Remember this?

Guess who failed inspection and can’t get her car registered right now? (Even with the most expensive registration rates in the whole danged state, which is still beyond my comprehension.) That stupid crack is not even in my line of vision.

I hate this city more every day. Having just waded thru posts from ten and eleven years ago when I still loved it here, it’s even more surreal to me how much I hate it.

Way to go, Time Warner, Comcast, and AT&T:

Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic

Yes, let’s take the future of technology BACKWARDS about about a hundred steps instead of moving forward, why don’t we?

I’m not even likely one of those that would be highly affected, the principle of it all just annoys the techgeekchick in me.

I’ve about decided that one of the best things that could happen is that the United States takes some of the money that gets wasted annually on unnecessary junk, WiFi the entire country, and be done with it all.

By the way, Comcast, you’ve got a lot of nerve even proposing such a thing, seeing as how you lost thousands of the customers you inherited from Time Warner (both Internet and cable TV customers), and most everyone (in Tennessee anyway) agrees that your service sucks. I know people who had RoadRunner accounts from practically Day One, and for YEARS, that jumped ship soon after you moved in. I’d back off if I were you, but hey, that’s just me.

(No offense to the one unnamed friend of mine who works for Comcast, of whom I am certain does a standout job amongst a sea of ineptitude.)

HT: Newscoma via Twitter

UPDATE: In browsing links to blogs talking about the NYT article, I just read the most perfect comment about this whole situation from someone in Canada, I believe:

The internet providers were given massive tax breaks to improve their networks (fiber to the home and whatnot). Now they not only haven’t done that with the money, but the inferior networks they’ve built instead are reaching capacity.

Somebody should make your ISPs sleep in the bed they made.

Well said.

UPDATE #2: And oh yeah, no offense either to my other friend in the Metro Nashville area who works for AT&T, even though I wouldn’t call that the sea of ineptitude Comcast is.

Oh, I forgot the best parts/slash/salt in the wound about that last post about me being short $1.16.

1. I had to spend $2.68 on a flea collar today, which was the first flea collar I’ve had to buy in at least 10 years, maybe 15. I’ll spare you the yucky details, but (of course) it involves Tojo the Psycho Cat.
2. I actually did receive a check in the mail for $9.50 today. Unfortunately, my wonderful mailman I’ve had for years (and always came in the morning) has apparently either retired, quit, or is on an extended vacation, and in his place is a creature who it would seem does the route in reverse - therefore being late as all get out, sometimes after business hours no less. And is about the unfriendliest sourpuss of a postal worker I’ve ever seen, though that’s beside the point. Anyway, the check arrived too late to get it in today’s deposit at the bank.

The hits just keep on coming and my luck continues to suck. But again - California!

I am exactly $1.16 short of being able to pay my already overdue car insurance payment. Don’t that beat all, as they say? (Well, they do say that down here anyway.)

Car payment’s due tomorrow. Going to have to be a few days late, obviously.

This might all be just a little bit easier to tolerate were it not for the fact I had to put nearly $5 of gas in the car the other night just to be able to drive the 15.4 miles from the Wal-Mart in Olive Branch to my house.

But hey, I guess it could be worse. I could be living in California.

My pal CeeElCee brings up a good point about all the flood of e-mail marketing preceding Father’s Day (and for that matter, Mother’s Day, for the same reasons) that I’ve been thinking about myself in recent weeks, and have in the past.

We are all mostly taking it in stride and being tongue in cheek about it over there in comments, but obviously all of us whose fathers are deceased have had pretty much the same thoughts about it all, as I’m sure folks who have lost their mothers thought the same in the flood of e-mail marketing preceding Mother’s Day.

My mother’s alive and well, thanks (and a frequent reader & commenter here, and regular Internet user).

But what if she weren’t? Not to mention the fact that HER parents have been gone for ages; one for nearly as long as I’ve been alive.

I had a long conversation for the first time in several months with my former longtime co-worker, who lost her very elderly and extremely ill dad last summer. One of the things she and I have always had in common is that our fathers’ birthdays and Father’s Day always fell on the same week (as does her birthday). So this year, she is experiencing the June double whammy I have been for the last four years.

I get that it’s all about marketing, I understand it. And I know you can’t please everyone. I mostly - like I said - take it in stride and just overlook it. Normally it doesn’t bother me THAT much.

But it ALWAYS gets my attention, because of the circumstances - and it’s NOT the kind of attention marketers are striving for with those Mother’s Day and Father’s Day suggestion e-mails.

