Got a good caption for the Gaga’s outfit?

Friday evening Larry was gone for a meeting at Union Rescue Mission downtown. I decided to kick off the weekend by watching a movie streamed on Netflix. Seemed like a nice way to relax. We got a high-fallutin Blu-Ray player that’s hooked up to the internet, so I can stream music or movies, or even look at facebook on our new widescreen flat panel TV. Not that I want to, but it’s there. Up until December we had a bulky tube TV inside a 1990s armoire that cluttered up the living room. Of course I wanted a more modern TV (actually, I wanted a digital projector and a pull-down screen, but Larry wasn’t keen); but even more I wanted to unclutter the living room, and that big armoire was soooo Y1K.

The TV’s got beautiful resolution, on the rare occasions we turn it on. But when I turned it on at 8pm, I couldn’t get Netflix. I tried some of my other internet apps, like Pandora, and couldn’t connect them either. I called my internet provider. We walked through the situation for about ten minutes, then the guy passed me up to a “Level Two” technician. While talking to the Level 2 technician the phone cut off. I called back, and an Entry Level guy named Tariq answered.
I told him I’d already been bumped up to Level Two, so could he pas me up the ladder?

“Sumpn I can help you with?” Tariq asked.

Oh boy I gotta go through the drill with him too? So I did.

“I’m mona tell you right now, Level 1 and 2 don’t know shizzle. If you’re gettin stopped at the Gateway Ping, that’s not yo blu-ray, man. That’s yo ISP or da router.” Call yo ISP and modem manafacturer and gimme a call back, kay?”

Tariq knew his shizzle. They should promote Tariq to Level Three.
So I called Time Warner and got through about three levels of call center people, all filipinos (It’s Friday at 9pm by now, but it’s Saturday afternoon in the Philippines). They passed me up the chain, then passed the buck to my wireless router manufacturer. The last lady I spoke with gave me their number.

So I called Linksys and got through about three different people, in fact one filipina sounded just like one of the women I’d spoken to at Time Warner. Maybe they used the same call center? Link Sys filipina said I needed to configure my modem manually, so I should call TW back and get a static IP and port numbers from TW. I called Time Warner back. They gave me port numbers butnot the static IP. So now I was back to LinkSys again.

I started getting on a first name basis with these folk. This time I got a voice at Linksys that sounded like a computer generated voice. Like the computer on Jepoardy but with no personality. It turned out it was a real live person. His name was George. I put him on speakerphone so Larry could hear his voice. It was trippy. Maybe he had Aspergers. Well George walked me through just about every possible problem and couldn’t solve it. The phone cut out three times and George called me back each time. Finally he suggested I conference in Time Warner so he could talk to them directly. This definitely wasn’t a computer talking, and not your average customer service guy. We got the Time Warner lady on the phone. George knew more than anyone so far. We reset the blu-ray twice, reset my wireless modem twice, tried all sorts of configurations. Lost computer internet, got it back … Larry decided to go to bed.

I should mention my goal for Lent was to get to bed before midnight every night. This wasn’t going to happen. Finally at 12:15am I told George that I just wanted my internet back. He did better and got everything up and working again.

By then I was too exhausted to watch anything on TV or netflix. My ancestors supposedly had difficult lives. But what I’d gained in modern conveniences I’d lost in time. I had spent four hours on the phone to get movies streamed to my flat panel TV; four hours I could have used to write.

I checked my email and home page and saw the news about the earthquake Japan. News of the tsunami hadn’t been reported yet. It wasn’t until the following morning that the weight of the situation was clearer. And yet it still doesn’t feel real. I lived through Northridge Quake of 1994 and was in New York City on 9/11. Those events still feel surreal to me.

Saturday I called LinkSys and asked to speak to a supervisor. The person on the other line pulled up my records and noticed I’d been on the phone for hours the night before. She was hesitant to hand me over to a supervisor, but I said it was important. Finally the supervisor came on the line. I told her George was a rock star and they better hold onto him.

This morning our rector spoke of the events in Japan, and framed it around Lent: God gets down into the hard things and suffers with us. I think I was too distracted to let the weight of it all sink in, but Larry felt overcome with grief.

