2010 New Hampshire Fisher Cats Tickets!

Our Fisher Cats tickets came today!  And not just the mini-plan ones…I had bought tickets to a couple of other games when the individual game tickets went on sale a few weeks ago, and they sent those, too.  Normally, I have to print those out.  But I guess when they were processing all of the mini-plans and stuff, they just printed out real tickets for everything they had on file for the fans, and sent them ALL out!  Good, I like real tickets better, anyway, and that’s less paper and ink I have to use, printing them out.  Plus, I just LOVE having that envelope full of tickets for the upcoming season, just waiting to be used.  Every year, I take a picture of the tickets all fanned out like this, just because it makes me happy!

NyQuil is magical stuph.  Srsly.  I wasn’t having any cold symptoms, but I had Mike get me a big bottle of it (the cherry flavored, that green licorice stuph is NASTY).  The reason is that it seems to be the only thing that makes me go to sleep.  With all of the racket from the cats at night and the landladies being Screaming Mimi’s all day, sleep has been hard to come by, but much needed if I wanted to knock this thing out.  Well, it worked, because I took it Saturday night, and was groggy most of Sunday, as well.  That sucked, because I’d been hoping to be able to go out and take advantage of the nice weather.

So Mike went by himself to the store, and he also said he was going to get lunch somewhere.  I figured he’d be gone for maybe two hours.  He was gone for four.  Where did he go, I wondered, was he out looking for New York jobs or something?

You know why he took so long?  He drove all the way up to bloody Salem, NH, because he wanted to go and have breakfast at Denny’s.  Who the hell drives 40 minutes to go to a greasy dump like Denny’s?  And there ARE closer ones, the closest one to us is in Danvers, about 12 miles from here.  I checked.

But he wanted breakfast food, I was too sick to cook it, he can’t cook without nearly burning the house down or making food have odd odors that drive me to the barf bucket just from having to smell it.  Also, when we go out together, we almost never go out for breakfast, because I hate it.  Not the food necessarily, but because I can’t deal with sitting in a room full of families with screaming kids in the A.M., the ones who are always out on weekends.  They all go to Denny’s because it’s cheap.  Well, I don’t like it much in the P.M., either, but it’s worse in the morning.  If we’re staying at a hotel that has free breakfast, I go down, put it on a tray, and take it to the room where I can eat it in peace.

Anyway, I asked him what he would have done if I’d not been so groggy at the time he left, and came along?  Would he have made ME go to Denny’s, if he was hell-bent on having breakfast at 1PM?  That would have been wife-abuse, just trying to make me set foot in any Denny’s is bad enough.  But I’m getting over being sick, the last thing I wanted was some greasy crap upsetting my tummy.  Does Denny’s make ANYTHING that is not greasy?  I don’t think so.

Later I was feeling better, so I made him take me to TGI Friday’s, because I wanted a Sam Adams Noble Pils and some broccoli-cheese soup.  I also has a Give Me More Stripes coupon worth eight bucks that expires this coming Saturday, that I wanted to use.

But when we got there, we were told that the beer taps were broken, no Sam Adams anything except for Sam Light, in a bottle.  As light beers, go, Sam Light is okay.  But I hadn’t had a beer in a week, and I wasn’t about to settle for light beer.  Nothing else they had bottled met up to my exacting beer standards…as in, it all came from what I like to call The Big Three Piss Trough.  I do not quaff from The Big Three Piss Trough, if that’s all they have, I go without or go elsewhere.

I opted to leave…we hadn’t ordered any food yet, so it was okay.  I just would have  felt more and more resentful if we’d stayed and drank the Sam Light, when I’d been looking forward to Noble Pils.  I felt bad…it was a Sunday night, nothing they could do about the taps, no doubt they got someone to come out and fix them during regular business hours.  We’ll go back sometime before my coupon expires, surely the taps will be fixed by then.