And I guess what kind of bugs me is that it seems like those holiday marketing e-mails are greater in number at Mother’s Day and Father’s Day than most other holidays, even Christmas. And while I do realize it’s all about the marketing, and I understand why it’s a necessary evil - it just seems like it might be a little better if many of these e-mail marketers scaled back their holiday marketing pummeling for those two holidays for the very reasons I bring up.

You hit someone like me on a bad day in a bad year - last year, not so much; this year, every day is a bad day - and tick them off, the results are never going to be good.

Again, I don’t have that big a chip on my shoulder about it, really. Generally, I’m pretty laid back and easygoing and not all that touchy about most things, I just have to work a little harder at it when it comes to this. And for the most part, the ones that come from Amazon and places like that, I mostly just overlook and hit the delete-delete-delete without much more of a thought.

Though the point is, there IS a thought… and it’s not the one they want me to have, that they’re intending with their marketing campaign of those holidays.

I have many, many e-mail boxes so I get TONS of these mails, and even more tons that aren’t coming from more traditional Internet marketers and are coming from the mega-spammers.

So it’s there that I take out my frustrations when I feel like it - which, this year, has been rather often. So depending on what kind of mood I’m in at the moment - well, let’s just say there’s several e-mail spammers that have been getting “My father’s been dead for almost four years, go away” e-mails back.

Not that they care, the mega-spammers. I can’t really say I haven’t thought about doing the same with some of those Amazon and other e-mails though.

Marketing’s marketing, and there’s no simple answer, I know.

But fair warning, marketing e-mail spammers and marketers of the non-spammish kind: Today would have been my father’s 66th birthday, so I might be a little less nice than “go away” today. Apologies in advance.

I’ve got so much going on here right now trying to get so many things done and work related, and now to boot have two very sick elderly dogs - I had enough on my plate with one sick one (Lulu), and suddenly out of nowhere, Dobie took a turn for worse last night - anyway, I’m having trouble coming up for air right now.

Be back soon with more details, but for now, just keep us in thoughts and send good karma this way for my four-footed babies if you will.  They could use all the good karma they could get right now, and thanks.

There’s just really no time to be spared, so pardon me for this hit & run update.

1. A little while ago, I ate a cheese Krystal - because I was badly in need of food that I could get quick and didn’t have to cook and it was 3 in the morning - and it was unbelievably, horribly, terribly, awfully & ungodly bad. I have never had a Krystal that tasted that disgustingly, putridly bad in my life. Yes, I realize that Krystals are not haute cuisine, but come on - it’s a Krystal. How can you screw up a Krystal that bad?? If I die in my sleep here in a little bit, you’ll know what happened. Blech. A shoe sole would have tasted better I think.

2. I’ve been eating entirely too much fast food lately anyway, which is kind of okay because I never eat anyway and all I ever get is, like, one little McDonald’s cheeseburger, and they’re all of a dollar and I DO NOT HAVE TIME to cook. But let’s not talk about the fact that in the past two weeks I’ve been served (A) a cheeseburger that was between two top buns, and (B) got home one day and opened the bag to discover I had a top & bottom bun with cheese in the middle - and no burger. Wake up, people! I know it’s just an unimportant $1.00 cheeseburger, but it might just be someone’s only meal of the day that you totally screw up.

3. I know I shouldn’t have laughed because they’re both elderly and one’s a little sickly and might be a bit senile, but watching not just one but two of my cats fall off the desk a few minutes ago, within a few minutes of each other, with an empty chip bag (the small 99-cent Big Grab size) on their heads was almost as funny as a few years ago when my elderly then-16-year old cat got his head stuck inside an empty Krystal Chik box.

4. On a not-as-amusing note, Maggie’s (same Maggie as in the pic above) new favorite place to nap is with her head on the edge of my keyboard, which usually eventually occurs to me at some point after being puzzled as to why I’m typing in all caps or ““““` is appearing on the screen again.

5. I am apparently now completely and totally assimilated into the electronic communications world at this point, because now that my fax AND my printer are both borked, and a fax that I needed to get where it needed to go so I could start getting some commission payments didn’t go through because that dinosaur of a mid-’90s era fax that I inherited from my old office is totally dead now… it took about a month for it to finally occur to me that I could just put a stamp on an envelope and MAIL it.

