Journal TopShelf's Journal: Whooosh goes December... 1
Man, the holidays just seem to fly by so quickly, it seems like it's been ages since I've kept up with things here. Really quickly, then (as I've got some CD-based training to get through in the last couple hours here at work):
1. Weight loss has hit a (predictable) plateau around 188, mostly due to a 4-day excursion to my in-laws, where the good cookin' just keeps on coming. I'm back in the saddle now, though, but will have to work hard to get to my goal of 175 by early March.
2. The media tie-in for my blog is signed, sealed, and delivered, now I just have to wait for them to post my first piece sometime in the next couple days. It's been quite a rush, really - I started dedicating more effort to the blog about 3 months ago, and I'm already about to be featured on a big-time site.
3. Bethanie's getting divorced? I missed that one, until browsing through the JE's just now. My oldest brother divorced earlier this year with 2 kids in the middle, and while it was as amicable as any divorce can be (he lives in a new place just blocks away and everyone gets along), you can tell it's going to be a work in progress for quite a while. Best of luck to all parties there...
4. The Xmas haul was less than in previous years, which is perfectly OK, as we're climbing out of a debt hole and have better things to spend money on, but my wife got me a nice jacket, and I pooled monetary gifts to get an LCD monitor for the home PC and pay part of my dues for the upcoming hockey season, which starts in two weeks.
Also pertaining to Christmas, we had our "Worst Online Shopping Experience Ever" this year, with Lillian Vernon. First, they got our credit card number wrong, but since their system doesn't run the credit check right away (strange), we didn't find out until an email arrived hours later saying "call customer service". We got on the phone, corrected the mistake, and a few hours later, got another email. We called again, corrected the mistake AGAIN (someone mistyped our expiration date), and were told everything would be OK. After a couple days, however, my wife checked the order status online, and shortly thereafter, got another email saying "call customer service". She calls, and finds out that someone had cancelled our order, but their system didn't have any notes or tracking information to suggest who or why (this at a time when she was at a spa, and I was at work, so it wasn't us). By this point, we're just a couple days from the holiday, so she gets a manager on the phone, who apologizes profusely, and offers to "manually override" the order and give us expedited shipping for free, in order to get our gifts on time. The packages are being sent to her parents' house in Indiana, since that's where we went for the weekend.
So we get to Indiana, and the goods aren't there yet. Saturday morning comes and goes, still no delivery. We call them yet again, and this time, the manager says the packages are currently in West Virginia. Evidently, the previous manager we spoke to gave us the "expedited shipping discount", but didn't actually flag the order for expedited shipping, so instead it went regular USPS, and was due to arrive on the 30th!
Fortunately, the kids still had a great holiday without those particular gifts, so we're refusing delivery and will get a full refund of our money. I imagine Lillian Vernon must have had terrible problems this season (perhaps a new ordering system?), as it seems we hit so many different bumps along the way, that I doubt ours was an isolated case.
congrats on the blog (Score:2)