Day two. The pump guy finally showed up around 2:30 yesterday afternoon, took one look at the milky water in the koi pond and pronounced this conclusion: it ain’t the pump that’s your problem, it’s your well.” I called the well digger (again) and now, this morning, I’m waiting on that serviceman.

The RLA and I linked together four or five garden hoses and semi-flushed the pond with water from our neighbor’s well. And yes, they gave us permission. We weren’t sneaking around the neighborhood at dusk looking for unattended pumps.

The problem is finding well water. Even here on the wrong side of Dixie Highway, most folks have city water and a lot of people even use that for their sprinkler systems. City water is not usable for fish, since fish don’t like the flouride, the chlorine, the benzene and assorted other -ides and -ines that modern tap water provides.

Fortunately, my boss understands the demands placed on a two-career family when the children are sick, and so here I am, waiting for the man while the RLA goes off to mold young minds. Today, he says, he is going to teach them the difference between looking and seeing. I always say that that was the single most important lesson I learned in college. Well, that and how to roll a decent joint with only one paper, and not one of those sissy, double sized papers, either.

Last night, after we gave the fish some fresh well water, we trotted off to Books and Books (the finest independent book store in the south, as far as I’m concerned) to hear Christopher Moore speak. In a moment of lame-ass fandom, I gave him the scarf off my neck. I’d just knitted it, too, with some really yummy hand-spun from the Yarn Wench. It was a natural grey wool, with some odds and ends of color and sparkly stuff, but mostly manly. OK, maybe a leeetle metrosexual. But Moore had a runny nose, which he’d had since Denver, and was on the road for New York and Toronto and I felt bad for him. And I’m a total fan geek, all right?

I managed to take way more time than was polite, got my copy of A Dirty Job signed and made an impression by telling him that I think he’s the modern Thorne Smith. That got a huge smile from him and the book store owner, and Moore said that yes, he thinks that he’s channeling Thorne Smith.

For those readers who have no familiarity with either Christopher Moore or Thorne Smith, Smith wrote the original Topper books (among others) and Moore is the author of such great modern novels as The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, The Island of the Sequined Love Nun, and Lamb, The Gospel According to Biff, Jesus’ Childhood Friend. Most of these (with the exception of Lamb) deal with regular folks, whose lives get turned inside out when the old gods, or minor gods, decide to take an active interest in them. Wonderful stuff.

I used to have an assistant who was useless. No, she was beyond useless, and a back-stabbing idiot. She would constantly come to me to complain about her computer: “It doesn’t want to do exwhyzee,” she would whine. “I told it to do exwhyzee and it won’t, it insists on doing efgeeaitch.”

I would suck in air, count to thirty in a language I don’t speak, and tell her, “No. Your computer is not a sentient being. It neither wants nor does not want to do anything. It can only do what you tell it to do, so the mistake must be a user error. Show me exactly what you tried.”

And then she would, and I would point out that she had/hadn’t held down a specific key, or had her caps lock on, or she had typed a word backwards, or some other stupid mistake and she’d glare at me and talk trash behind my back. But that’s not why I bring her up. No, I am reminded of her today because all mechanical things around me are breaking down.

She was a real whiz at astrology (of course) and she would have said that Mercury went retrograde, or Uranus was in my house of blahblahblah.

But the fact is, I got the lap top back on Monday, and by Saturday it was turning itself off, again. So now, the lap top in on its way to Cupertino, and I’m freaking out. I’m also down $500 dollars, because repairs are a minimum of $300 and I had to buy an external hard drive to back up everything before I sent the machine away.

This morning I woke up to a white koi pond. White with coral and calcium silt, and my pond pump is screwed, and I am sitting at home waiting for the pump guys to come and a) take the old pump away and b) sell me a new one and c) install the new one so that I can flush the pond and make sure that my five 25-pound koi are not dead on the bottom, since I can’t see through the water to check. Nobody seems to be floating belly up, so we’re good so far.

But I’m sitting at home, not at my work desk, and the boss is back from two weeks on the road and he’s pissed that I’m not there today. Not to mention that I missed something while he was gone that I was supposed to be on top of and wasn’t.

Crap.

