I guess it all started about a week ago when my cell phone fell out of my pocket and dropped straight into the toilet right after I had just pee'd. I have never destroyed a cell phone before; it was my first time, and of course, I was NOT happy about it. I instantly plunged my hand into the commode full of pee and retrieved my poor ruined phone. Yuck. :P So later that day me and Jamie went to the cell phone store to get a new one. Jamie had an older flip-phone that he had abandoned because the camera and video suddenly stopped working on it for some unknown reason, and the cell phone store couldn't even get it to work again when he took it in for them to try to fix a couple of months ago. So we deactivated that phone and kept it for an emergency spare just in case we ever needed it. Jamie was limping along with my old flip-phone, which had a camera and video that worked, but we had let Lilly play with it in the past, so it was partially busted, and began coming apart whenever you flipped it open. So since I didn't really care whether I had camera or video capability on my cell phone or not, we decided to reactivate Jamie's old cell phone for me, and let Jamie have the upgrade and get a new phone.
Well, about $160 later at the cell phone store ($50 of which we'll get back with an inconvenient mail-in rebate, and an additional $30 fee which will conveniently show up on our next cell phone bill), we both got fixed up with our respective phones. I determined later that day that I didn't like stepping back to a cell phone that didn't have a full keyboard for texting. And Jamie couldn't figure out his fancy new phone, which I coveted, since it had a full keyboard. To top it all off, after I got Jamie's old phone, which the camera/video allegedly didn't work on, I tried it, and the camera/video function somehow mysteriously worked perfectly, like it had never been messed up at all. So that really made me mad. The only reason I had settled for Jamie's old phone in the first place was because he wanted a phone with a camera/video, and we just assumed that that phone's camera/video capabilities were broken forever.
So we have decided to swap phones. But there's one more bad thing about it. I just discovered last night when I was playing a video that Jamie had recorded with his fancy new phone over my computer, that the audio that goes along with the recorded video doesn't transfer. So when you play a video that was recorded with Jamie's new cell phone on the computer, it has no audio at all. There is no sound whatsoever. Apparently it has something to do with something called a "codec". I'm trying to figure out how to fix it, or get something to help me convert the stupid video files to the proper format, but I'm not very tech-savvy at all, and it all seems so complicated with all that confusing jargon and what-not, that I don't really know what to do, and I'm pretty upset about it.
In addition to the whole cell phones snafu,
- It's been 80+ degrees lately and we don't have air conditioning because our heat pump is broken
- Lilly's laptop has bitten the dust -- the keyboard no longer works on it, and now the sound on it is messed up too
- I still haven't gotten my car worked on (I still need an oil change and a new valve-cover gasket put on)
- Jamie claims he needs new tires on his truck
- Me and Jamie got Jury Summons in the mail last week
- Lilly sucks -- I'm almost 100% sure that she has to have ADHD, but I don't think her pediatrician would believe me. Lilly drives me INSANE CONSTANTLY, and I don't know what to do
And today we had a TERRIBLE day at the beach.
Of course Lilly started BEGGING RELENTLESSLY as usual to go to the beach not long after she finally got up this morning. I looked at the weather forecast, and it said there was only a 30% chance of rain, so I decided it would be fine to go, to shut Lilly up. So off we went.
When we got to the beach, I was struggling to put up our stupid umbrella in the wind, when unbeknownst to me, the stupid gigantic inflatable purple whale that Lilly demands to drag to the damn beach with us every stinking time, even though it's so huge that we can barely squeeze it into the car, had blown away, over to some other people. In my struggle with the umbrella, I saw some lady's feet standing in the sand in front of me, and heard her voice tell me "Your whale is hungry"! I looked up from my umbrella struggle to see her holding the damn purple whale, asking me "Is this yours"? I quit fooling with the umbrella, sheepishly said "Yeah", and took it from her. I mumbled something about how "I thought Lilly had it". The lady explained that the wind had blown it over to where she was sitting, and that's why she had told me that it was hungry. I was mortified. She went back to where she had been sitting, and I fixed the stupid whale so that it would be harder for the wind to blow it away, or at least keep it in my line of sight so that I would know if it had blown away again or not.
I thought I had my stupid beach umbrella set up good enough, so I whipped out a sandwich from our cooler to eat. But the wind picked up again, and I had to fling my sandwich down on top of the cooler to grab the stupid umbrella. I angrily yanked the umbrella down temporarily so that I could finish my sandwich before messing with it again. And ironically, the sandwich had become a literal sandwich during the blast of wind, which had blown sand onto my sandwich. So I crunch, crunch, crunched the remainder of my cheese sandwich (bleh >:P) and when I got done eating, I turned my focus back to the stupid umbrella.
I decided that since it was obviously going to be an unexpectedly extra-windy day, and Jamie wasn't with us, that I would just remove the bottom pole from the umbrella, effectively shortening it to just being able to cover only me, laying in my vintage 80s ugly brown lounge chair. That way, it would at least be easier for me to grab and hold in place, if a sudden gust of wind picked up again.
Well. Not long after I thought I had it all fixed up reasonably well, the damn umbrella began violently turning wrong-side-out for extended periods of time every few minutes, thanks to some freak gale-force winds that would not stop. So I was forced to constantly keep the damn umbrella in a bionic robo-grip to keep from Mary Poppins-ing the hell outta there! It was HORRIBLE.
