next ones come out as gorgeous as they did the first year. They're finally 'settling in'. What's the saying..

"The First Year They Sleep.
The Second Year They Creep.
The Third Year They Leap."

After I snapped all those photos, we hit the road for breakkie, and returned via the 'back way' and I hit the brake hard when I noticed a rather gangly, goofy looking bird on a felled log by the street. It was a Pileated Woodpecker. It's the first time I've ever seen one of these guys, and I was flabbergasted at the thing. It just hopped about the log, throwing bits of moss, paying no attention to us ooglers. Dan snapped a picture with his cell, it's bad.

He also shot a short movie, and just as he started it, the woodpecker made a vocalization. I was delighted! My reaction is on the movie and as dorky as a reaction can be:

This is what they look like in a decent picture:

We then went down into town to buy a new bed (downsizing to Queen from King for space purposes, but also upgrading to comfort as well.. ::Swoons::. The 14th we'll be sleeping better. YAY! We returned home after a quick stop to Home Depot; to my favourite section... PAINT. And the Adirondacks were given a new lease on life today. I decided on a whole new colour to give a punch to the greenery of the back yard.

A happy Friday belly-rub.

It's Friday. At last. Even a shortened week seems too long sometimes. Such beautiful weather and being tied to my desk putting docs together for reporting can make one slightly bitter. It's been sort of a weird week, kind of surreal in its making, I guess. It seems fitting after having such a nice holiday weekend of car buying, and scoring a gorgeous log headboard for our bedroom, and spending really great, quality time with my husband that the week following would be full of family and friend drama, and all around weirdness. One friend's marriage is falling apart and I get these cryptic messages from her but she never calls me back, trouble is brewing in the grandma department and certain family members are already circling like vultures on the wing, my sisters are sniping at each other, and Satan's (aka my mother) birthday is on Monday, so I can be sure expect lots of martyrdom and victimhood there too. At times like these I want to hop into the Pri-Pri and just drive north and not look back.

I guess I just want comforting things this weekend. To organize our crazy house for one; OMG, it's insane. We packed most of my sister's stuff up so we have most of the guest-room back again, but now we have to move out a piece of furniture, move a shelf, and reorganize all my crafts that are scattered all over the house. I want to paint too, but I don't see it happening easily. AND, the cobwebs... OMG, the bloody cobwebs, my arch-enemy. I cannot keep up with them, they appear almost as soon as I've torn them down. I never hated spiders before; until now. It's going to be a busy weekend. But at least it's the weekend. ::sighs:: I like the weekend.

On the Prius front, things are amazing. After the weekend of driving about in the new baby car, I finally was able to guage the benefits of the mileage on Tuesday. I snapped this picture with my phone of the little display that Priuses (Prii) have that shows your realtime consumption, averages and such. This lovely display shows what I averaged for miles per gallon for the 35 mile trip into town to work. It was only slightly less for going back up the mountain; 48.9 mpg on the way home, and that also included some less-than-economic driving on my part, being an aggressive, impatient sort on the road sometimes.

I only had to fill up yesterday since we bought the car, and it cost $23 and we'd already gone almost 400 miles; and there was still a bit left in the tank. The little green things are 50watt hours of energy recharged to the battery (energy by which a 50 W bulb illuminates for an hour). A lot of people have told me; "Well, you're saving all this fuel, but what about the cost of recharging the battery?" What they don't understand is that the Prius charges itself; when it's running on motor alone, it's charging its battery, there's no plug-in or such. It just trades back and forth between both energy sources as it goes along.

I noticed when we were buying it that the little paper on the window had a higher number for city mpg than highway. It didn't make much sense until I started driving it. You get a lot more 'performance' out of the motor when you are actually gnarled up in traffic. The Prius will run more on battery then, and save you more fuel, so you actually get way better mileage when you're slowed by lights and such. Highway is mostly motor-driven, except when you lift your coasting; that's all pure charge. It's a delicate dance, but you can see it on the little consumption display as you go along. Naturally, you eat up more fuel when you accelerate out of a stop and when you go up hills; but with this guy, you are also stocking up energy in your battery when you do that. It's a good trade.

I am hopelessly in love with the Prius, I dare say. I adore my Jeep and always will, but the stark economical difference, not to mention the wide practical differences between one and the other makes me appreciate the Prius all the more. These practical things come with owning any normal car; like air-conditioning for one... The smooth, gliding feeling on the road, the quiet inside the cabin... I love Jeepie Jeep, but it's nice to know that if I'm all dressed up and in makeup in the middle of a sweltering summer, I don't have to drive with open windows because if I didn't I would feel like I was sitting in a turkish steambath on the surface of the sun. Open windows of course means my hair is instantly frizzed out into a sunburst around my face, and the heat causes me suspire my makeup off (eyeliner melting around my eyes into a racoony mask)--all this simply to get to our destination. It gets old arriving at nice events and such looking like I was run over by a semi.

Anyway it's time to stop rambling for today, I hope you all have a lovely weekend.

A Monday-Like Tuesday.

