LETT-0-MAN’s blog

Today was fun! I woke up to a text message coming in on my phone from Bank of America alerting me to some odd charges on my debit card. I log in to my account and see that there is no money left in it. When I went to bed the night before there was $3000.00 in my account! What the hell! I look at the current statement and it looks like some ass was using me card number to remodel his house. They spent $2000.00 at a Bed Bath and Beyond some place in New Jersey. Then they paid off a $400.00 medical bill from some hospital in New York. Then they bought something from a place called Winfield for $450.00. Then they bought some miscellaneous crap with what was left in my account. Naturally I freaked out and called the number that the bank told me to call and tried to use the claim number that was attached to the message but the robot didn’t recognize the case number even though they just gave it to me!!!!? I called the regular customer service number and they tried to open my account but couldn’t because my account was opened in California and I would have to call the California CS number! Apparently Bank of America can access my account from anywhere in the world accept Washington and Idaho? Why I have no idea. Any way, I then embarked on a three hour wild goose chase with the bank’s automated system that kept insisting I choose a number from the list or I couldn’t continue even though the options I was given had noting to do with who I needed to talk to. Some of the calls just ended for some reason and some had two robots talking at the same time before dropping my call? Now I am really pissed and yelled at the first “human” I got on the line before I even told him why I was calling. He was finally able to block my card and put a hold on all the pending charges. I asked him when I was going to be able to get my money back and told him I kinda need money to live on AND I had to pay for all my classes and books on Monday! He then talked to his supervisor and got all my money back an hour later. They won’t tell me what they are doing next as far as tracking down the bastards that used my card number. I hope that the over all amount makes what they did a felony so they get thrown in jail. They should be easy enough to find, the idiots paid a hospital bill with my bank card. I have no patience for dishonest pieces of human trash like that so when all this is over and done I hope they end up turning in to an early Christmas present for their new cell mate Bubba.    

Today was interesting. I sold some stuff to cover this semester and since Schwab never updated my address, they sent my check to some place? I had to call them up and ask where the hell my money was and they just put a stop on that check and issued a new one. I asked them to send it to my new address and they said for some stupid reason I had to pick it up in person and the closest Schwab office “that issues checks” is in Portland. NICE! I downloaded directions and left this morning only to find out that the roads in Portland were developed by maybe an eleven year old. I got real lost and stuck on the freeway to Salem. Once I got back on the freeway back to Portland none of the signs going north look anything like the signs going south! So, I gave up and found my way home. I called Schwab and bitched out the customer service person so now they are sending me a third check over night mail and I have to sit home all day tomorrow so I can sign for it. WOW! Do I ever miss California and its wacky 21^st century ways. When I got off the phone I was pissed. So now it seems to be fixed. We will have to see what tomorrow brings. Money is irritating. After my over the phone bitch session I ended up going out for Mexican food with mom then we went up the street to my new favorite Asian market so I could stock up on yummy supplies. I have been honing my Pho making skills and needed more dried noodles some good fish sauce. I even got a bottle of the thick fish sauce from Thailand that smells REALLY bad but I am sure is fine in soup. I’ll have to test it out tomorrow since I will be cooped up in the house all day. I will have to say a highlight today was seeing a flashing road sign saying fireworks are legal from June 28 though July 6 and only between 7:00am and 11:00pm. BADASS!

I had to go through the big box of fireworks I have stashed in the garage. OK, I went out and talked to them and made sure they were all feeling well and tucked them in before I came in to go to bed. Last count I had 25 BIG mortar type three stage sky rockets. Whoo Hoo! I also have a brick of roman candles and something that just says “The big shot”. I don’t know what it is but it’s taunting me so I may shoot that one off tomorrow night. Heh…..

I am half way through copying all my blogs on to a disk. All I have to do is finish up 2008 and I am done.

 

Here is a list of what I am listening to while I babble.

 

1) The Bravery – Time Won’t Let Me Go

2) Silversun Pickups – Lazy Eye

3) She Wants Revenge – These Things

4) Furniture – Please

5) Peter, Bjorn and John – Young Folks

6) The Bravery – An Honest Mistake

7) Sneaker Pimps – 6 Underground

8) Telepop Musik – Breathe

9) Moby – In This World

10) Peter, Bjorn and John – The Chills

11) The Jesus and Mary Chain – Just Like Honey

12) Ladytron – Sugar

13) Luscious Jackson – Naked Eye

14) Nick Drake – Fly

15) Death in Vegas – Girls

16) My Bloody Valentine – Sometimes

17) Death Cab for Cutie – Soul Meets Body

18) Snow Patrol – Run

19) MGMT – Kids

20) Bloc Party – I Still Remember

 

I know it’s an odd mix but I moved all my music and I haven’t fixed all the paths in I-Tunes yet.

