welcome to camp telophase

I said in my previous post that we had no gas because of forgetting to change the end—of-service date. Turns out that:

(A) we still had it because they hadn’t flipped the switch yet

(B) the phone call to straighten it out took all of 10 minutes and there was no creating of new accounts or anything like that

(C) the rep even waived the $19 setup fee.

In conclusion: gas company 1, ISP minus several million. We’d use them for the new house but alas they don’t service it, instead it’s a propane area (cue Hank Hill jokes) and the company seems to be run by one guy who’s laidback and ok with texting so there’s that.

OK. So we have bought a house in a city closer to friends and family and rather than try to do All The Things At Once with moving as regards fixing up the new house and fixing up the old while at the same time trying to pack and move, we chose to do it in stages. We got internet set up at the new house so we can go down there and work while meeting with tradespeople and such, and have gotten most of that done. There's painting happening there right now and we've got a few photos sent by the painter so it's looking good.

Anyway. As part of that whole setting-up-internet thing, myrialux called our ISP and discovered that for whatever reason we can't have two overlapping houses on the same account. This seems odd, because there's got to be plenty of people paying for internet at their house in the country, or their college kid's service, or Nana's service. But, whatever. The ISP rep who started setting up the service to transfer canceled out of that and we got a new account set up for the new place. We can't get into the new house account online, although autopay works just fine, we get bills just fine, and the people at the storefront can get into it and tell us it's fine.

Fast-forward to Easter Sunday when we wake up at the old house with no internet. A few power cycles of the modem later we assume it's a more general outage in the area. However there's none reported that we can see on the ISP's website. Note that our house's radiant barrier is VERY GOOD at blocking all sorts of things including cell signal, and the waves of cell signal ebb and flow in our area according to some mysterious criteria of their own, so trying to do anything online using hotspots is futile unless we want to sit outside on the patio furniture that has been marked by feral cats.

It then occurs to me that it's the end of the month, and that might speak to the problem, if for some reason the account was set to turn off at the end of the month, even though we did not specifically request it. myrialux calls in and lo and behold, that's the problem: the original rep actively set our account to close at the end of March, even though we did not yet have a moving date set. The solution should be easy enough, right?

Wrong! There is no way a rep can turn the account back on when it's been cancelled! (Note that myrialux is being bounced back and forth between reps and Sales for all of this.) We have to create a NEW ACCOUNT!

It's now Monday or so. Fine. We have a new account created. Great! Does the internet work? NO! Because we have (a) an outstanding bill and (b) the old equipment! More calls ensue. The outstanding bill is just the normal bill from our account due in early April, it's that the account closing terminated auto-pay so we need to pay it manually. OK, no prob. Paid. Why we can't just use the old equipment I will never know, but myrialux wraps it up and takes it off to the storefront. Awesome.

However, the reps at the store can't release the NEW equipment to use until a flag in the account is switched that, presumably, gets flipped sometime after the old equipment's return wends its way through the system. Back home, to MORE phone calls and explaining the whole sordid affair AGAIN to a new rep. By this point, myrialux has actually created a document detailing what's happened and the order it's happened in for both our reference and for showing the storefront reps.

Calls duly made, the switch is flipped and myrialux goes to the storefront AGAIN to pick up the new equipment. Home again, install the stuff and activate.....oh no that would be too easy. The online activation is not working.

And that's where things stand, because myrialux had no spell slots left and missed most of a day of work--he managed to hotspot a while during the afternoon by propping his phone on the living room windowsill and sitting in a chair next to it, but it wasn't ideal. I investigated coworking spaces in our city that would let us book a private office (because of myrialux's many meetings) for 2 (so I could get internet time for various projects) for one day and we've ended up at WeWork, not my first choice, but the one that sat in the middle of the Venn diagram intersection of expense, location and convenience.

(And of course our office has a giant glass wall facing the entrance into the workspaces and I forgot the Seekrit Art Thing I need to work on is using nude figure study reference so this afternoon is probably going to be spent with the computer and me awkwardly rotated to block the screen while I scribble black bikinis over the figures I want to use but that's a thing that can be done.)

Tonight will probably involve more phone calls and possible visits to the ISP storefront, but hopefully things will work out. Blah.

I revised 20,000 words yesterday the first 12,000 or so before getting my ass kicked by the personal trainer, and the rest afterwards.

I am so dead right now, physically, mentally. I'd hoped to get more revising done today but HAHAHAHAHAHANOPE

I've also got some premade romance Christmas-themed covers up on Etsy* that I'll be linking in another post just because my LJ/DW has been around long enough it's got surprisingly good SEO reach for things I post here.


* You may have an impulse to suggest improvements that could be made. Please refrain. Once they're on Etsy, they're done. This isn't like posting artwork to the blog and asking for constructive crit, it's a product that has been manufactured and I'm not going to revisit it until someone who's paid for it asks me to.

I'm either having a bad allergy attack or my first cold in 3 years. Already took a COVID test, which showed negative (though I know that doesn't necessarily mean it's true).

And, dammit, after having been trapped in the house by ice for 3 days, I was looking forward to tomorrow's balmy 50°F temps and going to the massage I had booked. I've rescheduled that for the 17th on the basis that both I and she will be happier if I err on the conservative side.

If it's a cold, then our grocery trip on Monday is probably to blame. Bah.

Sora had a small respiratory thing for several days, sneezing a lot (very cutely, as all kitty sneezes are), having goopy eyes, and hiding for most of the day in his office (a cat bed hidden in a corner of the closet in my office), but he was symptom-free yesterday. He was prone to them as a younger cat/kitten, and hadn't had one for a number of years, but the day after a feral tomcat sprayed our front door and managed to aim perfectly through a little gap between the door and the doorframe such that the front of the house stunk of tomcat for a few hours, he came down with symptoms. So I blame that tomcat, even though we could have just as easily brought in a virus or some such on our clothing.

FYI, we have Nature's Miracle enzyme spray and I used it to soak the front door, the brick nearby outside, and the doorframe and floor on the inside. We also got a spare bathmat and put it in front of the door inside so if the tomcat comes back, or if our cats decide to mark their territory in front of the door, we can throw it in the wash.

Today I discovered that it is indeed possible for me to climb from the passenger seat of my car to the driver's seat without pulling or injuring any part of my body, thanks to an ass who parked his ginormous truck close enough that I couldn't open the driver's door enough to get in.

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