Three Lousy Things Happened Yesterday
Thursday, Aug. 21, 2003

Termite Bonding Is Expensive

The other day when I was washing my car, I leaned into the house and said to Aisai, �I don�t remember getting hassled by the termite bonding pirate this year.� Aisai responded because we didn�t deal with him. Our contract with him is up and we�re free to go elsewhere. And good thing too since he never seemed to keep paperwork, treated the house for something totally different, would try to bill us twice, etc etc.

Aisai called Cooks and they said that it�d be $1100 for an initial treatment and then $56 every three months. Yikes. She then called Orkin, same song, but now $120 every three months. I complained around the office and Tboss told me to call Terminix. I did and they seem to be the cheapest, kinda. They�re who knows how much for initial, but Terminix Dan says he�ll be lower than both Cooks and Orkin, and then it�s $200 a year for the termite bonding. Sounds good, but that $200 per year is about the same at the $56 per quarter of the Cooks. But, we�re both despondent about it since we didn�t expect to spend this money. Money, that currently, we don�t have.

Sick Leave Abuse Algorithm Says You Suck

When I got back from 3.5 hrs of lame, lame, fieldwork in 98 degree heat, Tboss came and sat down in one of the guest chairs in my office. Crap. That means something�s really up. Well, last year it seems I used 81.5 hrs of sick leave. Though I accrue it a little faster than that, we�re only allowed to take a certain amount of sick leave without doctor�s excuses for it until the computer flags us as deadbeats. I was flagged and Tboss wanted to let me know.

This didn�t help my stress level, but I was able to swing by Dr. Conway�s office on the way home, and she�s having her 40th birthday based on all the plastic crows and the sign out front, and I picked up a record of all the times that I payed a copay and why.

Last year I had bronchitis around the 20th of January and the flu in early November. With that paperwork and the immunization at UAB and a dentist visit, I took the 81.5 and turned it into 30.3. The deadbeat line is 72 hrs.

A Spammer Used My Old Geocities Address To Spam From

And I know that he didn�t really spam from that address, not only because geocities addresses can�t actually send email, but also because yahoo assured me that the header was forged. Well, that�s great but I�m still getting tons of bouncebacks. The good part, it seems, is that there was only one mailing using my email address. Seems my alter ego was hawking prescription drugs sans prescription delivered overnight. Depending on what spam filter was used, the email got either a 38 or a 18, where 5 was enough to filter it, on the spam scale.

I concerned me since I can�t make that address stop forwarding to my yahoo address since yahoo and geocities are one. And I�m fairly ensconced into the yahooness these days. I do have my knology account, but I�d really not want to use a real account on my real ISP to email.

Which brings us to the irony that I use webmail so I can cut n� run to avoid too much spam, but I�m not wanting to cut n� run. In fact, there are some places where they still think my email address is at hotmail. That�s the address that shows if I�m posting on a newsgroup, but hotmail cancelled that account years ago. So I wonder how much spam bounces off that.

I need to tell about my redecorating weekend�but I don�t feel like it now.