6. Besides the petered out fax and printer, now my desktop is apparently on its last legs too - I’ve known it was coming, was hoping to hold it off a little longer, seeing as how that’s pretty distressing since I do 100% of my work on this computer these days - but it spit out a frightening serious error at me the other day and threatened to not start (but it eventually did). In the course of seeing what I could afford to ditch in an effort to get it speeded up a little and prepare to defragment the drive for the first time in I dunno how long, after going through some other directories, I took note of the millions of Notepad files I’ve got saved to the desktop - and had a bit of a chuckle over the title of some of those files, such as: CLC Links Widget, WP Tutorial, Moved Blogs, kathyt, kathyt Links Widget, More Moved Blogs, B Blogger Template, one simply titled B, B Tutorial (yes, I don’t remember why I felt I needed to make her her own instead of giving her the one I gave everyone else), and Sarcastro Stuff (which reminds me yet again that I STILL need to repost all his old photos one of these days, ugh). Anyway, giggle - yeah, I’m a blog geek.

7. There are angels in the blogosphere and in my MySpacesphere too. Angels, I tell you.

8. I’m so tired I don’t have time to BREATHE, and I don’t have time anyway because I have way too much work and projects to do. This staying up for a day and a half at a time, sleeping a few hours and starting all over again is getting a little old. I’ve been up again for about 38 or 39 hours now and worked straight through for about 22 well, really about 29 or 30, of those, so yeah - ’scuse me if I’m a little loopy right now.

That is all. But seriously, if I don’t at least show up for a minute on Twitter by tonight? Food poisoning. Ugh, a nasty, dirty, filthy shoe sole would have no doubt tasted better. Yuck.

9. (Yes, Lesley and Brittney, I know I shouldn’t eat meat anyway.)

10. (But still - it’s a Krystal! How can anyone screw up a Krystal??)

11. Zzzzzz…

Lots of good discussion floating around the regional blogosphere this past week or two regarding the gas price crunch and the basically terrible state of our current economy in general, most notably this one at Mack’s (with heads up from ‘Coma) and this one at ‘Coma’s, which was really about the awful recent presidential debate and those asking the questions’ failure to ask about pertinent issues for most Americans - which probably for a lot of us lately is, like, hmm, do I eat, or do I put gas in my car?

I won’t go over the big laundry list of stuff I had to add to the discussions from a single, never married, no kids person who doesn’t make much money’s point of view all over again, but the Cliffs Notes version is I have cut back just about all I can until there’s very little to cut back. I don’t have cable or any TV service at all anymore. I don’t carry mobile phone contract service anymore, I have prepaid that I really only use mostly for emergencies and the occasional important necessary call (and really always did anyway, so paying for contract service for 10+ years was stupid on my part but again, I cut that out a long while ago). I can’t cut out Internet service, no, because then I can’t work.

But I’ve cut out or cut back thousands of other things. I don’t, as a rule for around the house, buy soda anymore, don’t even buy tea or juice - I drink water. Me, who has never really liked to drink just water unless I HAD to - water. I still drink coffee, yep, but mainly because I have a surplus given to me from the last two Christmases. One, the biggest bag of coffee you’ve ever seen in your life, but that’s another story.

Even things that most people consider absolutely essential, I don’t do. Like food. I eat one meal a day, and what I consider a meal, many of you probably would think it about 1/4th of one. Now, granted, I’ve got terrible eating habits anyway and have kind of eaten about once a day for years - if I remember to, sometimes I don’t so that’s zero meals a day some days. Right now, I’ve got enough food in the house I’m not going to starve, for a couple of weeks anyway, even though most of it I kind of look at and go “eh” about. Snacks - nope. Fruit - I’d love to have fruit around, at least bananas or something, but a lot of that’s gotten too expensive to think about buying on a regular basis too, especially when you spent four months mostly out of work.

Anyway, I said I wasn’t going to go through the laundry list of stuff and there’s plenty more, but I’ll stop there and just say it again - I’ve cut out and cut back just about all I can, some on purpose and some things just happened that way. There’s just not much else left to cut.

With all this discussion going on lately and especially folks talking about how the gas crunch is affecting them and their families if they have one, I realize one of my pet peeves for years is now pretty much a moot point. In talking with my close and married friends and knowing various things about some of their financial statuses, it used to bug the living hooha out of me that, comparing their situations with various aspects to mine, getting married could have solved most of any of my financial problems or hardships over the years. That just used to drive me insane and many, many times over the years dealing with various things - insurance issues, tax issues, and on and on - I often felt pretty much penalized for having remained single and/or childless all of my adult life.