I had a thought the other day about my blog. I seem to have a lot of babbling posted here on VOX. I am not sure how many people actually read it or not. I don’t write as much as I used to but then again my life has become rather boring these days. I like where I am at and I miss where I was but where I was is where all my LONG time friends are. Yeah, yeah, I am sure I will meet some new people up here but the ones I left behind were the 30+ year kind and I was used to seeing them daily. Living with mom these days is fine; we have always gotten along and I am sure she is happy to have another person to talk to other than a geriatric dog that can’t hear a thing. Anyway back to my blog. I seem to have close to 500 posts now and it would sure suck if something happened to VOX. So, I have decided to copy all of the posts past and current so I can some day go back over my thoughts to see just how demented I am. Since I am a cook about some things I am sitting here at 12:30 am copying all the posts pictures and all in to month and year folders. Who knows, some day I may make good on my threats and write a book…or two. I also want to write down all I can remember about trips I have taken, Army life, kid life…..family life while I can still remember them. I still have a lot useless random thoughts and observations I want to write down. To me, every day is full of some sort of comedy. I can’t even watch television five minutes without goofing on something or blabbing my opinion about something. Who knows my Nephews might just find all this funny to read some day.

Today was pretty much a wasted day. My nose was all stuffed up last night so I only slept for an hour or two. That threw off my clock so I was pretty much out of it all day. The highlight of the day was seeing a two page ad in the Sunday paper for fireworks. Not those lame poofy fireworks they still sell in some places in California but the cool ones you light and run from. Here in Washington they are allowed to shoot off fireworks a week before and two days after the fourth so I have been hearing booms every few minutes since the sun started going down. Looks like my people live up here. I am a big fan of anything that goes boom. I have a huge box of fireworks that Robert smuggled in to California a few years ago that we never really used up because they are REAL loud and flashy when you shoot them off in an area where they are illegal. This year the whole box goes off. Whoo! Hoo! There are a dozen or so circus tent type firework stands all around town so I may just have to do some shopping this week. Tonight I am going to bed early, I still kinda feel like crap and I want this cold gone before the weekend. Good night……

Well yesterday was pretty uneventful. I seem to be fighting a cold in the middle of June of all months so yesterday I woke up with a splitting headache and a nasty cough. The weather is nice up here but it seems that everyone retreats indoors when the weather gets in the upper 70’s and turns on the AC? The house was freezing yesterday. Maybe that’s why I am coming down with a cold. I thought these northerners were a hardy bunch. EEEK! It’s 77 outside.

My mom had a load of cedar bark dust delivered so she could cover al the dirt areas in between all the plants in the yard. They use a lot of it up here. It smells nice and helps keep the weeds down. So I helped shovel a bunch of it all over the front yard. For the rest of the day I zoned in front of the television. I felt kind of crappy so being a slug was all I felt like doing. I did make a REALLY good bowl of soup for dinner. I actually found an Asian market close to the house so I stocked up on dried noodles, spices, sauces and even bowls, chopsticks and those flat Asian soup spoons. There is a really good Pho restaurant right around the corner but I my soup is just as good if not better. They make really good spring rolls and salted lemonade so I will continue to eat there once or twice a week. Salted lemonade sounds nasty but it goes really well with spicy food. It’s real pulpy and just has a touch of salt. It’s not like you can chug a glass on a hot day and be refreshed but it does go good with spicy food.

Today I really have no plans. I still need to do real fun stuff like fold laundry and try to re-organize what has already been organized in hopes to make the piles smaller. I still need to put a lot of stuff on Craig’s list. Maybe I’ll do that now…..

That’s enough for now. Bye.

Didn’t do a whole lot today. I worked on my computer which made me want to spend a grand on a new one. This one is pushing 6 years old but it is still a strong machine. I went to Home Depot and bought a pole saw and a medicine cabinet. The medicine cabinet is in my bathroom now and the pole saw was used to trim the damn tree in the neighbor’s yard that was covering almost half of my mother’s back yard. Now the tree is trimmed up nice and the back lawn can finally have some sunshine. Tomorrow I need to get my fish tank cleaned up and ready to get sold. Fun fun fun.

I took these pictures from my front yard a few days ago. It would have been nice to have been on a hill, or maybe the roof of the house. If you squint, you can't see the stupid street lamp thats in our front yard.

