They sure aren't Manolos

I can't believe it. Five and a half years in the Northwest, more than a year and a half at this job, and once again, I found myself without the proper footwear.

At least I had time to acquire it. On the phone yesterday, planning for a canoe excursion tomorrow, I was told I should wear my Tevas, because surely I owned a pair. Doesn't everyone?

I've never owned a pair of Tevas, and dislike even the pronunciation Tay-vas, because it sounds pretentious to me, even though it's probably more correct than Tee-vas. Still, after deciding that I would be too embarrassed to wear the wrong shoes, after being specifically told what brand of sandal to wear...I went to the sporting goods store.

Where I felt pissed off at the world that I was having to buy a pair of those dog-leash material velcro sport sandals that I have never wanted to own. The fact that I could expense them cheered me not one bit.

I rebelled and picked out a pair of Columbia synthetic nunbuck sandals in mud and cabana pink. I feel good about those.

Moshi Moshi

Rob's parents and older sister are hosting Japanese exchange students for two weeks. Three boys altogether. We met them this morning and showed them how to play Wii.

I got all excited about showing them my photos from when I stayed with a family in Japan for two weeks when I was almost their same age. I found the album and plan to take it next time I see them.

As I flipped through the fat album, its plastic-covered sticky pages browned with age, looking at photos of myself wearing pleated shorts and button-down shirts tied at the waist, it occurred to me that my showing this album to these boys is the equivalent of someone in Japan saying to 15-year-old me, "I was in America once!" and forcing me to look at their pictures from the 1970s.

1991 sure was a long time ago.

Whatever I'm doing is what I'm meant to be doing

So, uh, I spent a little too much time yesterday figuring out how to isolate 30 seconds of a song and copy it as an MP3 for use as a ringtone on the new phone. And then creating about 10 different ringtones.

I don't even have a memory card for said phone, and can't figure out how to download stuff without the card, so I don't know yet if I'll be able to use them or not.

However, you can't tell me that was time spent "goofing off," because I just used that skill at work to isolate and copy a 1-minute story out of a 6-minute podcast that had no time code or other means of jumping to a particular story 2 minutes 42 seconds in.

Besides, my coworker just got back from waiting in line to get his wife an iPhone.

Me: 2 / Vancouver: 0

An e-mail regarding a Canadian parking ticket:

It seems I was refunded the $45 fee twice, in one $90 check. I am happy to pay the city back … but I live in Washington. To pay back $45, it winds up costing me money, in foreign exchange fees and postage, or the gas in my car should I choose to drive to Vancouver and pay the ticket in person. If I pay by credit card, I pay a finance charge in addition to the foreign exchange fee.

The correspondence below confirms that this relates to the reimbursement for a wrongful tow on Dec. 3. I was parked perfectly legally and in fact had paid the meter, yet my car was towed. Through no fault of my own, I found myself stranded in a foreign city at 11 o’clock at night. I paid a cab $10 to get to the impound lot, where I discovered that the tow truck had damaged my bumper.

So you can see that this incident already has cost more than the inconvenience and the price of the tow and parking fine.

I think I was pretty understanding at the time that the parking sign was confusingly worded and parking enforcement simply had made a mistake. Everyone at the city was quite polite and it seemed that the problem was getting resolved.

I had charged the $45 fine to my credit card, so I thought the charge would just be reversed, in which case, Bank of America also would have reversed the finance charges and foreign exchange fee. Instead I received a check, which is a further inconvenience because I don’t live in Canada. I actually opened an account at RBC to deposit the reimbursement check for the towing, which I received in February.

This too cost me the gas it took to get across the border twice: to open the account and again to deposit this $90 check that apparently was issued in error. Now I’ve received an invoice for $45, to correct the city’s mistake in my favor. Did the city also correct the mistake(s) made in its own favor? Did you contact and refund money to all the other drivers whose cars were towed that night and every other night until parking enforcement learned (from me, it seems) that they had interpreted their own sign incorrectly?

As a journalist, my instinct is to find out how many other accidental tows there have been. I’m wondering if there isn’t a class action lawsuit here. For a city the size of Vancouver to have this kind of incompetence in its parking enforcement and revenue services is, frankly, offensive.

