Running Amuck

Well after visiting 5 stores, waiting in line for 4 hours, and anticipating several more hours of complaining to AT&T about their inability to update their systems properly which caused me to pay full price at the Apple store, I am now the proud owner of an iPhone 3G.  Was it worth the wait?  Hell yes!!

I’m still playing with it and finding out just how much it can do, but I will definitely not get tired of having a mini computer in my purse.  My only complaint so far is battery life - only 1 day with relatively little usage.  I’ve heard that you get better standby life if you turn off 3G while it’s not in use.  Maybe I can find a way to make that a shortcut on the main page.

My grandfather’s funeral was, in a nutshell, fucked up.  Not sad, not somber, but fucked up.  Basically my grandmother was absolutely thrilled that she was no longer his wife.  To drive the point home, she wore a hot pink floral top with white pants to the funeral and demanded that no one leave flowers on his grave.  Um, yeah.  Other bizarre highlights included a man having a heart attack DURING the funeral service, right after an 80 year old woman sang the most painful rendition of “Jerusalem” that I’ve ever heard in my life.  The pastor decided to continue on with his sermon while 911 paramedics put him on a stretcher in the back of the room. 

My mom was beyond ready to leave, since dealing with her mother while she was trying to grieve was obviously not the easiest of things.  Luckily my stepdad got to use the company jet to fly us out there and back, so we left immediately after the funeral was over.  And for those of you who have never had the privilege of flying on a private jet, let me tell you, if you have the means I highly recommend it.  It is the only way to fly.

Cola is back home and doing well.  She’s just as vocal as she was before the procedure, but I think part of that is because she spent 5 days cooped up in a cage with only 30 minutes of human interaction each day, so she’s a little pissed off.  Now that she’s home we aren’t allowed to let her sit on our laps for more than 15 minutes since she’s still radioactive.  Other than that we just have to make sure to keep her poop contained outside.  That’s right.  My cat has radioactive poop.

My grandfather passed away last night.  My mom and her two brothers were by his bedside when he died.  I’ll be flying out to Washington later this week for the funeral, probably Thursday or Friday.

I’m looking forward to seeing my mom since she’s been up there for almost two months now.  She was still pretty upset when I talked to her this morning, but I think she’s relieved that there’s now an end in sight to when she can go home and resume her own life. 

Originally my plans for Friday consisted of getting up really early and waiting in line for a new iPhone.  I guess Marcus will just have to buy my phone for me :-)  He’ll also have to pick up Cola, since I’m taking her in for her actual procedure on Tuesday (the last appointment was yet another completely unnecessary and expensive exam, telling me exactly what I already knew) and she should be ready to go home by Friday.

I guess I’ll start this post with a cat update.  Casey is doing ok, but she’s eating less than she was a few weeks ago.  As far as I can tell she’s still as happy as can be (despite leaving poop and urine all over the floor every morning… sigh…), but she’s starting to look a bit more ragged.  I got a call from the vet last week letting me know that Cola’s thyroid test results came back.  Normal feline levels: 2.0.  Cola’s levels: 9.9.  Yikes.  Definitely hyperthyroidism.

Luckily there is a cure for Cola, albeit an expensive one.  Thankfully my mom has stepped in and graciously offered to pay the bills on this one.  Basically hyperthyroidism is caused by a tumor in the thyroid.  They can inject radioactive iodine into the thyroid area, which kills the overactive cells but doesn’t damage the normal ones.  Cola stays in the hospital for 5 days (since she’ll be radioactive during that time - how cool is that?), and then she’ll come home and supposedly be good as new.  No more meowing all the time, no more running around the house like a crazy cat, no more irritability.  She might actually be a normal cat!  I take her in tomorrow for the procedure.

In other news, my grandfather is dying.  He had a melanoma that spread into his lymph nodes and throughout the rest of his body.  My mom has been up there with him for the last month, feeding him his pain pills every two hours and basically waiting on him hand and foot.  She hasn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep in over a month and spends her days taking care of a man who was never very kind to anyone in his life.  My mom deserves a fucking medal, seriously.  I don’t know anyone else who would be willing to make that kind of sacrifice for someone.

