"Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it."
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Let Love In. Does this CD belong to anyone on my friends list? Perhaps it migrated into my home office when I cleaned up the things left behind by truck borrowers.
It's well into the 80s out there today. Upstairs, it's sweltering and I'd have to run the central air or I couldn't function. And even with the central air on full tilt, it would still be kinda hot in there. But in the new downstairs office, I don't have to run the central air, and it's still comfortable. This office move may pay for itself very quickly, just in electricity bill savings. Plus it's green. Yay!
For the last two weeks, we've been moving things in the house, to try to get my home office moved downstairs. There's still a lot of stuff to do, but I am now sitting at my desk in its new location, and all the computers are hooked up, and my internet connection is working. Yay!
I will take some pics to share here, when the dust gets a little more settled.
Hey, I just found a new Jo Carol Pierce album on Amazon, and it's available from a seller named JOCJUKE whose reviews say things like "Nothing beats receiving the album personalized by the artist herself."
I have now had three vitamin B-12 shots, and I think they are helping. My feet are warmer and have better color, and when I touch them with my hands they feel more normal, but there is more numb/tingling feeling. I think this is probably good. Y'know how if you sit wrong, your foot can go to sleep, and then you feel pins and needles as it wakes up? I am feeling a mild version of it, off and on, lately. It's slightly uncomfortable but IMHO it's a good sign. I'm hoping it will pass if we can keep the B-12 numbers up.
I am going in for an "arterial doppler" scan on July 1. This is a blood pressure test where they compare your blood pressure in different parts of your body. I have not had a second blood test or seen the doctor again since the first blood test. I'm not sure what he wants me to do now, whether I should get more shots between now and July 1, or take supplements and see if they help, or get another blood test, or what. I just left a message with the doctor's office asking them to call and tell me what they want me to do. We'll see what they say.
I've been going out on google and reading up on vitamin B-12 deficiency. This is probably a mistake because it is giving me a case of galloping hypochondria. I should stay away from those websites, they're bad for my mental health. Anyway, vitamin B-12 deficiency has a name, it's called pernicious anemia. Vitamin B-12 comes purely from animal sources, and vegans should take supplements. I am not a vegan. The other common cause of low B-12 is poor absorption due to a lack of something called "intrinsic factor". This is not one of things measured in the bloodwork I had done, so I have no idea how much of it I have. The fact that the doctor is having me get shots, makes me think that he thinks I have low IF, though I have not seen him since the bloodwork came back so he hasn't said anything about it to me. The shots I've been getting each actually have less B-12 than most of the pills at the pharmacy. I will talk to the doctor about this, when I next see him. If we can get there with pills, that's a whole lot cheaper and easier than the shots.
I guess if you're going to have a chronic illness, this is a fairly easy one to cope with. But it's scary. I hope things don't get any weirder.
So my blood work came back, and the doctor wants me to come in tomorrow morning for a vitamin B12 injection.
Edit: Here's the back story. Lately my feet are cold all the time. Unusually cold. This has been going on for a couple years, actually, and has led me to become extremely picky about footwear. But even the best shoes and boots have not helped. onefaller has been nagging me to go have this looked at. I felt like a complete hypochondriac fool, but I finally went. Was surprised to find, the doctor took this symptom seriously. He ordered this blood work, and found I am low on vitamin B12. He thinks the shot will help very quickly, like in a week. I hope so. I'm guessing that if it does, he'll want me to take a supplement or change my diet or something. I hope I don't have to keep going in for shots all the time, but if I do, well, there are worse things, like having annoyingly cold feet!
“Guess what, they must have put in a new cell tower because my Verizon phone is working at Burr Oak State Park, for the first time ever. I'm even getting pretty good signal, I think. The way I discovered this is that somebody was ringing my phone. It stopped ringing before I could get to it and the number was a PBX, so I couldn't call you back. So if you called me, try again. I'll be here for a few minutes.”
Ant season has arrived. Last night they found all the cat food dishes, including the bowl on top of the file cabinet. Thousands of ants were in each bowl this morning.