I must submit my complaints yet again. I do not like holiday weekends... well, allow me to rephrase that, I love long, holiday weekends... I hate the whole having to peel myself out of bed to face reality again afterwards part. It's such a tease!!! It makes me grumpy. It's like "Hey there... this is what life could be like if we didn't have to commute to a job every day, and the sun is shiny and the garden is green and there is sleeping in and waking up to wiggly dogs, going out to breakfast each morning... there is buying of cars and taking celebratory rides to Hood River winding through the forested foothills of beautiful Mount Hood." All that was missing was the hoard of ballet-dancing rainbow gummy bears Jettéing over the top of a chocolate waterfall. But then... Tuesday morning... bwah bwah bwaaaaaah.... Dun Duuunnn dunn.....

::booming dooming voice:::

Environmental Protection Agency Toxic Release Inventory Reporting.

o_o

Woo-freakin'-hoo...
You sit there copying papers, eyes blurring over spreadsheet after spreadsheet, while outside, the weather is glorious and your garden is growing without you there to watch over it, and your dogs are locked inside the house-cave instead of digging for critters, and the doofy-looking pin-head band-tail pigeons are flocking your house and eating up all the seed without you there to listen to their sweet cooing

ARGH! It made me so grumpy that at the sushi place, I once again snapped at someone who actually got up and moved to another seat. In my defense, she was the most obnoxious thing in the world. She was this youngish woman of some undetermined nationality (I speak four languages and studied linguistics and I could not recognize the language she was speaking...) yammering away unceasingly in a blend of English and Whatever-that-language-was, on and on and on, in a very loud, extremely nasal Fran-Drescher-like voice. I wanted to shoot her. If I were carrying a 9mm, I probably would have. She sat right next to me and was bli-de-blahing me into commiting homocide. Finally I said: "Excuse me, but are we *all* forced to spend our precious lunch hour partaking in the details of your uninteresting life? Really?" The people around me looked both embarrassed and then relieved when she got up and asked to be moved. I felt sorry for the folks on the other end of the bar though, because it was only seconds before she was back at it. I could see the shoulders of one woman sag and her eyes roll into the back of her head; luckily for us over in the evil section, the nasal voice was largely drowned out by the general noise of the place now that cell-girl was at a good distance.

I really think that people should be tested for the following in order to qualify for cell phone ownership:

1) A tolerable voice
2) A brain
3) Some measure of common consideration for others
4) And if anything, a life replete with stories of adventure and slapstick that if forced upon others, are at least interesting or entertaining.
5) Oh, and the ability to walk and chew gum.

I'm so intolerant lately. What's my deal?

I'll just bask in this image of quiet Regency family bliss for a while, and pretend there's no such thing as cell phones. ~There's No Place Like The Past... There's No Place like the Past.. ::click click:: Damn. Still here.


I suppose I can at least find comfort in the entertainment I derived from the sight of a 60ish-year-old woman with long curly grey hair wearing black go-go boots, a floral micro-mini and a hot pink T-shirt adorned with bedazzle beads and strategic slits in the top to reveal little parts of a wrinkly, leathery cleavage. She was also at the Sushi place today. She was from Vegas from what I overheard (which probably explains the fashion 'je-ne-sais-rien'), and was most annoyed by chatty Kvatrinka too; she offered me a gap-toothed smile of gratitude for sending cell-girl packing. ::sigh:: I suppose life has it's balance sometimes.

Oh, and PS.....

Mr. Prius Highbottom and I are in love. It's official. 48.9 mpg average for my trip in today--and the battery charged itself up to the tippy-top too on my Sushi jaunt. ::swoons::.

Prius Love.

I guess, if the writers of South Park are right; we will be having to contend with 'Smug-Emissions' up here at the Hungarican Hut from now on. For you see we have broken the Jeep trend and gone out and bought ourselves a mileage-positive vehicle at last. Our Jeeps have racked up the miles.. and it has come time to start thinking about replacement. To replace them with something that gets only 17-19 mpg would be unconscionable for both our wallets and our Carbon footprint considering our daily commute.

Hubby was also getting worried that I'd end up with a broken-down car and he wouldn't be around to help me with it when he's traveling. So this morning, while we were enjoying breakfast at the cozy cabin in Welches, we decided today was the day we'd go down and 'look' at Priuses (Prii?) and possibly the Insight if there was a dealership nearby. Of course we never go to the Honda dealership. We stepped on the lot at the Toyota dealership, looked briefly at the very pricey 'pre-owned' ones, and then were duly assaulted by a hungry car salesman.

We figured that the 'basic' package Prius was almost the same price as the used ones; so what the hell, if we're going to go for payments, we might as well get the one with 52 miles on it, as opposed to the one with 21,000. It was touch and go there; when we were sort of waffling on whether we should just jump in for the whole hog, or play it pragmatic and do all the requisite research and dilly-dallying at other dealerships, and possibly miss our $1,000 discount and possibly the car we had pretty much picked. It only took doing some basic math to figure out we'd be stupid not to choose this model for a new vehicle. Just parking one of our Jeeps and using the other and the Prius would pretty much pay for two thirds of our monthly payment in fuel savings.