Again, I do not have Canadian checks, but I do have an RBC savings account. With an e-mail address or RBC account number, I think I can transfer money online to the revenue services division. However, this too costs an additional fee. So I’m not even sure how much I owe the city of Vancouver, after the $10 cab ride, credit card fees, an international phone call this afternoon, damage to my car bumper, and so forth.

What do you suggest?

Response:

This was quite the trip you had coming to Vancouver, BC. I would like to extend my apologies for our errors. I am preparing to write off this request that you pay back the city $45.00. I think you have been through enough inconvenience and therefore please disregard our invoice this debt has been removed.

Un-American Girl

Feeling guilty about a review I posted on Amazon last week.

The book is From Baghdad to America and it is the sequel to From Baghdad, With Love and it's about a dog. Also the war in Iraq and the Marine who rescued the dog and moved with him to La Jolla.

(Hey, La Jolla readers, have you ever seen this guy at the park? Be careful, his dog has PTSD.)

As my review says, I really enjoyed the first one. The second one, not so much. Maybe my standards are too high, because I judged it against books written by writers, not written by Marines. (No offense to any members of my family who actually are Marines.) I'm not being snotty here...I don't think he's a great writer. Period. Reviews that rave about what a great writer he is, how clever, how expressive, etc., have an implied "for a Marine" after each of those sentiments.

I didn't think he was a good storyteller when I read the first book, but it was such a wonderful story, it didn't matter. Here, I think it does. As I said.

He's not a terrible writer or anything. He does express his feelings quite precisely. I'm just saying the book could have been better. But next to all those reviews about how life-changing and important this book is, I feel kind of like a jerk. Insensitive to the plight of combat veterans.

My review says I found it "ridiculous" that he thinks he doesn't have PTSD. What I really meant was "offensive," but I changed it.

Seriously, it offended me. It does a disservice to combat veterans, like him, who don't want to admit they have a problem. Case in point, this New York Times article. Except reading that article made me feel bad again, for dissing the book. Like I 'm shooting down a heartfelt effort to raise awareness. Which I don't mean to do -- my criticism is meant to suggest ways the story could be better told. How it could have moved hard-hearted Anti-Americans such as myself, instead of frustrating me to the point that I'm thinking, "Yeah, yeah, you saw a lot of people get blown up. I get it."

Tell me more about what it was like for the dog. You'll get through to me.

See, I was moderately affected by the aforementioned NY Times article about combat vets and alcoholism. Then I clicked through to this first-person column about a 50-year-old dude who had a heart attack. And got really choked up. Do I relate more to 50-year-old documentary producers than I do to combat veterans? Yeah, probably. Still, it says something about the power of a personal story versus sweeping generalizations.

In the journalism community, we call that "putting a face on it."

Life's little travesties

Man, I must be in good spirits, because the last two days have been peppered with ridiculously pathetic moments in the office, and I'm nothing but amused.

Yesterday we had a BBQ. Which sounds like fun, except there are only 5 of us here on a busy day...and only 3 of us were here yesterday. Festive.

See, another satellite office has a grill (and more people) and since they had one, headquarters said we could get one, and they'd buy us burgers (including the vegetarian variety). There's construction happening on the front of the building, so we BQ'd in the back of what is basically a steel frame building with an overhead garage door that opens into a parking lot with a view of self-storage units. Scenic.

Then we sat down and ate together for the first time since I've been here. So it actually was fun. Except...the designated grill assembler didn't start assembling the new grill until about 10, and wasn't done til after 1. Not a completely unacceptable time to have lunch, but I was star-ving.

Today, the first exciting thing that happened was I broke the hot water lever off the water cooler. Yes, it is July 3 and I had tea this morning. It's pouring rain. I worked at my desk for a few hours listening to the drip drip outside. Until I realized that the drip drip was inside. The construction workers must have removed the part of the roof that keeps my windowsill dry.

But they fixed it quickly enough and I was so entertained by all these odd little things that I thought it was a good time to call the city of Vancouver, which had the nerve to invoice me for the money that they accidentally overpaid me when they reimbursed me for accidentally towing my car.