It’s been interesting timing, knowing that a relative of mine is essentially waiting to die while I have been grappling with my decision to essentially wait for Casey to die.  While I understand the scope of the issue isn’t the same (a human dying is a significantly bigger deal than a cat dying), I can’t help but compare the two situations.  However, there’s one difference that I can’t get past.  I get to decide when Casey goes - when I recognize that her quality of life has gone down, she doesn’t have to suffer and wait it out.  My grandfather, on the other hand, doesn’t have that choice.  He is waiting to die, constantly medicated and confused, embarrassed of the burden he is placing on everyone around him.  It begs the question, why is putting an animal to sleep the humane choice, but doing it to a human is wrong?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating that euthanasia is always the right course of action.  It’s just something that’s been on my mind.  If you were dying, and you knew you were dying, and your entire life consisted of being drugged and waiting to die, would you want to live like that?  Or would you want someone to put an end to it?  Is it wrong of me to hope that my grandfather dies quickly, both for his sake and my mom’s? 

I’ve never experienced a death in my family, at least not anyone that i was closely related to.  In all honesty, his passing doesn’t upset me since I never really knew him that well.  I’m more concerned for my mom.  I’ll be going up to Washington for the funeral when he passes, which according to my mom will be in the next week or two.  I haven’t been to that part of Washington since I was about 5 years old, so that should be interesting.

What do you guys think about the whole euthanasia concept?  Maybe this topic of conversation is a little depressing/morbid for a blog, but if you have comments feel free to share.

It’s been almost 3 weeks since we moved, and we’re still dealing with fallout from all the various pieces of moving that have gone awry.  In fact, Marcus and I realized yesterday that not a single thing has gone right with our move so far.  Case in point:

• Austin Bargain Movers sucks, as mentioned before.  I still need to call the manager back and figure out how to get paid for the damages to my property.
• Time Warner never got my initial request to transfer my internet and cable service.  On moving day, I was told that the soonest anyone could come out to turn on my internet was the following Tuesday.  After a strongly worded email (see, it does work!) I got a call from the supervisor who managed to move up the date to that Saturday.  Still late, but at least something positive was done.
• My previous apartment has still not been rented, so I’m paying double rent.  The complex has decided to hike up the rent for that apartment to over $1000 a month (I paid $865), so I don’t see it getting rented anytime soon
• Marcus transferred his utilities bill to the new place, or so we thought.  Turns out they shut off electrity at his old place but forgot to turn it on at the new one.  Thankfully our electricity didn’t get shut off, but our landlord did get a bill that we now have to pay.
• USPS totally fucked up my change of address form.  They stripped out all of the address and apartment information on my request, so it thinks that I used to live on “Mopac.”  After calling the Oak Hill post office several times and contacting the 1-800 number (which just told me to call Oak Hill), I finally went to the post office yesterday and filled out yet another change form, which won’t go into effect for another 10 days.  In the meantime, all of my mail (including my stimulus check) is being returned to sender.
• Since moving into our new place, we have had to take about 5 work-from-home days to allow various contractors and plumbers in to fix the various problems with the condo (leaking sink, leaking dishwasher, messed up blind installation, etc.).  Luckily we love the new place despite the problems, it’s just annoying to keep missing work because of it
• Our brand new refrigerator is making sickly and whining noises that don’t sound… normal.  I need to call GE and see if they can send someone out to check it out.
• A stray cat that lives in my new neighborhood attacked Casey one night, which we only discovered after one of us stepped in her poo and tracked it into the house.  We went back to see where it was, and found tufts of Casey’s fur all over the place, which means she literally shit herself as she was being attacked.  So now she can only go outside while we supervise, until we find a way to capture the stray cat that keeps showing up in our backyard.

In addition to all that joy, I’ve spent about $1000 in emergency vet bills in the last two weeks.  Long story short, Casey is in renal failure, and I don’t have the funds to support the level of care she needs to keep her healthy.  After spending the night in the animal hospital and getting fluids she is much more energetic and seems much better, but it is only a matter of time before her kidneys fail completely.  I made the difficult decision to stop vet care for her and make her as happy as possible until she stops eating again, at which point I will have to put her to sleep :(  She loves to be outside so we were hoping to make her an outdoor cat in our backyard, but the damn stray cat has ruined that plan.  Additionally, now Cola (my other cat) also has a UTI, but the antibiotics aren’t working and we don’t know what else is causing it. 

