Finally, finally, finally got around to opening an Etsy shop. I still have a few dozen finished bottles and over 100 empty ones sitting around, hence the shop. I need to add another dozen listings eventually, but finding the energy to photograph them, write up a description, create the actual listing… bah. They’re all priced so far at $7.99, which is basically cost: I don’t buy the bottles and the like in huge quantities, so between those, the seekrit liquid I use inside, and the PayPal/Etsy fees, I’m not even breaking even. But fuck, I don’t care; I want them out. To that end, I’ve created a coupon code for anyone interested: ICANHAS gets you 15% off (so bottles would be $6.80 plus shipping).

In other news, I can has yarn crafting! When I was but a tiny thing, my Aunt R taught me to knit and crochet. I was maybe five at the time. By seven, I’d completely forgotten, and have never relearned. I’ve always meant to; always wanted to. Whenever I’d stop at a Michael’s or Hobby Lobby or JoAnn’s, if I happened past the yarn, I’d make a mental note to buy the supplies and finally learn. Earlier this week I finally actually got around to it. I bought some yarn, a set of crochet hooks (2mm-10mm, aluminium because I hadn’t read up on the difference between materials re: hooks and needles yet; may have to pick up another set soon), a set of 9″ knitting needles (sz 1-15, bamboo, woo), and a “Knitting Accessories Set” thingie with a bunch of things I don’t know how to use but will apparently need at some point.

Because I am an idiot, I accidentally chose “Super Saver Shipping,” which I fucking hate. True to form with Super Saver, Amazon split the order into three parcels, each shipped separately. The yarn arrived yesterday; the knitting needles (and a Swiss Army knife I threw in on a whim) should arrive Thursday; the crochet hooks and a skein of yarn should arrive shortly after. So now I have yarn, but no tools with which to use said yarn yet. Being as I am, there’s no bloody way I’m going to go buy needles/hooks when I have $70 in them (I probably shouldn’t have bought full sets of them at first, but it was more cost effective and I am nothing if not frugal) coming this week. Until they arrive, I guess I’ll just look longingly at the yarn, dreaming about the mangled-yet-soft things to come.

Speaking of yarn, holy shit but yarn is more complicated than I’d ever imagined. I knew — vaguely — that it came in different weights, but acrylic versus wool, and the different type of wool… fucking hell. I eventually decided on acrylic to start with; I’m going to mangle the shit out of my first few projects, so why waste money on good yarn just yet?

Also, just based on the videos I’ve watched, me and my rheumatoid arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome think we’re going to be Continental knitters. English looks like it’d get painful pretty quickly.

And now back to stalking the tracking info.

Had a post-surgery follow-up today. I expected debridement and a general recap of how the surgery went.

The debridement went as it always does. One “chunk” of crusting was too big to remove, so he tried to break it up, which hurt like a motherfucker. He finally pushed it down/back, so I’ll either cough it up (and doesn’t that sound fun) or the daily irrigation will soften/break it up. Definitely hoping for the latter.

What I didn’t expect was to be told George had returned. Yep, the more insidious of thw two, good old inverted papilloma, had returned. It had been lurking behind and under Bjorn — the everted/exophytic papilloma — so it went undetected until the routine post-surgery biopsy was done. Most of what had grown out from the septum was actually inverted, which is highly unusual: exophytic is the one that usually grows outward from the sinus; inverted generally arises from the later wall of a sinus. George apparently decided to change thing up.

Neither I nor Dr F had expected this. When he’d seen the exophytic growth — which had been biopsied and confirmed as exo, not inv — he’d not been in a huge hurry to remove it because it doesn’t become malignant as inverted does — but now, as he says, “if I see it, I’m going to take it.”

This also means the “Whoo, inverted free for a full year!” thing is gone. There’s no way to tell when it came back, but it was definitely before the surgery (obviously). We’ve known about the exophytic growth since February 2011, so, who knows — it could have been there as far back as that.

So now my 50/50 is more like 70/30. It’s going to come back. It’s just a waiting game.

Everted I didn’t fear: it’s benign, grows outward, no malignant transformation. But inverted… inverted scares me. And now it looks like I’ll never be free of it.

I know many other people have it far, far worse than I do, but still, fuck this.

This is, hopefully, the last post in the Great Services Saga of 2011 (The first post is here and the second can be found here), because I’m now a fairly-happy U-Verse customer. Finally.

At the close of my last post, I was awaiting the 27th June installation date. The day arrived and around 2:45pm, I got an automated call from AT&T that my tech was running a little late, but that he’d be at my “unit” (townhouse/two-story apartment) within an hour. He (let’s call him “A”) arrived around 3:14pm, ready to get started. He looked around for some sort of “wiring box,” slightly worried that it might be outside (“if it’s outside, it’s probably locked, and you’d need complex maintenance to open it”). Thankfully, mine was inside, in my pantry. Next came the hunt for a suitable phone jack. Having had Comcast for the entire four years I’ve been here, I had no clue where they were (with Comcast, the main cordless base plugs into the modem, and the two satelitte bases just have power cords). A bit of hunting later and we discovered that, for some ridiculous reason we cannot discern, there are no jacks in my living room, but two — two! — in the kitchen. He decided to use one above the counter (behind the microwave, which I had to move. Fun times!), and told me he’d have to drill into the wall and put the modem et al in the front closet, which shares the wall. Uh, okay. Fine; whatever. Just get it done.