I was at the laptop on Saturday, gearing up to scan in another dozen or so vintage knitting patterns, and maybe a few vintage sewing patterns to populate the old Etsy shop, when, much to my surprise and chagrin, my laptop put itself into deep sleep. And it Wouldn’t Wake Up. I shook it, gently: “Wakey, wakey, computer.” I pressed the reset key. I held the power key down. I struck any number of key combinations. I plugged and unplugged various peripherals. I inserted a cd…or at least attempted to. I pulled the power. I shut the power on and off, attempting to pulse the laptop back to life in an electronic version of electroshock therapy. All of which accomplished exactly nil.

In despair, I did the only thing left to me: I took my precious in to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store. And the geniuses concluded that my laptop was asleep and wouldn’t wake up and they had no clue why, either. All of which is to say that my laptop is still down the street and I am going through major computer/blog/gossip/e-mail withdrawal.

So. On another topic, entirely, I offered a couple of old programming books on the local Freecycle group. They were a couple of years old, but ColdFusion hasn’t changed much. A data base slurper is a data base slurper and PHP is PHP. Right?

I got an e-mail response from another freecycler that went like this:

I can’t believe you have text books for a subject which all reasonable and respectable scientists have dismissed as impossible. Are they really teaching this somewhere?

It took a while, but I responded: HA! Good one. You had me going there for a minute. ColdFusion is a programming language, as I’m sure you know.

It’s an obscure quote, from a John Hiatt song by the name of “Ethelyne” but those were the only lyrics I could come up with that had to do with bathrooms. Sorry. Anyway, and without further ado, I present to you my toilet paper collection.

The box. Even it has a certain, uh, camp appeal.

Israel was a very young country at the time, and poor. The kibbutz system was a show piece for American Jews. The toilet paper was the deal breaker, however. Recycled paper with chunks of who knows what. The art director at my office astutely pointed out that you’d pay big bucks today for a sheet of that stuff, and you’d be buying it in a high-end paper boutique. Maybe so, but you still wouldn’t want it anywhere near your ass. The pink stuff was barely better, and came from a very elegant hotel.

This stuff was hard, and coated on one side. COATED, people. As in, slick… non-porous.

Different train. This was also hard, and crinkly, like onion skin paper or tracing paper.

Those are just climate stains, OK? This paper was like crepe paper, with a heavy, crinkly texture. Soft-ish. Sort of.

The famous neon pink, heavy as paper towel. Deeply textured. Ribbed, even. Swiss engineering at it’s finest, eh?

I thought that you’d be able to see, in the scan, that you can read my handwriting, even where the paper is doubled. It was another example of crunchy, hard, slick tissue paper.

Pink waxed paper. Pre-cut, to add insult to possible injury.

And that is your tour of European toilet paper, circa 1966. Thank you, thank you. It was my pleasure.

Sorry about the big gap in witty entries, here, but you know? Sometimes even I can’t find life amusing.

And I have been working on something special for you all, really I have. My little scanner and I have been very busy with this project.

It started two weekends ago, when I went north to the home territories for my Auntie Em’s birthday. The RLA and I planned to go up for her party, and come straight home, not getting sucked in to working on the parental units’  home dismantling project. But then my brother came by and poked around in a cabinet in the garage that I hadn’t gotten to yet and he discovered a major lode of vintage photos of family members we had never seen. Both the family members and the photos. Neither were ever mentioned. Of course, that set off a new push in the genealogy*.

But he also found three large boxes of other stuff. My childhood stuff, to be precise. My Barbies. My lavender Ken doll case. Watch for that bad boy on E-bay. And two things which I thought had been lost forever in the mists of time and parental tossing of childhood crap, and another two things which I have no idea why they were even or ever saved.

Item 1: A twenty-foot chain of chewing gum wrappers (why?)

Item 2: A small box of Creepy Crawlers, made one vacation when the Sistergirlfriendgirl got a Creepy Crawler maker for Christmas. I had a lovely color sense even then, let me tell you. The black newt with the red tail is very nice, and so is the yellow and lime green caterpillar.

Item 3: My collection of Beatles trading cards. Almost a complete set of Series 3 (black and white). Memory does not play me false, as I have more John Lennon pictures than anyone else, so I wasn’t impressed with Sir Paul-The-Cute-One even at the age of 10. Although this discovery got me excited, a quick perusal of E-Bay reveals that this is one more Boomer toy that is more valuable in theory than in practice. Guess I’ll be keeping those.