I know that’s not so true now, not with the rather horrifying state of today’s economy. What perks married folks get nowadays aren’t making so much of a difference when it costs $40-100 to fill up your car with gas and everything in the grocery store is edging up to costing a fortune.

I had running jokes going for years with two of my closest male friends from college about marrying either one of them someday, both of them who were/are well off and without a lot of financial concern even in today’s awful standards. At one point in the Nineties, with one of them, I was about thisclose to biting the bullet with one of them and just saying okay, I give up, let’s do it.

Anyway, yeah. Right now everything just sucks and I’m sick of it.

Yeah, I’m working now, but two of the three pay on a monthly basis only and I won’t get any significant pay until late May. Most of you know I’ve started a new venture to try and bring some more income in, but again, it will likely be late May to June before I really see anything from that. And having had a backlog of 4-5 months with very little to no work nor pay - I’m not exactly starting in the black to begin with.

We won’t even talk about Tax Day last week. Why anyone in my position OWES money is beyond me, unfortunately I will be owing even more before this is all over with. At least next year might be a little bit of a break, but only because I barely worked for 3-4 months so, you know, double-edged sword there.

I drive a compact car. A COMPACT. And yet it’s costing over $30 to fill up the tank from empty. Come on.

My washer and dryer both died some time ago so I’ve been relying on (A) the laundromat or (B) the not-that-often trip to my mother’s to get any laundry done. I need to do laundry right now. People keep asking lately about visiting or getting together, got a friend coming to town with his band in a couple of weeks, got another friend coming in from Chicago shortly after that. Everything I could wear for such an occasion needs to be washed. I can’t spare the cash for the laundromat right now.

Today was maybe one of the most telling days of all for me. I have a total of about $0.92 in cash to last me until the end of this month… with almost ten days to go.

First of all, an unfortunate error in subtraction has left me exactly 13 cents overdrawn at the bank. You know what they’re going to do to me with overdraft charges over that, I’m soooo happy. I’d have gone and thrown some of that 92 cents I have left in there to cover it, but by the time I discovered it today, it was too late anyway.

There were some household items that were badly needed, and I had a Target gift card that, for whatever reason, I thought was $25. It turned out to be $20, so while at the register I wound up putting a couple of things back.

I had a Wal-Mart gift card too, with about $12 on it, from some Christmas last year or the year before, I don’t know which. Only problem is there are virtually no Wal-Marts very close to me, here in the center of the city. No matter which one I chose, I was going to have to drive clear across town, so I decided maybe I’d head to the one in Southeast Memphis or in Olive Branch (cheaper tax wise).

But I don’t have enough gas in my car to get there or to any of them. Sure enough, when I was leaving Target, the almost-empty light came on. It went back off a little up the road, but it’s still close enough to empty I can’t drive out to the ‘burbs to spend that $12 and however many cents. The 92 cents in my wallet to last me until the end of April isn’t going to get me too far at the gas pump.

I know things will get better for me, at least eventually. But today, I’ve just had it.

Sorry, I got nothing else today. And that’s pretty much literally, obviously.

Very much sad about this.

His was literally one of the first Nashville & Tennessee regional blogs I started reading regularly, lo, all those ages ago.  I’m sure there’s good reasons but I’m gonna miss his special brand of humor & views on life in general, cute stories about being a good dad, and absolutely perfect sarcastic wit anyhow.

Don’t you dare disappear on us altogether, & happy trails, pal.

I figure if you’re going to have what is quite possibly the, but definitely one of the top ten, worst days of your life, trying to balance that out with a minute and a half or so of an absolutely adorable, not born very long (about two months) baby is not a bad idea.

But the other reason is because my mom has trouble sometimes seeing YouTubes, and doesn’t have a MySpace, so this way she can look at her too (we were just discussing said child a little while ago).

This is one of my oldest and dearest friend’s (since HS, and we were roommates in college) sorta newborn, third child and third daughter. Her eldest (now 19) is sorta like a godchild to me (except I’d be a terrible godmother), and there’s about ten years’ difference between all three girls.

My friend is a year younger than me, but already a grandmother, and I think that’s hilarious, though I’ve been pretty good about not giggling about it TOO much. (Plus I might as well get over it anyway, ‘cos pretty soon that’s not gonna be funny anymore anyhow. Most of my friends’ kids are entering college this year or next, some already there. Ugh.)

