Still not feeling well. Drove my oldest to school, came home and slept until almost noon. Realized I probably screwed up my taxes because I wasn't alert enough to focus on the details of what I was doing. May have to refile, might not, still need to do state, trying not to let it get to me. Last night I asked the girls to clean out the fridge. Apparently I never explained that cleaning out the fridge means removing every container and examining the contents. I tried to temper my exasperation and likely failed. Called my mom today to apologize for being so out of it yesterday. Told her I loved her and thanked her for teaching me how to cook.
Conversation went well, some day I'd like to get to the bottom of why it's so difficult to chat with my mother. She knits, I knit, but she doesn't want to go to a knitting group or class. She says she's a lone wolf and I get that, but it's frustrating to hear as the child of parents who dragged me everywhere when I was a kid whether I liked it or not.
*****
I wrote that yesterday and never posted it because I got distracted by phone calls and hanging out with the girls. I'm feeling better than I did and will attempt to go to work tomorrow barring an unforeseen setback. I'll have to wake up early so that may be tough, but I think I can make it through an entire day at work. I also have to work the Health Fair on Saturday. There's a certain irony about missing a wellness event due to illness, but hey, I'm human too. I'm relieved that the illness was not worse nor did it entail a particularly long recovery period. I credit this to taking myself to bed immediately and severely limiting myself as far as daily activities. As a result we need groceries, the entire place needs to be cleaned, but I know I'll get to these things when I am able.
I can tell I'm healing since my mood is better. Even seeing a bill from AT&T for $224 dollars couldn't totally dampen my mood. Being the proactive person that I am I immediately called Verizon to see if I could get a network extender. The first guy I spoke with said that I could, but it would run me $200-$250. He was dubious about Verizon waving that fee for someone who wasn't an active customer, but I didn't have anything better to do so I thought I'd try talking to whoever was in charge of customer care. Fortunately I met a really cool guy who was determined to work with me and my situation. I might need to go out and buy a longer cable, but I may not.
The upshot of it is I now have to decide if I want to keep paying AT&T $26 something a month for prepaid service that works well at my place, or bite the bullet, order the network extender from Verizon, and pay $55+ each month for postpaid service with data. I'm at the point where I would do just about anything to get away from AT&T, the idea of data is nice as well, but doubling my phone bill when it just dropped is not especially appealing either. I think I'll probably go back to Verizon since I'm thinking about buying some of their stock. I own shares of other companies in a Dividend Reinvestment Plan and am looking for ways to diversify my holdings. Another company I'm thinking about is WE Energies, I think both of them offer an IRA option, but I'd have to back and double check since I looked at a lot of companies today.
A cool thing I did for my kids that I wish I would have done long ago is transfer a single share of stock over to them. I'm only permitted one transfer per account so I couldn't give each of them the same stock. I'm hoping that the transfer limit is per day so the girls can get a share in each of the companies I own, but if not, no big deal. They weren't expecting it, don't know about it, and if they want to complain about it I will gladly take the share back from them and add it to my pile. One thing I'm particularly proud of is never having touched that stock. There were times when I thought about it, perhaps times when I could have or should have, but I never did and that's an awesome feeling.
Going back to AT&T for a moment, prepaid customers can't get through to a live representative and the chat function on their website only works for people with postpaid accounts. They probably think they're saving money this way, but if they were a little smarter they might see that chatting with prepaid people gives them a chance to sell them on postpaid services. Verizon was willing to talk to a lowly prepaid customer and they're going to get my business back, AT&T has a lot to learn, but they probably don't care since I'm just one of however many billions there are on the planet. Two people I know used to work for AT&T, both said that at the end of their careers things were so bad it was one of the worst experiences they had at a job.
*****
Okay, apparently this is where I'm stopping today.
Until next time,
J