MOTHER FORKING SHIRT BALLS!

OK, sorry about the title. I've had a frustrating day thus far, and working in a church keeps me from either cursing like Yosemite Sam or throwing furniture like I'd like to be doing right now.

I'm paranoid about my bank account.  Probably not as much as some people, but certainly more than other people might be.  I blame Steve and his hyper aware cyber-security self. Everyone knows when you shop online, you always run the risk of someone stealing your credit card/debit card info, and so I keep a fairly close watch on all that.  I've also got it set up so that any time something is directly charged to my bank account, I get a text message so that I will know immediately if something is amiss.

This morning I was just leaving for work when I happened to glance at my phone.  I saw that I had a text message alert from 1 AM for a charge to my account from iTunes.  I last bought a song on iTunes in mid March, and it wasn't for nearly the amount that was being shown in that text message.  Well....crap. 

When I got to work, the first thing I tried to do was check my iTunes account to see if I'd bought something and forgotten about it.  I tried to open the iTunes program on my work computer, but for some reason it kept crashing.  I don't know if you've ever really, really wanted to get into a program and couldn't, but I came very close to putting my head through my monitor.  I had to find another computer in a completely different part of the church to check my account.  I didn't see any charges there, so went online to look at my bank account more closely and saw that a second charge to iTunes had been added.  I was swiftly becoming untethered from my sense of humor!

 I called the bank to alert them and ask what to do.  The very nice lady I spoke to could see the charges, but couldn't tell me what they were for, which is understandable.  She said I could go ahead and cancel my bank card if I wanted, but that I should called Apple first and make sure it wasn't something easily explainable.  So I got online and started a chat with an online Apple representative. I thought that would be faster than waiting on the phone, and I was (thankfully) right.  The woman who came online to help me told me that she couldn't find any charges to my account, but that she would elevate my problem to the next level just to make sure.  I was fine with that, but I was getting antsy about getting back with the bank to cancel my card.  I got a call from a second rep from Apple asking me to verify my account and all that jazz, but he also couldn't find anything odd with my iTunes account.  However, he decided to elevate my problem to yet a third tier of customer service, which I agreed to.  I'll be honest, I almost hung up so I could contact the bank, but I felt like it would be rude to hang up on him, so I hung on the line while I contacted the bank online to cancel my card.  I'm very glad I did.  The next person I talked to was apparently an IT worker for Apple, and she was able to get into my account far enough to see that someone had hacked into it and was using my account to buy gift cards through a secondary email address!  Those bastards.  However, the silver lining is that the issue was identified and could be addressed. The IT woman's name who helped me was named Coni, and I could have kissed her right on the mouth at that moment. I'm completely impressed with the way they handled the situation, because you don't expect a huge company like Apple to have such good customer service.

So my account was adjusted, but I still had to go and change the passwords to my bank account, my iTunes account and my home e-mail, just to be on the safe side.  I also had to cancel my debit card and fill out paperwork for bank fraud, which may (or may not) allow for a refund of the money that was stolen from me.   Now I just have to get that mailed off and see if I'm going to be refunded for some jerk-face thief that decided I should be funding their iTunes in-app purchases or whatever.

All is well that ends well, though.  I am much calmer than I was before, but I'd still like to find whoever did that and rip their ears off.  Let's just hope I got a handle on all of this before my card is used for anything else.  Finger's crossed! 

BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY: A CAPITOL ADVENTURE

JULY 19, 2014

Today was our real adventure day! 

While getting ready, I was having some trouble finding something to wear. I brought my go-to Yellowstone t-shirt, but I wasn't sure if the unwritten laws of stupid stuff prevents a person from wearing a tourist shirt from one place to another, different tourist place. It's kind of like not wearing the shirt of a band to their concert. None of us want to be that guy. Anyway, I decided to throw caution to the wind and wear it anyway. I was still feeling kind of gouache about it when we went to breakfast and I saw a business man (a relatively young man who seemed to be fairly proud of himself and the way he looked) wearing a black and white flowered shirt only buttoned to the top of his stomach, underneath his suit jacket, and another man wearing a full business suit with a giant, red, Sherpa backpack and a Whole Foods bag. After that I felt ok about my t-shirt.

