Hope your New Year's was better than mine - it wouldn't have taken much

Happy New Year to my random readers ... all nine of you now! (Hey, since my last note to you guys, my readership - or followership, at least - has doubled! Woot!) Side note: if anyone wants to get me a present, I'd love this shirt.

If the quality of New Year's Eve combined with New Year's Day is indicative of how your year will turn out - I sincerely just want to quit now while I'm ahead.

Allow me to explain...

New Year's Eve
After incessant e-mails from J.D. Shelburne, the guy putting on a New Year's Eve show in Bardstown, begging me to come to the concert, I got my mom to agree to babysit the kiddo for the night, and Scott and I would go to the concert.

Alas, I spent the day in bed with a migraine and feeling like crap, so needless to say, we skipped the concert. Scott was pretty pissed because we didn't go out for New Year's Eve. I really don't believe in going out for New Year's Eve, but, whatever. It's not the first, nor will it be the last, thing on which he and I disagree.

So, I curled up on the couch with a glass of strawberry wine and my nook and read a rather crappy Jennifer Weiner novel. (I love Jennifer Weiner, don't get me wrong, but this one just wasn't doing it for me like her first few did. What's even worse is that this one, Certain Girls, is the sequel to Good In Bed, which I loved.) Went to bed before midnight. Happy New Year.

New Year's Morning
Still feeling kind of crummy in the morning, but get up with the kiddo and we watch TV and play and do the things we do. I decide I want a new cover for my nook, so I start looking up nook covers on BN.com because I found a 25 percent off coupon if you use your MasterCard. I should have known better, no discounts on anything nook related. Ever. Really, if I learned nothing else while working at Barnes & Noble, that should have been it.

Since I couldn't get the discount, I figured I'd see what I could find on eBay. I find a relatively cheap, synthetic leather one that will take a month to get here (shipped from Hong Kong, of course), but it's only $10. Rock on. I Buy It Now, and go to checkout ... only to find I can't complete checkout because my PayPal account is acting funky.

The douchebags responsible
for Tagged, Inc.

It's asking me for my account number again? What the hell? Is this a phishing site? The web address looks legit. I do a google and apparently this has happened to other people, it's legit. So, I go back, I give them the info they want, reset my password and security questions to go to my overview page ... where I see seven transactions made the day before for $200 apiece to Tagged, Inc. What the fuck is going on here???

So, yeah, someone hacked my PayPal to purchase $1400 worth of gold. AGH. I immediately file dispute claims for the seven transactions - and go to my bank account page to see if any money had gone missing. Luckily, not yet. But that's not to say that my account won't be wiped clean later. Of course, PayPal has their seven-day "investigation" period right now, so I have no idea when this will be resolved. And right now they are in the phase where they are awaiting comment from the seller. What the hell is the seller going to say to them? I have this fear that it's not going to go in my favor. Luckily, I have Identity Theft coverage on my homeowner's insurance, so I have recourse if PayPal goes south on me.

New Years Evening
After all of this crap, I decide to take a nap. I can't get warm, even laying under two comforters. I feel awful.

I wake up later and the chills, the random body aches I've had all day ... I start freaking out that it might be the flu. Great. So, I decide to haul myself to the evil that is all evil, and go to the Urgent Treatment Center. Ewww.

I head over there, just to realize that our new, much suckier insurance (thanks Obama!) kicks in, and I didn't have the cards. So I call Scott and ask him to bring me the new cards. In the meantime, they won't take me back until they have my insurance card.

Scott finally gets there with the insurance card. The girl looks it over and goes, "There's no co-pay on here." I don't know chica, I'm sick as a dog, it's brand new insurance, what the hell do you want from me? I was like, "Just bill me." She goes, "Okay." So I sat there for nothing? Really? (Come to find out, on our new, much suckier insurance - thanks Obama! - I will have to pay the full cost until our astronomical deductible is met. Damn I miss our no-deductible plan. I really hate you Obama!)

They take me back, take my temperature (100.2 - even after three Tylenol), and they take my blood pressure. The first time she takes it (actually, she doesn't take it, the machine does because they are too lazy), and it can't get a reading, can't get a reading, can't get a reading and inflates and deflates like five times before popping up 172/98. WHAT? Doesn't a BP like that mean I'm dead? I don't trust it. So she takes it again, on the other side, and that time it comes up with 160/92, which isn't much better. But the fact of the matter is, yes, it's high - but I don't trust your machine, plus it's always been high, every time I've been to a UTC. (The last time I went to a UTC, the guy put me on blood pressure medication. WTF?) I smiled and said, "Yep, it's high, but that's the main reason I joined Weight Watchers."

Okay, so she asks me what's wrong, I tell her, blah blah blah. She comes in to do a flu test. She screws it up, and has to do it again. Yay. Come to find out, she had never done one before, I was her guinea pig. I laughed and said, "I popped your flu test cherry." The other nurse didn't find that too funny. Screw you all.

So, she goes out and about 10 minutes later the Nurse Practitioner comes in (which was weird because she told me it would take 15 minutes to read the flu test). Now, this woman weighs at least 300 pounds, has a scowl on her that won't leave, and you could tell that she had no desire to be there, dealing with sick people. Umm, hello, you work at a UTC. You applied for, and took the job, don't blame me. Are you just bitter because you aren't a "real" doctor?

She said the flu test was negative (yay!), and that my blood pressure was high. (No shit, Sherlock. But you weigh 300 pounds, don't you dare start trying to give me advice on my healthy ways.) Then she looked at my ears, throat and listened to my breathing and told me everything looked, and sounded, okay. Her tone was that of, "You are fine, why the hell are you wasting my time?" That's right, because I frequently take Tylenol and still run a fever over 100 degrees when I'm fine. Go to hell. But she gave me a prescription for Z-Pack and off I went.

I will admit that, after about 24 hours of sleep in 36 hours' time and the first dose from the Z-Pack, I do feel a lot better. But that doesn't mean that the first day of 2011 sucked any less.

On top of it all, I already blew two of my New Year's resolutions - the one about not drinking soda and watching my WW points. But I figure, being sick, whatever liquids and food I can choke down, and keep down, I'm doing good. Ergo, I'm not going to hold myself to any New Year's resolutions until tomorrow.