That's a list you may as well forget listing with.
So, when I answer the phone, which rarely rings anymore, since I lost my cat wrangling job, and there is a delay, I just hang up. Telemarketer! If its a real person, I don't mind so much, because I jabber at them, being short on human contact.
I ask what country they're in, what its like there, what their housing is like, about the weather, etc. I like talking to people from different countries especially.
One time I was talking to this guy from India and he could not understand how I could be living alone. He lives in a jammed together space free house, with tons of relatives and their kids, without room to move, he says, and would love living like I do. Wait a minute, I say, being lonely isn't good either, we both need something in the middle. He agreed.
I think I was talking to him over a tracfone issue.
Anyhow, so last night, I half thought the call I got would be the neuterscooter vet, stranded maybe on Bear Camp road. She and her ex never stopped by yesterday because they got going, out of Portland, too late. They were headed to Arcata, CA. She moved there recently. With that big storm that moved through Oregon yesterday, I thought maybe they'd cut across to the coast from I5 on Bear Camp road and gotten stranded. They used that road a lot when they'd hold clinics on the southern Oregon coast. That's a killer road. People are always dying on that road, getting lost and stranded, starving to death or worse. So I answered the phone.
It wasn't the neuterscooter vet. It was a telemarketer. Or scammer. I start out, "Whatever you're going to try to sell me, I have no money." I think it best to let hopeful salespeople know they have a person without extra bucks on the line, so they don't waste their time.
He starts in about a comcast deal. I am skeptical, but he's affable, so I listen to his rapid fire spiel.
Sounds too good to be true. He already knows how much I'm paying now, on a deal, for just internet. I know that deal will expire in three months, at which time I know I'm going to have to cut out internet too unless I find another deal. Well his deal is a six month comcast higher speed internet (I didn't know I needed even higher speeds) but includes 50 channels of TV plus hbo and streampix, whatever that is and is only $3 more than I pay now.
I'm thinking to myself, TV! without the channels pixelizing into nothing, or me trying to hold the antenna cable coming down through the old wood stove chimney to give it body boost signal strength as signal strength fades in and out, during an exiting part of a show. I'm also thinking I won't have to cut my internet for three months longer, beyond when I knew I would have to, when the first deal ends. And, he claims, he'd send the cable box to me for nothing. For the last deal, they charged me $20 to send me the modem.
He already has all my personal information, including my account number. So I saw no risk in saying "yes".
That's when I heard a toilet flush in the background. Here, on my end, I am screwing up my face and saying to myself "WTF". I do talk on the phone sometimes, from the bathroom, I will admit, but is he telemarketing from the toilet?
Why not, I guess.
On his end, he claims he will transfer me to someone who will place my order. Silence follows. Finally, he comes back on and claims I'll get the cable box in five to seven days. I say "What about the person who is placing the order you were transferring me to, did that not need to happen?" "I'll place it," he assures. We hang up.
Today I was restless about this, still wondering if that was a scammer or what. I call comcast and ask them. They indeed contract with TLK but the only such deal he could offer, the comcast blast, cost $10 more than I was told, so he says it was probably a deal offered through TLK, but he says my account shows nothing new on it, nothing added, nothing going to be sent. I said well maybe he slept in and it will show up later today. Or something. I told him about the toilet flush I heard and asked if some of these folks work at home. He says they do and laughed about the flush sound.
Will I get the deal or won't I? Will the failure to transfer to the order placer mean I am out?
I hope not! Because Survivor has a new season coming up, starting soon.
Granted, I haven't missed TV very much and one or two channels seems like plenty and I don't really want to stare mindlessly at stupid shows, through a vacant basically sleeping brain too often, but now and then, it's nice to be able to do that.
Sure I have netflix but netflix doesn't offer much of anything in real time, like news. Netflix doesn't even have many new release movies anymore. I don't know what happened to them. I'd like to dump Netflix again but I have it free for a time, as a free gift from a friend. (you can recommend a friend and that friend gets a month or two free).
I haven't seen Sunny, the dead neighbors' orange tabby boy, since before the thunder storms hit. Dano, was crouched pathetically at the dead neighbor's sliding glass door step, still not understanding why he can't go inside, on such a horrible night. He would not come to me. I took blankets over for him to sleep on. And he did. Still no sign of Sunny though. He may be holed up, I hope, until the rain ends.
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| Sunny showed back up soaking wet and tired out. That's him, curled in a ball in the dirt of his dead owners' yard. |
Zeva, the uncared for but owned white long hair girl kitty, who loves my other neighbor, since her owner, on another street, seems to barely notice she is alive, was huddled herself forlornly under the other neighbors eaves near her front door last night.
I had to clip Vision again. She just got way too hairy for her to handle or for my nose to handle. So I took the old girl, my oldest at 19, into the bathroom and clipped off (badly as usual) enough hair to unbald every bald man in the state of Oregon, were hair pieces made from her very beautiful hair, for those bald men, if they wanted them.
Vision is very very good when I am clipping her. After I let her go, she prances around like she is the queen of the world and the most beautiful of all cats ever to have graced this earth.
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| Vision lost half her body weight (in hair) after this fall's clip job! |
After I clip her, I am usually covered head to foot in her fine black long hair. And I am.
I figure cat hair in the compost pile after I clip the cats is cat hair I won't have to clean up all over the house or in hairballs from them ingesting it after grooming. It's a good thing. But I'm no better today at cat haircuts than I was two years ago.
The cats don't seem to notice I give bad haircuts. That too is a good thing.
I will leave you with two more cat photos. The photo below is Tweetie, one of 12 cats I took out of a trailer park in Albany, after the woman who cared for them, and for whom I had gotten them fixed, died suddenly, leaving them, most of them kittens at the time, with nobody. I still have Tweetie and her sister, Button, from that horror situation. Tweetie is now four, or is it five? She got a butcher ear tip, at the Wilsonville clinic I was using for spay neuter at the time.
And then there is Forest. Remember Forest? Remember a little over a year ago, the Bone Pile colony, those hillbillies who were not even feeding all the cats they had there, most offspring of their own unfixed cats? How they tossed the remains of dead cats in a pile that became a pile of bones? How they were indifferent to the suffering they were causing? How they had dug another hole, for the bodies of all the latest off spring, after they shot them? How I was just going to get them fixed, and was not told they planned on shooting them. And when our eyes locked, me and the doomed cats, I got angry and went at it, despite those people who didn't give a shit, although the woman thought herself to be very religious. They would not even watch a trap, those people.
Well some of these situations keep haunting me in my nightmares. Forest, in the photo above, was one of those damn lucky kittens saved in the nick of time by me. He never tamed at two other fosterers who tried so back he came and now he's happier than happy could be and ever so beautiful. His best friends? Blueberry, Teddy from the homeless camp, and another Lebanon caste off, Smolder, son of Sage.
Both photos, of Tweetie and of Forest, I took from my driveway through the cat yard fence.
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