We drove to the metro station parking deck and had a little trouble figuring out what to do. Parking out here just kind of a nightmare. every space seemed to be reserved for someone. The thing is, we wouldn't have had this problem if we'd been here a week later, because they're opening a metro station just down the street from our hotel! BOO! Timing is everything! :) We finally just left the car in one of the spaces and crossed our fingers that it would be there once we got back. 

-Now let me pause here to make a pronouncement: if you are sitting at a red light (behind someone else) and the light turns green, and if you start honking your horn the split second the light turns...not giving them time to move their foot from the break to the accelerator, you are an a**hole. If you are proud of the fact that you do this thing...you are an a**hole. If you come from a place where this behavior is acceptable, then everyone in your town is an a**hole. By this Logic, Washington DC is full of a**holes.

Moving on.

We got on the Metro and headed towards the National Mall. Riding public transportation is kind of weird. Everyone very studiously avoids everyone else they don't know and most people just plug in headphones and stare in one spot til they get off. Is this true for trains in all places, or just really big cities? Granted, you probably don't want some random subway person getting cozy with you, but I couldn't help but think that if my hometown had a train, none of that ignoring stuff would be going on. By the time you went from one end of the line to another, you'd know the names of everyone around you, know which college team they cheer for, the names of all their kin folks, and the recipes for squash casserole they swear by.  The train kept getting more and more crowded, and just about the time it got so full that I wanted to start screaming and clawing at the doors, we arrived at our destination!  I was so excited!!!!!

The museums we really wanted to see today were all around the Mall, so we started at the Smithsonian Castle.  I had no idea what it actually held, but it turned out to have a sample of stuff that you could find in all of the other Smithsonian museums.  A Reader's Digest Condensed version of the museum experience, if you will.  Unless I missed a whole lot of stuff, it was fairly small, but still interesting.  They had an exhibit of different kinds of souvenirs, which I thought was cool.  It wasn't like t-shirts and stuff, but things like a napkin from Napoleon's court and pieces of the Bastille.  I guess it was what people used to take a souvenirs before you could buy snow globes. I have no idea. Anyways, what I thought would be awesome was if they had souvenirs of the souvenir exhibit!  There was actually a book, but I didn't get it, although that would have been funny.  Souvenir-ception!

We next went to the Air and Space Museum, which was crowded beyond crowded.  I didn't realize at the time that we were just a day away from the 45th (I think) anniversary of the moon landing, which probably explained why it was nearly shoulder to shoulder in there.  They were checking bags at the door, which slowed everything down to a crawl.  They weren't checking very hard, so I'm not sure what they were looking for.  We also had to go through metal detectors.  Were they looking for guns?  Probably.  I guess it would be easy to take down a lot of people if you wanted to go postal in a place like that, but it still makes me kind of sad that it's a possibility.  The museum was interesting, but too much like the Sprocket (ptooey) for my taste.  I guess it's because the USSRC and the Air and Space Museum had a lot of the same type of things, although we had the Saturn V and they didn't (NYEAH!)  We did see a lot of cool stuff, though, and there was a section where we got to make a very good Star Trek IV joke AND sing a verse of "Danger Zone" which was worth the whole visit right there!  Hee! 

Next we went to the Smithsonian's National Museum of the Native American, and it was amazing!  I hadn't even known it existed until a day before we left on our trip.  It was a really beautiful building, and there was some kind of festival going on where they had dancers and speakers.  It was very cool.  I've always been proud of my Cherokee heritage, as much about it as I knew of it, so seeing the exhibits was a great experience.  I wish we could have spent more time there, but it was very crowded as well, and we still had a lot we wanted to see.  We did eat at this museum, though.  There is a restaurant there called Mitsitam, which is apparently "Let's Eat" in the language of the Delaware.  They have food from five different regions of native peoples (it's so hard to be PC, since I just want to call them indians, but I realize that it's cool) in the western hemisphere.  You could mix and match food from all of the different places, but the room isn't very well laid out, and since you can jump from line to line, there is a whole lot of chaos.  I finally just jumped into a line and got turkey and some kind of rice salad from the "Northern Woodlands."  It was delicious, but it would have been better if you weren't having to essentially play Frogger with a million people to simply get lunch!