Mac is old and doesn't eat quickly, especially since he no longer has Elizabeth to compete with. It takes him all day to eat a very small dab of wet cat food. He's also a messy eater. He picks up each individual piece of dry kibble, carefully drops it on the floor next to the dish, and then bites it in half, eating one half and leaving the rest on the floor, before going back to take another piece out of the dish. Any area with a food dish will quickly grow a ring of crumbs on the floor.
Does anyone have a suggested way to keep cat food available, 24 hours a day, without it becoming an ant farm, and without poisoning Mac?
In other pet-related news, thank you rikhei for the link to the Furminator. Mac barfed up several hairballs the day you posted that. We went out and bought one, and Mac has not thrown up a hairball since. Yay!
“Hello! I'm in Tellico Plains. We just had a nice lunch at the Tellicafe, complete with a mile-high chocolate cake slice. I'm leading a group of about 8 or 9 people, and it seems to be going fairly well. Nobody's gotten left behind and nobody's crashed, but they don't think I'm too slow--so that's cool. Got into Franklin last night around 7. There's about, probably, 60 riders here. I have a roommate; his name is Sam. He totally reminds me of Russell Stephan if you just subtract the police stories--but yeah, he's got the long hair, and the tendency to feed everyone at the event, and the incredibly grating morning perkiness. I guess we're going to get some gas here and I'm going to lead the group on up to the Skyway; we'll go up Bald River Falls--a lot of them have never been there. I'll try to post again later. Bye!”
“Well here I am in the same travel lodge in Wapakoneta Ohio that I spent the night in almost 2 weeks ago. Actually a little different here, although I think I might be in the same room. There's no longer a McDonald's sign on the trailer right across the parking lot from me. Looks like they finished building that McDonald's. But I still don't think I'll eat there, anyways. Things are going pretty well, got a little bit of rain just north of Findlay. But not enough to really stop and put on the rain gear or anything. It passed before the road even got wet and on the other side of the rain it was warmer, so that was nice. Gonna meet some guys from VFR forum tomorrow morning at really early hr. So I guess that's about all, I'll try to voice post again later this weekend.”
This morning, there was a bird attacking his reflection in the passenger side window and mirror on my truck. He was doing it every time I looked out the window, for at least two hours. M says he's been out there doing that every morning, of late.
Maybe I should put a bag over the mirror when I park, or park someplace different.
Not sure what kind of bird. A brownish red bird whose tail looked more red when he spread it out. Maybe an immature cardinal?
“So here I am, back in St Clairesville, after an eventful day of riding. We got in some nice twisty roads, stopped at some nice parks overlooking the river and Skip let me lead all day long until the very end when we were on Rt 9 coming back into St Clairesville, and I thought "y'know, he probably would like to go a little faster, I'm pretty slow." So I waved him ahead, and a quarter mile later he crashed! Don't worry, he's OK, and the bike is ridable. Just that it's kind of amusing that it happened so quickly when he took the lead. He found some of the cinders that they put down on the roads here and managed to slide out his rear wheel, then it hooked up and high-sided him. So it was a pretty exciting day. We came back to the hotel and had some nice dinner, and then went and got in the hot tub where we had things stolen from us! Drunks stole our pool towels and out room key. Anyways now we're back in the room and it's been a fairly good day. I guess I'll be home tomorrow and talk to everybody soon. Bye!
Edit:
The auto transcription was very bad! I also had trouble with replaying it and transcribing it myself, because very time I turned on the playback, it killed my keyboard! I had to reboot twice to get my keyboard back. WTF?
I would also like to note that Skip did not just blow past me and accelerate like a wild thing. He was not being squidly at all. I was just thinking that maybe I wasn't as slow as I thought, because he wasn't leaving me behind and I certainly wasn't having to struggle to keep up, when BAM! He was crashing!
The only thing I can find to fault in what he was doing, was that he crossed the center of the lane, in that turn, and you just don't want to do that on those roads; there's always crap in the center of the lane. I've been riding down there for so long that I have internalized that rule, I don't take those racing lines where you cross the lanes in turns. I wonder if he was following my lines all day, without realizing it, and then when he had to choose his own line, he picked the wrong one?
Looking at his tire tracks, the cinders in the middle of the lane wouldn't even have been visible, until they were disturbed by him skidding on them. His bike ended up laying on its right side, against a road sign. He got a new dent in the top of his gas tank, where it hit the sign, but if it hadn't hit the sign it would have ended up in the ravine, which would have been much harder to get out of, probably would have needed a tow truck. Plus with all the trees down there, it would have probably been dented even worse.