Something struck me after I received that invoice. There are times when you really feel like you're getting away with something, like getting lifetime service and a slightly used TiVo for $40. Here, good fortune just sidled up to me and sat on my lap. If they'd said, "Uh, sorry ma'am but we can't register this TiVo to you," I would have fought it, but it wouldn't have stirred any moral outrage in me.

This whole thing with Vancouver (yeah, I'm going to use the literary device of synecdoche here. It's one of my faves. Look it up) just completely infuriates me. I did not one single thing wrong, but the world just kind of felt like messing with me.

Like last week, I tried to refill a prescription. I had a new one, written four days earlier (as opposed to some others I've been hoarding... I don't even know if a pharmacy would fill an 8-month old Rx). And when I went to pick it up at the pharmacy drive-thru, the dude told me it was too soon to refill it.

I'm racking my brain, trying to figure out how to talk my way into this prescription. I must be doing something shady here, like get twice as many pills to take on vacation...or buy 1oo mg pills and split them to save money. No wait, that would leave me with more pills.

I have exactly one dose of the Rx left and really can't miss a day.

The pharmacist tells me that someone has picked up my prescription up for me at the other store. This is not possible, although I did get the prescription filled at the other store last time.

"When?" I ask. He doesn't know. I said, "Not since May!" He checks and finds out it was June 4. I picked up 24 pills.

Oh.

He leaves the window again. It was still June. Maybe it was too soon for a refill. I'm sitting in the car, railing (to Rob) about how I will die if I don't get this prescription refilled.

Waitaminute. 24 pills? It had been 24 days since June 4...no way I wasn't due for a refill.

A woman comes back to the window and says they're on hold with my insurance. "How many pills did you say I picked up?" And she nods and says, "24 pills" ... and I open my mouth to explain the complex math to her, but they've already figured it out. And they refill me and we move happily along with life.

It seems to me that if I were a pharmacist and an insurance company told me a prescription couldn't be filled, I'd find out why before telling the patient that she can't have her drugs. They probably should have figured out before I did that 24 pills doled out on June 4 would be due for a refill on June 28.

Why did I only get 24 pills? I don't know, something about the vacation supply I got in April? Why do I need my insurance company's permission to take a drug that was prescribed to me? Why can't I just pay for the drugs? Who knows? Ask Michael Moore.

Seinfeld the way it was meant to be seen

Yesterday we got a 40-inch Sony Bravia. I agonized over the purchase of this thing, so afraid I would get the wrong one. Not about spending $1300 or so on a TV...but what if it broke or wasn't as good as another one?

I was looking at a 32-inch Sharp Aquos at Stupid Prices for a very reasonable $469 (tax included). But when we got there Friday, it had a "Sold" sign on it. I'm glad, because when the TV was turned off, you could see a mark on the screen, which apparently didn't show up when the TV was on. I can see myself buying it without noticing that...or getting far enough along in the buying process that I would be willing to accept such a defect rather than leave in defeat.

Later, my mother made a very good point. TV is a very important part of my life. It's our primary form of entertainment. (Don't judge. We also work out regularly in our garage and play with our dog, just not for as many consecutive hours as we watch TV.) Shopping around for a deal and winding up with a substandard machine could detract from our enjoyment of said activity. So I went for it.

By the way, that $40 used TiVo wound up being the best investment of my life. The previous owners had purchased lifetime service, which apparently stays with the machine even if the machine doesn't stay with them. Translation: I have a TiVo for which I never have to pay a monthly service fee. Now in even less of a hurry to upgrade to an HDTV in the bedroom.

The new used TiVo looked quite unused, still wrapped in plastic and containing all the original packaging. It's clearly been sitting around for a few years, since the "recently deleted" shows include events from the 2006 Olympics. Quite interestingly, the TiVo was activated along with its lifetime service on my 30th birthday.

It gets better. I was paying $6.95 on a 3-year contract on the broken machine. The nice lady at customer service canceled my other TiVo service, which was $12.95, but not on a contract, and switched the 3-year contract to that DVR. Where I once was paying $20 a month, I now pay $6.95 with a slight upgrade of one of my machines. So clearly I am saving enough money to merit the purchase of 40-inch TV.