We ended up going to the 99 up the road.  It would be a freak of nature if we walked in there, and their taps were broken, too…but no, they worked fine.  No broccoli-cheese soup there, so I got the fish chowder with a Caesar salad.

We sat at the bar at the 99.  While there, we overheard a server complaining to the bartender about a table who had a $100 check leaving a 31-cent tip.  The bill was probably $99.69, the jerk paid $100 and told the server to “keep the change”.  My, how generous!

If people are too cheap to tip properly, they should go to the drive-though, or eat at home.  Times are tough, I know, but servers only make $2.65 an hour, they rely on tips to make a living wage.  Most servers work hard to earn said tips, but some people are too cheap to give them.  If you are going to a full-service restaurant, you must budget for the tip as part of the cost of the meal, you can’t just omit it to save money.  If you need to save money, don’t eat out at all, or go to McDonald’s or some other place where you don’t have to tip.  Sheesh!

Anyhoo, let’s hope that this sickness is over and done with, and that I will get to enjoy all of those baseball tickets!

I thought I was over it, and we did go to that beer dinner on Sunday night.  Everything was fine, no problem.  I was a bit tired the next day, so I took it easy.  But on Tuesday, all of this shit flared up again.  If I wasn’t throwing up, I was having stomach pains, or endless headaches.  The headaches especially are driving me insane, because half the time, I can’t take anything for the pain, because I gack it right back up.

Also, I have gotten almost NO sleep over the past two weeks.  I can’t sleep at night because that’s when the cats want to play horsecats on the bed.  If I close them out of the bedroom, they’ll just scratch on the door, which also drives me nuts.  And I can’t sleep in the daytime because my landladies are incapable of speaking in “indoor voices”.  Also, it sounds like they are operating a bowling alley up there.  Asking them to be quiet will do no good, they think they ARE being quiet.  Plus, I’m not in the mood to stir up any shit with them right now.

This morning was the worst.  I finally got some sleep, just a few hours.  When I woke up, the headache came back, but my stomach still hurt so I was afraid to take anything for it.  So I just laid there and tried to relax it away on its own, sometimes that works.  And it way…until one of the landladies suddenly went out into the back hallway and yelled at one of her dogs.  You’d think that said dog was clear on the other side of town, because you probably could have heard it that far away.  Anyhoo, my headache came blazing back, 100 times worse than it was before.  Sheesh, we don’t make all sorts of racket, why can’t we get the same courtesy in return?

I finally got back to sleep around noon.  I woke up about an hour later, awoken by a horrible stench, which turned out to be me.  I had broken out into a horrible sweat, and this disgusting sickly sweet smell was oozing out my pores.  I had been running a fever, and it felt sort of like I was under a heated blanket, but I wasn’t, just the sheet…it was actually pretty warm out today.  Anyhoo, the smell was so bad that I had to throw up from just smelling it.  Oddly enough, Mike said he didn’t smell anything.  Weird.

I wanted to take a shower, but I had no more clean pajama pants (I was going through them more quickly than usual due to repeated incidences of the sickly sweet stench thing).  I sent Mike downstairs to the laundry room to see if I’d left any down there, fortunately, there were three pairs, which he brought up for me.  I finally took a shower and felt a lot better.

Screw this, I’m sick of being sick.  Here I thought I was doing the right thing in getting the stupid vaccine, and all it’s caused me was hell.  I wish I had listened to the people who said NOT to get it.  Then, maybe I’d not be dealing with this crap now.

The weather is warming up, I have a lot of stuph coming up, and I will be mighty pissed if I have to miss any of it due to this shit.  We’re supposed to go to Old Sturbridge Village next weekend for the Hearthside Bounty thing.  Even if I’m feeling like shit, we’re still going.  Maybe I might have to skip the dinner thing and stay in the room while Mike goes.  But the point is that I WANT to be in a hotel room, jut for one night, with no cats dancing all over the bed all night, no noisy neighbors, just one night of peace and quiet.  Is that too freakin’ much to ask for?