Marcus and I haven’t been sleeping well and are both exhausted pretty much all the time.  I know that eventually things will turn around and get back to normal, but right now we’re having a hard time dealing with all of the moving and animal crises.  I guess that’s what happens when you make a post about how wonderfully perfect your life is - it’s just inviting bad things to happen!  So maybe this post about how life kinda sucks right now will turn it around again

In case you’re not in the mood to read a really long post, here’s the key information you need to know for this post:

Never, under any circumstance, hire Austin Bargain Movers for your move. 

Moving day was Thursday.  We pretty much stayed up all night packing (and got to witness the crazy hail/tornado/storm situation all night long).  Around 9:30 the next morning I got a call from the movers saying that they would be late due to closed roads from the weather.  This was understandable - I had tried to get bagels that morning and the shops were either closed due to power outages or the roads were shut down due to giant trees strewn about the streets.  It was a disaster zone.  Anyway, our move was supposed to start at noon, and it was now scheduled to start around 1:00.  Gene, the manager I suppose, said “the movers are only loading the truck right?”  To which I replied “No, I had specifically requested that they both load and unload the truck.” (I had rented a Uhaul to save money on the hourly rate).  He said ok and hung up the phone.

We got a call from the movers around 1:15 saying they couldn’t find the apartment.  Turns out good ol’ Gene didn’t give them the right address, and also forgot to inform them that it was both loading and unloading (even though this is what I had requested in the first place).  So the movers show up and start the clock at 1:20pm, after making sure I understood that the rate is by the hour and checking to see if I was under any time constraints. 

2 hours pass.  The truck is only half full.  (Keep in mind that I have a 1 bedroom 1 bath apartment, and the last time I moved across town 6 months ago it took 3 hours to load the truck, drive it across town, unload the equipment and assemble all furniture).  At this point the movers inform me that they do not have any pads or straps and they don’t know how to pack the truck without this equipment.  Their website, www.austinbargainmovers.com, explicitly says that the movers provide dollies, pads, and tools for every labor-only move.  So Marcus goes to Lowes and buys them the straps they need to pack the truck, while I start unpacking boxes to find blankets to use as pads to protect our stuff.

3 hours pass.  The truck is still not loaded.  The workers are sitting idle in the truck.  One is talking on his cell phone, the other is just standing around.  The idle worker happens to glance up and notices that I am staring at him, probably with an icy expression on my face (I rarely know what faces I’m making, but I’ve been told that when I’m pissed off it is painfully obvious).  He flinches, then starts running back to the apartment to pick up more furniture.  THIS is what I’m paying $50 an hour for???

4 hours pass.  The truck is FINALLY loaded and we start to drive to Marcus’s house.  Because they were late to start and took so much freaking time to load the truck, we are now driving in 5:00 rush hour traffic.  We get to Marcus’s place, and they have to rearrange the truck again because these movers have no spatial skills and have no idea how to properly load a truck.

5 hours pass.  Movers are still reorganizing the truck.

6 hours pass.  Movers “finish” at Marcus’s place, leaving half of our belongings at his house because they haven’t figured out how to properly load the truck and can’t fit everything.  At one point, both movers are sitting idle while Marcus is packing the truck for them.  For reference, I rented a 24′ truck that is designed to hold up to 4 bedrooms.  I have a 1/1 apartment, and Marcus has about half the amount of stuff that I have because he’s lived with roommates for a long time and they had all the furniture.  The fact that the movers can’t fit this stuff into the huge truck means that they have no idea what they’re doing.

7 hours pass and we finally arrive at our new home.  At this point Marcus and I start discussing what is happening here, and we realize that these movers are either the worst we’ve ever encountered, or they know what they’re doing and are deliberately moving as slow as possible to hike up the hourly rate.  I can barely restrain my fury.  Movers start to unload.