We walked across the mall to the Natural History Museum!  This was the one I was most excited to see, because I've only been there once and that was when I was a 7th grader.  It was also crowded beyond crowded, and I didn't get to see everything I wanted, but I still got to see a lot!  I had no recollection about how huge that place was.  I'm sure I missed entire wings of things, but I saw what I could.  One specific thing I really, really, really wanted to see was the gem and mineral exhibit. That's where the Hope Diamond is, as well as a room of other huge and/or significant pieces of jewelry that I had been rushed through when I'd been there before.  Steve and I found the Hope Diamond right away, and I almost had to punch a little kid in the head.  See, the diamond is in a small case on a rotating platform.  If you want to get a good look at it, you have to get close and wait for it to turn in your direction.  People were crowded around it, and when they finally moved, Steve and I stepped up to the glass to see it.  Right as it started to turn towards us, a little kid ducked under my arm and stood  right in the way of it, so we couldn't see it.  She was much too young to be there by herself, which means that there was a parent off to one side letting their kid be rude.  I did not punch the child, of course, but we ended up having to stand there for another full rotation of the platform to be able to see.  That put us in the position of having to stand there longer than we normally would have, which kept other people from seeing it until we walked away.

I moved on to the gem room, which was very crowded, and I realized pretty much right away that things weren't going to be easy to see in there.  People were so damn rude, which meant I had to be rude and wedge myself into a non-moving wall of people just to get a glimpse of the things I'd come to see.  Literally, people crowded around the cases and wouldn't freaking move.  I get it, these things are amazing, but when there is a line of people behind you, don't just stand there.  Look and move!  I was stuck between a man who very clearly seemed to just want to stand and lean against the wall, and a kid and his grandmother who knew everything. EVERYTHING.  Neither her, nor her grandson, shut up nearly the entire time they were behind me.  Also, the kid kept coughing on me.  Full on, right on my arm, coughing on me.  He also kept trying to get in front of me, but I kept my hand on the wall to block him.  I suppose I can't really blame kids for being rude, because mostly they don't think of things like being polite when they're excited about stuff.  The adults, however, I can blame all I want.  The woman and man in front of me just basically stopped at each case and stood there without moving often enough that I (genuinely) came within an inch of saying "FFS!" (expletive abbreviated)  and bodily shoving them out of the way.  I finally stepped out of the line to walked around them, and suddenly they sped up to get back in front of me!  Grrrr. I had to skip some things, which I shouldn't have had to do, but unless I wanted to start spitting on people's necks to get them to move, I didn't have a choice.  I felt I was much much ruder than I probably should have been (although my version of being rude is probably like being "Canadian Rude" in that I just say "excuse me" louder than I normally would.)

OK, here is where I get a little indignant and it may sound like my whole day was ruined.  It wasn't, I had a great time, but I did get very irritated.

People really need to learn some kind of museum etiquette. Trust me, I know people go to museums to see all of the awesome, historic stuff that they contain and they get excited about it.  It would be wonderful if we could go to them and take a much time as we wanted pressed up against the cases, staring, reading and re-reading the little card, posing for pictures and tweeting about what we're looking at.  If the museum isn't busy, you CAN do that.  However, and I can't stress this enough, if the place is busy and there are people crowded around something, hoping to see it, you shouldn't be that mouth-breathing-window-licking-gooney-bird backing up the line. That is just bad form. BAD FORM.  You have to make yourself as small as possible, turn sideways if you have to, and no matter how much you'd like to study details on something, if you are mashed full-frontal onto the exhibit case for minutes at a time, you need to understand that people are going to be plotting your death.  Read, glance, and move on.  Go back later if you can, but don't sucker-fish yourself to something and refuse to move if other people want to see it.  Also, you also don't have to take a picture of/with everything you see.  Seriously, lighting in museums is usually not conducive for photography unless you have specifically equipped cameras, so the picture of that thing you had to pose next to that took your buddy so long to take with the iPad the size of a cookie sheet that had to be unfolded out of the giant crowd-control Sherpa backpack he'd been wearing is going to turn out badly.  Take a few pictures, fine, but if you have to stand open mouthed and peace signed next to every exhibit, you should be punched.  Also, don't stop in front of  a crowded exhibit to start texting a friend or start messing with your phone, or to have a conversation with your family about where to eat lunch.  I realize that I know these things because I once worked at a museum, but most of it should be common sense AND common courtesy.        