I’m not calling the doctor yet because I don’t want to risk being trapped in the hospital for Opening Weekend of the Fisher Cats, something I’ve been looking forward to for many months.  Even if I still have these symptoms, I’m going, the room faces the ballpark, I can stay in there, watch the game, listen on the radio; at least I won’t completely miss it.  After that, then I’ll consider calling the doctor.  But not before they have the chance to make me miss Opening Day.  I figure that if I am dying from ill effects of the Hamthrax vaccine, I am entitled to my dying wish, right?

Hopefully, this crap won’t hang on that long.  I’m actually feeling well enough now, that I might want Mike to get me out of here for a few hours tomorrow, the weather is going to be nice again.  Maybe this last sweating episode will be it.  It had better be, because this is getting VERY old!

I swear, if in the future, some government bureaucrats decide that it is necessary to make it mandatory for everyone to get the Hamthrax shot, or else be quarantined or jailed (they have that power here in Massachusetts, scary, huh?)…someone’s gonna find that needle and syringe shoved firmly up their ass.  Because they will NOT be using it on me.  Not ever again.

On Wednesday, I put the stuph in the slow cooker for the spaghetti sauce.  As it cooked, I felt more and more nauseous, because it smelled GROSS.  This is a recipe I make all the time, but I don’t think I will ever make it again now.  Mike came home, though, and said it smelled good.  I guess it was just me, but I will NEVER eat that stuph now.  Every time I even think about it, that horrible stench comes back to mind.  It felt like it was hanging in the air for days.

Hopefully, I’m really okay now, although for a while I felt like I’d be sick like this forever.  I hope we’ll still be able to go to that beer dinner tomorrow night.

If we can’t, I’m gonna be royally pissed.

The flu vaccine does inject a small does of the virus into the body.  It’s not normally supposed to make you actually get sick, but it does for me.  A couple of weeks later, and I’m not sure why.

This happened back in 2008.  I got a seasonal flu shot near the end of October, so I could be sure not to be sick for one of the premier events of the craft-brewing year, the Maine Brewers’ Festival.  And I was fine for the event.

The next day, on the way home, we stopped at Federal Jack’s Brewpub in Kennebunk for lunch, as we always do on the way home from Portland.  I was fine there, too.

So we got home about an hour and a half later.  As we approached the house, I had to ask Mike to stop and let me out near the front door.  He did, I unlocked the door, ran inside, nearly tripping over cats, went into the bathroom, lifted the toilet lid, and gacked.  If I’d had to walk from the parking space out back to the front door, I’d likely have gacked on the sidewalk.  That is, if I didn’t gack in the car first.

It wasn’t food poisoning from Federal Jack’s, it takes a lot longer than 90 minutes for that to take effect.  It was the flu, it was nasty as it always is…but it only lasted for a few days, not for weeks on end, as it did in my pre-flu shot days.

And that’s what happened this time, too.  We were out all day Saturday, I was fine.  At 5AM on Sunday, I got up and gacked.  I stayed in bed all day Sunday and then again all day Monday.  I gacked a couple of times on Monday, too.  But then I couldn’t sleep on Monday night, and ended up sleeping almost all day on Tuesday.

I had been watching TV in the bedroom, first Rachael Ray, which started with a segment I could have done without, all about colon stuff, colonoscopies, colon cleanse benefits, that sort of thing. It was kind of gross…if I wanted to see that on a talk show, I’d flip the channel over to Dr. Oz.  He shows gross stuff, such as pictures of actual colons and other innards, too…but it being a medical show, you expect that.  My tummy was a little too sensitive to deal with colons, yanno?

Martha Stewart came on at 10, and I watched that.  What that was over, I switched over to channel 4 for “The Price is Right”, because I didn’t feel like watching “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”  After TPIR, the local news and then the CBS soaps come on, but I fell asleep and missed them all.  I was planning to get up and throw the stuph for the spaghetti sauce into the slow-cooker, so that Mike wold have something to eat.  But I didn’t wake up until he came home, and it was too late.  He had to scrounge up something else to eat.

