Cameron had a major ( victory on the potty today. )

Cameron and I tell each other stories. It's really awesome. They're always about him, of course, but must have a beginning, you know.

He will launch into a ( detailed narrative... )

Then there are the stories he asks me to tell him. Once, when he was sitting quietly, I asked him if he would like to hear a story. "Yeah!" he said, though I'm not sure he knew what that meant. So I began, "Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Cameron..." ( Read more... )

On May 7, I ordered Cameron a new clock radio from etronics.com. They claimed the item was in stock and would be shipped within 24 to 48 hours. ( Long, annoying story... )

So I guess we are back to square one on the clock radio. Arrgh!

I sang the lead in my high school production of Bye Bye Birdie. We had no official auditorium, just the cafeteria, but we had a huge set piece that the director wanted to "fly" in and out. So the crew rigged some cables over the pipes near the ceiling. Looking back, it should have been obvious to everyone how unsafe this was. Anyhow, it was dress rehearsal, and we were using the set piece for the first time. I was blocked to be sitting directly under it for most of a scene (about 10 minutes), after which I sang a short verse to end the song and exited. I had just gotten off stage when I saw a crew member, who was holding the cables, suddenly land on his back, slack cables still in hand, and heard an enormous CRASH! Yep, the cable had broken, and the several-hundred-pound set piece had crashed to the stage, right where I had been sitting less than a minute before. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. I remember thinking at the time that, as I had no understudy, if I'd been killed they would have had to cancel the show.

Opening night of my first principal role (other than school plays). My skirt, which had a train in the back, had not had the hooks and eyes applied yet, and it had to be safety-pinned closed. As the final curtain fell, and we all scrambled off before the bows, someone stepped on the train, and the safety pin went flying. The only thing holding up the skirt was one teeny safety pin in the front that I'd used to keep my bodice from riding up. Frantic, I called out to my fellow cast members: "I lost my pin!" Amazingly, another one was found immediately, and people set about pinning me back up. Unfortunately, all the women had gloves on up to their elbows and could not get a good grip on the pin, and the men just plain didn't know how to pin anything, and before I knew it my cue came.

Balancing my skirt on my hips, I strode in with the three others I shared a bow with, and curtseyed very carefully... WOOP! One side came down. I was about to reach for it when WOOP! The other side came down. Fortunately, the aforementioned bodice pin saved me, or the entire thing would have been at my ankles. As it was, the people on either side of me grabbed the flaps and held them closed behind me, and we all, with arms interlacing, shuffled awkwardly backwards (quite a trick when everyone is wearing a train!) to make room for the next bows.

I don't remember ever getting a strange fortune. However, I will share the best fortune I ever got, which was

The luck that is ordained for you will be coveted by others.

I still have that one on my fridge. OTOH, my father-in-law once got a strange one while they were visiting us. It read:

Promote literacy. Buy a box of fortune cookies today.

Inspired by juverna's story of where she was when The Big One hit, which she originally left as a comment on someone else's LJ, I am reposting my comment to her as a separate post:


October 17, 1989. I was at Santa Clara U. freshman year, about 30 miles from the epicenter. It shook like crazy, but I was on the ground floor in a modern building and didn't worry too much. I was more surprised than anything at how hard it shook.

Just when I was sure that the shaking had completely stopped, my next-door neighbor appeared in my doorway, white as a sheet.

"Ah, you're from out of state!" I greeted cheerfully.

"Pho-pho-pho-phoenix!" she stammered.

Somebody produced a battery-powered radio, and for the rest of the night we listened to reports and wandered the pitch-black campus in clumps of seven or so. Classes were cancelled the next day so they could evaluate the buildings (nothing major was amiss).

We worried about one of our dorm-mates, who had left for Berkeley around 4:00 and would have reached the Cypress structure around the time it collapsed. We were very happy to see him return the next day. He said he could see cars getting crushed in his rear-view mirror. :-O

The adventures of the hospital bill did not end with the day I chased all over town. It took another month, several more phone calls, and a lot of frustration. Here's a synopsis:

Middle of April, I start to get calls from the collection agency. I finally answer one. The guy is very nice, not intimidating at all like they are in the movies, talks very slowly and reassuringly. In short, very good at what he does. Tells me that, whether or not I am at fault, it is going to be reported on my credit 60 days after being sent to collections, which is May 27 (hey, that's today!). So he recommended that I just go ahead and pay it, and "your insurance company could always reimburse you."

I told him I realized it was his job to get the money for his agency, and knew he really did not care where it came from, but that I did not owe the money and was not about to front it and trust Kaiser to pay me back.

More phone calls, and finally I get through to "Trudy" at EPMG, who professed not to know anything about "Adam" taking me off collections. Real condescending, as usual. She kept typing things into her computer and saying Cameron was coming up "ineligible," and that I was not going to just be "taken off collections" unless I sent the money. Finally I said, "Might it have anything to do with the fact that you guys copied down my son's medical record number incorrectly?"

"Oh," she said, a little less high-horse. They'd left out a zero in his number, which I'd noticed before but didn't mention because I thought 'Adam' had taken care of it. Sure enough, when I told Trudy the right number and she typed it in, it came up "Eligible." Sheesh! So then she promised to "take me off collections." She then gave me a stern lecture about how, "in the future," I should look over my bills carefully and call right away if there is a problem. I didn't give her a flip answer because I just wanted her to do her job, but I wanted to say, "Yes, in the future I will make sure you guys don't f*ck up something as important as his medical record number and send me to collections without checking it."

I guess she did do her job because within a week I got letters from Kaiser saying they'd paid the bills, and when I called the collection agency and typed in my account number it said, "This account has been cancelled." Whew!

Today is Cesar Chavez Day, and that means we have the day off, and the rest of the world says, "Who's Cesar Chavez?" It was a good day to chase down a ( $662.50 hospital bill. )

I've been pretty lucky. Off the top of my head, the only thing I can remember actually being stolen (had my car broken into once, but AFAIK nothing of value was taken) was my purse out of a locker in the college gym. I brought it on myself; I didn't own a padlock, so I would just put my purse in the bottom of a locker and cover it with my clothes. This worked a few times, but one day I came back from the pool and found my clothes rearranged and the purse gone.

My comb and keys were in there, in addition to my wallet and checkbook, so I looked a sight as I begged for change to call home to have my folks pick me up. I was grateful, however, that my watch had been in my pocket and was still there, and that I didn't yet own any credit cards, so I didn't have to deal with that headache. I had, however, just been to the ATM the day before and had about $50 in my wallet (a lot of money for me back then).

I reported it to the college public safety office. Six days later they called: my purse had been found in a trash can. My wallet was gone, but everything else was there.