Astrological Guidance Sought

This morning my mail box was missing the familiar annoying daily horoscope that I must have signed up for accidently. I never paid any attention to it because it was in my voices gmail and rarely checked. Then I got the apple and all three of my email account are in one inbox, so I sort of started looking at the teaser, then gradually I opened the thing and read it all. Ever so slowly I came to look forward to the banal generic advice from my stars to help me though my day. One day after reading Scorpio I decided to check Aries for my girl, and soon I was reading the daily scoop for my husband, my friends, my casual acquaintances, and even my dead relatives. It didn't even bother me that Leo had an almost identical prediction as my own sign some days, or that most of what they said was like getting answers from the magic eight ball. It was reassuring to know that someone thought I was in someway predictable.  Now it's just not there. I know there have been some big downturns in the market and wonder if my generic life line has ended up in the ticker tape trash heap. If so can some one please advise me If I should continue to work hard toward my goals or relax at home today. Should I be cautious in financial matters or do I deserve a little indulgence? Most importantly, is my sex life heating up this weekend or should I content myself with warm snuggles with a friend. Help, please, even if it's only a fortune cookie with my name on it. 

He's the One

“I'm in love,” my daughter say. I have heard this before, but ever curious about her state of mind I look up anticipating. “I've never felt this way before about anyone or anything. My life has changed forever. I have never been happier.”

“Not even on your wedding day?” I queried. 

“Well, where is he now? This,” she says, holding up her new iphone, “is something I can trust.”

We spent the rest of the evening basking in the love, setting up email and phone contacts, turning our little black rectangles sideways and back to watch the page move at our command. The next day in the car we google everything that pops into our heads as we drive along the interstate. At the bank I pull up my Amex account to see how much she owes me from the corporate card she borrowed for Denver. We set the GPS to show us how to get to places we already know how to find. “Look, there's our house, that's the lake!” Sure enough, there it was all laid out in living color, trees and roads and buildings. We are both sound like mad scientists gone wild with the power of technology. 

I know love this intense cannot last. Soon enough I will find the little black box in the bottom of my pocket book and I'll think about how much money I've spent on it, how much of my precious time I've devoted to it, how I don't get that little catch in my throat when I look at it. Someday, but not today, not now. Now, just like my girl, I'm in love.

Can You Please Hold?

Perhaps I shouldn't have let the girl take over the phone call, but we had been in a bit of a snit for days in that way mothers and daughters have of miscommunicating. I had picked her up from the shop where we had taken her car (formerly my car) for a check up. We talked as we drove home together, chatting about work, the way we did before we quarreled. Back at home it seemed like a good time to bring up the phone bill for our shared minutes with our spawn of the devil wireless phone service. Now my relationship with Sprint has been long and unsatisfying, but in that way that I have, I just keep forgiving them and taking them back. Each time I call them they are always so nice, but after every conversation I get my bill the next month and find I have been charged for things I got for free the month before, plus new unfathomable items. Even though I have known for a long time that they are just no good, I am terrible at breaking up. The girl on the other hand has the moving on thing down to a science. 

She never actually yelled at any of the half dozen or more people she spoke to, even after two of them hung up on her and she had to call back and start the process over again. She had already gotten them to remove the roaming charges of $55.46 that were incurred while talking from our own house and the $47.80 charge for text messaging that was included in our basic package until last month before I foolishly called them, but then she came to the international text message to Guatemala for 20 cents and the 1.20 for text to UK. They refused to take it off the bill, even when she explained to them that she knew no one in Guatemala, but she had been texting UK for a year without additional charges. I only heard one side of the conversation, but it seemed like they implied that she had just forgotten where her friends lived. “So,” she says in a voice that anyone in their right mind would have known not to argue with, “you're telling me that I can't use my phone in my own home, which is less than ten miles from where it was purchased, but I can text Guatemala without actually knowing I'm doing it?” 