But my fever had broken, and I woke up all sweaty.  I decided I felt well enough to take my first shower since Saturday, and it did help make me feel better.

So now I’m behind on a lot of stuph, and am trying to see how long I can sit in this chair before I get tired again.  All that time in bed made my lower back seriously hurt.

But the worst has passed, and we should be able to go to that beer dinner up in Portsmouth on Sunday!

All is well.  So far.  If I log back in here later and see the*default* crap theme again, and I have to rename stuph, I’m gonna scream.  Because I KNOW I’ll forget I had to do this AGAIN, the next time this damned thing tries to demand that I upgrade.

At least it was easier than all the crap I’ve been dealing with over trying to set up wireless around here; I am convinced now that it will NEVER happen.  This damned modem/router thing that Verizon gave me when I first got DSL is a piece of junk.  Srsly.  Works fine as just a modem, but the router part never worked, no matter what I tried.  I gave up, until Mike’s boss started nagging his ass again about the need for him to be able to connect his stupid work computer to a network, for snow days and all.

“Buy a new router”, someone said.  Yeah, but it will fight with the old one, I said.  I finally figured out, with a lot of effort, how to turn of the router part of this piece of junk and make it just be a modem.  I bought a new router, hooked it up EXACTLY as instructed, and it says that there is something wrong with the modem.  That is why the little flashy modem light on the router means, so says the Belkin router manual.  Too bad said manual doesn’t tell you how to possibly fix it.

So I went and signed up for some forum that is supposed to provide tech support to DSL users.  Some of their posts have helped me in the past, so it was worth a shot to sign up and post my issue there, right?  I spent a good part of an hour writing a detailed post about my issue, telling them exactly what I wanted to do, what I have done that hasn’t worked, what equipment I have (complete with brand names and models), what operating systems are on the computers involved, how much of my hair I’ve torn out trying to get this crap to work, what kind of beer I drank when it didn’t work, how many times I had to get up and pee while in the middle of all if this…the whole floopin’ nine yards.  I honestly thought that if I gave that much detail (okay, not really about the parts about the hair, beer, peeing), someone would be able to help me.

But NOOOOO!  I got exactly two responses so far.  The first guy told me to call Verizon tech support.  Sheesh, if I thought for just one second that Verizon tech support would have been remotely useful, I’d have gone that route first.  I already know their tech support sucks.  A lot of people on that forum said that Verizon tech support sucks.  I thought that was why someone created that forum, because most ISP’s tech support sucks.

The second guy must have been either Beavis or Butt-head in real life, because his response made no sense, he clearly did NOT read my post well enough, and asked why I was doing what the instructions told me to do.  Floopin’ USELESS.

I had to disconnect the new router and reset the stupid Verizon Westell 327w Versalink piece o’ junk to factory defaults, just to get the thing to work properly enough so that I could stay online longer than five minutes.  The stupid Belkin router is sitting here, unplugged, doing nothing.  And flooping Staples now has $45 of my money for something I can’t get to work, and NO ONE IN THE WORLD can help me.  Either they tell me to do shit that I already tried a dozen times that didn’t work before, tell me to buy a new router, which I did, and I just told you how THAT went, or they send me to the Verizon website directions for network setting-upping.  Which also didn’t work, although I followed it to the letter.

I swear, I could probably find an easier way to how to reduce belly fat, while still drinking all the beer I want, before I get this damned wireless crap to work.  Oh, and before anyone says it, it is NOT either laptop that’s at fault here, not Mike’s work computer, and not my netbook.  Both of them have wireless cards that work in other places that have WiFi, such as hotels.