8 hours pass.  Still unloading the truck.  We notice that they are taking all of our furniture and placing it on the wet lawn before they bring it inside.  My fury is building exponentially at this point.  It is now 9:30pm.

9 hours pass.  Still unloading the truck.  One of the workers has stopped working entirely and sits in the truck while the other one slowly loads a dolly and brings the boxes in one at a time (ignoring our requests to put the designated bedroom/office boxes upstairs).

10 hours pass.  Movers have finally emptied the truck.  No furniture is assembled.  Almost all of my tables/desks have signifnicant damage because the movers did not have pads and did not know how to load the truck.  There are holes in the corner of our upstairs wall because they were careless when moving our furniture.  It is 11:30 at night (keep in mind, we stayed up all night packing and are exhausted).  I write them a check for $225, which is the equivalent of 4 hours of work plus the trip fee, as I am fuming and appalled at the terrible service.  We say that we will not pay any more until we speak to the manager.

They call Gene, who starts YELLING AT ME for not calling him and letting him know sooner that the movers were not moving quickly enough.  He says that I agreed to the hourly rate and had to pay the full amount.  I reminded him that his website said the movers would bring the necessary equipment and that they were unprepared.  His response: “That doesn’t matter!!!  You have to call and confirm that you want us to bring equipment for a local move!”

At this point I lose it.  All sweet and reserved aspects of my personality go out the window.  I am not putting up with this guy’s bullshit.  I let him have it, telling him exactly how unacceptable the moving service is, the fact that his movers were working at a snail’s pace and deliberately sitting idle until they noticed that we were staring at them, that our property was damaged and they didn’t even finish the job after 10 hours.  Every time he came back at me with a retort, I shut him down cold until he started backpedaling, stuttering, and basically had no ground to stand on.  It was glorious.  Unfortunately, the phone died while we were talking, so I didn’t get a chance to truly unleash my fury.  We gave the movers the check and said that they could either take this check or take nothing at all.  They left with my check.

It is now midnight.  We take the truck back to Marcus’s place and load the rest of the stuff ourselves.  We drive back and unload.  It is now 1:30am, and we still have to return the truck, which we got on the other side of Austin.  We drive back and return the truck.  We also go and pick up the cats, who have been sitting in an empty apartment for 12 hours now and Casey has not received the medicine she is supposed to get at 10:00pm.

We arrive home at 2:30am.  At this point we go upstairs and realize that none of the beds are assembled, so we start to do that.  We also have to start filtering through boxes to find our bedding, since the movers didn’t organize any of that like we asked.  We finally get to sleep at 3:30am.

The next day I got a call from Gene.  He asked to talk to Marcus, which made me laugh on the inside because I think he was trying very hard to avoid talking to me after our little chat the night before.  He basically started begging for us to pay an additional 2.5 hours.  I refused, and told him that this was the worst move I’ve ever experienced and I won’t pay any additional money for the level of service that we received.  He said he needed to talk to the owner and would call me back.

He called Marcus directly a few hours later, and asked him to give them 2.5 extra hours.  Guess he was trying to play both sides and see if he could squeeze some extra money out of us.  Marcus thankfully stood his ground and said he would have to discuss with me to see if we thought that was reasonable.

We put together a list of things that went wrong with the move, the time we had to spend fixing their mistakes, and the damages done to our property.  After assessing all of this work, we determined that they actually owe me several hundred dollars based on how much property was damaged.  After talking to our lawyer, he said that we had a case and that I should cancel my check immediately.  We are still waiting to talk to Gene and discuss this, but we are prepared to take him to court if necessary. 

It is now my personal goal to prevent this terrible moving company from ever ruining someone else’s move again.  I’m filing an official complaint with the BBB and TxDot (which all movers have to be registered with).  I am searching for every online movers review site and giving them a bad review.  If you know of any review sites that I haven’t covered yet, please let me know so I can post there as well.  No one should ever have to experience the hell that we went through with Austin Bargain Movers.

I don’t believe I can recall the last time things in my life were working out so perfectly.  Things just seem to be falling into place at every turn.  Check it out:

1. Over the last month or so I have become a real estate hunting machine.  I’ve been scouring the internet for available apartments, condos, townhomes, and houses for rent in an area that’s close to our new office.  After viewing quite a few really nice apartments, but not being completely sold on any of them, I decided to contact a realtor about a property that had been catching my eye online all week.  On Saturday, Marcus and I went to see the place, and instantly fell in love. 

It’s a 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath townhome condo tucked away just south of 183 and Mopac on a pretty little cul-de-sac.  The entire place has been completely redone with an all new gourmet kitchen, new cabinetry and appliances, updated bathrooms, and great flooring throughout the house.  It even has its own small backyard/patio area that is completely maintained by the owners.  By the time we saw the second story, we were asking for an application.  We had the paperwork filled out and the security deposits procured by Monday. 

The only potential snag in the process was the credit check.  Marcus had a bit of trouble in the dot com era, which pretty much destroyed his credit.  Despite building it up over the last five years, we weren’t sure that he would be approved.  On the other hand, I have stellar credit, so we were hoping that any doubts the owners had with his application would be quelled by my good ratings.  As it turns out, we had one of the strongest applications the realtor has seen in a long time.  On Wednesday, we got a call saying that we were approved and the condo was ours.

To add to the happiness, Marcus found out on Thursday that his current duplex had been leased early, which meant that he would get out of his lease early and not have to pay any double rent.  The only item left to straighten out is getting out of my own lease, which I intend to take care of today.  Hopefully our good luck continues and my current unit will be leased quickly.

2. After a painfully long two months of dealing with Casey’s urinary tract infection woes (which I believe are now kidney infection woes), the vet finally figured out the antibiotics she really needed and got them in this week.  After three days of being on the new medicine, she is like a brand new cat.  She is more energetic, more affectionate, and overall happier and healthier.  I can’t imagine how miserable she has felt having a urinary/kidney infection for two months, but at least now I know she is healing and feeling better (and will hopefully stop peeing on my floor in the near future).

3. At the end of May, both Molly and Rachel will be coming to Austin!!!!  This will be the first time that the three of us have hung out since Molly’s wedding, which was about two and a half years ago.  Thanks to the new living arrangements, I now have enough room to host both of them comfortably in my own place.  That Friday night is officially going to be our “girls’ night out,” and I can’t wait!  I’ve definitely missed them both and I’m REALLY looking forward to hanging out with them and showing off my new place!

4. Did I mention that Marcus and I are completely smitten and moving in together in less than three weeks?  Even though this is one of the biggest relationship milestones that either of us have experienced, it just seems like the most natural and “no-big-deal” thing in the world.  No doubts, no worries, just complete excitement about what’s about to come.

Life is good.

Normally filing my taxes is a relatively easy and somewhat exciting process.  I tell the government how much I made, and then they send me a big fat check!  This year, however, was a very different story.  Between working two salaried jobs (three if you count the fact that I went back to Loopone in November as a project manager) and the contract work that I did, doing my taxes was much more of a headache than I’ve ever experienced before.

Now luckily I was smart enough to know that I was going to owe taxes this year and had more than enough saved up in the bank for my final check.  However, there were a few things that I wasn’t prepared for that caught me off guard.  Here are a few things that I wish I had known before filing my taxes as a self-employed individual:

1. If you work anywhere other than your house, driving to your place of work is tax deductible.  BUT, you have to make sure to document all of your mileage in writing, and also document the total mileage the car has traveled in a year to calculate the percentage of time that the car is being used for business purposes.  This is probably the only thing that’s going to potentially trigger a nasty audit for me - I can prove that I drove to the office, but I didn’t have the documents in writing.

2. If you work from your house and have a dedicated room for work (like a home office for example), the money you pay in rent/mortgage for that specific square footage is also tax deductible.  But you have to prove that the area it is ONLY used for business purposes.  In other words, you can’t deduct working from your couch because that’s also a personal use room.  Also, if you rent a space for working, like a hotel if you have to commute a lot, that can be deducted as well.  Expenses like food items while working can also be deducted with proper documentation.

3. If you are self-employed, you need to make estimated tax payments once per quarter.  I didn’t know how to do this, so I didn’t do it at all.  However, if you earned most of your income near the end of the year (like me) and withheld taxes near the beginning of the year (like me), you can count your withheld taxes as actual payments and reduce your tax penalty.  The form is a major bitch to fill out (took me 2-3 hours with all my paperwork sitting in front of me and referencing the IRS examples), but it reduced my tax penalty from $375 to $38.  Huzzah.

4. Anything you use for a job (like a laptop) is deductible.  Again, you’ll have to designate how often it is used for business purposes and how often it is used for personal things.  I was able to deduct a lot of the cost of my laptop since I bought it specifically for contract work.

I’m sure there are other things that would have been nice to know beforehand, but at this point I’ve blocked them out.  I’m just happy to have my taxes finally out of the way.  All that’s left is to send it via certified mail.  One gripe I have is that ground service for DHL, Fedex, or UPS is not an IRS-approved method of mailing a tax return.  Even though the IRS office I’m sending it to is in Austin and would get there just as quickly on ground as an expensive overnight service would.  Grr. 

Sorry for the seemingly terminal absence from the blogosphere.  I’ve been busy doing the whole life-living thing and haven’t had a lot of time for blogging.  Without further ado, here are some life updates:

 I’ll get the bad stuff out of the way first.  In the past six months I’ve taken my cat to the emergency room twice and to the vet so many times I’ve lost count.  She’s had recurring urinary tract infections, which I discover each time by finding bloody urine all over the floor.  After several rounds of antibiotics, she’s not getting better.  It’s looking like she has some kind of kidney failure.  I have to finish up this round of antibiotics before we can run any more tests (I’ve had to force feed her pills twice a day for the last month).  I’m trying hard not to think negatively, but I’m reaching a point where I have to start seriously considering when to draw the line and decide how much of this stuff is too much.  Until then, I’m just hoping that these antibiotics might clear up whatever’s messing with her kidneys.

Enough with the nasty news, now on to bigger and more exciting things.  Like moving!  I’ve been back at Loopone as a project manager for about six months now, and in that time they have gone through a major restructuring.  We have a new CEO and a new boss above the CEO, and because we’re supposed to double our employees in the next six months, we will be moving to a new office.  The location isn’t set in stone yet, but it sounds like it’s likely to be just north of the bridge on 360 and 2222.

Now, normally I was kick and scream about how much I fucking hate rush hour on 360, but the timing on this works out perfectly.  See, there’s this apartment complex that I absolutely fell in love with when I was apartment shopping last time, but the one bedrooms were way out of my price range.  It’s literally like a half a mile from where the new office would be, and super nice (condo spec, great amenities, attached garage, etc.).  And as it turns out, my current apartment complex has a pretty lenient policy on breaking leases (I only pay for the unit until they re-lease it, no other fees).

At the same time, Marcus’s lease ends at the end of June, which is the same time frame that the office is moving.  And since we’re two crazy kids in love, we thought, “Hey, why don’t we move in together to that place that’s close to the new office?”  And so that’s the current plan.  No work commute, and co-habitation, a pretty major first for the both of us.  We’re still waiting to hear where the office is officially going to be before we make any final decisions on location, but I think we’re both pretty set on this apartment in particular. 

 So that’s the major life update.  Time to finish up my taxes and then maybe play a little Guitar Hero.  Until next time!

This year’s first post is brought to you by the letter B, in honor of my most recent test to prove that I am, in fact, a human and not a robot:

That’s right people. Boners. Happy 2008!

As I mentioned in my last post, I want to spend some time looking back on the last year and remembering what I have experienced and what I learned from it all.  To facilitate this, I’ve come up with a life lesson learned in each month.  I’ll dedicate a post to each. 

December: It’s ok to ask for help
January: Quitting does not make you a failure
February: Sometimes it’s ok to cry
March: Mediocrity is the bane of my existence
April: Always follow your dreams
May: Life is only as good as you make it
June: Exploring the world puts life in perspective
July: Without a purpose you feel unsettled
August: Money isn’t everything
September: Don’t ignore a red flag
October: Breaking up is hard to do
November: I can only be responsible for myself