Month: October 2021

Since I am not going to Florida in November, there are some Disney park tickets I need to take care of. Disney doesn’t allow you to get a refund on tickets you purchase, even if you want a refund before the actual start date of the ticket. Your only real option is to push the start date of the ticket as far into the future as possible. The hope is that one day you’ll be ready to use the ticket again. Disney also makes it really difficult to do this. While most of the world has moved to the world of the Internet, Disney requires you to call a phone number to make changes to your tickets. Here’s the interesting thing. Disney will allow you to buy park tickets, make park reservations, and make hotel reservations online, but if you want to make changes, you gotta call this number.

Ok, so yeah, calling a number is more an inconvenience than doing things online but it’s not that bad, right? Whatever call centre Disney has set up for this purpose must have two people on staff. Though the call line is supposedly open from 8am to 11pm EST, I have yet to get through. Each time, a recorded message tells me that call volumes are high and my anticipated wait time is over ten minutes. I think I’ve tried to call them three times now and here is how long I’ve waited before I had to hang up because I had other things to do: two and half hours, two hours, and one and a half hours.

Disney is a multi-billion dollar company, with amusement parks, TV shows, and movies that rake in money by the landfill. As a corporate entity, there is very little that can’t do or have a problem they can’t solve. So if I have been on hold for approaching eight hours in total and I still can’t speak to a Disney representative, that’s not because Disney can’t figure out how to solve this problem, it’s because they don’t really care about helping me trying to change my tickets.

I am going to try to call Disney again this week and hopefully I’ll be able to get through.

Someone from the flooring company came to my apartment today to take measurements and to make a general assessment of the levelness of my concrete. To my surprise, they said it wasn’t too bad in terms of levelness, though it will require some work for sure. My biggest fear was that they would need to flood the entire surface of my living room and bedroom but he didn’t think that would be necessary. He showed me pictures of an apartment nearby that had very uneven subfloors and it required nearly thirty large bags of leveling compound. It was essentially laying down a new concrete floor for the entire apartment.

The next step is to get a real and accurate quote from the flooring company. Then I need to get approval from strata to start the work.

I spent most of my evening trying to remove a sliver from one of fingers. It looks like I somehow embedded a piece of facial hair in my finger. It was prickly enough to embed itself into my skin. There’s not enough of it for two different types of tweezers to remove it. I’m gonna have to leave it for now.

I had to buy a new router for my home. The one that I bought for about $20 almost ten years ago seems to slow down to one-quarter speed at random times and then stays at that speed until I notice how slow it is. I then have to reboot the router, which seems to fix it until it happens again. I suppose I could just do this indefinitely and save myself a few dollars but wifi technology has come a long in the last decade.

I decided to get a new router that also operates on the 5GHz band as well as the old 2.4GHz. Back in my day, routers commonly only had two antennas but this new one has four. So the router was delivered today but sadly, I am not able to install it. It’s double the size of my old one so the short Ethernet cables I have in my network closet aren’t long enough to reach where this new router needs to go because it’s so big. I had to order a five-pack of longer Ethernet cables before this new piece of equipment can go in.

On the flooring front, the dude who I’ve been talking to took a week off last week so I wasn’t able to make any progress there until today. I returned the samples I got from the flooring store and then we booked an appointment for them to come to my place to take rough measurements. I also got a rough quote from them. It won’t be cheap to get new floors, that’s all I’ll have to say about that for now.

I totally get why some people install their own floors, it can save you thousands of dollars but it’s just not practical in my case. I am not the most natural home renovation person and I know I would made a ton of mistakes. A lot of these mistakes would just wind up costing me money, time, and frustration. In the end, I wouldn’t even be able to guarantee I’d have new floors that I would be happy with. This is one of the times where spending money to get a professional to utilize their skills and experience is completely worth it.

I decided to not go to Florida and Disneyworld next month. Things seem to be getting better in Florida but it’s still not great. We’ll see how it goes in a few months time.

My dinner companion and I decided to try a new restaurant on Friday night and we kinda winged it because I did not make a reservation. We arrived around 7:30pm and saw that this relatively small restaurant had a few open tables. The sight of this had me relieved. Unfortunately, the hostess that greeted us told us that unless we had a reservation, they were booked all through until closing that night. What a bummer. It turns out they were booked all weekend by Wednesday earlier.

We left disappointed and just went up the block slightly to check out another restaurant. This alternate restaurant didn’t exactly excite me, so we decided to head back down in the other direction. When we were passing by the first place that we really wanted to go to, the hostess chased us down.

Apparently, a table of two who had reserved earlier could not prove they were vaccinated, so the restaurant had to decline their patronage and their spot opened up for us. We both were vaccinated and had our passports ready for scanning, so that table became ours.

What an amazing amount of luck that we were passing by again and that those two people decided to roll the dice and tried to get in without proof of vaccination. Their loss was certainly our gain because we wound up having a fantastic meal.