I give up.  If Mike’s boss is that insistent on having a home network here, let him send the damned IT guy over here to set it up for me.  The jerk obviously lives under the ASSumption that everyone knows how to make everything work just the way they want it to.  As it is, Mike HAS asked the IT guy for help, to at least tell him what needs to be done, but he won’t.  Jerk.

I should call Verizon and demand a new modem/router, for free, being that I’ve been a DSL customer of theirs for so long, and this old one is shit.  One reason I don’t want to call them is because they seem to be obsessed with trying to sell me a whole FiOS package…DO NOT WANT.  I supposed I could hint that if they don’t give me what I want, I’ll switch to Comcast…but what if they call my bluff?  I hate Comcast more than Verizon, but they are the only other game in town for high-speed internet.

Screw it.  I give up.  Anyone want to buy a barely used Belkin router?

So I upgraded, and my theme disappeared, it went back to that boring white thing with the blue header, the “default” theme.  I looked for my old theme to put it back, but it was GONE.

Then I remembered.  When I first installed this theme, and modified it to make it my own, it would keep reverting to “default”.  The only way to make it stop was to delete the one called “default” and rename this one “default”.

Well, that all went down the toilet after the newest upgrade.  Since WP comes with several themes now, it put back the default “default”, overwriting the theme I wanted.  Now I have to remember what I did to alter it, where do I put the cat pic banners and all?

Pain in my butt is what it is.  I swear, sometimes having annoying people ringing my doorbells and bothering me all day long is less annoying than this crap.

Well, once I get the cat pics back up in the header banner, I’ll try NOT renaming it, and see what happens, if it still will keep reverting back to the boring “default” on its own.

Srsly. I wish WP wouldn’t annoy us to upgrade every five minutes. I only do it because looking at the yellow upgrade bar in the dashboard annoys me. I do it just to “shut it up”.

Gack.

So, should I bother?  Yes, better safe than sorry, I say.  The CVS Minute Clinic should be able to give me both in the same visit.  Yeah, it’ll probably cost money, but hopefully not much.  Apparently, there are places giving out the Hamthrax shot for free, but I’d honestly rather pay.  The free places are probably all located in one of the inner circles of hell, full to the brim with The Great Unwashed and all their screaming, unwashed kids, with long, long, long waits.  I’d probably catch something before I even got the damned shots.  It’s probably all done in government buildings, the sort that are sweltering hot in the summer and freezing in the winter, because they are too cheap to turn on any air-conditioning or heat.  I’ve been in such buildings before, not fun.  So no thanks.  I’ll just pay the insurance co-pay at CVS, where there is likely very little wait, and get it over with.

Mike’s work just started offering a flexible spending plan, and he signed up for it.  Basically, this lets us pay for medical expenses such as co-pays with pre-tax dollars.  Mike estimated how much we’re likely to spend on out-of-pocket medical stuph for 2010, and his work put this entire amount on a special MasterCard debit card, which we can use to pay for any eligible medical stuph.  The amount they put into the account is divided by the number of paychecks for the year, and they take that much out each time.

We expect to save a hefty amount on our 2010 taxes because of this; I wish his company had offered this before now.  Mike spends a lot on co-pays for his various doctor visits and prescriptions, nowhere near as much as I do, but he has more health issues than me.  Just the diabetes stuph alone costs a fortune!  His insulin is covered by insurance (still, it’s a $50 co-pay, but considering that it costs something like $400 without insurance, we can’t complain), but all of his testing supplies and stuph are not.  Fortunately, these items are still eligible for the flexible spending plan, so it’s all been factored into the amount he’s having deducted from his paychecks.

In any case, I can get my flu shots paid for with pre-tax dollars, so I’m happy.

Speaking of taxes, we’ll probably start doing them this weekend, as we now have all of the needed paperwork for it.  I hope we at least break even this year.  I work as an independent contractor and do not get any taxes taken out of my pay.  So Mike increased his withholdings at work to cover it.  Last year we owed a little to the Feds, but got a small refund from Taxachusetts.  This year, we hope to owe less, or maybe get a small refund from the Feds.  We shall see.