“A” continued to tinker with wires and then packed up his things, telling me he’d just need to “head down to the box” and that he’d be back in “20 or 30 minutes.” Cool. He left; I waited. When he returned, he stayed in his truck. For half an hour. When he stepped out, he was shaking his head. Uh-oh.

His first words as he entered? “We have a little problem.” The system wasn’t letting him “do anything” because the system had an installation date of 31st December, 2036. Basically, the system wouldn’t let him install U-Verse because it wasn’t the right day for it. I wanted to bash my head against the wall.

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So the Great Services Saga of 2011 continues apace. If you follow me on Twitter, you’re generally pretty up-to-date on this.

To recap: Comcast pissed me off once too often, tried (and failed) to get DirecTV, then decided to go with AT&T. They’ve given me nothing but problems, so I had Comcast reinstalled while AT&T had an “engineer” come out to do something-or-other. At the close of the last entry, I was waiting to call back to see if said engineer had showed up.

So! The 17th arrives and I call AT&T back. Yep, the engineer has been out, and we set up a new installation date for the 27th. All is well, right?

Except that no, it’s not. This afternoon I call again, just out of curiosity, to see if there had been any installation cancellations — I’d snagged one with my previous installation attempt. The person I spoke with promptly tells me that my order had been cancelled.

WAT.

Said person tells me they have “no record” of my call on the 17th. They say someone called me on the 13th and I never returned the call. First of all, when that person — Maria — called, I picked up; we spoke! For half an hour! Then, after some “digging,” he “found” the record of the call, but that someone had called on the 20th, to tell me that the 27th was not a possible installation date, but that I hadn’t returned the call. That, of course, is a lie: I received exactly seven phone calls yesterday, and each was from a person I know. Not one — that is zero, zilch, zip, nada! — call from anyone else. (Which means I was lied to by yet another AT&T rep. That brings us up to three blatant lies.)

Said person — let’s call him Alex (because I can’t remember his name) — then rescheduled my installation. The 27th, however, was no longer possible; the “best (he) could do” was the 29th. Oh, fucking fine, whatever, I don’t care. Then Alex tells me he’ll transfer me to retention; after all the problems, he thinks I “deserve some sort of compensation, maybe a credit on the first bill.” Cool, right?

The retention rep, let’s call him Demitri (because that’s his damn name), is a snotty little thing and informs me they can’t “do anything” until I have services installed. Fair enough, I say; I thought as much, but when he wanted to transfer me, what was I going to say? For some reason, Demitri decides to transfer me to “Disconnection,” which, unlike retention, may be able to “do something.” (Retention and Disconnection? How many levels of let-me-go hell does AT&T have?)

When I’m transferred to Disconnection, the rep — Brian, since I can’t remember his name, either — first tells me he “still sees an engineering issue.” I try to be polite and nice to CS reps, since my issues are not their fault personally, but I almost blew a gasket at this point. Never rose my voice or cursed, but momentarily lost the ability to speak for all my rage. Every since rep since Angela on the 17th had told me that issue had been totally and unequivocally resolved, and now another rep tells me it might not be? Brian puts me on hold for 16 minutes and returns with good news: not only is the engineering problem solved (“someone just forgot to remove that note from your account”), but I can, in fact, get installation on the 27th, not the 29th. Unfortunately, all he can do is add movie channels for three months; if, after everything’s installed, I call back, I can be transferred to billing, and they can credit my account or “offer something else.”

More platitudes and apologies, and I’m off the phone.

So… the 27th, from 1-3pm. Huz…zah? I’ve been burned by AT&T so many times already — and I don’t even have the damn services yet! — that I’m hesitant to rejoice. I told Brian I’d call back Monday morning, and that if anything was amiss I’d personally hunt him down (jokingly, of course!).

If it weren’t for the awesome deal ($30/month less than Comcast), I’d just give up. As it is, I’ll wait until the 27th and hope I don’t have to go on a rampage at the AT&T offices downtown. (And yes, I know where they are. :D)

To say that I’ve been having cable-ish issues lately would be the understatement of the year. I’ve finally gotten things sorted out for the moment, but the last two weeks of Cable Hell bear documenting.

My troubles with Comcast are hardly new. I’ve had Comcast off-and-on for about a decade (four years at one house, two at an apartment, and four here), and they’ve always given me something to complain about. It wasn’t until I moved to where I am now, though, that they truly started giving me grief. In the past four years, they’ve double-charged me seven different times (usually double-dipping, but sometimes charging me six times in one day for the same amount, for the same bill) and have three times credited the wrong account (once to someone with my same first name and last initial, the other two times to people with no connection to me I could see). Time and again, they’d assure me the latest issue was a fluke, that it it would never happen again — until it did.

May 18th was the last straw. That lovely morning I woke up to find my internet service disconnected. Not “out,” mind, but disconnected: every URI/URL I tried to visit led me to Comcast.com. I phoned customer service and an overly-cheerful rep happily confirmed that they’d disconnected my service, just as requested.

Wait, what?

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