Phone Calls

The City called at around noon, following up on Lisa's home improvement rebate application. There needs to be an inspection first. An acquaintance of ours who works for the City does the inspections, and she'll come by Monday. On the back of her approval sheet will be directions on how to collect and annotate the receipts. Then she asked if we were doing the work ourselves or bringing in a contractor. I told her about Coastline and she said that any contractor had to have a business license with the City. I told her I'm sure Coastline did, as they just finished the job down the block; but she checked anyway. Then came back to say that all business licenses expire on June 30 (day after tomorrow) anyway, so they need to get a new one. She was kinda emphatic (read: bitchy) on this point. I said I'd follow up with the contractor and make sure he had all the paperwork needed.

And politely said goodbye. This is why I want Lisa to handle this. I really wanted to give her the Cheney business and tell her to f-off, but I was a good boy (meds must be working overtime now).

Lisa's not thrilled, however, with making the calls. It's a pain in the ass. The California Closet units we have in the kitchen and bedroom (which we hoped to uninstall then re-install in the "new" house [in an attempt to keep costs down, as all closet hangers and shelves are NOT included in our $380K budget]) will cost about $350 to uninstall and another $350 to re-install. Lisa wants to talk this over with Fred, but I don't think she's going to like the conversation; Fred is decidedly anti-pre-fab. So this will be interesting.

As for the other calls... Electricity went OK. Gas was fine. Trying to contact the cable company (Time-Worthless) was impossible... but this has got to happen, as not only do we need the TV, but I need the cable modem for access for work... but she bounced around from phone tree to phone tree, before getting disconnected.

So then she tried the phone company. Ewwwww, the break-up of Ma Bell has made the whole situation FUBAR. If we want to keep our phone number, we need to keep this number in service... as we can't transfer it to the condo less than a mile away because it's not in Verizon's region. We'd have use AT&T for the new place. Of course, we'd like to keep our old number. But even at the cheapest rate, that's $30+ a month (and they can't guarantee it would work, with all the demolition taking place). Verizon: not very helpful, and Lisa not very happy. So she sets up the new phone with AT&T; she'll cancel Verizon when we vacate the house.

I tried to call TimeWarner after dinner, but I'd get two rings THEN a busy signal... I'll try again either late tonight, or early tomorrow morning.

I packed up some of the office today; want to try to do some of the bedroom closet tonight (before picking up Kyle), and then pack for the trip. We leave EARLY tomorrow morning... I'm hoping this trip will be serious stress relief (but I worry that we'll be stressing all the time lost while we're there...).