I scored today. I went to check out an oriental market that’s close to the house and found the soup bows I had been looking for. I even got some chop sticks. Now I can get back to home made soup. MMmmm noodles. Other than that today has been pretty boring accept for the movies. I just finished watching The Royal Tenenbaums and Lost in Translation. I like them both. I really the style of the Royal Tenenbaums; Maybe it’s the people who are in it. I also liked Lost in Translation. A lot of people didn’t though. I liked it because I like watching other people. For some reason other people’s lives fascinate me no matter how boring or mundane. I know it was just a movie but that’s how it felt.

 

Oh and my hand feels a lot better. There are still a few sore spots but I think I will live.     

Well I have decided to try to write a little bit each day no matter how boring instead of doing nothing for weeks at a time and then writing a novel.

 

Today I sort of slept in then decided to try and clean up my filthy Jeep. I got the whole dash and console scrubbed and cleaned off then decided to try and mount my front license plate. I bought a mount that fits in the trailer hitch hole in the front bumper but when I tried to use it the holes for the security lock didn’t line up. Well today I decided to drill a new set of holes. Since I was in a hurry, I decided to hold the mount down with two little screws while I drilled two 5/8” holes. That was working fine until the big drill caught on the metal and spun out of my hand. Normally that’s not a big deal but since I was using the drill with one hand instead of attaching the second grip I was squeezing the handle pretty hard so when the bit got stuck it jerked my whole body around and almost put me on the ground. Now I have a nice “oops I stretched that one too far” pain in my ring finger, wrist and forearm. I really doubt anything is seriously wrong. I still have full motion and I can support my body weight on it, I just wasn’t ready for the quick jerk. Now I feel really stupid because all I had to do is clamp the mount down to the work bench before drilling. Oh well, now my ouchy is reminding me to use my head next time.

I had plans to make dinner but my cutting arm is pretty sore so Mom and I went to Carl’s Jr. for dinner. It funny how a nice big burger covered in jalapeno peppers can make you feel a lot better. heh  

Damn, today has been a LONG day. I finally got a Washington driver’s license, an emissions test on the Jeep, new Washington plates for the Jeep, changed my address for voter’s registration AND got a screw pulled out of my rear tire that has been there since I left California. Time seems to be flying. School doesn’t start for another month and a half so I have been slowly easing in to my new environment. One thing I have noticed is the lack of good places to eat. There are a few but none of them hold a candle to what I had back in the Bay Area. I thought I was just a little home sick for my old stomping grounds but after talking to the guy behind the counter at the DMV, who was from Concord California, there are little or no good places to eat. Hahahahaahaha; that was the first thing he mentioned missing since they moved. Maybe I should just open a restaurant and call it “Our food doesn’t suck”. There are some cool things to do, don’t get me wrong. Two weeks ago my mom asked if I wanted to go take a tour through the Tillamook cheese factory. That was pretty interesting AND entertaining. That place pumps out a crap load of cheese in a day. It also has the highest number of thick necked, stumpy looking visitors and one things for sure…..they like their cheese. I thought it looked more like vultures attacking an antelope but it was the free cheese tasting area and a cheese/ice cream shop. Heh. This week I tagged along with my mom and some of her friends to Tacoma to see their glass museum. I found out that Dale Chihuly has a lot of his work on display so I begged then to let me tag along because he is one of my favorite artists. My mother was the youngest in her little group of friends and the oldest was 84. Whooo! Hooo! Party time! Hahahaha. They all turned out to be pretty funny. One of them has problems sleeping at night so every once and a while she drops off to sleep. Some times in mid sentence then she would wake up and start talking again. Heh. We took the train to Tacoma which was pretty cool as well. I have never been on an Amtrak train but it was kind of like riding on a roller coaster/car. I ended up being the one who kept track of time so we didn’t miss out train and I made sure they all got to the shuttle that brought us from the train station to the museum. So far the weather has been over cast and cool. We had a week where it was in the 90’s but ever since then it has been in the 70’s. Last week we had a nice storm that ripped through the Portland Vancouver area with up to 70 mile per hour winds and dumped a few inches of rain all in the span of about 40 minutes then stopped. It was weird. I took some movies during all the stages so I’ll have to post them. It was pretty wild. The news stations keep talking about massive thunder storms but I haven’t seen anything so far. I did hear one small boom during the short storm but so far that’s it. I think they are just teasing me.

 

These are from the Tillamook factory:

 

 

These are some of the Chihuly works that were on display outside the museum: