Stop! Sabbatical time!

Okay, that's it. I'm officially going on sabbatical. Much of 2012 is going to be full of continuing education, development, writing, photoing, fine tuning, and relaxing. I thought I'd get all of that done this year. My brain is screaming to my heart right now, "Wrong, fool! Keep it goin'!" My heart wants a cookie for the pain.

We're in our new place in less than a month and there is still so much to organize and toss and pack. I have so much reading to do on entrepreneurship via some kick-ass resources, so much writing to do in general, so much photo work to do (ai yah, I need to make more time for that next year), so much resting to do to reinforce this whole wellness lifestyle, etc. My brain looks at everything, compartmentalizes life into neat little boxes, and gives the rest of me a punk attitude, like my body can do what it did when I was younger. (If only getting carded chronically could make my body younger. Sad face.) My body looks at my brain and gives it the stink eye. My heart just pounds because it can't decide which thing to take on first so settles on working on a few small things concurrently, and then it feels overwhelmed with looking at surrounding things to do and wishes for a cookie to appear. I'll still be blogging but the big website I have envisioned won't be up for a little while. Damn, I need to make the temporary site live... after finishing that... and also finish the holiday cards, which will be mailed next week since I had to order breast cancer stamps because my local post offices had none and I'm not waiting in any more long lines this year.

By the way, the best ideas I've had this month involved combining pumpkin spice and snickerdoodle mixes and using the cinnamon sugar topping on formed cookies before baking. They. Are. Ridiculously. Fantastic! And in my refrigerator. So I'm off to get a cookie. Because I can. And because I need it for my well being.

These giraffes cannot run 35 mph (56 kph)

First, a shout out to Lemuel J. Lott, for fixing my iPhone 3GS voicemail. Whoop whoop! I should've asked if he could repair the power button on the phone since that's been extremely wonky lately, but there's a local place that can fix it for fairly cheap with a 15 minute in person turnaround time. I've got to go there soon.

Nothing screams out Korean sauna
with fire sudatorium and food court
like a family of giraffes, right?

I've been curious about this family of giraffes for a few years, and my curiosity was peaked this summer when I drove by at night and noticed the festive giraffery. I took a few minutes out of my commute to snap this amazing marketing tool, and visited the King Spa website just now. Holy crap, this place looks awesome on the inside! Not what I'd expected.

I'm not surprised that this is in the Asian Trade District, but giraffes? Maybe it's the African connection to the Pyramid room they have, or something. Someone who visited it had some good things to say about her experience there. I may have to try this soon. After we finish moving across town. (OMG I loathe packing.) I'm kinda meh when it comes to Korean food but I love that the menu offers the mighty and noble corn dog.

Hopefully by then I'll have scored a full-time jobby job that I can do. I've been worrying about this since I left my last job due to health issues (yay discovery of having Sjogren's Syndrome), but there are plenty of things out there that I'm totally able to do without wearing myself out. Basic admin stuff, for the most part. (EDIT:  I really want to work full time again but still worry about my body crapping out from whenever the uber-fatigue hits. I truly don't know if I'll be able to but I'd love to find out. I'd love to also see about working more hours part time. I am all for that right now. Bills don't pay themselves. I digress.)

Thing is, I'm WAY overqualified to be a basic admin, and I've had no luck with applications for that and similar positions. Even applications for jobs at the level I was at have gone mostly nowhere. I've had three in person interviews since March. Three. Total. The few very considerate rejection notes I've received were nice, but I'm really tired of being frustrated with not bringing in a decent income. Being on UI (at Tier One federal level now, yay) has helped, but gah I'm so not used to not working! At least I've had nine months to recuperate from pushing myself way too hard for several years, with having Sjogren's but not knowing I've had it.

Speaking of jobbing, I am very grateful to a friend of mine for hooking me up with a job helping him and others. It's basically organizing and filing sheet music (a LOT of sheet music for a LOT of instruments), but it is craziness how scattered everything has gotten due to being too busy to file from doing lots of liturgies (services, for you non-Catholics) so I'm glad to help, even if only for five hours a week. I'm even more glad to get paid extremely well for filing, but I do have a music education degree plus spent five years working in liturgy at the diocesan level so I'm sure some of that compensation is for my expertise. It's so wonderful being back in music again, even though I've had no experience with orchestral anything aside from coordinating brass musicians, listening to music, and observing my husband practicing the violin a few years ago. Yay for learning a new job skill!

Chaos is swirling again

There's a lot going on right now that I don't have the time to go into, but I'm kinda nearly done with my website. Just have to process a few more photos, upload, change some coding, then make it live. It's nowhere where I'd like it to be but further development will have to wait until mid-2012 on account of packing and moving and jobbing and chillaxing and such as.

The power button on my iPhone is wonky again but I found a local place that does national repairs so I'm hitting that in the next few days. I'd much rather pay a lower cost for a replacement button and have a 15 minute turnaround for getting my phone back than the alternative of sending it away to Apple. This place has Apple certified technicians and is BBB accredited so I'm not worried.

