Bravery?

As I've mentioned before, I pretty much can't cook. I must have either been feeling brave or I just wasn't thinking... I attempted *two* recipes that were new to me. On the same day :0

Well, it turns out that I can make a kick-ass macaroni salad. Who would have ever guessed that there is *mustard* in macaroni salad???? Definitely not me.

I also tried a new crock pot recipe, tweaked to be vegetarian and to my taste naturally. It turned out OK - I think that the fact I used too many noodles didn't help matters any. The macaroni salad needed four cups and the Cavatini only needed two cups. So of course I put four cups of noodles in the crock pot. I think the recipe should have been *really* good if I put in the right amount of noodles, but for now, I'm just adding some extra spaghetti sauce to balance it out and it's still pretty good.

I also made some of my most awesome coleslaw - yum!

I can't believe how many dishes I used. That's probably a big reason why I don't like to cook - I hate cleaning up the mess all the creating creates. Ugh.

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I can't wait to see if Time Warner is going to credit us for the half day that we didn't have internet service today. Even tho' the Rigases were ripping off Adelphia, I was a much happier customer with them. Adelphia was cheaper and the customer service was sooooo much better. If there was an outage, I was able to reach a representative quickly and I had answers. Today's outtage aside, I haven't had great experiences with RoadRunner customer service. Today Time Warner's solution seemed to be to just take the phone off the hook so they wouldn't have to talk to customers. (I realize that their phone service was out too, but come on - they don't have back up systems for their customer service??? They couldn't even put out a pre-recorded message that let the customers know what was going on when they called???)

I also hate that if you want to use the web space they 'give' you, you have to use their pre-formatted web pages. I hate them. They are ugly and there aren't many options to personalize them. I also have to close out all of my tool bars to even use the page because their stupid upload and management tools don't even fit on the screen. I also hate that you can't upload using FTP. I can't direct link to anything I upload. It's a real pain to store anything in 'my space' - which I think is absolutely not very customer/user friendly. I can't do a lot of things that I used to when I had my free-for-all space that Adelphia gave us.

I wish we had another cable company in the area to compete against. In Ohio they have WOW! cable competing against Time Warner. You can get digital cable and internet for $60 there. For $65, they offer the same package I have. I pay over $105 a month for my cable bill. Verizon isn't much better than Time Warner. I would love to see WOW! here.

I'm not holding my breath in hopes of any kind of credit on my next cable bill.

Bad Day

Aside from the fact that my Dad isn't home yet, Christmas was really nice. My sister cooked a really wonderful dinner, as usual (and I made sure I brought home enough leftovers for a change). I think we were all happy with the gifts given and received - I know I was! We all had fun playing games after dinner and presents. We visited Dad in shifts, so that he would have company throughout the day. And then lots of rest and relaxation the next day and catching up on things. It was all a really nice holiday.

Until today.

I don't know what I did to anger The Powers That Be, but they sure didn't like me today.

After waking up late from a good night's sleep and a refreshing shower, I donned some new clothes I got for my birthday and was ready to greet the world.

Except my truck wouldn't start.

AAA was kind enough to tow the truck to my mechanic. Paul said that he would look at it Monday. But in the meantime, I missed a birthday party I was supposed to go to today. I also wanted to visit my Dad and there were some sale items I wanted to pick up. I had plans tomorrow that I'm going to miss out on too. Ugh.

Relegated to the fact that I'm stuck home, I headed out to the mail box - surely there would be some leftover holiday cheer there to make me feel better. Not. I got a bill I wasn't expecting. Ugh.

OK then, I'll just work on some stuff I've been putting off. I know - I'll contact Time Warner and find out why I can't access my web page or any of the stuff that I had uploaded to my 'free space' for the past week. After going back and forth with TW for a good part of the afternoon, it turns out that my migration didn't work when they switched over to their new system. It seems that I've lost everything I had out there. Including the one and only picture of me that I ever liked - it used to be my profile picture. But surely I had backed up that picture somewhere, right? *Right*??? If I did, I have no idea where I put it. And to top it off, it turns out that the web space that TW has to offer me is not FTP friendly. Pictures and sound files that I liked to put there and link to have no home now. I was having fun playing with and learning HTML, and now I can't play around with it like I want to. I am really unhappy with TW right now - for what I pay for high speed internet and web space, this should *never* have been an issue. Ugh.

I gave up trying to accomplish anything today. I made myself a double batch of toffee chip cookies. Toffee chip cookies make everything OK.