ANYWAY...

There was more to see, but due to the crowds and the fact that we'd been walking for several hours made us decide to go back to the hotel.  We did have a bad moment when we had stepped outside to look at a map, when one of those bicycle-cart guys started trying to convince us to go on his tour.  We'd already been quite clear we weren't interested, but he wouldn't back off.  I finally took down his number just so he'd leave us alone. If you need a bicycle cart tour of Washington D.C. let me know and I'll give you Rickshaw Steve's phone number.  It's in my phone.  We jumped back onto the subway and went back to the parking garage.  Luckily, our car hadn't been towed!  Huzzah!

We went to Chipotle for dinner, which was the first time I'd ever been to one.  We have one in Huntsville, but it's always crowded, so I'd never been.  It was pretty good.  We also stopped by Target to buy some essentials we needed.  It had been a great day! :)

GRRRRRR

I'd like to think that I'm generally an easygoing type of person.  I mean, I know that's not true about all things in life (just ask Steve - heyo!), but I'd like to think that in most situations, I can take the daily bits of unpleasantness and keep rolling along nicely.  I say, I'd LIKE to think that, but after yesterday I'm not so sure anymore.

I had an appointment at my doctor's office.  It wasn't with my doctor, but I had to see a nurse so that I could get a prescription refilled.  It's apparently a new rule or law or something, because it's the first time I've ever had to do that just to get a refill for this particular prescription. It's inconvenient, but I can understand that someone, somewhere feels that this is the best way to do things now.

So I went into the office first thing in the morning.  I was the first and only patient in the waiting room, and they made me fill out an insurance form (again) after saying it had been two years since it was updated (It wasn't. I'd been there three times since last January.)  I also made a faux pas by not remembering the name of the nurse I was there to see.  I had written it down, but forgotten to bring it with me and I called her two different and wrong names before they realized who I was talking about. Oops. My appointment was at 8:15, but that time came and went.  I'd always thought that not being called at your appointment time was because other patients took longer than they thought, but apparently not.  However, I really wasn't that bothered about not being called back right away.  I figured they had their reasons.

The door opened and a nurse told me to go to the scale (as every dang nurse always does) and then she directed me towards an exam room.  Something about this lady was weird.  I felt right away that she seemed...I don't know...terse or angry.  I apologized about getting her name wrong, thinking it might have insulted her, but she didn't crack a smile or even really look at me.  She walked over and wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm and up close I could really tell she was angry about something.  I just kept quiet and she walked out of the room.

Have you ever been around someone who was really mad at you?  You get that weird, tingly feeling in the pit of your stomach and your face gets all warm?  That's how I felt as I was sitting there.  I began to wonder if I had inadvertently done or said something that I hadn't realized, because it felt directed at me.  She wasn't gone long, but when she came back in, she didn't even close the door to the exam room.  She just turned around and said in a rather rude way (I'm paraphrasing:)

"I can't write you a prescription, you don't qualify anymore.  These are not my rules.  I don't even know why they told you to come in."

She gave me a very, very short reason why I wasn't eligible and said when I came back to see the doctor next month, maybe I could get it then. I was genuinely puzzled, because while I could sort of understand her reason, it didn't make a whole lot of logical sense, so I got a chance to ask one question before she pretty much stalked out without saying another word.  I had been with her for less than five minutes.  I was completely nonplussed.  Honestly, I've never been treated that rudely in a doctor's office before, especially by a nurse.  I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, but she acted as if my very presence in the office was some kind of joke meant to inconvenience her in some way.  I was slightly concerned about not having the prescription refilled, but not so much that I would have made a scene or anything, so I have no idea what her problem was.  Was she ticked because of whatever this new rule was that said she had to see people specifically each time the prescription was refilled?  I don't know, but I did know that whatever her damage was, I didn't cause it.  By the time I'd gotten to my car, I was mad.  The more I thought about it, the madder I got!

