Another hectic weekend filled with unexpected twists and turns. For the sake of brevity (see my last post), I’m dividing up my posts to keep from reaching book length. Thursday Sept. 26th, we took Amber to the vet for her rabies and parvo-virus shots. We ended up waiting half an hour in the exam room before the vet came in. This is par for the course. This might be the first time that it was worth the wait. The vet is nice enough but all business. She doesn’t have much of a sense of humor or personality. To be fair, maybe she doesn’t show it to paying customers, only friends and family. Her brother Michael works with her, running the office. He does whatever needs to be done. I’ve known him for years and always enjoy talking with him. We are alike in how we look at life. We use common sense and logic for viewing situations and problems. Everytime we see eachother, one or the other of us is griping about the state of society and “how no one cares.” We often share the latest bad time we’ve been given by someone we’ve encountered or a company we deal with. I could literally talk to him all day. There’s not a lot of people who I can say that about. My husband has only become familiar with Michael in the past 6 months and now he finds him a riot as well. I credit Michael for us still going to our current vet. With 3 dogs, we spend A LOT of money on vaccinations, check ups, etc. We are religious about taking the dogs to the vet. Their health is a high priority. Anyway, a year and a half ago we had a bad experience where someone at the vet’s office screwed up and gave us wrong test results and our dogs weren’t given medicine when they needed it. I was livid and after fuming about it for a few days, I called the vet’s office. I started explaining it to Michael, who I knew would be reasonable. He didn’t even listen to the whole thing and got the vet who started defending the person who works there that made the blunder. She didn’t take into consideration that we’ve been going to her since 1996 and she knows we’re honest. I told her to “think about how you can make this right.” She knew if she didn’t make some kind of concession, we’d take our business elsewhere. A few days later, she called back and talked to my hubby and said we could have medicine for the dog that didn’t get it for free and free checks on all 3 dogs for the parasite. These stool sample checks cost like $50 each (for us, her cost is less). I felt better about it but I have NO DOUBT that her brother was the voice of reason in getting her to do anything towards smoothing things over with us.
Anyway, Michael has led an interesting life. He was in banking before but also held other jobs along the way. Thursday, he was regaling us with tales of his employ at an industrial laundry that washes hospital linens. Dealing with feces, urine, vomit, blood and disease ridden sheets is comedic gold! He had us just ROARING with laughter. It was worth the price just for the entertainment value alone. I told him he should write a screenplay and turn his experiences into a tv show. He either didn’t take me seriously or doesn’t like to write! 🙂 So that started the weekend off to a great start. I love to laugh (doesn’t everyone?) and getting the chance to is pretty rare. Not just a little chuckle or snort but full blown, bend over and hold your sides laughter. Yankee Candle needs to bottle the smell of laughter! I didn’t know it has a smell but they seem to think EVERYTHING does. According to them Peace does so why can’t other intangible things like Hope, Faith, Despair and Anxiety?! The only ones I know what they smell like are anxiety which obviously smells like nervous sweat and despair which is salty like tears.
We didn’t have any estate sales that looked good on Thurs. so hubby suggested we go look at laptops. We went to ABT in Glenview, IL and the salesman knew less than us. How is that even possible?! He was trying to sell us on an old Lenovo. Then we went to Best Buy which I already hate. We were swarmed by salesmen that each had their favorite and were pushing us towards those. We’re looking for a replacement for my Toshiba Satellite that is about 7 years old. I love it but it runs so slow and the CD drive hasn’t worked since we installed a virus software about 3-4 years ago. In June ’12, our HP desktop died and we went the way of the Mac. We love it but have had a problem we can’t fix since then. We run a collectibles business online and have a really nice website, The Collectors Dream, that hubby made with Microsoft FrontPage software about 12 years ago. We love the website but have been unable to access it since we lost our HP. We can’t update it, add new items, put “sold out” on items or change the prices. We need to upload the old FrontPage ’98 (yes, it’s that old) software to a Windows based computer and pull the site from the web, make changes and then update it. We’ve done this in the past when our previous computer died so we know it can be done. Unfortunately, we don’t have a working CD drive on a Windows based computer to put the software on. The Apple desktop is incompatible. We also want to start a new website on the Apple and asked all 3 of the salesmen for suggestions on NEW software equivalent to FrontPage. We want the WYSIWYG type where you don’t have to do any coding. One texted his friend and got some non-answers. Everyone is familiar with i-Web for Apple but that was discontinued in June ’12. So we were kind of bullied by the salesclerk to get a Samsung laptop and buy an external CD drive for $40. I didn’t like the color of the Samsung or that it wasn’t a touch screen. It had good memory and the price was right. We had it up at the desk and had given our credit card and Best Buy reward card. We were on the verge of paying for it when a guy we hadn’t dealt with previously told us something that floored us. We explained in detail what we were going to use the laptop for and why we needed it to all the salesmen but this guy is the first one who knew anything. He said we should check and see if that software is compatible with Windows 8. He actually looked it up for us online on the spot. He saw that FrontPage 2003 was only compatible with Windows 7. Oh joy. So there is no way to get a version of Windows 7 unless you have an old computer. We had been using Windows XP with the ’98 version of FrontPage. Basically, he told us that even if we got that laptop and the external CD drive, we couldn’t use it for what we needed it for. We were dumbfounded. Stunned, we decided to walk away and not get anything. Since that changes the whole purpose of buying a laptop. To think how close we were to making a monumentally expensive mistake! So we saved hundreds of dollars but left disgusted. Just an observation over time but Best Buy’s salesmen in general seem so slimy. Like they are porn bots come to life. Like every second they’re not working they’re looking at porn. I have no idea where I get this impression from… 😉
We did some research over the weekend about what software to use to make an online store with shopping cart. There is nothing simple like there once was. Now the choices look like Sandvox, RapidWeaver and Freeway Express. Also mentioned is Dreamweaver. Sandvox looks good except that you have to use their templates. You can’t use your own background like we did with FrontPage. I asked on Twitter about which to use and got only crickets. I really thought Twitter would be a place to get a quick answer or any answer. Either that or no one knows. What is the advantage of making a site on Sandvox versus WordPress? If we ever do start making the new website, we may go with an Apple laptop so we can check on things when we travel. Reading through Apple forums and community pages, everyone who used FrontPage is in a similar boat now. The fact that they’re not making anything as good as they previously did is just crazy to me. Shouldn’t everything be getting better with time, not worse? Aside from suggestions to hire a web designer (not an option), I’m open to hear what else is available.
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