Fortunately he was wearing his Aerostich, and he was flung off in such a way that he didn't hit anything with his body, just got tossed onto the ground. He couldn't have been going more than 20mph. He got a few gouges in his suit, and a gouge on his boot, and a bruised hand. But it could have been a whole lot worse. This is why we wear our gear.”
“I have made it to the motel here in Saint Clairesville Ohio and it wasn't too bad of a ride down--a little cold, little drizzle--but all in all, it wasn't too bad. So anyway I'll close see you tomorrow.”
So today I got another call from that collection agency. I was careful not to reveal any information about myself, but I got her to reveal quite a bit of information about what she is trying to do.
It turns out, the reason she's calling my cell phone, is because the information she has, shows the phone number of the debtor, is the same as my home number. And when she calls my home number, our outgoing voice mail message tells people to call our cell phones. The debtor has the same first name as I do, so the credit people have already added my cell phone number, to their database. I got her to tell me the debtor's name, address, and last four digits of her SSN. The SSN is not the same as mine. The name and address are actually listed in my telephone book.
A further unfortunate coincidence, is that the debtor has three last names, and one of them is the same as the first four letters of my last name. That's the one that's in the phone book, just a few lines up from mine.
The credit reporting agency who has me mixed up with this person, is Trans Union.
So now I have to try to figure out what to do. It doesn't sound like true identity theft. It sounds more like someone had fat fingers, and stuck my home phone number onto the debtor's record. And now all the rest of my information is slowly being pulled into this person's record, blurring me with her.
I went out to Trans Union's website, and found that anything I do with them will require me to prove my identity when I contact them. I'm afraid that any information I use to do this, will get added to this debtor's records, and I'll never get it out of there.
Maybe I should hire a lawyer to handle this for me? Are there lawyers who do this?
Maybe I should get both of my phone numbers changed, immediately, before any more of my information gets pulled in? But the phone companies will still know who I am, and they'll probably still find me again.
I could call this number in the phone book, and if it actually reaches the debtor I could ask her to get my phone number taken out of her records. But she might find it convenient to encourage them to chase this random stranger instead.
I have torn the house apart looking for my Gerbing electric heated jacket, and I can't find it anywhere. Have I lent it to any of you, or left it at your house? It's like a black nylon windbreaker with electric wires in it.
So today, telemarketing recordings started calling my cell phone
Security:
Public
Mood:
irritated
First the collections people, now recorded sales pitches. I wonder if my cell phone number has somehow gotten put in a database somewhere, that these people are using? And yes, I have registered this number with the national do not call list. A long time ago. I've had this cell phone number for years. I just went out and added it to the do not call registry again, just in case it somehow got expired or deleted or something.
Also over the weekend, I received a text message on my phone, from some random phone text spammer inviting me to chat. My phone plan doesn't include texting, since I never use it. I hope I don't start getting more of these, and having them cost me ten cents apiece or something. It could become really annoying and expensive.
I wonder if Verizon can do anything about this? If I call to complain that I'm being harassed by random telemarketing and collections people, would they credit me back my air time? I guess if it starts costing me, I will have to call them and find out. I hope I don't have to get a new phone number. That would be a nuisance.
Anyone want any pillows? How about a sleeping bag with a broken zipper, or a quilt that's fraying at the edges? It seems like there should be some sort of textile recycling, but I asked at Recycle Ann Arbor and they don't take such things. Maybe the animal shelter would want these things?
Does anyone need women's size 10 shoes? I threw away all the beat up ones, but I still have few pairs that are in near-new condition and just don't get worn. Also, socks. I have become very picky about my feet, and as a result I have a lot of socks and shoes I don't wear.
The battery in my cell phone has suddenly decided that the phone must go dead very quickly when removed from the charger. This phone is old enough to replace for free with the whole Verizon "New Every Two" thing. So I have ordered a new phone. It won't get here for a couple of days. So, be aware that my phone isn't working very well right now. If you need to reach me, send email.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
elizilla's journal
puzzled
nervous
hopeful
irritated