It pretty much ruined my whole day.  That sounds kind of hyperbolic, but being treated so rudely first thing in the morning really set the tone for the day.  So thank you, lady, for giving me a scorching case of the Mondays, and thank the horse you rode in on, too.

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) I absolutely cannot stand it when I'm talking to someone, and I ask a question, and they just ignore it.  I'm not talking about situations when I ask a question and whomever I'm talking to doesn't give me a straight answer to it, I'm talking about people who just completely act as if the question had never been asked and start talking about something else.  This happened to me again yesterday!  I just don't understand the rudeness of it.

I guess what really bothers me is that they weren't even personal questions.  I know my idea of personal information and other people's ideas are sometimes different, but I generally don't ask knowingly personal questions of people unless we're very good friends and I think they'd be comfortable telling me.  I'll even go a step further and say that I completely understand even when those friends don't want to talk about those things with me, if they are truly personal and uncomfortable to talk about.  They can just tell me they don't want to talk about it or whatever and I'm OK with that.

However, to just ignore a general question (one I'd needed an answer for) in the middle of a conversation is just so flipping rude!  I even repeated myself thinking that they didn't hear me, but I know they did.  Then the person I was talking to just turned around and started talking to someone else (about the same dang subject) as if I had just evaporated.  I sat there, trying to figure out if what I asked was rude or prying in some way (and, hand to God, I can't see how that's possible considering the subject of our talk) but it just flew all over me.  I don't know why it bothers me so much, but I guess I just don't understand how otherwise generally well-bred people can just be so freaking rude for no reason.  I can't imagine ever doing that.  It's like slamming a door in someone's face mid sentence. 

Sorry for being ranty, but people who are blatantly rude just get up my nose.

2) Are there any amateur dog whisperers out there?  Butler has been acting very weird and it's worrying me.

About two weeks ago we had to take him to the vet for his normal "old man" check-up and shots.  As you know, he hates getting in the car and going places, so it was as traumatic as it always is.  He didn't have a complete strip-the-gears checkup, but they did the usual blood work and senior exam stuff, but nothing really out of the ordinary. When we got him home he refused to go outside, which is weird.  It was really weird.  He wanted to come into the house and stay, but we can't let him do that usually because he's very clingy and if he's loose inside the house he basically wants to walk in-between your feet and stay right with you.  That means that you can't really do anything productive.  We eventually had to push him outside, which I hate to do because it makes me fee l so mean, but he seemed fine once he got out there so we didn't worry too much.

Fast forward to that night when we put them to bed.  Both dogs have been trained since they were puppies that they go into their kennels to sleep after they eat.  That's just the way it's always been.  Before we had gone to the vet, Butler had been doing this thing where we'd get him settled into his kennel, and then he'd stand up and scratch at the door.  We finally figured out that it was because he wanted a drink of water, so we had gotten used to letting him out at least once every night to do that.  If he stood up again, we'd just tell him it was time to sleep and he'd lay down again.   But that night he refused to lay down.  He'd bat at the door and whine, and I'd let him out to see if he was thirsty or if he needed to go outside. I wasn't sure if any of the shots had caused him to feel bad or something,  and I didn't want a repeat of the horrible thing that happened in his kennel a while back.  He didn't want to go outside and he didn't want water.  He just started wandering around the house, which really isn't like him at all.  Then he'd come back into the living room and go to kennel again. We'd close it up and the whole thing would start over again.  We finally just went to bed, thinking he'd eventually lay down again, but he wouldn't.  We could hear him scratching at the kennel door and doing that pitiful nose whistling thing that breaks my heart.  I'd get up and let him out, but he'd just wander around again.  I knew that if we kept getting up and letting him out, he'd never stop, so I finally had to just go to bed and try not to listen to him whine. Eventually we just took both dogs outside and let them stay out for the night, just in case he really was feeling sick.

