Tag Archives: things I won’t do

Lucia Falls Regional Park & Non-Related Tidbits

Posted on June 21, 2015 by Pamela

A couple of weeks ago we had dinner with some friends who live practically in the middle of Lucia Falls park. I had never been there before or anywhere in the vicinity for that matter. I’ve lived here for almost 20 years and my knowledge of areas beyond the paths I’ve worn for myself is pitiful. The park was lovely. Shady and green on a hot day. We had a delicious dinner outside on the deck. Wonderful way to spend the evening.

This is all that is left of a dance club that was there a long time ago. This is what our hosts told us.

In other news, my grocery store no longer has the prunes I like. It has some generic brand and then a fancy organic brand which is cleverly packaged so it looks like it’s a decent amount but you can tell when you open the package there will only be about 5 prunes in there that you paid about $1 each for. I thought about asking someone but I didn’t want to be that old lady asking about prunes.

You also might have noticed that I haven’t said a peep about Women’s World Cup. It’s a tragedy. I managed to watch one half of one game with the USA. There are numerous contributing factors but the biggest one is this writing project. But also a bunch of miserable commutes stacked together and the timing of the matches is during my commute home. I’m going to try to watch USA tomorrow.

Another weird thing about the writing project is that my brain is so wrung out even if I do read or watch something, I need it to be simple or something I’ve already seen or read. I just got out my ancient copy of the The White Mountains, by John Christopher to read again. And last week I watched The Lake House for at least the fifth time.

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I Don’t Want To Bend Like The Bad Girls Bend

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Pamela

Klamath River in December

We went back to work today. I was a little surprised by how many people did not have to go back to work.

CTran was on regular schedule.

When I pulled into the park-n-ride there were three other cars. There was a bus driver smoking in the smoke shack and he said, “There are drivers out there looking for passengers.”

Normally I take a bus with a slightly longer route because it’s less crowded. This morning I took the direct bus and was the only passenger on it. The bus driver was delighted to see me. He got on the radio and quizzed the other drivers to see if anyone had a passenger. Normally this bus has every seat full.

I don’t want to complain. I had a long break. I was glad to be back. It was nice to be able to go through all the stuff that’s piled up with few interruptions.

There were 4 people on the bus home. One of them was a regular and she told me she was the only passenger in the morning.

At first I felt bad that CTran hadn’t modified the schedule. But most of the people on the commuter buses have monthly passes. It was nice (I guess?) that the bus drivers got paid to drive empty buses around.

I had a traditional new year’s soup at my new favorite Japanese restaurant. I’d link to it but their website is an abomination. When they were putting it in we sneered and said, “Just what downtown needs, another Asian place.”

Then we tried it and we’ve been back at least once every other week.

But the traditional soup had mochi in it which is nasty. It was like gluey mattress stuffing. At one point I had a very small amount in my mouth and I was thinking: I cannot swallow this.

There was nothing to hide it in and I started mentally ticking off the items in my purse, trying to figure out if there was anything to save me. I gagged it down. But oof, never again. I hope that isn’t bad luck.

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Pam Against the Machine, Part 627

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Pamela

I finally found the picture of the cucumber plant. It did nothing all summer and then blew up at the very end when summer was winding down. Still, it didn’t make any cucumbers. Then when summer was finished, it finally made cucumbers. So when I was pulling everything out I found two full grown lemon cucumbers and another half dozen that were like grapes. I picked and ate them all while I was standing there.

There’s this service we subscribe to at work. On our most recent invoice they advised that their billing would be changing and we’d only be getting a simplified paper bill. If we wanted a complete bill we’d have to do it via electronic delivery. I do not have a problem with that. The notice said you could sign up for this billing via a URL or by calling customer service and picking #X on the phone tree.

I went to the URL and could not login. I called the customer service number and pressed X and was told that choice didn’t exist and to please hold for customer service which was a multi-level tree where nothing related to my question.

I finally got a customer service person on the phone who seemed a little taken aback by my question. I had to wait on hold and finally she comes back and says we have to set up an electronic invoicing account and can continue to hold while we do this?

What? NO! Are you kidding me?

“This is stupid,” I told her. “I just want to get a complete bill. Now I have to set up another account? Forget it. I won’t do the electronic delivery.”

