Rants

I pretty much ignore pre-season baseball, because well, it doesn’t count. Friday night I received an email from MLB.com reminding me that my Gameday Audio subscription was going to be automatically renewed. After last year’s experience I thought it might be a good idea to tun into the last preseason Red Sox game playing right then. Guess what? That’s right, the same issue I had with the WEEI broadcasts last year, annoying sound gaps, were present again. So I turned it off in disgust and fired off a reply to that email telling them that I wished to cancel my subscription.

MLB.com will honor any refund request for a seasonal subscription made within 10 days of the purchase for the current season or at any time before the subsequent season begins.

By Saturday afternoon I hadn’t received a reply to the email and time was running out. I dialed the 1-800 number in the email. After drilling down through the voice mail prompts to get where I needed to be, I was informed that I should call back during their normal working hours, Monday through Friday 9 AM to 8 PM and Saturday from 12 noon to 6 PM, then automatically disconnected. Wait a minute it is 4 PM eastern time, unless their phone support is in Hawaii, I was calling in their “normal working hours.” Very convenient, Sunday is the start of the season, so they have pretty much guaranteed that I won’t be able to get a refund.

While I read on one end of the couch, Donna was on the other watching TV. Mostly the reruns of yesterday’s World Ice Skating Championships, but during commercials and lapses in excitement she would surf the channels. At one point she nudged me to remove my headphones. CNN was doing an interview with someone involved with a new IMAX movie called Wired to Win: Surviving the Tour de France. Looks interesting, but it is not playing at any IMAX theater within 600 miles of us. Sigh.

After the movie segment we hopped to the other CNN where they were into something about the increasing number of major hurricanes. Seems it might be because since the 70’s the surface temperature of the oceans has risen 1 degree Celsius. Last winter was the warmest on record. Glaciers melting! Global Warming! The reporter pinned down one scientist to say that it is because of human actions that this happening. We are ruining the very environment we need to survive.

From there she jumped to Bravo where Real Housewives of Orange County was on. After watching a couple of minutes of this very weird show I came to the conclusion that if this is what life is all about, causing our own extinction via global warming can’t come soon enough.

Today was the first day of spring and it felt more like winter than most of winter did. Average high is 72 and we were at least 20 degrees cooler with overcast skies. The highs for the rest of the week is going to be in the lower 60’s, at least it is supposed to be sunny.

This is so much worse than hearing the theme to Shaft smoothed into background sounds for my Local Forcast on the Weather Channel.

“We Got The Meat” to the tune of the Go-Go’s “We Got The Beat” selling delivery pizza. Or worse still, the Gilligan’s Island theme bastardized to sell shrimp at trendy chain restaurant.

A co-worker came up to me the other day and said, “Check this site out, Realtors are mad because they have to pay for this, and it’s out there free now.” Riiight. Check it out for funzies.

Zillow.com Your edge in real estate.

I typed in my address and it said my house was worth $126k. It says that a year ago it was worth $99k. It also says I have 3 bathrooms and 1887 sq. ft., when we only have 2 baths and about 400 square feet less. Plus they show my house about a 1/4 mile away from its actual location.

But at least that explains the $239k starting price on a house about 6 further down the road. They must have checked Zillow.com, which says $193k or a similar service and then jacked up the price to allow for negotiating. I hear that after the open house and a month on the market it is down to listing for $199k.