It is Item 4 which turned my world upside down. I thought this object lost forever. I had searched for it for years. There is only one other thing I could find in the house which would make me as elated by its discovery: and that is the drawing of “My Father’s Store” that I did when maybe 7 years old and which features the shoe window (every pair different and includes a pair of bunny slippers) and a view of my father through the doors (where he is fitting a pair of shoes)**

No. What I found, and what I have been scanning in for the greater edification of my readers, is a small box that originally contained coconut patties. I didn’t and don’t much like coconut patties, but my Great Uncle Nat did, and he gave this particular box to my mother when we went to Europe in 1966. I may have mentioned that trip before?***

What the box contains now, and what it held all during that Grand Tour was my special collection of European souvenirs. What I chose to collect, and why, has been the subject of debate around the office since my discovery. My boss, and the PDB both consider this to be a major marker of my mental instability and innate peculiarities (Hello?? Mr. Pot, I’d like you to meet Mr. Kettle). OK, OK, so get to the point already, right? What was it that I collected that long ago summer when I was 11?

Toilet paper.

I had never seen anything quite like the variety and quality of European toilet paper, and I knew that none of my friends would believe me when I told them that on a Swiss train, the paper was hot pink/magenta and as thick and textured as a paper towel. Or that in a French hotel (a four-star hotel, no less) the toilet paper was pre-cut into little squares and the paper itself was thin, stiff and crinkly like tracing paper, or waxed on one side… No wonder the French are always pissed off about something.

So I collected samples, labeled them assiduously and saved them in that little coconut pattie box. They were a hit with all my friends. I haven’t seen that box in 20 years at least, and lamented its loss every time I thought about it.

I’ve been scanning them in, and will post them soon, I promise.

* The Rubes. From Yonkers. They were my maternal Grandmother’s family. Also cousins/uncles to my maternal Grandfather. Somehow. I think through his mother. Is it any wonder that certain members of my family have 6 toes?

**Shoes. Go figure.

*** Yeah, like one or two HUNDRED times.

So. I’m a blonde, although here at the second half of my life, it is more of a rodential sort of brown, liberally salted with white? grey? transparent? Whatever. Anyway. I’m a blonde, and sometimes I act like one.

Take for instance the other night when I was reviewing my credit card bill. There were two very large charges to Apple. I tried to review the purchases, but there were no details. I drew a total blank. I knew that I had bought no new hardware, no new software from Apple. And there were two charges made on consecutive days. I was stumped. It had to be credit card theft, right?

I went on-line to my credit card company and challenged the charges. Done and done. When the RLA came back from walking the dogs, I told him about the mysterious charges and he looked at me like I had grown a third head.

What do you mean, you don’t recognize the charges? DUH. It’s the calendars and books you made for everyone’s holiday gifts. Almost $800 worth of calendars and books.

Yesterday morning, bright and early, I called the credit card company. They had already credited my account the full amount and had closed the file. (Let’s give credit—HAH—where credit is due: American Express.) As far as they were concerned, the matter was over. I said it was fraudulent, they believed me. Done and done. If I needed to pay Apple, Apple would have to re-bill me; I need to call them.

So I did. And I apologized for being a ditz. And I told them that I needed to pay them, but AmEx couldn’t reinstate the charge, and what do we do now?

Apple support escalated me through a few levels of customer service, and then got my e-mail, so they could send me instructions for payment. But they didn’t. What they sent me was a thank you note for being a loyal customer. And told me to keep my order, free of charge.

There’s an old adage in marketing that an unhappy customer will tell seven people about a bad experience, but a happy customer will only tell one, maybe two.

I’m over the moon happy, and I want as many people as I can tell to hear the story of what customer service is supposed to be. Both from American Express (you said you didn’t make that charge and that’s enough for us, here’s your money back) and Apple. I don’t even know WHY Apple made that decision. Maybe it was because of MacWorld. Maybe they looked up my account saw that I’ve been a loyal customer since 1988. Maybe it was just karma. Maybe I was the one millionth customer. Maybe it is just that Apple is the best company in the world.

What ever. I know that today, I’m proud to be a stockholder and a former employee. Steve Jobs, you are my idol.