Recently in Psychotherapy Category

I’ve been holding back for a little while now because I figured the issues I have been having are due to the merger between Embarq and CenturyTel to become CenturyLink were temporary. I miss Embarq. They were always helpful and replaced my dsl box several times for free when they started burning out over and over for whatever reason (cheap materials had nothing to do with it I swear). Now that I have returned to Ohio, they have merged with CenturyTel, whoever the hell they are. I’ve been having issues non-stop. Not with the internet, the dsl, while slow because I am on their lowest tier, is steady and the box (knocks on wood) hasn’t broken yet.

I’m annoyed because the online billing system is a failure. Complete and utter failure, otherwise known as EpicFail. I could create an account login and change the temporary password. That is it. That is all I have been able to do for over a month. I cannot add the account number they gave me. I cannot view my bill online. I cannot pay my bill online.

Being as I don’t use checks and didn’t order any, now I have to pay the bill over the phone. Which was so fun to do finding out that the bill I received, which had all kinds of credits on it due to all their other screw-ups, had already had the new month’s bill added on to it equaling a surprising amount. I was obviously quite pissed. I haven’t even received the next bill, either. Not surprising.

They also told me that the bill was going to be a certain amount, minus another certain amount each month since I took a year long contract with them. Turns out that was a lie, too. They told me only the amount for the dsl, they told me the full amount was this piddly amount I was going to pay without telling me what the basic phone line was also going to cost. So to say the least, I was pissed. I may go ahead and cancel the house line anyway. I know, I know. They say that when calling 911 you should have a house line. Well, 911 for my county doesn’t apply to where I live. Don’t ask, I have no freaking clue as to why. So the house phone may be getting cancelled. The money I’d save for not having it could probably be applied to the DSL to go to a higher tier and get a faster connection.

I’ve emailed back and forth regarding the online billing and they have no idea why it’s not working. I want to know who else is having issues with CenturyLink’s online billing. I don’t think it even works and they just don’t have the balls to state ‘hey this doesn’t work’. Instead they tell me ‘we sent the issue to the technical department and they are working on it’. Mhmmm.. whatever. I haven’t heard anything as of yet and anytime I try to add the account number it continually tells me that I cannot access that account online. Hopefully someone in the tech department gets off their lazy ass and fixes it.

Until they get their ducks in a row, I’d say go elsewhere for your phone and internet. Laters.

Dear Teachers,

I know a bunch of you just got fired due to the cut backs on the budget. I know those of you that are still working at the high school are having to take on more students. I know you don’t get paid enough to put up with sassy, hormonal, annoying teenagers. And yet I have a complaint, even though you have to put up with all kinds of other crap, I’m going to pile more on you.

I’m not very pleased with any of you because you didn’t put out a list of supplies. You could have at least put it up on the school website to let me know what was required of my child to have at her disposal in your classes. Seriously, how am I supposed to do my job in preparing her for your class if you don’t tell me what it is she needs? Is it really that difficult to sit down and write ‘binder, loose leaf paper (college/wide ruled), etc? Notebooks, loose leaf paper, binders, folders, pens and pencils, etc are given. I know she needs these things.

What I’m talking about are the things that aren’t common or if you have a specific request such as “I’m selfish and I don’t want to share a binder with your other courses so you will need a 2 inch binder dedicated to MY class only.” Ok, so that’s probably over the top and not an accurate quote, but my daughter did say you used the word ‘selfish’. Now she also needs a notebok of graph paper. The local Wally World has been out of notebooks of graph paper for almost a week. It’s too expensive to buy it anywhere else and I’d get less paper for more money on top of it.

I’ve emailed your principal. Basicially just to let him know what a hard time we’ve been having in gathering the supplies that are requested required of her simply due to the fact that I didn’t have the information available to me a month before school started. So hopefully next year I’ll have a list in one hand and a calculator in the other when she becomes a sophmore.

Sincerely,
Frustrated Mom

So, depending on where you live, where you went to school and what years you attended, you probably had a normal every day schedule that started at 8, ended at 2 or 3, and had anywhere from 6 to 9 classes, including lunch and/or study hall. When I went to high school I had 9 periods, 2 were study halls and another was lunch. We had 3 minutes to get to our lockers to exchange books and get to our next class. There wasn’t much time for talking to friends, texting (didn’t exist) friends across campus, etc.