We had been there for probably a few hours when the sky got overcast, and a few drops of rain started to come down off and on. I started packing up our stuff and getting ready to go. When I finally finished packing everything up, and I was trying to persuade Lilly to leave, the sky got even darker, and it began thundering. I told Lilly that it was going to start storming, and that we had to leave, since it wasn't safe to be near the water. Finally we got in the car. We sat there in the car for a few minutes so that Lilly could change out of her bathing suit and put on some dry clothes (we don't like to use the bathhouse at the beach, because it stinks and it's disgusting). While we were sitting there, the thunder got worse. Then it started lightning. And then came the rain. Except it was more like being in one of those automatic car washes, where you can't see a thing except for the water blasting your entire car. So we had to drive home in THAT.
Except we didn't go straight home; we needed to swing by Dad & Patti's house to check and make sure everything was OK, since they're off on vacation. I finally made it there in the storm, and it was still pouring the rain hard. I clicked the remote garage door opener, and even though it only took me 2 seconds to run into the garage, I still got soaked to the bone because it was raining that hard. I put Dad's mail on the seat of his recliner, put more cat food in the feeder, changed the cat water, retrieved the fun noodle that Dad said we could have, and ran back into the car, soaked, where Lilly was waiting for me. I clicked the garage door remote to close the garage. It closed, and then I realized that the garage lights were still on. I knew that they had come on when I had clicked the remote, so I thought surely they would go back off on their own. I don't have any experience with fancy automatic garage doors or anything like that, so I don't really know for sure exactly what they're supposed to do. So we sat there, and sat there, and sat there, waiting to see if the damn garage lights would go off by themselves. It was only a few minutes, but sitting there in the car in the storm made it feel like an eternity. So I clicked the garage door remote again just to see if maybe that would turn off the damn lights. No dice. Of course, it opened the damn door back up again. So I clicked the remote again to shut the door, and this time I decided to sit there and wait to see what happened with the stupid garage lights. I tried calling both Dad and Patti on their cell phones to ask them if the stupid light would go off by itself, but nobody answered. So I decided that I would just sit there for 5 whole minutes, and if the damn lights still wouldn't go off by themselves, then I would go in again and see if there was some kind of hidden secret switch I had to flip to turn the crap off. Finally, finally after exactly 5 minutes, *blink* the damn garage lights finally went off on their own, and me and Lilly could finally make our way home in the storm. The closer we got to home, the more the storm slacked off, thankfully. A little while after we got home, I turned on my laptop to check the news, and saw "SEVERE WEATHER ALERT" blasting on the headline. Uhh!!! Oh, well, at least we made it.
That brings me to yet another crappy thing. Remember how I mentioned in a recent post how we couldn't wait to go metal detecting at the beach to see what treasures we could find? Well, guess what? IT'S ILLEGAL TO GO METAL DETECTING IN PUBLIC PLACES IN GEORGIA. I am SO PISSED about it. We learned of this recently when we were at the beach, and Jamie was talking to one of his friends that happened to be there. Jamie just happened to mention to his friend that we were planning to do some metal detecting there soon, and Jamie's friend told him that the week before at that very beach, someone was metal detecting, and the sheriff came and kicked them out because of it. So I looked it up on the internet when we got home, and sure enough, it is strictly prohibited to do metal detecting in any kind of public park in the state of Georgia. UHH!!!!!!!!!! That really makes me MAD!!! I was really looking forward to it, and now we can't even do that! I am grateful, though, that we didn't have to learn about it the hard way, and it end up being us getting kicked out of somewhere for metal detecting. That would be awful.
Anyway, I'm just really sick of everything sucking lately. And the cherry on top for today is that the bunny chewed the entire nose off of one of Lilly's Barbie dolls that was laying in the floor, and Lilly is DISTRAUGHT over it, and screamed and wailed at the top of her lungs about it for several minutes straight. I promised her I would buy her a new one, and Jamie told her that we could make that Barbie "Bad Nosejob Barbie", or "Accident Barbie". Lilly was NOT amused.
I can't win for losin'! Dammit!
I do have one helpful tip to share, though, that I learned about from the cell-phone-in-the-toilet disaster. The man at the cell phone store told me about this, and I'll be danged if it didn't work. He told me that if your phone gets dunked in water, to open it up and take the battery out of it as quickly as possible. Also flip it open if it's a flip-phone, or slide it open if it has a slide-out keyboard. Basically open the phone up as much as possible. Then place the phone inside a ziploc bag of uncooked dry white rice (I only had brown rice, so I used it and it worked too). The rice absorbs all the water out of the phone so that the phone may actually work again, after it completely dries out. I think I had my phone in the bag of rice for maybe 2 days. I thought it was stupid and couldn't possibly work, but when I put the battery back in my phone, I couldn't believe that the phone worked again. I was able to get all my contact information off of it. One or two of the buttons weren't very responsive, but I could get around it. So I thought that trick was pretty amazing. Who knew? Rice?
So I'm glad that something semi-good came out of all the crap that's happened to me this week! Pass along this cell phone/rice trick to everybody you know, so that benefit may be gleaned from my misfortune, and make it all worthwhile!
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