It has been a little over two weeks and he is still doing it.  I don't know what's wrong.  We didn't get back any bad health reports from the vet, and at every other time of the day he seems exactly the same as usual.  He sleeps, barks and pees on things.  That's just how he rolls.  But at night it's like he suddenly has the surge of nervous energy and he can't be still.  We've tried sitting up with him for a while, we've tried sleeping in the living room with him(and I'd like to apologize to anyone who has ever had to sleep on our couch. It's torturous.) to see if he's just suddenly gotten some kind of separation anxiety.  He still wants out while we're in there, and he will eventually lie down, but he jumps up anytime he hears a noise.  I don't even know what to say to the vet if I were to call her.  "Uh, my dog won't sleep at night, even though he sleeps all day.  I know you said he needs more exercise, but we can't take him on walks at 1:00 in the morning!"  He just sounds so pitiful and it also gets aggravating, because Steve and I need to sleep at night.  I don't know.  I just don't want to ignore him if he's got a problem, but it seems less like he's got a problem and more like he's just wanting to piss me off.  Bless him.

3) This is a sad, but beautifully written piece that I think you should read.  A friend of mine wrote it.  It hurts my heart, but it also is a lovely bit of writing.

4) We had ants in our kitchen over the weekend. ANTS.  You know how I feel about bugs of any type being in my house, but ants just tick me off.  They are so tiny and hard to kill!  I had seen one on my kitchen curtain earlier that day, but it was just the one. I can't remember if I killed it or not, but I think I did.  Later that night Steve went to get something off of the counter and they were just...bleh...everywhere.  Apparently I'd spilled some sugar behind the canister, and didn't realize it, and they were having a grand old time nomming away.  The only poison spray we have to kill bugs is this high-octane stuff that is supposed to kill everything in it's path, but I know for a fact it doesn't kill ants. I nearly poisoned myself with it once trying to kill some ants in the cabinet, so I didn't want to spray it on the counters just in case I accidentally get it on something I'll eventually eat (again.)  We ended up having to move everything, spraying bleach and water all over the counter-tops, and going on a stalking mission to hunt down and kill every last one of them.  Our house reeked of bleach, and it ended up fading some of the paint on the wall, and the damned ants still were coming out of the woodwork. Literally, they were coming out of the woodwork.  Apparently we have a breach that can't be fixed until we completely replace a window. Curses.  Anyway, I finally located some of those ant bait things that we had left over from last time we had the ant problem and put them in strategic places.  The ants went in and out of them, and a day later we didn't have anymore ants. So, yay, I guess.

I still feel guilty for using the ant traps.  I mean, yes, I hate the ants and want them to die.  But it's one thing when you're tracking them down and killing them yourself. It's completely another to trick them: "Oooooh, look, I'm providing you with delicious food!  Please take it back to your home and share it with your family!  MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"  I realize how dumb it is to feel guilty for that, but there you go...

'TWAS BLIND, BUT NOW I SEE

Facepalm.

Sunday morning I woke up with sticky eyes.  I think it actually had a lot to do with the pollen and what not, but since it was also time to change my contacts, I went ahead and took them out before I got in the shower.  I kept reminding myself to make sure I put in a new pair of contacts, or at least grab my glasses, before heading out to church, but of course in the best tradition of good intentions, I didn't do either one.  It wasn't until we were on our way to church that I noticed that I couldn't see anything clearly**.  Thank goodness I wasn't the one driving!

Since we were already running late, we couldn't turn around and go home, so Steve and I decided that after orchestra practice (and after I got the sound system and announcements set) we'd run back home and I'd get them.  It was kind of a miserable hour for me.  Since I've started keeping my contacts in almost all of the time, I keep forgetting that I can't see squat without corrective lenses. I forget they are in my eyes altogether unless I get something stuck underneath one of them.  Honestly, my vision has gotten so bad that just walking around in the church was hazardous.  I had to feel my way around and I couldn't focus on anyone's face so that I could talk to them.  I'm also pretty sure I looked like I was drunk, because I kept weaving around. Not being able to see clearly was scary!

