Home now! Good weekend, but not in a way we had anticipated. More words coming later; I’ve got a date with some cats and laundry. Hooray!

(title is a lyric from ‘dimitri mendeleev’ by astronautalis – give it a listen here)

My week has been extremely tiring, but I don’t want to complain anymore. I’ve been louder about the bad than the good, and that’s a depressing way to live – so in the spirit of being the person I want to be, here is the awesome side of things that have happened this week:

• I had Monday off to go to the PNE, but the rain changed our plans. Instead, I worked from home and got a lot done while totally naked, and saved the vacation day to use another time
• .. like this coming Monday, because I won two gate and ride passes to the PNE courtesy of London Drugs‘ awesome Twittering!
• My hard drive died dead, but people have given me tons of suggestions on how to recover some or all of the data so there is still hope that my blackmail-padded retirement fund can live again
• I sold a bunch of old things for phat cash that will be my spending money in London. It was a random decision with a relatively quick follow up and a surprising pay off, and a very unexpected boost to my UK Trip Fund
• We’re going to PAX tomorrow! In addition to three days of nerdgasms, I get to visit my favourite Americans and drag Ed to the Lego store in Bellvue
• I have a three-day work week next week, and two 4-day weeks after that! One of those weeks includes a trip to Whistler for our anniversary, for which we are planning a day at the Scandinave baths and another day being way up high thanks to the Whistler Peak to Peak Gondola
• Countdown to London: 50 days!
• It’s summertime in a beautiful city full of people I love. I have Diet Coke, a roof over my head, food in my belly, someone who loves me, and a great rack. The minor inconveniences currently giving me ass marbles will be dealt with, and I am lucky that those are the worst of my problems – in short, I have nothing to truly complain about. Life is awesome.

Stay beautiful, everyone!

I called the store at 10 this morning to ask about my warranty, and was told the owner of the shop would call me back to talk about it. I waited until 4:20 when my patience finally expired, and I called them back.

As explained to me by the head mechanic, the warranty I have was a deal offered through Costco Canada and an organization that has since gone out of business. Since the other company is dead, they are not honouring the warranties because it means they don’t get paid. My “only option” is to go to Costco Canada and demand they pay my repair bill, since it was their deal in the first place.

Some facts:

• The shop I bought my scooter from is still run by the same people from two years ago; it’s the distributor that partnered with Costco that is no longer around
• The shop DID honour some of these warranties by just eating the cost in the name of customer service, but have stopped doing that because it was costing them money
• This likely won’t mean much, but I have all my original paperwork including my receipt that says I have an extended warranty
• I don’t give a fuck about the distributor going out of business
• I’ve asked four times now for an estimate of this repair bill, and I haven’t once gotten an answer – even a few minutes ago he danced around an answer saying his “shortcut” to save me money on parts ended up taking him twice as long as it would have to go the normal way and while the parts for the repair will cost me under $100, the rest is all labour .. and he started today’s work on my scooter at 10:30am and he isn’t done yet, so …
• There are two shops in Vancouver that sell Vespa scooters – I’ve always publicly backed THIS shop, and I have a very loud online voice
• I WANT MY SCOOTER BACK

I’ve asked Ed for help, and he is making some phone calls. I feel sick to my stomach, because I was positively elated that my prudence of 2009 was going to pay off in my favour. I can’t believe I was just told “yeah, sorry, this is all on you” when I did everything right, and I’m baffled that the shop’s lack of being paid for repair work done under warranty is somehow my problem.

This sucks.

Will update as more information is available – here’s hoping that Ed and his ability to handle shit like this calmly and rationally can come through in our favour.

Here’s the page I have in my paperwork outlining the deal I bought:

click make big go

It’s close to after midnight* and something evil’s lurking in the dark – me, actually. Hi there.

As I was laying in bed trying really hard to fall asleep, a nagging thought kept poking me in the back of the head. It’s been almost two weeks since I dropped Lola off at the shop, and I’ve spent every other second of that time stressing the fuck out. I just dropped a large wad of cash on an Impromptu European Adventure, and I had no idea a) how much this repair was going to cost and b) how I was going to pay for it. Sure, I could easily stick the entire painful bill on mister credit card, but that wouldn’t really solve anything – just defer it at a rate of 11% per month for a while. I’ve got some money set aside for London Incidentals (which is the name of my Clash cover band), but if I use that money wisely and put it towards Lola’s repair, I will be broke on my trip. I was wrestling with my desire for spending money in the UK versus being a Responsible Adult when a Sneaking Suspicion entered my head and wouldn’t leave: the warranty on my scooter. There was something special about it, but WHAT?

