adventures in short pump

things that pissed me off today: --sprint cut my phone off ELEVEN days before my bill was due. last time it was "only" seven. at least this time i hadn't already put the money in the mail. so, once again i got to drive out to lovely downtown short pump. woo! even better: during rush hour! --adventures in book buying, in which Q pops into convenient barnes & noble to buy the new gabriel garcia marquez novel. new fiction table? nope. other new fiction table? nope. new fiction shelves? nada. ok, i'll walk upstairs to the fiction & lit section... nothing. and by nothing i mean NO garcia marquez-- not under G, not under M. the woman at the register has no idea who i'm talking about. ok, so maybe she's extra help hired for the holiday rush. fine. surely the people staffing the information desk have heard of him? i mean, i realize it's been over two decades since he won the freakin' nobel prize... she asks me if marquez is spelled with a C or a K. while deciding whether it will be more efficient to point out that garcia is not his first name, or whether to just spell marquez for her, i see that right behind her is a giant stack of the book in question. i just point at it. when i take it back to the same register where i'd inquired before, the woman says "wow! those folks at the information desk are quick, aren't they?!" grrrrr. --my car's oil light came on again. second time. both times in short pump, both times when i had to drive out there to BFE to get my phone turned back on (did i mention BEFORE the bill was due?). i am plotting to never, ever go there again. (you hear that, sprint? knock it off!) last time i moseyed into walmart & bought some more oil to dump in it. this time, at 5pm, i decided that the $35 it would cost me at jiffy lube, which had no line, was worth avoiding the clusterfuck at walmart. even though i'm broke, and that $35 came out of money i'd set aside to pay my car insurance, which is due in four days. call me lazy, but i'd had my fill of oxygen sucking morons for the day. deep breaths. back home, i cleaned for the impending arrival of the new roomie. she'll be here tomorrow before i wake up, so her boyfriend stopped by to get the keys (only because she lives an hour away, and it was raining, etc-- if he still has those keys after tomorrow, she's moving right back out. either that or he's paying a third of the rent.) had a nice chat with him, actually... he's kinda cute. gotta watch that. ("that" being my behavior. not, you know, his ass.) meanwhile, am trying to be productive in re the heartbreak. still raw, still a mess, still in a bit of denial, i think. focusing on the music, and spreading it. to that end, i've organized & catalogued all my bootlegs, so's i can spread the love. next week i'm buying some contraption to convert everything to digital. http://cwboots.blogspot.com/ plotting to get the hell out of town soonish. i have off the 7th through the 17th, barring one pesky shift right in the middle that i may have to bribe someone to cover. norfolk, then charlotte. fingers crossed that my car cooperates, as does the weather. blah.