The Little Lady’s school is much different. So different in fact that I don’t have a clue as to how parents cope with the goofy schedule they have. They have A days and B days and short days. Short days in middle school meant getting out early on Wednesday, for the high school it means starting late. On her A days she has to be in her first class at 8 am and on B days she doesn’t have to start class until almost 10 am. Classes are 90 minutes long and there are 15 minute breaks in between classes (due to length of class time) and a half an hour lunch somewhere around 11.

She has 4 classes on A days and gets out at 3:35. She has 2 classes on B days and gets out at 1:50. You can imagine how this is screwing up the fact that I want to get a job, right? I mean, yes, there is a bussing system, and there will be a bus pass purchased for her. On B days she’ll be sitting around for almost 2 and a half hours (depending on when the bus arrives) doing nothing, or sitting in the library when they open it, doing homework (or nothing).

I just can’t imagine how annoyed I’d be if I were stuck with such a schedule. The main thing that bothers her is all the time she’ll be spending on the bus and ‘doing nothing’ on B days. She seems to think that I’ll keep taking her in on B days and Wednesdays and I just can’t do that. I want to buy her a freaking bike so she doesn’t have to ride the bus, it’s really not that far and there’s a bike lane everywhere but on our road. She says she wouldn’t want to ride a bike. Whatever. She can’t walk, it’s too far. Where’s a teleporter when you need one?

So yesterday at the fair Honey and I were sitting down taking a break in the nice ice cold breeze where the sun still shined warm enough to keep me from freezing to death and chatted. I guess there were some ladies that walked somewhere behind me or out of my visual area and glared at him or something. I’m not entirely sure but this evoked a question that, instead of laughing off, I tried to answer honestly.

He asked me why women wear tank tops, have their breasts hanging out, decorated in sparkles (I think the tank tops were decorated in sparkles and lots of boob was showing) if they didn’t want you to look at them. Such as, he looked to see what was written in the sparkles on their tank top and got glared at, even though he wasn’t staring, and they covered themselves up. What’s the point of wearing such a top if you don’t want people looking at you?

So I chuckled and said that’s the whole point. You’re looking at someone that has to incite drama so they have a way of going all over-the-top emotional on you or at a later time to one of their friends. Women wear these tops, showing off skin, and then get offended when you look, even if you aren’t gawking and whistling and innocently trying to figure out what the hell their top reads, in order to get angry, glare at you and then make a whole stink out of it right then and there (if they are truly drama whores) or later on to a group of friends so they can be fawned over.

Personally I could care less about the drama. If I want to wear a top that is sexy I don’t wear it so that men will gawk at me, I wear it because it makes me feel good. I like to feel good about myself and wearing something sexy, whether it be a nice set of bra and panties, or a sexy top when I go out that might show a little skin, is for me. It’s because I am feeling absolutely amazing that day and I just want everyone to know how good I feel and what a wonderful mood I’m in. If they happen to gawk, well perhaps their moms didn’t teach them any better.

My funny “Holy shit” moment was when I saw two girls who were dressed trashy in a semi-goth (I shop at Hot Topic) wannabe outfit and .. I don’t know how to describe this. I am really sure they had beer bellies. That’s what it makes me think of. They had their shirts tied up in the back because they got henna tattoos of a pentagram (that’s why the pic above) and they had them (not surprisingly) on their lower back. So I am going to call this the “Wannabe Goth Tramp Stamp”. The tattoos I didn’t give a crap about at all. I wanted to walk over there and cover up their stomachs. Other than their bellies, their figures looked just fine. Their bellies looked like they drank a 6 pack a day. These were not pregnant I’m going to be a mommy bellies, these were saggy and hanging over the belt bellies. It was just in very bad taste for them to be walking around like that. I’m sure it was just so the henna would dry but still… bad taste.

What I truly enjoyed was almost getting run over, repeatedly, by large mexican families at the fair. There were at least three times I ended up separated from Honey and Little Lady, not because I wasn’t walking fast enough, but because god forbid they stop and wait a moment or veer a little to their right in order to walk past me. I’m not talking mom and dad and two or three little kids either. I’m talking mom, dad, teens and friends, little kids and cousins, sisters and/or brothers of the parents. Extended families cutting me off. So I had to STOP and WAIT for anywhere around 7 to 15 people to walk SLOWLY in front of me before I could catch up with them. And it’s kind of hard to yell “Hey, wait up” when they are all talking loudly to each other, yelling at kids, or on their phones.

Anyway. Other than the funny people watching and being cut off we all had a wonderful time at the fair. There are just those who have to be rude in order to think they are superior to others and that’s just fine with me, just don’t get in my face about it, I might just start laughing so hard I cry, which would probably make you think I need to be living in a round rubber room.

