lauraraeamos.com

Pack up, kids. We're moving.

lauraraeamos.com

This is, I don't know, the fifth incarnation of my blog, or something. This is the final move. I promise. Where else can a writer go but to her own egocentric self-titled domain? :)

These old archives will remain indefinately, for your amusement and my nostalgia, as long as Blogger doesn't delete them.

So mark your bookmarks. And to those of you who have followed me from one home to the next, over and over again, thank you.

just so you know

I am not lost. I have not been abducted by aliens (not that I know of, anyway).

I have been working on content for my brand new shiny website :) It's the hubby, really, who has been doing all the hard work. And it should be ready this weekend.

I'll give you a hint - it's colorful.

Stay tuned...

funny ways to torture a telemarketer

I don't know if there are some kind of established etiquette rules for use with telemarketers, but lately I just pick up the phone and hang up.

The caller ID says "Xanthus Higher Learning" and they are a student loan consolidation company. There are other companies, about four of them I think, who call every single day. They want to buy my government student loan and give me "rates as low as 1.9 percent!" Somehow I find this hard to believe. And I don't even have the patience or energy to find out what the catch is.

So I hit the "On" button, immediately followed by the "Off" button, because I absolutely HATE it when they get the machine and don't leave a message. They never leave a message. And then at the end of the day I have fifteen blank messages to erase.

It should be illegal.

Jim and I listen to 89X (The Morning X is freaking hilarious!) on the radio every morning in the car, and one morning they were taking calls about the funniest things to do to telemarketers.

One guy called in and said he had a little girl who was newly talking. When a telemarketer called he would hand the phone over to his daughter and she would rattle and blabber on and on and on to the guy (who would eventually hang up).

Another guy says that when a telemarketer calls, he asks, "Will you marry me?" and that pretty much shuts them up.

A couple of people said that they try to sell them something, like, "No, I won't be needing any Nutri-Turf but would you like to buy my car? It's on sale this weekend only for $1599!".

Nutri-Turf calls me several times a week to see if I would like any lawn care.

I'M RENTING!!!

I even told her this once and she started to say, "Oh, that's okay-" But I didn't listen long enough to find out what she was going to try to sell me when I don't even have a lawn.

So I wonder if it warrants bad karma if you hang up on or otherwise torture telemarketers?

confidence in five easy steps

I "fixed" the back hatch on the Camaro that's been broken for the past six months. We've had the hatch tied down with a shoestring, and it flops up and down every time we go over a bump. And that would make the car trashy enough on its own, even if the paint wasn't already so rusted and faded and streaked with a shoddy wax job.

But yesterday I had a nifty idea involving a bungee cord. We can't afford to fix everything that's broken on that car (let me tell you, that car can break in ways you didn't even know a car could break!). I looped the bungee cord up through the latch assembly hole from the inside, which holds the hatch down tight and still allows for us to open and close it like normal AND hides the bungee cord so you can't even see that it's broken at all. How crafty am I?

And today my world is a little less janky. At least, to the casual observer.

Our neighbors don't talk to us here. One couple waves sometimes and we appreciate that. But the others don't even look at us. We are obviously skanky white trash, I mean, we do drive a decrepit 80's model Camaro.

You can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of the girl - that's what they say, isn't it? I never lived in a trailer park, but my father does play a banjo and keep ducks and goats. It's a strange existence, growing up in Bedford, Michigan, one of the nicest suburbs of Toledo, Ohio, going to classes with the children of doctors and lawyers and financial analysts, and your parents keep farm animals. I'm going to have to write a story about that some day - hick family living in the suburbs.

But I love my family and I'm not ashamed of what I come from. They are kind-hearted and accepting people and I love them for that.

The thing is, Jimmy and I are going to be pretty well-off some day. I'm not just daydreaming - I'm serious. Jim is a very talented man and I see him doing very well for himself, and us. And then I'm hoping that with my writing I'll eventually do alright for myself as well. And will the neighbors want to talk to us then?

You see, I'm a stubborn bitch. I hold one hell of a grudge. I'm the kind of girl who goes to her high school class reunion just to make sure everyone who was "better" than me then is more miserable and impoverished now. Revenge of the nerds, the geeks, the outcasts, the fat girls, the poor girls in a snobby rich community.

No, that isn't very self-assured. I know.