I thought harder, and vaguely remembered some of the many fights conversations I had with Ed surrounding Lola’s purchase. When I make a seemingly ridiculous decision to do something crazy, I tend to a) have done a great deal more research than it appears, and b) do a lot of fast talking to get my way. I had repeatedly told Ed that buying Lola at that instant in time made perfect and magical sense for a variety of reasons, including ……………

Holy shit, one of the reasons was an extended fucking warranty.

Well, there went my hopes of sleep. I got out of bed and padded into the living room and started to pull all the paperwork down off the shelf. I made it through two magazine racks full of stuff we probably don’t need to have any more when I hit pay dirt: the bill of sale for my scooter, and all the corresponding paperwork including the pages I had printed outlining the special add-on bonus available during May and June of 2009: $200 towards a helmet, $50 towards a pair of gloves, a $50 Costco gift card, and a two-year extended warranty that was an extension of the 1-year warranty the scooter came with.

Lola is under warranty until June 16th, 2012.

I vibrated with excitement and demanded Twitter play along to see if I was on the right track with this exciting new theory that my valve seal replacement shouldn’t cost me a fucking cent. Not satisfied with that, I even woke Ed up to run the new developments by him. He was 80% asleep and likely didn’t fully get what I was going on about, but he grumpily agreed with my assessment. All that was left to do was to go the fuck back to sleep some how and wait until morning when I could call the shop to demand an update on Lola and to inquire about my findings. I was cautiously optimistic, because everything I found lent proof to my favour – I had receipts, time stamped print outs, DEFINITIONS even – this had to work. It had to! It was all right there in black and white and yellow and red: 3-year warranty! The same warranty that saved my ass last year during the Great Gasket Failure of 2010 was STILL VALID, and therefore HAD to cover my ass for 2011’s Valve Seal Gate!

Didn’t it?

As of right now, I don’t know. I’m waiting for the shop owner to call me back, and when I phoned this morning the guy who answered my call said a) my scooter is being worked on today and might be ready this afternoon if all goes according to plan, and b) the extended warranty was offered under the old distributor and he’s not sure how it plays out now. I’m squirmy with stress and restless anticipation, because I NEED this to go my way. Besides, I don’t give a flying fig about distributors; I’ve got signed paperwork with proof of my extended warranty. Are places allowed to do that? Cancel something bought and paid for because something changed in the back end of the business?

Between the stress of this repair and losing all my naked pictures, I’m completely keyed up and twitchy. I hope everything is positively resolved and soon – I have to come up with 151 synonyms for the word “employee”, and I can’t do that if I’m too worried to concentrate.

AHHHHH!

(*: I started writing this update at 12:30 this morning, so I am technically correct – the best kind of correct)

It’s dead, Jim.

On Sunday night, I turned off my iMac because things were dangerously hot to the touch. Unfortunately, the next morning it wouldn’t boot. I started by unplugging peripherals, and eventually narrowed down the problem to my 500GB LaCie external HD – it was dead. Before panicking, I did a little research online and found that the most likely culprit was the power supply, so  I ransacked the house but was unable to find a similar power cable due to the weird-ass configuration of the connector. Refusing to cave in to reality, I set the drive aside to bring into the office hoping that Desktop Support would be able to help me.

This morning I told my sob story to IT Keith, who forced open the casing and connected the SATA drive to his PC. Windows happily read the data, and I was elated – all my music files, pictures, articles, resumes, websites and more for the past 10 years could be rescued! He started transferring the information to my network drive, and I’d be able to transfer it back over to my computer later. Hooray!

Unfortunately, the transfer was taking too long and IT Keith needed his computer back to do actual work. He gave me the drive back and said he’d rig me up a system so I could transfer the info over later. This was cool; I’d still get my stuff back including our wedding pictures and tax returns. I could be patient.

Then the other IT guy arrived, and he brought with him two power supplies that fit my drive. Hooray! We plugged in the first one, but it wasn’t watty enough and it didn’t work. The second was 62w (I needed 57w), so it should be cool.

*pop*

*sizzle*

*smoke and burning*

Um, shit. We quickly unplugged everything before fire could happen, and set about to finding another solution. He took the drive back to his desk to try a hard drive reading toaster and/or his own PC, where he could copy the files and I could retrieve them later.

.. except that pop and sizzle kind of killed the drive for real this time, and it will. not. be. read. by anything we’ve tried. It’s completely, utterly, horribly dead and my data long gone unless I want to pay $600-$1500 to use a data recovery service (which I clearly cannot do). Instead of grabbing the data when I could, or asking if I could just transfer over the truly important stuff, or waiting until I had a PC available to use, we actually killed the drive dead when it was working just fine only minutes before.

I’m trying hard not to think about it, because I have a minor panic attack when I think about what I just lost. Losing all my music is annoying, but I can probably recover most of it. Losing all my written work, IRC logs, websites, pictures – that’s the heartbreaking part. Pictures of Sasha, of my dad, of friends long since grown apart. Images from our wedding and honeymoon, from Ed’s grandparents 50th anniversary, of my snails. My first website, written entirely in humiliating Comic Sans and HTML’d by hand in Notepad. All gone.