I don’t have anything profound to say about Japan, only that we will be praying for them.

Ted Rooney gets the funk on.

I helped my friend Todd with his GLEE audition

Well today was fun. I was going to head down to Orange County for the last day of a conference.  Larry had just left for the day. I went to the bathroom to shower and primp.  I turned on the shower to get the hot water going, used the loo, lit a couple matches to clear the air [sorry, it's part of the story], waved the matches out and extinguished them in the sink for safety’s sake.  Then stepped into the shower-tub. Man, it was steamed up. I’d never seen our hot water get that hot that fast.

Oh. That’s not steam. That’s a fire. The shower curtain was on fire.  ON FIRE.

Not really believing what I saw, I pulled the curtain which only gave it more oxygen. #Holy xልወርግ!” I cussed, then tried to aim the shower head at the flames. Well fire travels upward, and shower heads are designed to aim downward, so it only worked on the part of the curtain that was already burned up. I inhaled, grabbed the hem and YANKED the curtain down into the bathtub. The wire rings split open like clothespins.  Sadly a hunka hunka burning cloth still stuck to the rail. I considered muffing it out with the towels, but I’d spent too much on the towels. It looked small enough that it would burn out on its own.

The fire was done. But the smoke alarm went off in my office next door. I’d seen my nieces and nephews do a trick when their smoke alarm reacted to the steam from a shower: get a coat or blanket and wave the smoke/steam away from the alarm. I grabbed a down vest off the desk and waved at it. It worked. I started back to see if the chair broiled remnant was still on fire, but then the alarm started up again. So I waved it again, stronger, vigorous, flapping the vest over my head and down to the ground. The vest caught the lamp on the bookshelf and knocked it over, shattering the light bulb into the high pile carpet. Okay so I can’t walk around over there. First things first, alarm was still going. I pulled my desk underneath the alarm to stand on the desk and take out the battery … forgetting that my desk has only three legs. … a file cabinet acts as the fourth leg, which I just pulled it away from. The desk toppled over.

Okay, glass in the carpet, alarm still going. I ran out to the kitchen and got the  Cisco step ladder and was able to extricate the battery from the alarm.

The fire was out. But the bathroom was a mess: charred curtain remnants clogging the drain, soot burned into the rod, and oh hey! it’s still steaming in here, because I HADN’T TURNED OFF THE SHOWER YET. Water was still geysering out. And whaddya know, without a curtain, that wter just sprayed out onto the tile and seeped into Larry’s office.

At this point I realized I needed to go get the vacuum from the pantry, open the front door and  windows, go get a box fan out of the garage.  I needed to get some shoes on until I could vacuum up the class. Oh and I should put some clothes on to go out and get the box fan. I had performed all the above heroic tasks in my birthday suit.

It took about three hours to clean up everything, from pooled water to the charred mess in the tub to the broken light bulb in the carpet and my overturned desk.  The good news is, I got all my housework done!

I wished I’d taken a photo of the mess in the bathtub before I cleaned up, to put on the blog. But when you’re staring at a fire blooming over your head, you really don’t think, “hey, this would look great on my blog.”

When Larry came home a couple hours later, he saw the box fan in his office window and asked, “You hot or something?”

• Lesson 1: Polyester is made from petrol. Who knew!
• Lesson 2: Don’t put matches out by waving them wildly.  Not in a small space.
• Lesson 3: Get a fire extinguisher.

It’s 2:25am, and that’s early for me. That is, I’ve been getting to bed at about 5am the past two weeks.  I set myself a deadline to complete my book proposal. It was the albatross around my neck for the past several months. enough already. Lent was going to bring enough suffering, why add that as well? So I made a promise to myself to finish it by February 8.

I didn’t.  So I stayed up working every night since then.  (I took Valentine’s Night off).  Once I completed that, I began working on revamping my website(s).  This, as well as my angryconvos.com website for the book were garish and glaringly Y1K.  So here we have the new website.  I must say that WordPress and Standard Theme rock.  I am keeping my old blog up, you can visit it there. I might migrate all the content over here, but … well my husband would like me to get back to a regular sleeping schedule.

Enjoy.  Do let me know what you think. Drop me a line on the Comments.