I'm halfway through the annual Christmas mailing prep. I have 170 on for this year (same as last year) but with a few changes in people. So interesting how people float into and out of one's life.

I've finally updated my LinkedIn to better reflect what's on my resume. I've also made my Facebook page visible since I really need to get my personal brand going. (Hooray for a few of my friends liking it already!) It was fun doing Gate of Life at a local level, and I learned a lot of things through that over the years. I still haven't taken down the photo goods store since I've been a bit preoccupied, but I'll get to it after I do a new store with better pics under my name.

We got a deal from Death Star!

I've been a Death Star (see the logo) customer since February 2006. It is now December 2011. You would think that I'd get great customer service from them, but even one of their automated systems kicked me out plus told me to go to a retail store. I've been a bit annoyed, very understatedly.

Hubby and I both have an iPhone 3GS. Over 75 minutes, I attempted the hell to communicate with AT&T about transferring from the 550 minute a month plan (since we never use our minutes) to the 10 cent a minute paygo plan while keeping our data services. I've heard this is possible from the interweb plus from 3 of the reps I talked with today, even though this possibility is nowhere to be found on the AT&T website. This should be easy to accomplish, yes?

No. Not only no, but a booming resounding HELL NO all Moses and Ten Commandments and lightning from the top of Mount Olympus style.

The first call went well until there was no option to get to a customer service representative on the GoPhone side. I got booted out of the system because my wireless number wasn't in their system and because I did not have documentation needed for activating a new phone.

The second call sucked major ass because I could barely hear the person on the other line. (I actually giggled about calling about a phone issue while being on a line with horrid quality. I now know this was wrong. Giggling was soon replaced by thoughts of beheading and smiting, especially after many fake and obligatory apologies.) I was transferred to someone who could allegedly better help me, but that person was also difficult to hear, and ended up giving me the 800 number to the first person.

The third call was answered by a very friendly and helpful lady. She was genuinely apologetic and gave me two good numbers to call. Yay!

The fourth call ended with the same result as the first call, so I tried the second number given by Helpful Lady.

The fifth call featured me lying about having documentation and/or SIM cards and/or I don't know what else, just to try to get to a person on the GoPhone side. The automated system told me I'd have to go to an AT&T retail store and speak with someone there.

Seriously? The automated phone wench didn't have a human serviceperson to boot me to at all??

Have I mentioned that it feels so barbaric to use a land line and have to dial 1 before the 800??

The sixth call was answered by someone who sounded like Denzel. He was extremely helpful and knew exactly where I needed to be in the phone labyrinth. He also mentioned (unlike the other reps) that hubby's phone is actually still under contract and wouldn't be up until April. Well, alrightie then.

Denzel hooked me up with someone who was freaking incredible to talk with. (Benjamin Prius, I hope I didn't mangle the spelling of your last name. Mad props to you sir, and I hope you get lovely snow this weekend in Lubbock!) Apparently the iPhone is an exception to the GoPhone rules and doesn't count as a regular smartphone. Balls. After some chatting and some amazement on his part since he could see that I'd talked with a few people within the hour, he hooked me up with some better rates on plans not normally offered. The upshot is that we'll save $20 a month, which will help since we're planning to move across town in two months (aah!). I'd hoped to save $60 a month with getting the 10 cent a minute plan for both of us, but oh well. At least I tried and something good happened out of the ordeal.

Maybe in April when hubby's contract is up, we'll look at paygo again, but the iPhone 5 should be hitting about then (or news about it, anyway), so we'll see. Technically we could go paygo now, but I'd have to buy a different smartphone and he'd have to get a new phone too plus fork up the early termination fee. No thanks. We're both happy with our 3GS phones and use our computers way more for computery things anyway, but I'd still love a better phone cam. I could get that now with the 4S on a new contract but I'll wait. I'll be busy packing and jobbing and job looking and crashing so I might as well wait.

In other news for today, I'm still frustrated at not having my personal website finished. I'm streamlining the holiday card list and putting everything together for mailing. I finally got my certificate of creditable coverage from UHC so added that to my BCBSTX certificate and faxed them to Cigna today. Now they'll pay several of my doctors for working my pre-existing conditions plus pay for labwork (well, when I call everyone back with the all clear to refile the claims). It's been so annoying at trying to get this from UHC since like, oh, June. Of course, while cleaning while packing last night, I found the original one they sent to me in April in an unopened envelope, so that's very much a my bad and I feel utterly stupid for not realizing I've had it all this time!! I'm a day late for making sure our tags are registered but am glad there's a 5 day grace period. I was hoping to have already been to the local Tom Thumb (to do the tag thing) and be back home by now. I haven't even showered yet! Gah, it's 3:45 pm and I haven't even eaten lunch yet. I suppose I should do that next.

We got deathstar, we got deathstar....