It’s beyond heartbreaking to lose all those memories – it’s actually going to cost me my livelihood. You see, I basically grew up online in the infancy of the internet – in 1997, we were doing things so sordid and naked that if they took place today, the devastation caused by moral panic, Fox News and Nancy Grace would spell the end of online life as we know it. Since my very first step online with a 1200bps modem, I’d been storing chat logs, screenshots and pictures away in a secret folder for blackmail purposes. The logs aren’t all that useful anymore; it’s too easy to fake them and a lot is lost in the translation – but the pictures! I have – had – naked pictures of dozens of people, some of whom have gone on to become responsible members of society with jobs and mortgages and cell phones of their own. I had always assumed – counted on, really – that one day I’d shake this annoying tendency to not be an enormous asshole and start threatening to release the information I’d saved unless they funded my cushy lifestyle of no pants and Diet Coke. All my retirement plans just went up in a puff of smoke, and I am utterly desolate and wrought with despair at the loss.

This sucks.

To make me feel better, please email pictures of your genitals to kimli at delicious juice dot com.

OH FUCK – I just realized that I’ve also lost the ICQ log of the conversation Ed and I had the very first time we chatted online, in which he asked me if I’d ever have sex with five guys at once. I’d been planning on suing him for breach of contract, with that as Exhibit A. SHIT! This is SO MANY KIND OF SUCK! I am a sad.

:(

I got a locket today. I asked Twitter what I should put inside the locket, and these were the suggestions I received:

don't look at me, the innernet made the suggestions

@ginallama and @peechie wanted guinea pigs and Justin Bieber; @stepc suggested DNA and drugs (it’s a DNA helix and chemical composition of cocaine); @hessiebell asked for a glitter pug and @sattlerkm wanted a picture of Ed’s wang, and @chrisbrett had the best idea: peanut butter on one side and jelly on the other.

You people are WEIRD. :)

It’s customer appreciation day in my office building, so we get ice cream. I was on my way downstairs with my ice cream ticket clutched in my sweaty elf hands when a gentleman holding a box of ice cream bars got onto the elevator. In the interest of practicing my small talk and to show off my amazing power of observation, I made a witty quip about his having a lot of ice cream. He proceeded to offer it to me, which confused me a little as I was already on my way to get free ice cream; why did I need it from this strange man? When I told him I was good in the ice cream department, he explained that he was going around offering ice cream to people who didn’t get any, and in exchange, he would ask them to come to church. Oh. Okay, then.

I didn’t want to point out the fact that the ENTIRE BUILDING got free ice cream today, that they could get it downstairs from far less creepy people AND that the ice cream downstairs didn’t come with a side of church, but thankfully he got off the elevator on the 6th floor. I turned to the other lady in the elevator who had also made witty small talk about the man’s ice cream and told her what he said before she got on. I don’t think she was amused at the glee I showed at being able to get ice cream without having to go to church, but agreed that it was really fucking weird (maybe not in those words) and she’d have likely turned down strange man cream (again, not her words) as well.

I got my free ice cream without the side of church, and it was delicious. A bright spot in an otherwise terrible day, even if I had to listen to people complain about it on the way back up to the office.

“I can’t believe they only had TWO KINDS of ice cream! This sucks!”, whined the lady holding three ice cream bars. Her friends nodded in agreement, shifting their own ill-gotten treats awkwardly in their arms. The free ice cream was one bar per person, but the ladies cackled at their system-gaming skills and planned to enjoy ice cream for many days to come. Annoyed and unable to keep my mouth shut, I blurted out “but you’ve got FREE ICE CREAM; ice cream you didn’t have two minutes ago. Even if there are only two kinds, how can FREE ICE CREAM be a bad thing?!” Ironically, I knew the answer to my question – when it comes with church, that’s how – but I have very little patience for people who complain just for the sake of not being happy. You got FREE FUCKING ICE CREAM – more than you’re supposed to have, as it was one per person not lie and take four – and you still found something to bitch about? Seriously, how do you get up in the morning? Your life must be terrible.

Lastly, here is a man dressed as a Tetris piece:

this has been the weirdest fucking tuesday

Maxi dresses. I love them, and each summer I spend hours looking at them longingly. I’m not so fashion stupid (shut up) that I don’t know that maxi-length things and my body type go together like Jägerbombs and Tuesday night – it may SEEM like an excellent idea, but the harsh reality in the light of the day is a cruel slap in the face of otherwise. Don’t get me wrong; maxi dresses look amazing on the right body type: tall, slender, willowy bitches look great in that shit. However, I’m the anthropomorphic embodiment of an upside down pear – nothing looks good on me, let alone long clingy elegant dresses.

