Sam’s Bad Day/Pampering for Cyn

Sam has­n’t men­tioned this, but he had a crap­py day yesterday.

Okay, it did­n’t start off so bad­ly. He had an inter­view at Kinko’s that real­ly went fair­ly well. He’s sup­posed to have a sec­ond inter­view next week. No, it isn’t the job he’d pre­fer, but it would be work—and he’d be eli­gi­ble for health insur­ance after 90 days. Even bet­ter, they offer ben­e­fits to domes­tic part­ners. I’d be eli­gi­ble. I haven’t had health insur­ance in sev­er­al years, and I’d actu­al­ly be able to have cov­er­age with­out Katie los­ing eli­gi­bil­i­ty for Peach­care (which is far bet­ter cov­er­age than any she could have any­where else).

How­ev­er, he was going to get tires put on the car after­ward and some­one hit him. And he was tick­et­ed. I’m hop­ing he’ll fight the tick­et. He was­n’t hurt and the car is dri­ve­able, although it’s ugly and the doors on the pas­sen­ger side are more dif­fi­cult to close now.

To make mat­ters worse, we learned that our auto insur­ance was­n’t in effect! Appar­ent­ly, the car­ri­er decid­ed that some­thing was hinky because my name did­n’t match my dri­ver’s license (though we’d TOLD THEM THAT and explained it!) and despite hav­ing been giv­en our new address and phone num­bers back in May, they claimed they “could­n’t find us”- so they dropped us! Not hap­py news. Not at all. Get­ting cov­er­age again took a great big chunk of mon­ey and now we’re with a more expen­sive car­ri­er and alto­geth­er, this was just BAD.

NTB seemed rather expen­sive any­way (after all that!), so he came on home. We checked around and decid­ed that Sam’s Club would be the bet­ter choice for the tires.

I cer­tain­ly did­n’t think I’d be get­ting my hair cut & col­ored this week after that. We were wait­ing ’til we could afford it, and I’ve been sore­ly tempt­ed to start hack­ing at my bangs, at least, myself. Sam made me promise that I would­n’t do that, though. And today, he dropped me off at 3–13 Salon.

I was rather ner­vous as I was being giv­en the tour (yes, for­mal tour, de rigeur for all first-time cus­tomers). The place looks like a Hot Top­ic fash­ion show is in progress. Every­body who works there is young and very goth, all tat­tooed and pierced and styl­ish. Black seems to be the uni­form col­or, although there’s not a uni­form per se. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many dif­fer­ent kinds of hair­styles and col­ors in a month, less alone in a few hours. And I mean on real peo­ple, not in pic­tures. The music was a bit loud for my tastes, but that isn’t unusu­al. And the place is BIG!

They do the paraf­fin thing on your hands no mat­ter what you’re there for, apparently—it’s just SOP. They had a smock that fit even my great big body with no gap­ing. The col­orist got my hair col­or right, and the gray is cov­ered up more than I ever remem­ber it being before (it had got­ten real­ly obvi­ous to me recent­ly). The styl­ist cut my hair a bit short­er than it’s been in a while, but I like it and it should be easy to care for. They do a free make-up “touch up” if you’ve had your hair styled, too—that was new to me. I guess it’s a way of encour­ag­ing you to come back and real­ly have your make-up done, and I have to say that I’d do so if I had the mon­ey. (I’ve been putting on my make­up pret­ty much the same way for 20 years or so now, just out of habit.)

They do birth­day par­ties. I think that’s neat, and I know G would absolute­ly love it. I’m not sure as to whether or not shad­owkatt would be inter­est­ed, but I’ll tell her about it.

Sam won’t let me know how much it all cost, though. He made that appoint­ment and han­dled tips and every­thing. That wor­ries me a bit. They have 5 or 6 dif­fer­ent price lev­els, and the col­orist and styl­ist I had were at the mid-range lev­el. The col­orist had been there 7 years, the styl­ist 6. I have to won­der how long their top peo­ple have been there. I’m afraid to even think about how much they most cost! But the guys I saw (Rico and Jason) were won­der­ful, so I’m quite hap­py with them. I feel very thor­ough­ly pampered.

I learned while at the salon that there was a DMV office about a block away, so we went there next. As I post­ed ear­li­er, I final­ly got my name changed (as I’ve been try­ing to do since 1996!) on my license. You bet­ter believe we’re fax­ing a copy of the new license to the insur­ance agent in the morn­ing to make sure there aren’t any more prob­lems because of that.

Sam and I were going to game tonight since we did­n’t get to do so last night. (We’ve set­tled on a Mon­day-Wednes­day-Fri­day sched­ule for the home game, which was nec­es­sary so that he’d get to have some peace from me bug­ging him.) He got two new tires put on the car today while I was get­ting pam­pered, and want­ed to decom­press a bit by play­ing Spy Hunter and check­ing his email before we got started—totally understandable.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, around 7:30 pm the super­vi­sor for the data entry job called and asked if I could do a batch of work—tonight. There was­n’t any more work avail­able on Tues­day when Sam took stuff back to her, but appar­ent­ly, she just had some deliv­ered. And the com­pa­ny com­mit­ted to a 24-hour turn­around. And every­body else she just hired (17 new peo­ple) had said they could­n’t do it tonight. So Sam, being the incred­i­bly won­der­ful man he is, went out to pick up the work, and I start­ed enter­ing it as soon as he returned.

It’s an entire school’s fundrais­er forms. I got up to the Ms, but then the sys­tem went down for its night­ly main­te­nance. So now I’m killing time until I can log back in (hope­ful­ly short­ly after mid­night). Sam went to bed, of course—it would be sil­ly to expect him to sit up with me! He always wakes up by 6 am or so, though, so he’s going to take the stuff to the gal who is sup­posed to do the ver­i­fi­ca­tion when he gets up. It has to be ver­i­fied and then back to the com­pa­ny by 10 or 11 am. I do hope this kind of sud­den stuff isn’t normal!

I’m afraid the data entry thing isn’t going to work out, hon­est­ly. I’ve had hor­ri­ble mus­cle spasms since I did the first big mess of it this week­end, and I was just start­ing to recov­er when I got the call today. 

I’m spas­ming much more again. I hope I can man­age to get through the batch I have to fin­ish tonight, but then I fear that I’m going to have to take one of my hoard­ed mus­cle relax­ants. Things are bet­ter when I can spread out the strain, but this kind of dead­line does­n’t allow that. We need the income, though, so I feel guilty to even think about quit­ting it already. Okay, we can obvi­ous­ly sur­vive with­out it. But I feel much bet­ter to be work­ing and con­tribut­ing some­thing to the house­hold. It mat­ters to me. And after such an expen­sive car day, I real­ly want to be able to work. I thought I’d be doing some­thing else by now, but that has­n’t worked out. (sigh)

So you’ve been sub­ject­ed to this ridicu­lous­ly long entry because of the night­ly serv­er main­te­nance. Believe it or not, I cut one impor­tant sub­ject out of this entire­ly, to put it in a sep­a­rate post. Aren’t you lucky?