The only two parts of that maul where I felt any peace were at the Bare Escentuals Boutique and Legal Sea Foods.  If you use Bare Escentuals makeup, and shop at Sephora, when there is a BE Boutique in the same or in a nearby maul, you are batshit insane.  Srsly.  I did go into the Burlington Maul Sephora, checked out the BE offerings, and it has gone WAY downhill since they opened up a BE Boutique upstairs in the same maul.  The place was a floopin’ circus, I could not wait to get out of there, and I went upstairs to the peacefulness of the BE boutique.  There, I could take my time, and look for what I wanted, in peace.  This store is one of the few reasons I go to any maul in the first place.  I only wish I didn’t have to walk halfway through that hellhole of a maul, nearly getting my ass mowed down by various idiot parents who were using their SUV strollers as battering rams, in order to get to this fabulous store.  Needless to say, the BE Boutique got my money, Sephora did not.  And I actually got a better deal, price-wise, at the BE store.

I had left Mike at Sears to buy his underwear and crap, and it was a mistake.  I had left him there because it takes him forever to pick out his crap, even if it’s just underwear, and it bores me.  He has no interest in going to a makeup store, and I preferred to go without him, anyway.  I also wanted to hit CVS in the maul, to grab some Nice & Easy, as it’s hair color time again.  I try not to buy that when he’s present, because he doesn’t like the smell of the hair color products, and will bitch and moan about it forever.  But if I buy the stuph, and he doesn’t see it, use it when he’s not at home, it’s all good.  The smell is gone by the time he gets home.  But if he knows I have the stuph, he imagines the smell lasting for months.  Go figure.

So, after I got my girly crap, I went back to Sears.  I wanted to buy underwear for myself, but could not find the women’s underwear department, no matter how much I walked around.  I did get the cooktop cleaner I’d been wanting to get; I got a couple of big bottles that should keep me going for the good part of a year.  When I was upstairs in the appliance/electronics department, I walked past the cordless phones, which reminded me that we needed a new one, as the old one pretty much died.  Normally, I would have waited until I met up with Mike again to make the decision as to what phone to buy, but I wanted a phone that was a little more expensive than one he would have picked out.  Which was probably why we had to buy a new one, he picked out a cheap one, it died, and there you have it.

Anyhoo, I selected a phone with two extra handsets, as well as a feature that the old, cheap one didn’t have…Call Block.  You see, I have been harassed several times a week with calls from some collection agency, looking for some guy who is not here, I assume it’s someone who gave out this number in the past, maybe he had it before we did, who knows?  But they are NOT looking for us; however, their message says that if I don’t pick up the phone and talk to them, I agree that I am *Joe Deadbeat* or whatever the hell his name is.  How dumb is that?  What if I weren’t home, does that mean I agree to be *Joe Deadbeat* and will pay his bills?  It’s actually WORSE if you pick up and talk to these people, then they will still think you are *Joe Deadbeat*, and therefore still won’t leave you alone!

Well, with the new phone, I can block the number that these calls were coming from.  It was the first one I blocked when I hooked up the new phone.  And I can block 29 more numbers of people who call and annoy me.  I love it!

Meanwhile, Mike had gotten his underwear and stuph…and a new credit card, from the evil Shittibank!  Apparently, the cashier who rang up his purchase told he could get $15 off his purchase if he applied for a Sears MasterCard (not the same as the Sears store charge, which we already have).  Now, if I were there, I would have told the cashier to shove it; as it was, the guy who rang up the phone and the cooktop cleaner did NOT ask me if I wanted to apply for this card.  Good thing, I wanted to just pay and move on, no hassle.

