project 365 #217: still life with garlic

project 365 #217: still life with garlic
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I did a lot of various stuff this weekend, from the Biltmore Estate to getting new tires to a fabulous score at Salvation Army (patience, grasshopper, details are forthcoming) to hot, buggy but beautiful hiking in Bent Creek with the dogs to the Biltmore Village Arts & Crafts Fair. And other stuff, too, that included beer drinking and general fun and alas, smoking waaaay too many cigarettes, for which I am paying in today's smoggy heat. I would have liked to blog about this stuff. But I did not, which leads me to the following two observations about this past weekend:

It was hot as fucking Hades and I HATE CHARTER COMMUNICATIONS. I had no internet last week. So on Friday, since I had divined that this was going to be one of those things that involved hours on the phone during working hours, I called up Charter. Before I called up Charter, I dug through my recent correspondence with Charter, which I hadn't opened because, beacon of efficiency that I am, I let them just take their monthly pound of flesh out of my bank account directly and they send me a statement. I knew the money had been disappearing, so I didn't bother to open the statements. Charter, for their part in this symphony of ignoring, hadn't bothered to switch my account over from my old house and had happily been double billing me since May 15. Yeah. So they felt that I had never paid my bills at the new house and consequently they had taken away my internet although not, for some inscrutable reason, my TV.

It took a while to sort all this out and at the point where the customer service rep started to get snooty and suggest that perhaps I was some kind of evil fraud meister who was simultaneously getting cable at two separate houses, I lost it. Unfortunately or fortunately, in this day and age, losing it completely and shrieking like a batshitinsane bitch on steroids is the only way you can get these people to actually do anything. So they got my cable on again, in the midst of which we discovered that they had never switched my modem over and I should probably never have had working cable internet and so on and so forth and then finally it was done and I was content.

Until Sunday, when it happened again and I had to go through the entire goddamn same conversation (with additional screaming) again with a whole new rep. That's also when I found out that calling Charter's tech support line will get you a dysfunctional voice mail that just says "You have entered an invalid number" no matter what you do until you hang up. I was a bit rabid by the time I finally got through and then I just had to leave the house in disgust, argh.

However. All this is made up for by Friday's score. Friday morning I went to the Tire Barn on Patton Avenue (in WNC, btw, these two words rhyme, which is awesome) and while the really nice older Tire Barn guys were putting 2 new tires on my car I went next door to the Salvation Army. That's another good thing about Tire Barn - it's right next to a lovely strip mall containing not just a big Sally's Army but a head shop, a Sally's Beauty Supply, a giant store of wicker furniture that I have never been in, a taqueria and a KFC. Excellent. So at the thrift shop I perused the paperbacks, as is my invariable habit, and I scored a Wodehouse and a trashy sci fi novel called the Legacy of Heorot and, oddly enough, Minnie Pearl's autobiography. Cool, I thought, I've always liked Minnie Pearl, even though I know nothing about her. Guess what, gentle readers? It was signed! Yeah! I now own a copy of Minnie Pearl's autograph! Yeah! Woot! I have no idea why this excites me so but it does! Go me!