too bad it's Monday

It is a chilly (bone-chillingly chilly) day, and it is dark and dreary. I have accomplished the VeggieTales inverse-goal (they were the Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything, after all, and not the Pirates with a Very Nonsensical List of Goals) of being in Boston in the fall.

It is now Boston in the winter.

The gas bill was very expensive, last month. We think it’s a combination of trying to heat a relatively sizable apartment to a civilized temperature and doing a lot more cooking in the winter. It is hard to be motivated to eat a salad or some other unwarmed meal when one is already bundled up and shivering at one’s dining room table.

We turned the heat down but then we turned it right back up because it turns out we can’t actually stand having it at 60. We are babies. Also my futon is nestled back into fairly drafty bay windows.

This is going to make summer really difficult, because the apartment will be unseasonably warm and we will not be thankful, only irritated. It is somewhere between 70 and 73 at work most days, and this is pretty nice. I guess.

I am also very dehydrated this winter, which I blame on the unsporting rule of no food or drink, yes, even water bottles, at our desks. Some people have desks in rooms that are away from the lab, and they can have water at their desks. I am slowly shriveling into a raisin. I don’t like raisins.

And when I’m home, I don’t think about drinking water the way that I do in summer, because it is cold and water doesn’t warm my bones. I am getting a lot of use out of slippers this winter.

Unrelated: I like my Mac, but the next time I actually buy a laptop, I think it will still be a PC. I don’t like that the Mac makes it almost impossible to troubleshoot, and I also don’t fully understand how to use it to its best advantage, which I guess makes it a good thing that it’s basically an email and word-processing machine.

Naively, I thought that I had finished my Christmas shopping last week, but the Amazon system is apparently a bit too clever for its own good, and decided that the combination of my name with my parents’ address was clearly wrong. So the packages that were supposed to arrive in Illinois before my own arrival have arrived in Boston, saddling me with their presence and the question of how best to transport them alongside me.

I emailed Amazon’s customer support, and received a reply from an accommodating fellow who didn’t seem to have fully understood my email query or really much about the issue at all.

I have now been issued a full refund with instructions to refuse the package from the driver, then to place my order again with Amazon. They offered me free one-day shipping for my troubles.

Unfortunately for this fellow, I clearly stated in my email that I knew where the order had been sent because I had received the package, and I had not refused to accept it from the poor middle-man of a delivery driver. So now I have money credited back to my Amazon account, gifts in my possession with an uncertain fate, and I’m supposed to place the order again. One-day shipping is not all that attractive to me – it’s not as if the calendar is threatening to roll over to Christmas Eve.

I don’t know what to do with the merchandise that I currently have. Admittedly I have never worked customer service for an online retail giant, but it seems to me that the reasonable thing to do would have been to either offer some financial incentive for the misstep and leave me to my own devices to get these things to Christmas, or to send me some materials for returning the merchandise and to send new merchandise to my parents’ house and not bother with this refund deal.

Right now the most tempting thing to do is take the refund and run with it, but I’m not certain about how legal that is (and I do get 5% cash back at Amazon this quarter, I guess). So I probably have to call them tonight. Shipping things, for whatever reason, is never easy for me.

I want to make Christmas cookies next weekend. Tis the season, and it is the last full weekend when I’ll be in town, which seems to situate it nicely for cookie-baking.