(no subject)

Younger Girl is sick, for the second day in a row--croup-like cough, stomach ache, lassitude. Tonight she and I were supposed to meet up with her Girl Scout troop at Great America for a sleepover at the park, but we have called her leader to cancel our participation--the fact that the kid herself suggested the cancellation tells me that she's not faking. So I'm home (again) for the day.

Meanwhile: we switched our internet and phone service over to Earthlink, and have had nothing but, um, wrinkles in the fabric of our lives thereby. Spouse, being the technologically stubborn type, has been all over them (which appears to mean riding herd on technicians from Earthlink, Covad, and ATT (who own the phone lines over which all the services actually travel). Yesterday the nice man from ATT who was supposed to have been here at 9 am showed up at 2 (miscommunication at their end) and did some magic stuff and the noise on the line was thereby significantly reduced. And then, about 8pm last night, all phone and internet connection ceased. I mean, gone. You pick up the phone and hear nothing, not even the hollow roar of your own voice coming back at you. We have call-forwarded the house phone to my cell, but even so... And fortunately we had not yet cancelled the cable internet service, so I can come here at bitch about it to you all. But it seems like I'm home (again) for the day...unless, of course, they can't fix the problem until Monday.

Technology is my friend, except when it totally sucks.

Accomplishment Junkie

I was raised by a man whose family's unspoken mantra was "what have you done today." This didn't mean, how was your day or what happened to you today, but rather, Have You Justified Your Existence By Accomplishing Things Today. My father's family are terrific, but they are doers, and I grew up with a vague sense that if I didn't have something concrete to show for my day I was a bad person. (Neurotic much? Why, yes, thank you.)

So now I'm in research mode, and the one thing I can say about research (aside from the fact that it's fun, and my brain is currently chock full of information on early medical education) is that at the end of the day I have nothing concrete to show for it. So I wind up compensating by doing very concrete things around the palace. Yesterday I made a cake, and then we made homemade pasta for dinner. I think my sudden passion for quilting (I hope to post a photo of the Wiscon Guest of Honor quilt soon) is part of this too. All I can say is, I hope I get out of the research phase of this project before we're all the size of Kansas as a result of my culinary accomplishments.

Weird

We have no phone working at home, but we were able to have all home calls forwarded (oh, joy) to my cell. So I'm strolling the aisles at Costco, looking for gum and bread and stew meat, when my cell rings. A guy on the other end identifies himself as calling from a financing office at a car dealership in San Jose, and he asks for Younger Girl so he can confirm her financial information before clearing the purchase of a new car.

Um.

I tell him that YG is ten years old, and not buying any cars, thank you. He says, Um, yes, he can understand that. Then my cell craps out. So once I'm done at Costco and out in the open air, I call the dealership back. The woman who emailed the order in (!) said she was 19, and gave a social security number that supported that. So obviously she didn't give YG's ssn (since she was not born in 1987).

So at least I know the kid's not buying a car. But I'm going to have to do a little digging to find out the extent to which the kid's credit history has been compromised (after I get over the shock of considering that my kid has a credit history).