I went to visit my folks for Easter this past weekend and my sister and her family joined us. On Saturday, my nieces were out on their bikes. The oldest was just getting started riding without training wheels and it was awesome to watch her get more confident and learn about the mechanics of making her bike go. The younger was still on training wheels and she liked two things: having someone on foot follow right behind her and then slamming on the brakes. I got to help them out and my reflexes were fortunately up to the task. 🙂 Little kids are very random.
————–
We had some pizza and played a game of Name that Tune. My brother-in-law pitted my sister and I against each other as we tried to guess the songs on his phone on youtube. We were pretty evenly matched, until he played the pre-intro to an NSYNC video – and I guessed Bye Bye Bye in about 2 seconds. I was sort of pleased and a little bit horrified at my knowledge of boy bands from the early 2000’s. And I did pretty well with early Brittany Spears too.
One odd thing we noticed was that I was able to come up with the artist much more quickly than the song title in many cases. We figured that my internal database was sorted by the artist first -and whenever the artist popped into my head before the title I just said, “wrong column”.
It’s apparently a pretty big spreadsheet.
———————
On Sunday morning, the folks went to church. I stayed at their place and did a little origami – and also messed around with my phone. It looked like I had an outstanding balance way early and a late fee on top of that – but it turned out to be a credit on my account. Not very well indicated, Verizon.
I also needed to make sure that the premium visual voice-mail was canceled. It was a free trial that I inadvertently signed up for and never used because it seemed dumb and I don’t get many voice-mails. So, I popped open a chat window on the VZ website and asked about it.
And I got a very friendly, polite, and helpful response. It was unexpected – figured I’ve have to do battle to get an answer and to get it turned off. Instead, it was simple and a pleasant conversation. How odd that we are used to poor customer service – I’m looking at you, Time Warner Cable – and surprised when it actually works well.
Or maybe that’s just me.
————
After getting my phone account sorted, I got a call from Dad. Mom – who hadn’t been feeling great on Saturday – took a turn for the worse at church. She had been singing in the praise band on stage and got light-headed. She sat down and when Dad went to get her a cool cloth, she passed out. Fortunately, there were 3 nurses and 1 nursing student in the church that day and were on hand to help out. The brought her around quickly, but advised her to go to the hospital anyway. Turned out to be a bad reaction to some medicine she was on along with some dehydration. Still not 100%, but getting better.
———————–
Yesterday was a rough day at work. When I got home, I chilled out with some video games and a light dinner before going for groceries. While I was at the store, I dumped a bunch of change I had accumulated into the coinstar and got $20 for them in the form of an amazon code.
When I got home, I bought books.
And felt a little better.
Today was rough at work too and tomorrow promises to be worse in different ways. Think I’ll fire up the playstation a bit and make it an early night.