We were sold after we did our comparison. We made a salesman at a cricket-quiet dealership very happy I'll wager. So our impulse buy came home with us, and we just got back from a pleasure-ride to Hood River (which we averaged 52.6 mpg for the trip btw), where we walked the shore and watched the kite-boarders on the river and then had dinner at a lovely restaurant in town, where we sat in tables on the sidewalk with our dogs under our chairs.

We just got home. I'm pooped but exhilarated. It's my first new car, and it's jet black and I adore it already. I found this little blurb on Wikipedia that amused me:

Former CIA chief R. James Woolsey, Jr. drives a Prius because of its low fuel consumption. Woolsey noted the volatility of the Middle East, coupled with anti-US sentiment in much of the region. Noting that the high percentage of oil drilled in the Middle East gives vast profits to Middle Eastern regimes, Woolsey believes that it is a patriotic obligation to drive more efficient vehicles. In a Motor Trend magazine article, Woolsey claimed that those oil profits find their way to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, meaning that Americans who buy inefficient vehicles would, in effect, be indirectly funding terrorism. "We're paying for both sides in this war, and that's not a good long-term strategy," said Woolsey. "I have a bumper sticker on the back of my Prius that reads, 'Bin Laden hates this car.'"

Call me smug, or a tree-hugger or whatever else you like. As you make your admonishing remarks, I will be quietly smirking as I recall the display in the car showing me my average of 48 mpg city. ::smug:: Laugh it up fuzzball. ::heh:: Isn't he cute tho? Looks precious in the driveway, all glossy and reflecting my leafy oasis. ::swoons::

A Happy Friday Office Special.

Please forgive me, but it's been ages since I've drawn a horse. I used to draw them constantly once upon a time, in fact they were pretty much all that I drew on the most part until I hit my fantasy phase and drew nothing but warrior-chicks, dragons, badly proportioned heroes, and the occasional centaur. Now I'm into my Potteresque Regency forest creatures. Today I wanted to harken back to my Five Oaks Farm days and draw a goat or something, but then I started sketching the rear thighs and legs of this horse and it grew from there.

Inked in with the large graphic pen (it's like an inkbrush); I need to get used to it, I like having more control with the fine pen, but I wanted to experiment a bit today. It came out okay, I guess. I erased the pencil of course.

Some coloured pencils to give the critters some dimension.... I cannot say I'm an accomplished colourist. In fact, I sort of suck at it, I always have. I never mastered the neat single angle or lineless colouring as others have; in fact, every time I pick up coloured pencils I am torn back to a moment in the fourth grade when we were all at our desks in class. Mrs. Banks handed out ditto sheets (that's ancient English for 'photocopies') of a line map of Europe.

We were instructed to colour in the different countries. We all did so compliantly; the classroom silent except for the collective sound of coloured pencils being scribbled... The teacher was at this time making the circuit of the class, and paused at my desk. She reached down, slid my paper out from under my art pencil and held it up for the class to see. My colouring was as it always is, a riot of scribbled coloured blotches tangled within the borders of each European country, the lines of colour changing directions at random. In my mind it was fine because I had stayed within the lines on the most part.

"Stephanie obviously doesn't care how neat her schoolwork is," Mrs Banks declared, "try to make your work neater than Stephanie's."


There's nothing like a little public humiliation to give a child that special incentive to try harder, isn't there? See? I still haven't learned. No neat all-one-angle colouring for me, even today, thirty years later. Maybe it's all in secret defiance to Mrs. Banks.

Evil arrives on Mondays.

I am a crosspatch today, I must say. I don't know what my deal is, but I'm in one of my moods. I've already publicly humiliated a group of teenagers, sent really snide-sounding reminders to a couple of slow-responding people, made two really passive-aggressive remarks to my co-worker who is thankfully too much of a positive Pollyanna to realize it, yelled at two stupid geo-cachers who were thrashing around in the tall grass where our ducks nest, and I intentionally flattened a traffic cone, just because... and it's only half past two.

I don't take being cut in front of in line very nicely to begin with, but when I'm in a mood like this, being set loose with the public is probably a hazard. Four teens cut in front of me in the payment line at Sushi today, and I didn't grumble about it just to myself; no. I went off on them. I'd already built up a backlog of grumpiness having been forced to sit beside two twenty-something girls whose conversation was like a sucking hole of stupidity that with each iteration of 'like' I could actually feel my back hunch a little bit deeper and my fangs grow out a few milimeters. The line-cutting teens just stood there like a deer in headlights while I made a series of remarks about their shoddy upbringing in front of the whole bench of waiting people. They apologized meekly and slinked out, but then shot me their middle fingers and called me a bitch when they were in the security of a wide open public space. I blew them a kiss and drove off.

On days like this a zillion things will bug me. Typing errors, insincerity, all around stupidity. It's like my tolerance levels have been exceeded and I'm puffing steam like a kettle. It's probably good that I don't drink any more caffeine today, and try to center myself before I drive home, because if I don't I'll likely start veering towards texting drivers, accelerating towards slow-walking old people and flipping off Hummer drivers..

(I confess I do that last thing anyway just to be evil.. ::eep::)

It truly is a Monday in every way. ARGH!