Anyway, I’m not quite ready to talk about anything else just yet tonight (but I will), so here’s an adorably cute baby.

Oops, I forgot to blog this week, huh?  Wow, sorry.  This week has just been crazy busy.

So even though it has not moved from my driveway since Wednesday, sometime within the last 48 hours the windshield of my not-even-a-year-old-yet car developed a crack.  It’s at the bottom of the windshield (well, mostly) and not all THAT bad, I suppose, but come on, this is a practically new car that doesn’t even have 10K miles on it yet - and it hasn’t been out of my driveway since Wednesday!  I know we had a bad storm last night, but I discerned no hail, and I don’t see any evidence around of why this would have happened, so yeah, I’m not happy right now.  Happy Birthday to me.

Yeah, I don’t usually make a fuss about or even remotely announce such things, but since LiveJournal already ratted me out to Smiley and I guess everyone else on my LJ list, I figured I would go ahead and acknowledge it so I could gripe some more.  Right now I’m enjoying my last seven-ish hours of being able to say I’m 41.  Because 42 just sounds… older.

(Apologies to ‘Coma who is a little flipped out about 42 right now… hee.)

(PS When someone posted on Twitter last week about Gilligan’s Island’s Mary Ann, Dawn Wells, getting busted for weed, I really thought it was a joke and didn’t pay any more attention to it.  Well, I’ll be.)

(PPS Technically I won’t be 42 until 2:24 a.m. so really that’s nine-ish hours of being able to say I’m 41.  Hey look, I’ll take what I can get, even if it’s only two more hours of being younger.)

The Twitterites know this already, but I have a most interesting working prospect on the line today.  I’m not really sure yet whether it’s sorta-permanent or not, but it’s something along the lines of what I would love to do and never thought I would actually have the opportunity to do and get paid a cent for it, nope; and believe me, at this point something would be better than nothing, nada, zilch.  Anyway, keep fingers crossed and send good karma.  Even if it’s not forever, it might be a little bit better than what lately has amounted to putting a Band-Aid on a gaping and gushing wound (and might at least open the door for some other opportunities in the same vein).

In other news, the two boy dogs that can barely stand each other got in a big fight a while ago - which I despise because it scares me to death when they do that - and one brother is limping while the other one mostly just has his feelings hurt about me getting so mad at them.  Since their last big run-in with the dog next door - which, granted, has been a pretty long while ago now, it’s not like this stuff happens all the time - and after some investigation of pet advice pros, I have figured out that if I grab the one that’s likely to do more damage by his back legs, that usually settles it.  The other one and the third brother who wasn’t involved this time are really pretty incapable of inflicting much damage, though getting him to leave his bigger brother alone was a little problematic, but finally everybody calmed down.  Well, except me, who was still pumping adrenalin for another hour or so.

Apologies about the lack of anything besides LOLdogz last week.  It was kind of a really sucky week.

So hello, my name is Lynnster and I’m a music junkie.  Or music geek, I suppose, though I favor the former more myself.  Oh, you knew that already, huh?

Dobie & His Cat, Rocky… or Vice Versa

Originally uploaded by LynnsterZone.

Well, time for my once a month post again, I guess. Except I have kinda sorta made up my mind I’m going to start blogging daily or almost again, even if it’s not much of nothing but a couple of sentences or even if it’s just - whatever.

As for me & what all’s going on with me, things could not possibly be much worse than they are right now and have been for a few months now. I guess there’s a few things that could be worse but really, comparatively, at this point most of those wouldn’t make much of a difference. I’ll spare you and me both the gory details for now because it’s just too icky to all get into, and since I live with it day after crummy day after crummy day, I’d just as soon not infect my blog with it the way it has everything else in my life. So for now, let’s just say it’s pretty bad and just move on from there.

In other news, Rocky left our happy little zoo a few weeks ago. He was ten years old and this more often affects older cats, but he had been in old-age kidney failure for some time and when a respiratory bug hit most of the felines in the house in January, he was unable to withstand it. I have another older one also in declining health who is still struggling a bit with the bug (she’s 16), but she’s improved and back to her usual grumpy and neurotic self now.

Anyway, here is one my favorite pictures of Rocky with his dog, Dobie. I never really knew whether Dobie was Rocky’s cat or Rocky was Dobie’s dog. The night Rocky passed, two of the other cats (”little sister” Missy, and Schuyler) and Dobie stayed right by his side until he was gone.