But Mike, for some dumbassed reason, agreed to apply for the card.  He was approved, and they put his purchase on the new account, not the regular Sears charge, the one I’ve been paying ten times the minimum for, to get it paid off ASAP.  He now has a temporary credit card, and they’ll be sending him the real one soon.  And he’s happy about this…he, who wanted to close own the regular Sears account because it was bought by the evil Shittibank.  I was against that because I wanted to keep it in case we needed new appliances, which ended up happening (washer and dryer).  But Mike swore up and down, no more credit cards, and then HE gets himself a new one that we do not need!

Mike did not tell me of this new credit card, not until we finally met up at Legal Sea Foods, and not until after I had a Sam Adams Noble Pils in me.  The fact that Legal had Noble Pils on tap, in addition to the BE Boutique, were the only really good parts of this maul trip.

I didn’t ream him a new one over it, but I did demand that once the first bill came, that he hand it over to me so I could set up payment through our bank’s website.  I reminded him that the last time he tried to mail a check to Sears/Shittibank, they managed to *lose* it, and hit us up with a hefty late fee.  When I tried setting up bill pay on the Sears/Shittibank website, they let me pay the bill ONCE.  Then it never let me log in again.  That was when I set up online bill pay via our bank; after that, we never got hit with a late fee from anyone, ever again.  Our bank will cover our asses if a payee claims we didn’t pay.  Neener, neener, neener, Shittibank.  But WHY Mike agreed to another Shittibank card is beyond me, especially since he swore he never would.  This is what I get for leaving him alone in a maul for even five minutes, I suppose.  Next time, his ass gets dragged to the BE Boutique with me!

I guess there is one good thing about his getting instantly approved for another credit card…that means we might have a better chance now of getting approved for a mortgage to buy a house and get the hell out of this dump town.  Our credit sucked big fat hairy smelly donkey ‘nads for years, thanks to all of that Evil Bossman shit.  I guess it’s finally gotten better now; maybe it’s time to start looking at houses again.  Maine may not be realistic now, since Mike still has to work, but New Hampshire could be realistic.  But no way in hell will I agree to buy a house in Massachusetts.

Anyhoo…my panic attack came about after we ate at Legal Sea Foods…we’d forgotten the stupid shower curtain liners that only Sears has…the nice thick, cat-proof ones, that is…so we went back to Sears to get them.  As we were entering Sears, it started…I told Mike that I had to sit down, I was dizzy, light-headed, and was afraid I’d have to go to the hospital.  It had nothing to do with the two beers I’d had…in fact, if I’d been able to have a third, I may have been better off.  That’s how much I hate the maul, there is only so much I can take without some sort of medication.   So I sat down at a nearby chair, popped an Ativan, and waited to calm down, while he went to buy the stupid shower curtain liners.  By the time he came back, I was fine, and then we left the hellhole that is the maul, and went grocery shopping.  Fortunately, it was getting late, and Market Basket was pretty quiet and asshole-free.  And the liquor store next door had Sam Noble Pils, which brought much happiness.  Damn, but that is some wicked good beer!

I still didn’t get my needed underwear and socks.  Mike didn’t find the handkerchiefs he’d been looking for, either.  Maybe we’ll just go to that fancy French department store, Tar-jhay, to look for some.  Target is much less stressful than any maul.  Srsly.

We need to hit Sears, because Mike says he needs new underwear, that’s where he always gets it.  I also could use new underwear, and socks, as well…I’ve been tossing out the holey ones a lot lately, and it’s time to replace them.  I’m not a sock aficionado or anything, I just buy plain old men’s white tube socks.

And then I thought of other things we need from Sears.  Shower curtain liners.  For some reason, only Sears has shower curtain liners that are strong enough to withstand the abuse of cat claws.  Still, eventually, they need to be replaced, and we’re out of replacements.  So if we pick up a couple more tomorrow, that should take us through most of the year.

And cooktop cleaner.  We have this stove, and it came with a sample of  a cooktop cleaner.  It worked really well, but now the sample size bottle is almost gone, and I want more; however they only sell it at Sears because it’s the Kenmore brand.  So we’ll pick up a couple of bottles, once again, to take us through the year, and avoid further trips to the hellhole that is known as The Maul.

