I stopped to get my oil changed on the way to work yesterday, since I thought it would save some time. I knew it was a mistake, but I did it anyway.

First of all, the special-price $20 oil change ended up costing $130 with all the extra services that got thrown in. Granted, they were things that I probably needed, but they kinda had me over a barrel, so to speak.

Anyways, today when I went outside to go to lunch, I noticed that the front end of Rocinante was sheeted in oil. Opening the hood, I found the entire engine and the inside of the hood to be coated with oil, and the oil cap missing.

*sigh*

So I had to spend my lunch hour driving back down to Boston Road to get my oil cap, get things cleaned up a little, and get a few quarts of oil replaced.

I went down to the B&N to get a book to help me study for the CCNA, and wound up buying a new edition of Dandelion Wine. I’m a total sucker for a new edition of a much loved book, and Dandelion Wine is my all-time favorite novel. I used to have another edition, but I loaned it to someone and haven’t gotten it back yet. Good news! You can keep it! Everyone needs their own copy anyway. 🙂

This new edition is hardback, and has those wonderful untrimmed pages that I like so much. It amuses me that untrimmed pages, once a mark of an unsophisticated publisher, are now once again in style. I’m anxiously looking forward to publishers releasing *really* untrimmed pages. That is, books you have to read with a pen knife to cut apart adjacent pages.

This morning I was scolded for being 11 minutes late to a monthly staff meeting. I was late because I was working on a customer problem. Later in the meeting, I was scolded for that customer problem not being solved yet. This was, in fact, the only part of the entire meeting that had any relevance whatsoever to me.

I’m reminded of a former manager who said, in a meeting, “We’re going to keep having these all-day meetings until we figure out why nobody is getting any work done!” Of course, the difference there was that he was clueful enough to be joking when he said it.

So, if you ever wonder why I seem to hate my job more at the beginning of the month, well, it’s because we have this meeting on the first Monday of each month.

Must remember the mantra: My job is what I do to pay for the part of my life that matters.

More online banking peeves.

Twice in two months they have misplaced a rather important payment. I got my “termination of service” notice from the electric company yesterday. The other one was even more serious than that, if you can imagine.

If I try to open multiple tabs, so that I can look at my current account status as well as my pending payments, one of the tabs logs me out.

Payments that are supposed to be made today don’t show up in the account status (register) view, because the payments haven’t been made yet, but they also don’t show up in the pending payments page, because that lists future payments only – ie, starting tomorrow. And, of course, yesterday’s payments don’t show up either place either, because they haven’t cleared yet. So, on the second day of the month, when I do most of my bill paying, there’s something like $1200 of pending payments that were supposed to be made yesterday or today that are simply missing. I know that it’s supposed to be there somewhere, but I can’t see it anywhere. This has led to one fairly serious overdrawl so far, and, although I’m aware of it now and am trying to be more careful, I expect that’s likely to happen again.

There isn’t a real “register” view, listing all checks, past payments, and scheduled payments, like you’d have in a real piece of banking software, so that you can see today’s balance, tomorrow’s projected balance, and the balance next week after the payments are made. So, really, the only convenience I’m getting from this is the ability to pay bills without writing checks and using stamps. I suppose that’s a significant advantage, but it would be much more accurate to call this online billpaying than to call it online banking. What’s strange is that the online banking (so called) is free, but the online billpay – the only bit that’s actually useful – is an additional fee.

I don’t really want to switch banks again so soon, and, from what I hear, everyone’s online banking software is pretty terrible, so perhaps it wouldn’t be worth it anyway. *sigh*

**Addendum**

Oh, yeah, forgot one. The online banking bit is a completely different company from the bank itself, so I can’t call the bank about problems. And the bank never really knows where my money is at any given time. When those payments went missing, I call the bank, and they tell me that there was never a payment. I call the online banking place, and they say that the payment was made. The payee never got it. And yet another company/department – the investigative unit, or something like that – has to go look into it. That’s another number that I have to call, and repeat the story yet again. I’m really looking forward to calling about my electric payment today. I suppose that if my electricity gets cut off, you’ll notice by the absense of this web site.

After looking for the Ideal Hat for quite some time, I think I found it.

I had my hat from Paraguay, visible in this photo, but it has the unfortunate attribute that it changes size quite significantly based on the weather. It fits *great* when it is rainy, but doesn’t fit at all when it is warm and dry.

Anyways, I got an “aussie hat”, which is a leather fedora, a la Indiana Jones, and I’ve become very fond of it. Except that it has one of those goofy snaps on the side, so that you can snap up one side for no apparent reason.

Well, last week, when it became warm enough to put the top down, I found out what it’s for. You see, when you’re driving a convertable with the top down, aerodynamics are such that the wind blows directly up on the left side of your head, blowing off any hat you happen to be wearing. But if you snap up the left brim of the hat, it decreases the lift, and the hat doesn’t blow off.

Of course, as my mother immediately observed, I’m not sure how that maps to riding a horse. And don’t they drive on the left in Australia anyway?

I love spring.

Yesterday was my first top-down day, and it was sweet. Of course, Sarah usually wants me to wait a little longer to put the top down, so we compromised and put the roof back on, but left the doors and windows off. 🙂

It was just a little chilly this morning, but I left them off anyway. That’s always a big hit at the bus stop, with the kids wanting to climb up on the Jeep and through the missing windows. 🙂

Did I mention I love spring?

Our big brave protector, Tom Ridge, is now going to protect us from attacks on the train system (CNN).

My absolute favorite quote from the press conference is:

“Clearly, we could provide enough security to put the mass transit systems out of business.”

I think that they need to jump straight to the heart of the matter and issue what is, of course, the final word in terror protection.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the overarching plan to protect you from terror is that you go and cower in your homes. We will send around our heavies to ensure that you are, indeed, cowering according to protocol. Anyone caught reading Farenheit 451, and noticing similarities between the real and fictional worlds, will be summarily executed by a mechanical hound.

That is all.

* My Tungsten E looks a lot brighter and sharper when I use a screen protector sheet that is actually the right kind.

* When you plug a three-button mouse (USB) into an iMac, it Just Works, and the other buttons do useful things. Also, it doesn’t pop up annoying dialogs telling me that it found new hardware, like some operating systems I could mention. Yeah, I know you found new hardware. I’m the one that plugged it in.

* Authors mailing lists are noisy places, because, apparently, authors like to write a lot. Whoda thunk?

* At the risk of ending a sentence with a preposition … the smell of baking bread is a wonderful thing to wake up to.

* A good breakfast makes the whole day better.

* People who need to deal with people all day every day should not wear overpowering perfume.

This evening we had the inaugural LPLUG / Audio Authority chili night. I am as stuffed as a pig. There were four kinds of chili, and all four of them were *excellent*, imho.

I made what one person termed an indo-cajun chili, with chicken, sausage, and shrimp, with cajun seasoning and Kenyan Simba curry powder, as well as jalapeno peppers, chili beans, and some zinfandel. Mmmmmm.

In case you, too, feel compelled to ask …

I do not care about the basketball tournament. I do not know who is playing. After it is over, I will likely not know who played. I do not care who wins. After it is over, I will probably still not know who won. I do not know who won last year, nor do I care. I do not wish to gamble on the outcome of the tournament. I do not wish to engage in lengthy pointless debates over whether it is really gambling, and whether gambling on college sports should be legal. I do not care that you won $0.75 cents in the pool, or that you lost $368 last year. I will not be depressed if Tennesee wins, nor will I be elated if Kentucky wins, presuming that either or both of them are actually in the running.

That is all.