She was very nice and assured me she’d pass on my feedback. I’m sure “This is stupid,” is written in on a whiteboard in the lunchroom so that they can get right to work making it less stupid.

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The World Expects Way Too Much Remembering

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Pamela

I can’t find my photos of my cucumber plants so we’ll do hedge whacking instead. Look how nice and sunny it was that day. That red line in the bottom left is a new extension cord. I accidentally whacked the old one. Flames shot out. It was pretty exciting.

Has anybody calculated how far away are we from needing to hire people to manage our privacy and security preferences?

This stuff wears me out. These sites that want you to create a login just to look at something. Nope. Not doing it. Too many logins. Too many rules. You couldn’t use the same password for everything even if you wanted to.

This makes me so cranky.

I’m tired of customer service surveys, too. That’s gone way too far

For customer service surveys my time is billed at $60 an hour, one hour minimum.

I just went to download something free and they wanted my credit card. Nope. Can’t have it. (It’s a legitimate company, not some scammy thing but I’m still not giving to them just so they can have it on file and then one of their dopey CEOs can go to happy hour at Hooters and leave his laptop in the car to get stolen.)

At the office, we changed companies for computer protection and I keep getting these emails from the old company reminding me that Your! Virus! Protection! Has! Expired! Your! Computer! Is! Not! Protected!

Except that it is, by another program. So I went to unsubscribe from the emails which was an Alice in the Rabbithole clusterfukian adventure in time-wasting. Everything I did just opened a new window and went in a big circle until I was back where I started only with a million windows open.

So then I started up the chat help with “Steve.” [Aside: I actually enjoy doing chat help for purely entertainment value.] Steve was a robot and he kept opening more windows for me to tell me what to do. And explaining how I just do this, then this, then this and then click on the button that says this and I won’t get those annoying updates.

First of all, I shouldn’t have to click more than once to unsubscribe to anything. And second, my computer wouldn’t do this, this or this nor did it have a this button.

So I wrote a toasty complaint email which I’m sure was sent directly to the CEO where it was printed on gold-plated toilet paper for his morning constitutional. Then I made a filter to send the messages straight to trash.

I almost forgot to take the “after” photo so the sun was down when I ran back out there. I took it from this angle to hide how crookedy it is. I’m too short to get the top very well and also my arms get tired.

One of my financial institutions sent me a long thing about my privacy settings which mostly said, “Hard cheese, not much you can do about us sharing your info,” except there were two things that you could ask them to leave you out. But of course you had to call. So I called and it wasn’t automated it was a person. And then we had to go through about 10 rounds of account number, social security number, describe one of your last three transactions. I got all cranky about that. Is there really a lot of fraudulent canceling of sharing information going around?

So then she said we could set up security questions so it wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass next time.

And all her suggestions were for favorite things. I don’t have favorite things. And anything that’s my favorite now is going to be long forgotten by the time I have to remember it. Then we decided on first car. But then later after I got off the phone I realized I gave the wrong car. So hopefully I’ll remain permanently confused about my first car.

Thanks technology. You’re awesome when you aren’t killing me softly with your logins and passwords.

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Things to Do Before You’re 40

Posted on November 20, 2006 by Pamela

This morning I read a post that referred to a magazine list of things to do before you’re 40.

It’s too late for me but I was curious to see if I could find the list to see what I missed because there is nothing like assigning importance to random events and circumstances and giving them an arbitrary deadline.

I plugged the phrase into a search engine and turns out there are books and all kinds of people talking about these lists.

If you’re under 40 and have a list, I’d say get on it and go for it because once I hit 40 I was too lazy to do anything. I have to be in bed by 9pm or I’m tired for a week. A hangover lasts at least three days. A weird muscle pull can annoy me for months. If I eat too much or stuff that’s too fatty or preservative laden, I spend the night in roiling pain. It takes us a week to get organized enough to do dinner and a movie.

At this point I’m enjoying making a list of things I’m never going to do and am thrilled to avoid. I’m never going to climb a mountain, sail around on a frigate like Master and Commander, wait in line all night for anything, do space travel, observe a gnarly surgical procedure, gamble away my life savings, be on reality TV, win an Olympic medal, have a threesome (possibly negotiable) or study grizzly bears in their natural habitat. Whew. So liberating.

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