So we came home, and since we had a few minutes to spare, I decided to pop in a new pair of contacts, which were from a brand new batch that I'd gotten from the eye doctor. I hadn't wanted to waste any of the old ones, so the pair I'd taken out that morning were the last of those and I hadn't tried wearing any of the new ones yet.  My prescription had changed slightly, so I knew that when I put the new ones in, I'd have a little bit of adjusting to do, but I wasn't prepared for the absolute craziness I was greeted with when I put them in.  My vision was just as bad, if not worse, than it had been without the lenses in.  I kept thinking that I'd get used to them, but I didn't.  To be on the safe side, I threw my glasses in my purse in case my vision didn't clear up by the time services started.

When I got to church, I kept trying to clear my eyes, but it wasn't working.  I kept rubbing them and dabbing them with a tissue, but I still couldn't see.  I'd also randomly chosen this day to wear mascara, which I hardly ever do, so I just knew by the time church started I'd look like a sad hooker clown, but there was nothing I could do about it.  I was a little panicked because I was afraid that if I couldn't see, I wouldn't be able to catch the cues that I get from the music director, and that morning we were doing a different kind of service for Palm Sunday, so I finally just pulled out the contacts (and I wish I'd let the hand sanitizer dry before sticking my fingers in my eyes...ouch) and put on my glasses.  Everything was fine after that.

My main concern was that my eye doctor had somehow screwed up my lens order, and how much of a pain in the butt it was going to be for me to get the new prescription set and wait on my new lenses.  Also, I was going to have to wear my glasses every day until they came in.  I know that's a big "First World Problem" but if you've ever gone from fooling with glasses to wearing contacts, you'll understand my chagrin.  So once I got home, I decided to try the contact lenses again, and hopefully my eyes could adjust to them before night services.  I got the left one in, and I was just as blind as I'd been before, and of course that was frustrating.  I pressed on, though, because I was determined.  When I raised my right contact to put it in, though, I saw a tiny line etched in the lens.  I knew that my left contact had a line like that because I have astigmatism in that eye and the lens is weighted, but I'd never seen one on my right lens before.  Of course, then it all made sense.  I'd put my lenses in the wrong stinking eyes!  My sight is completely different in each eye, not to mention that a regular lens doesn't even properly fit over an eye with astigmatism, so no wonder I was completely blind.  I felt like such an idiot.

I don't think I'd feel even a quarter as dumb as I do if it weren't for two things:  One, the boxes are very clearly marked (L) and (R) so that I don't accidentally switch lenses.  Two, Steve asked me, as I was trying to figure out what the deal was, if I had the lenses in the wrong eyes.  I just gave him that "I'm not an idiot" face and went about my business.  Oops.

Anyways, now I can see and I'm feeling much better about life.  *SIGH*  It's things like this that remind me why I will never be a surgeon.

**EDIT: If you're wondering why I didn't realize I didn't have my contacts in before leaving the house, if my vision is as bad as I say, it's because I was in a hurry and my house is small.  Since I'm near-sighted (or whichever one means I can't see far off) I didn't have to look very far to see the things in my house so they didn't seem very blurry to me. Also, I know where everything in my house is, so it didn't dawn on me that I couldn't see it very well anyways.

GUUUURL, PLEASE.

I'm so very tired of the Zales jewelry commercials. You know which ones I mean, right? The ones where the guy presents the little box to the woman and the women go through various stages of ecstasy? Then the caption on the screen changes to something along the lines of: The "Blah, blah, blah" Store?

They grate on me.

I can't help it. I'm not going all feminist on you guys or anything, but frankly, the commercials are insulting.

I know that getting jewelry is a good thing. Hell, we all know how much I personally like sparkly things in general. But I'll be damned if a box of ugly, mass produced jewelry would make my panties hit the floor like the commercial implies it will*. Please.

I can understand being excited over an engagement ring. I can even understand that you might get excited over a well thought out, meaningful piece of jewelry. But these commercials (on purpose or not) just seem to say "Hey! Buy her something from our store! Anything from our store! She'll be apoplectic with joy because you give her something shiny! Bitches, loooooove shiny!"

*shakes head*

*Now, please don't think that I'd make fun of any of you guys for buying your wife or girlfriend a piece of jewelry, because I think it's a lovely thing to do. However, I'd like to think that any man I know and love would have a bit more imagination when it comes to the kind of stuff they buy!