About this time I noticed that right under the list she had made of Sprint employee names she was recording something while looking at her phone. A wave of panic washed over me akin to what a passenger on the Titanic might have felt after making a quick count of lifeboats and humans. She was writing down all the phone numbers in her contact list! OMG, she was going to cancel this service! I pulled out my phone and frantically started writing down my numbers too. “...and I will not pay the cancellation fee,” she stated emphatically, “You are the ones in breach of contract. I have the service area map right here and my house is on it. You misrepresented yourself when I bought the phone. I have used international text messages since last September without any fee and suddenly you're telling me I will have to pay extra for it from now on. No, I am certainly not interested in any other plan! No, I will not hold. The last two people that put me on hold hung up on me. You will fix this now.” 

I am scribbling names and numbers randomly on an envelope as she writes hers in a clear firm hand on a note pad. I stare up at this amazing creature that I have somehow created as she disconnects the call. “Are you mad at me Mom?” she asks.

“Of course not sweetie, I just wish I had been able to get a new service before we got rid of the old one. I need my phone tomorrow.” 

“We can go get new ones on Saturday. I think we should get an I-phone.” Although I am thinking WTF we can't afford that, I am pulling up AT&T on the net. “Oh wow,” I said “We can get one for $199 plus a two year contract, but the cost of the plan is a little more than Sprint.”

“So when have we ever paid what Sprint says is our cost?” she replies.

Of course she is right. I look up the store address nearest our house, less than 5 miles. “I'm off tomorrow and I'm going there and talk to them.” I add “phone” to the long list of things I have to do on Friday. 

“Do you know what that last supervisor told me?” the girl asks, “She said she couldn't use her phone in her house either. I told her of course not, you have Sprint.” The girl and I finish off the last of the second bottle of wine we opened tonight, laughing hysterically. 

“They're going to call and offer us some kind of deal you know,” she says, thinking ahead, “so don't worry about the service getting disconnected too soon.”

“No problem,” I reply, “If they call I'll just say Sorry, we must have a bad connection and I can't hear you, what?, what?” 

I know this will cost me. Things with the girl always do one way or another, but they are always worth the price.  

So, What do you think Joe would like to be for Halloween?

You may remember Joe (no not the plumber) and his ever faithful redneck ladies from April of this year. Gone but not forgotten, Joe continues to get seasonal updates with each passing month but somehow the purple flowers, orange pumpkin, and scarecrow tacked on the tree for Halloween creep me out in a way I can't exactly find words to describe.  Oh, please note the beer can front and center in the frame. Nice touch, really.

Impulse Buying

 I draw odd people and bizarre occurrences like a lightning rod on a tree in the middle ofan open field, but I was still surprised when the man tapped on my window in the mall parking lot. I had left work at 5:30 with an eye toward going to  the cool west end gym. I decided to stop for a bite to eat at Whole Foods along the way, and feeling very urbane from rubbing elbows with healthy strangers, I determined that I needed some better workout clothes. I was trying to get the tag off my new sports bra when the harmless looking gray haired man appeared by my window, gesticulating and pointing to a piece of paper in his hand.  I immediately began to write the newspaper story in my head, “His neighbors said he was a nice ordinary man, the last person on earth you would suspect as a serial killer.” The car was not turned on, so incautiously I opened the door a crack. It was beginning to get dark out and the lot was full of cars, but the two of us were the only humans in sight. I wondered if he was going to accuse me of damaging his car, but to my relief  he started talking about my Prius. He had a new one parked right behind me and evidently I did not get the memo about membership in the Prius car owners club.  

