nido di colibrí

walking the cat this morning in the chilled pale sunshine. he sat and watched the birds, walked a few paces, sat and watched the birds again (lincoln's sparrows love our courtyard for some reason).

then as we rounded a corner through a little breezeway, I caught sight of a hummingbird with something in her beak - a bit of fluff, perhaps - as she disappeared into a bush. I waited, and she came out a few moments, later, and perched and glared at me. definitely building a nest. I sighed. Our courtyard is massive, ancient by pacific nw standards with 100 year old trees and 90 year old rhododendrons, and it is subject to weekly extremely aggressive landscaping. they leaf-blow the hell out of this place every week, they mow, they prune everything very aggressively, they spray constantly, dousing bushes with chemicals that have no issues with pests, and spraying round-up on every budding possible dandelion they spy. they sprinkle chemical "weed and feed" all over the grass monthly (poisoning waterways), it's a mess. anyway. not a great place for hummingbird nests, but people feed them here, so of course they're around. I walked toward the bush to peer in. the nest was RIGHT THERE on the closest branch to me, just above eye level (for me anyway, I'm above average height), pretty much fully constructed, she's probably just lining it with soft stuff inside, now. "Oh NO" I exclaimed, out loud, looking back at her aghast while she watched me in irritation.

I emailed property management to ask if I could put a "no pruning/nido di colibrí" sign under the andromeda bush, but I'm guessing she'll say no. I'm worried for mama hummer. i know hummingbirds lose their nests all the time, often to other hummingbirds, they are so territorial. but still. I had to ask.

first world problems.

yesterday completely fell apart. I was on the phone with Verizon for two hours and got no taxes done whatsoever.

Those sneaky swindlers. So, we signed up for 5G home internet, and in order to get some sort of discount to do this, upgraded our phones to unlimited data. great, right? it's a little more expensive and we generally only use 2gb or less a month between the two of us, but if we did need to use a bunch of data for some reason, no worries. The only times we use a lot of data is when we're away from home and there is no reliable wifi, so we use our phones as hotspots, since verizon gets a signal pretty much anywhere we go.

so I go to my favorite coffee shop, to see if it's a place I can work from. There are only two outlets in the seating area, and one was free, so, perfect, right? yay!

But their wifi was terrible. It was taking 30 seconds to load a single google sheet. not workable.

so, easy solution - hotspot, right? I've done this a million times, super handy for work.

so I go to use it, and my phone says to go to my verizon app to set it up. the verizon app says it's already set up and spits me back to settings. an endless loop.

so I call verizon.

I get sleazy swindle-voiced sales-y customer service guy, after waiting on hold for 20 minutes or so.

"yeeeaaaaaah. that's because the lowest tier of Unlimited doesn't include hotspot."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I scoff. "WHAT is the point of unlimited data if we can't use our hotspots??!?!?"

Sleasy salesy verizon dude: "Touché." He replies. In a, "Yep, you caught us" kinda voice.

OMG.

Such fucking swindlers I swear to god.

OBVIOUSLY cellular service should be a utility, right? the fact that private companies run this at all should be illegal, this is a scam, people NEED this service to work and exist in this society.

So they already have you at their mercy, and then they pull sneaky shit like this.

So I ask a reasonable question. "My husband and I use less than 2gb a month. Can we drop back down to something more commensurate with our usage, and if we let go of whatever discount for the 5G that we get, will we pay less overall?"

"Yes," he replies, "but you don't want to do that."

What I gather from this reply and a few words he sputtered out afterward was, yes you can lower your overall monthly bill, but it will take you 20 more hours of jumping through hoops with me and several other customer service agents who will make every second of the process painful as fuck. so just don't.

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

lol.

I just hate getting swindled is all. Whatever, I just upgraded, Josh can afford it, it's just so fucking lame. This is wrong. It's unjust. But whatever, you gotta pick your battles.

Although this was a gigantic headache and a massive waste of time, I'm really, REALLY glad I found out now, and not upon arrival to a condo out of state where Josh needs to get online for a meeting and suddenly realizes Verizon has disconnected his hotspot service - something I never even know was disconnectable.

First world problems! We are so blessed. Just, annoying.

...

Anyway. today, I will take down xmas, sweep, henna my hair, and go see Gwen. If I'm able to get any traction at all with taxes between any of those activities, awesome, if not, then, i'll try again tomorrow. sigh.

good for me

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