Of course, knowing that I look like a little kid playing dress up in mommy’s closet doesn’t stop me from wearing things that I really should have left on the rack. I want to wear a maxi dress, and no force in the universe can stop me! Unfortunately, as my entire person is infused with an aura of ridiculous, I’ve got additional problems besides looking like a festive holiday sausage. For one, I’m short. I’m barely over three apples high. I don’t believe in hemming, so anything meant to be ankle length on me is actually beyond perilous – it hits the floor and puddles around my feet. I’ve got dresses so long that I have to hike them up in my fists to walk, a move so sexy I’m surprised people don’t fling themselves at my hidden feet and compare my glory to the sun and stars above. This is problematic for multiple reasons, but none more so than when I forget to lift up my skirts to expose my ankles like the sinful whore I am: I trip on my own skirts. I’ve fallen up stairs, down stairs, off curbs, out of chairs (don’t ask), all because my dresses are way, way too long. Embarrassing, yes, but that’s not even the worst part.

All my maxi dresses are strapless.

When you pull down on a strapless top, boobs will appear.

While Newton’s Law of Gravity has never been so sexy, it’s incredibly awkward to unintentionally flash all of downtown Vancouver. Ironically, I don’t wear maxi dresses often – not because of the inherent danger of tripping over myself with every step I take, but because the shirred style of the dress gives very little opportunity for cleavage. Shirred fabric is the crinkly elastic stuff that stays up by itself, but can’t really be cut into a V or U or be anything but a straight band stretched across your tracts of land (great or otherwise). Unless I yank the whole thing down to just over nipple height (which makes the dress even longer), I’m all covered up and positively oozing with demure respectability. I have no need for this (except for maybe when we go to Harrods in London), but sometimes I want to mix things up a little, and that’s when my less obscene clothing comes out of the closet. These dresses are tucked way in the back, and every once in a while I pull them out and think “man, why don’t I wear this more often”? .. and it isn’t until I’ve tripped over my hem in public and had the entire dress pull down below my breasts, exposing my naked (well, bra’d) rack to the world that I remember why I don’t dress like this.

Sorry, Dunsmuir Street. If I had known you were about to become intimately familiar with my wares, I’d have worn a nicer bra.

with the premiere of "Dancing with the Squirrels", many wondered if reality TV had finally come to an end

I’m out of Diet Coke. I could go get more – if I threw my empty cup out my bedroom window, I would hit the gas station across the street – but then I would have to put on pants.

Do I stay thirsty and pantless, or give in to my unholy desires and get dressed?

WHAT DO I DO??!

(as a matter of fact, this is EXACTLY like having to choose who lives and who dies. shut up.)

I’ve been without my scooter for ten days now, and have no idea when I’ll get her back. I am annoyed and sad and irritated and not used to being without transportation, and my patience is wearing thin. There’s been a distinct lack of communication from the shop – when I finally called last week for an update, I was told they had to order my parts after all and they MIGHT get here next week. This makes me extra super mad, because I could have been (cautiously) riding this whole time and just brought Lola back when they were finally able to make the repairs. Instead, she’s been sitting in a shop or even outside for 9 days doing NOTHING, and I’ve been stuck at home. This fucking sucks. And they can’t give me an estimate on the final damage, OR when I’ll have her back. I am impotent with rage and frustration, and there’s nothing I can do but pout and whine – ineffective and highly annoying. I WANT MY SCOOTER BACK. It’s gorgeous outside, and I should be having adventures. The initial thrill of public transportation has worn off and had a sweaty, hairy man gut stationed in the face, and I loathe needing to take the car everywhere and/or be at the mercy of others for a ride. ANGER! IMPOTENCE! FRUSTRATED FOOT STOMPING! :(

Fury and snarling aside, I’ve had a very productive and varied weekend. Friday night was the Great Trip Planning Session, during which Heather, Renee and I abused our credit cards and ended the night with firm plans and ways to get to, from, and around London and Paris. We worked out the details and prices within pennies, and each purchased an assortment of passes and tickets for the group. $400 each later, it was an expensive but highly satisfying evening – we’re going to PARIS, bitches! I am so excited for our trip I could (and undoubtedly will) squeal!

Yesterday I had the honour of seeing one of my oldest friends get married on False Creek. It was a beautiful wedding with awesome people, and I got a little teary more than once. The weather could not have been any more perfect, the bride was luminous, and the groom is one of my favourite people on this planet: all ingredients for a glorious day. Watching the bride with her father made me realize how lucky I was to get married while my own dad was still healthy and able to travel – having him walk me down the aisle is something I’ll never forget, and while I’m still pissed that he died, I’m glad I had that moment.

There is nothing on my plate today. Tomorrow, though: playing hooky! I took the day off,, and I’m going to the PNE. Corn Dogs and Tilt-a-Whirl, here I come!

pink!

i love this city.