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Dear Monday,

I completely and utterly GIVE.

It's only halfway through and I've had enough.

Just a couple of the half-day highlights:

1. American Home Shield SUCKS. Credit card gets hacked, company send new one, we call to update the payment on file with AHS and they tell us we owe $75 for a service call from October that we've gone over several times with them. No, I do not owe $75 for the service call in October to come and fix the dishwasher that was NOT fixed on the previous service call. It's the same appliance, not fixed right the first time.  It took from frikkin May until October to finally get someone to stop it from leaking. The first time we went over this it was "I'll make a note and take care of it." By the third time I'm told we still owe $75, no one is buying that crap anymore. 

All of this would be largely moot except that over the weekend, what appeared to be very sloppy water-dish etiquette from the dogs (the carpet seemed to have been soaked) turned out not to have been the dogs at all. We moved the dish, only to watch the carpet get wetter and wetter. Now there's a slightly gross smelling stain stretching from the bathroom door about 2 feet in radius across the carpet in the bedroom. I need to get a plumber out here before we end up falling through what appears to be rotting floorboards underneath that carpet between my bedroom floor and the garage.

But we owe $75. 

For the millionth time, no we don't. So now they're saying (which I don't believe for a minute) that it's the FIRST service call that shows owing $75 from May. Except we have the processed check showing it paid. Oh, but a scan of the check isn't good enough. It has to be FAXED to American Home Shield or it won't be legit.  Of course, who the F has a fax machine? Not us.

You better believe they're going to fix the plumbing and ever inch of the bedroom carpet when I get through.

Naturally, I have surgery in ten days and will largely immobilized and confined to the upstairs of the house for two weeks when this work will likely need to be done, including pulling up the carpet in the bedroom and moving all the crap out of the way to do it, which I won't even be able to help with. 

GRRRRRRR.

(Speaking of which, I'm now having nightmares that involve a hip and thigh so engorged and swollen with blood that the stitches start spurting open. Lovely. This appears to be a mixture of pre-surgery anxiety mixed with plumbing problems.)

2. Meanwhile, at work, claim after claim is getting held up for errors. And when I try to get with the people who wrote the stories (full of errors, it turns out) I get attitude and persecution complexes. Why yes, I'm sure the auditor singled your claim out for personal reasons. Just answer my damn questions!! And, after wasted energy back and forth explaining the same things over and over in creative and different ways in attempt to get to the bottom of the problem? Yep. Audi was right, tech was wrong, extra work for me. Booyah. I'm very sorry the east coast is getting slammed by a blizzard, but it's the only thing that's keeping me from committing harakiri. The storm means there's very little coming in for by bigger dealer while I wrangle with the Florida mess. 

3. I am in the middle of the post from hell (literally in many ways) about Brio over on the South Belt blog side of things. I am trying to put all of the 1990s articles together like I did for the 1980s so it's a one-stop reference. Between Blogger crapping out on photo downloads and it sucking all the memory from my machine trying to chug them into uploads, I have to let it run overnight to get stuff on the blog. Only to discover, some of the stuff didn't upload and, to keep from losing all chronology, I have to piece-meal each individual missing upload into its correct spot one.at.a.time. Which also slows everything else down to a crawl.  I'm never going to finish this thing. 

4. The very cool new toy to digitize Super8 film that I ordered ONE MONTH AGO is still on backorder, despite when ordering being told it was 7-14 days from order to shipment arrival. When will they get more in? Nobody knows. Should I cancel, get a refund, and buy it from the manufacturer's website for $20 more -- because they apparently can keep them in stock there but not at B&H? To cancel, I'd have to call them -- and they're in New York in the blizzard.  And I'd rather get the one I ordered at the sale price...

How is it only 2:00???????

And HOW THE POOP is it 70° outside in January in Denver?!?