For the next few hours this man talked and I listened. I kept waiting for him to hit on me like a natural man in the company of an attractive woman, but he really only wanted to talk cars. I usually can't figure out what to do with men who don't flirt, but this one was easy. He was a voice in need of an ear. He insisted I come see the bells and whistles on his car, and when I balked he told me he would sit in the back seat and let me take the drivers seat. It seemed gentlemanly at first until I realized he had so much stuff crammed in the passenger seat and floorboard that it would have taken an hour to move it. He showed me his GPS and bluetooth, all things I had seen before, but he seemed a bit taken aback when my first question was, “Why do you have a large chocolate cake in the floor?” There was a simple explanation. He was invited to a pot luck the next day and he found that if he took a large cake the weight conscious hostess made him take the leftovers home, therefore providing him with dessert for many days. He volunteered that the stacks of binders and papers in the seat were related to his job as an engineer. Ah, I though, this is all beginning to make sense to me somehow. 

Then Dustan asked me if I had though of getting a new car and selling the one I had now. I allowed as to how I had thought of it often. He seemed delighted and wanted to call his man and get me a deal. Okay, at this point I am slightly more open to suggestion but I'm not at all certain how I ended up at Panera with him writing an email to Nino, his personal car salesman. We sat by Panera's pseudo fireplace for some time waiting for Nino to return his call or respond to the email. Dustan bought me coffee when he got his dinner. I declined his offer of food. It was almost 9 before my new best friend  remembers that Nino is off on Wednesdays and won't be calling us back. 

Now I did not forget I was married, neither did I let Dustan forget. I called my husband and let him know I was talking to a man about a car. There was nothing more I could tell him with Dustan sitting there and god bless him, he took my word for it. I filled him in on the details when I returned home about 9:30, not having been to the gym or made any progress toward buying a car. To my surprise I have an email in my box the next morning from Nino telling me to call him, and then another telling me that he has a 2009 red Prius on the lot ready to roll out the door if I want it. Seems like the man who ordered it left for Europe for a month and can't take shipment, so instead of having to wait six months for one to arrive, I can have this one immediately. Friday night my husband and I give up dancing to drive to Woodbridge and pick up my new car.

We had to run the gauntlet of hungry car salesmen in the front of the car lot, one of whom told me they didn't have a Nino on staff. I flipped open my laptop and showed him Nino's picture on the bottom of the email and he slipped quietly back into the herd. Nino turned out to be a very perky red headed Irish boy with an Italian grandfather. He was wearing an orange sherbet colored dress shirt and a happy smile. Despite all that I liked him immediately. When I mentioned Dustan his eyes rolled back in his head. “The first time he came here he stayed for six hours!  I finally sent him over to my brother's garage to get rid of him and my bro called me back and told me he stayed there for four hours. But you know what,” he says to me in an amazed tone, “He has sent 5 other people here that have bought a Prius, three of them before he even got his car.” Seems like Dustan is on a mission to change the world, one Prius at a time. 

As Dustan had warned me, the rest of the crew at the dealership tried to charm, then shame, and finally guilt me into buying “extras”.  I had assured him that I would stand firm just like I had on all my previous car buying adventures. They were particularly relentless however, and I did my husband's folded arm bit and looked them squarely in the eye. “If you have to talk I can't stop you, but I'm tired, I'm hungry, and I'm not going to spend another penny beyond the price of the car.” The first salesgirl left and sent in the big guns to offer me exactly the same thing at half price. I repeated my statement and finally we got to the credit manager who made one last attempt, but at least he knew resolve when he saw it. I signed about a hundred pieces of paper without reading any of them and finally they let me leave with my car. 

Bright and early the next morning I headed out in my new Prius to pick up my daughter at the airport and take her to the credit union. We signed a few papers and low and behold, my daughter has a loan and  we both own a red Prius, identical down to the pre set radio stations. The only difference is a slightly lighter color on the seat fabric and that new car smell. Driving along the road this week I had the sudden feeling of panic that the mothers of twins must feel at times, wondering if I had picked the right one out of the driveway. I immediately reassured myself that there is no mistaking the scent of volatile organic compounds (VOC) consisting primarily of alkanes and substituted benzenes along with a few aldehydes and ketones. As you might have guessed I did a bit of research on that smell, after which I decided to roll my window down slightly for the next six months or so. While I know Dustan has probably been slightly off for years I'm not taking any chances.