Saturday, September 18, 2010

UN-Productivity

I've been getting into the habit of starting work before 8am every day. It's surprising how much motivation overtime brings. Usually it takes me longer to walk from the parking lot to the office than it is to drive from the apartment to work. The cold west wind is making that walk more and more unpleasant each day. The rabbit fur heavy duty Manchurian hat I ordered online came in the mail yesterday. I look forward to wearing it soon however ridiculous it may look. I've got no one to impress here other than keeping myself warm and make it through the winter.

It's Saturday but being accustomed to get up in the morning I couldn't get back to sleep after 8. Instead I got up and thought it could be a good day to make another attempt to drive to Winnipeg. First I need to get an oil change. And little did I know my day pretty much started and stopped there! GRRRR!

I rolled into the service stall at Oil Boyz just down the street about 500ft from my apartment at 8:30. I worked on my coffee and the local newspaper as the guys got to work on my car. Always full synthetic to save the number of trips I need to make to the shop. Half hour later one of the guys came up to the window and told me they don't have the right tools to take my car apart to do the oil change. I've heard about this before at other oil changes. For some reason VW has 6 unique screws holding a plate at the bottom of the car which doesn't seem to come off very easily. I was already overdue for an oil change and I didn't feel like make the trip to Winnipeg without one.


So instead I went to a real estate auction in town. It was so frigid this morning I wish I had wore gloves. The house is very cute indeed. The owner had lived there for 45 years and recently passed away. Tomorrow is her birthday. I was just there to observe. Technically I have an open offer out until Monday at 5pm so my hands are tied. The house has two bedrooms, one bath, eat in kitchen, half finished basement and a single car garage. It's got a lot of charm packed into a small space. It also needs all new carpet, paint, windows, bathroom remodeling and new kitchen appliances. But knowing how cheap I am if I moved in there I'd probably try to get through the winter without a refrigerator and just put everything in the garage. By the time I left the house was going for 57K which is still a pretty good deal considering it's 5 houses down from the river and in a very nice neighborhood.

I then came back home to call the cable company because my wireless router hasn't been working for the last two days. Despite countless attempts I couldn't get the router to rest to default setting so now it's stuck with the Ben&Jerry as the name with limited connectivity. GRRR! I spent an hour on the phone with the tech people trying to fix the problem remote but nothing worked. GRRRR! Instead they have to call me back on Monday to send someone over to check it out. Luckily I can latch onto another open network in the meantime.

So then oil change attempt #2 to Walmart. There was no line so I was optimistic to get it down relatively quickly. And being Walmart they probably have seen lots of cars including WV bugs. Well, the oil changes seemed to have taken forever. My heart just dropped when one of the guys told me they've never worked on a bug before. I watched on as he struggled to take my car apart to check my air filters. I had no intention to get new ones but luckily he wasn't even able to take them out so there's no way to change them even if I wanted to! Walmart had exactly the same problem as Oil Boyz. No one seem to have the right tool to take off these VW screws! So instead they told me they can do the oil change without taking things apart. How? I have no idea. By then I was getting really concerned that my car might fall apart as soon as I leave the store. The whole thing took almost 2 hours! I ended up getting fried chicken at Walmart for lunch and was thirsty for the rest of the day. By the time they were finally done with my car I was thoroughly frustrated.

While looking through the papers I saw an advertisement for animal adoption at the Humane society. There was a picture of a orange tabby with "deformed"" ears. I thought the cat looked like an American Curl, which is a breed characterized by curly ears. Not have seen one in person before I decided to pay him a visit. The people there where very nice and the cats were plentiful. Although seemed a little crowded, the animals seem like they were being well taken care off. There were a dozen dogs for adoption as well. They had a large fenced field to run in. Most of them were labs or collies, all big dogs. The kitties were so cute! Maybe once I get settled with my kitties here I can adopt the orange cat with the funny ears. There was also a black one with too many toes! I want to take them all home. I miss my Teddy and Ernie. :(

By early afternoon the temperature warmed up to the 50s. With fall foliage in town I decided to go for a river walk. Even though I have already seen every house on the market in my price range I still drove around town like a made person looking for any house I might have missed somehow. Nothing turned up.

Determined to get another productive thing in before the sun goes down I stopped by the House of Hair. Not sure if it's somewhere I would go in Rochester. I walked in half hour before their closing time but they told me it was too late to start a hair cut. Hum, really, why don't they just have their closing time set a half hour early then! I was a bit annoyed. On the way home I stopped by a second hand store and picked up the ugliest jacket ever with every shade of puking green. I had to get something to make the stop worthwhile and the jacket probably had the best quality out of everything there. It's heavy and ornate. For $12 I would wear it.

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