Nothing much has been going on lately. The kitchen is fairly clean, I’ve been reading like crazy, playing Sims like crazy, but that was all stated in the last post. Another thing I’ve been doing is searching for a new desktop wallpaper. I found this site awhile back called Desktop Nexus that has some really great wallpapers. Tons and tons of stuff to look through and which I found my latest wallpaper, the Bleach fanatic that I am, a Hell Butterfly image.

I also found the wallpaper that I used to create the new splash page for S-E.O as well. I did make some changes to it, a little darker, a little change in shade. Other than that, nothing much.

The mishap I’ve been having is with my dinosaur of a webcam I pulled out of storage a week or so ago. It’s so old and outdated that they stopped supporting it completely, other than having the latest driver on their site, in 2006. The latest driver is also from 2006. I’d get a new one, but it’s not an important thing. It works just fine, it’s the bandwidth from what I’ve read that is killing the quality of the video it’s showing. Whatever. It isn’t something I’d use all that often. I don’t have anyone overseas to talk to or anything like that so it’ll sit here and maybe I’ll use it to show off Dusty’s latest silliness (I swear there is something in that wet food). Perhaps someone out there has a clue? It’s a Creative WebCam NX. Literally OLD and outdated beyond all things possible and of course, no Vista support. Oddly enough, it works. For the most part.

Alright, I’m off. Laters.

I know that I haven’t been around all that much for quite awhile. I am here, lurking around, sometimes reading blogs, sometimes not being online at all. I like to take breaks more often from the internet to do other things, like getting lost in a favorite series of books or play a game for hours on end in between doing dishes and laundry.

So basically I have reread the entire series regarding Rachel Morgan and The Hollows again (that’s 7 books); I’ve read 7 of 15 books regarding the FBI Romance/Thrillers by Catherine Coulter again. She’s my favorite author in those regards and she’s also got me so hooked on Savich and Sherlock it’s not funny. I wish I could picture him better, he sounds extremely yummy.

I’ve been playing Sims 2 like a loon. I know, Sims 3 is out, but we have to pay off Dusty’s vet bills (will explain) and get everything else settled before we can upgrade the laptop to handle Sims 3 and I want to wait for the whole freaking collection dammit.

We had to take Dusty to the vet because he ended up having a urinary tract blockage. We knew something was wrong with him because he was moaning (at least that’s how it sounded to me) and he wasn’t doing much of anything at all. He was fine with being petted until you got near his side - which he hates being petted past his shoulders, so that was a clue, too. Plus he tried using his litterbox four times in an hour and that really blew us away.

So after going to the vet to get emergency surgery and just about ripping apart the wonderful people who cared for him there and at the recovery hospital we had our fractious kitty back home after a few days. He was so grateful to be home that he was loving and allowed us to love him up (which he never does, not even cracked out on catnip and half asleep) in return. Now he’s our Dusty again. The King of the Fractious Kitties (I do love that word). That is how he was described to the recovery hospital that took over his 24 hour care. They also said that he would attack if anyone came close. They had to gas him in order to give him his medication. Giving him his pain meds after he came home was a hoot.

Anyway. Please make sure to keep an eye on your kitties and their cat food. They aren’t supposed to get dry food. Although there are some REALLY GOOD dry foods out there. Due to the dry food we feed them Dusty ended up being blocked and having to go through hell to get better. Luckily he’s still technically a male. They didn’t have to slice him open and turn him female so he could pee without a catheter. So he’ll be on wet prescription food for life, unless we can find an alternative wet food for him that will be good and keep him from blocking up again. Also, since most people give cats dry food so they don’t have to brush their teeth, you can give them treats that will clean their teeth and they’ll love you more. I don’t know about Dusty. We are going to ask his regular vet when he’s back in the office if he’s allowed treats to 1) keep his teeth clean and 2) because sometimes he’s such a good kitty he needs a treat. (My fault, I got him hooked on treats.)

Oh let’s see. What else. Oh, I started using this site called Architectual Designs to build houses for my Sims. It’s a great site, they have some amazing designs and sometimes I just feel amazed at how well they come out. Others I have to alter sometimes because I only have the base game and don’t need a garage for a car my Sims don’t have.

So I apologize for not being around for so long. It’s easier to take a break every now and again instead of burning myself out on the internet all the time every day. I should be around again, just not as long or often. Laters.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I also took an hour to make a new splash page for Sweetly-Evil.Org. You should go see it.