Mike was just figuring we’d go to the closest maul to us, the Square One Maul.  I nixed this idea, because this particular maul doesn’t have a full-service restaurant within, one that serves beer.  Sorry, but no beer, no maul.  The maul is so horrible, I NEED beer after putting up with all of the crap there.  Square One has an empty bar/restaurant space, but it’s not had a tenant in years.  Only food option there is the food court, which is one of the inner circles of hell, as it is full of surly teenagers and screaming little kids.  No thanks.  I want my BEER!

I figure if we HAVE to go to a maul, it had better be worth my while.  So we’re going to the Burlington Maul.  Not only does it have restaurants that serve beer, but there is also a Sephora and a Bare Escentuals Boutique, things that Square One sorely lacks.  I’ll be hitting the BE Boutique, for sure, as I need some stuph from there.  Plus, it gives me something to do, while Mike takes forever just to pick out a package of underwear.  Srsly.

I think we’ll eat at the Legal Sea Foods there, we haven’t been in a while.  Nomnomnomnom…

I think that’s about it…we won’t be hitting any electronics stores, looking for a playstation 3 or anything. We can get better deals online for stuph like that, anyway.

I’d much rather be going to a ball game, a living history museum, or a beer festival, but none of that is going on now…okay, the living history museums are open, but it is COLD!  So we do the boring, necessary crap when it’s cold and nothing else is going on…and wait for spring, when the FUN begins!

This time, I was looking for help with this Netbook Mate Docking Station thingy that I finally got today.  It seems like forever since I ordered it, due to FedEx delays due to storms, and then Mike not being in the Massachusetts office of his work until today, to bring it home for me.  The thing was actually delivered on Saturday; yeah, we COULD have gone to his office then to get it, but we were too busy with that PawSox thing.  Although the office is officially closed, he has a key card to get in.  And then, he had to go to Rhode Island on Monday for the boring meeting, so he didn’t bring it home until today.

I wanted the thing for my netbook, so that I could have more storage space and an optical drive, so we can watch DVDs when traveling, install software on the thing, etc.  But once he brought it home, I opened it up, connected it to the netbook, and then popped in a DVD to test it out.  The netbook did recognize the presence of the external drive, but it would not play the DVD.

Once again, the owners’ manual was useless.  I wondered if perhaps the thing was not compatible with  a Linux operating system, but it’s a plug & play thing, connected with a USB cord.  And dammit, it says right on the box that it’s compatible with Windoze, Mac, and Linux!

So, before getting pissed off enough to pack the thing up and return it, I did a search online for help.  I actually found an entire site, complete with a wiki, for users of the Asus Eee PC, which is what my netbook is.

What I learned was that the media player that comes with the Linux based Asus netbooks will not play most DVDs on any external drive, due to some stupid licensing crap.  But there is a downloadable solution, and when I tried it, it worked.  I don’t know why it had to be such a pain to figure out how to play a DVD on this thing in the first place, you’d think it was one of those complicated home security systems or something. Would it have killed them to mention this in the stupid manual?

I don’t know if I’d really have sent the thing back, anyway.  It also has a 160 GB removable hard drive, and I was pleased to see that it can be connected to ANY computer with a USB cable.  That’s certainly added value.  So I’m happy.  And I’m happy I ordered it when I did…it’s more expensive now, and the rebate offer is gone.  Now I just have to remember to send in the rebate form!

So then I was going to buy a case that would hold the netbook, the docking station, the power cords, mouse, etc.  But then Mike told me that I could have part of his major award.  Said “major award” was his choice of anything out of a catalog provided for employee service awards.  He picked out a wheely suitcase that is very similar to mine, and it came with a bag that is about the size of a laptop case.  He already has a case for his work laptop, and he said he didn’t need it for anything else…so he reminded me of its existence and said that I could have it.  Fine with me!

New toys are fun!