An open letter…

…to Keyspan Energy Delivery…

Dear Keyspan…

Yanno, it’s bad enough that you rape me every single month with super-high charges, when all I use gas for is heating my hot water.  I’d love to get a cheaper rate by using you for heat, too, but I rent and have no choice.  It’s really not nice to charge me almost twice as much per BTU for the same damned gas that you provide to your heating customers.

But I could live with that, if that was the only issue.  WHY do you keep enrolling me in paperless billing, when I haven’t asked to do so?  Yeah, so I pay my bills online most of the time, but I never said that means I don’t want the paper bill.

And yes, there is a good reason why I need the paper bill…your website SUCKS!  I have been trying all morning to log in and pay my bill, with no luck.  I try to log in, and end up on a blank page.  Why is that?

And I can’t write a check and mail it, because you turned off my paper billing…WITHOUT MY PERMISSION…and therefore I don’t HAVE said bill.  So how do I know how much to pay?

If you feel you must do away with paper billing, can you at least have a website that works?

I finally was able to get in and pay, but I resent having had to waste so much time on this.

You guys really suck.

Sincerely,

Christine

Sick of the snow…

Today is the last day of February. And it looks like March is coming in like a lion; we’re to be dumped with yet more snow. It’s getting old, I’m ready for spring and baseball and outdoor furniture and such.

I’m hoping that all of this snow now means that it will officially be over and done with by April.  We’d had tickets to some ball games last year in April…Opening Night for the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, followed by Opening Weekend up in Portland to see the Sea Dogs.

It was a complete disaster…all of the games got SNOWED out.  This year, we only have tickets to Opening Night in Manchester (Fisher Cats), but that’s because they come with our season mini-plan.  That game will be on April 10.

PLEASE…no more snow after this one!

Save those pennies!

Last night, on the FOX-25 news, they had a story about a young man who is literally saving pennies in order to pay for his freshman year of college. Story with video here.

His name is Adam, he lives in Framingham, MA, and he’s set up a blog called The Three Million Penny Project. His goal is to collect $34,630.83 from friends and readers, which comes to a bit over three million pennies. That’s about the average cost per year to go to college these days.

Many people hate pennies. How many times have you bought something at a store for something like $4.98, and then walk out without the two cents change? Maybe you take it and put it in one of those “leave a penny, take a penny” things. I’ve often done that, because I just didn’t want to bother with pennies.

But maybe it’s time to look at those pennies in a new light. The news story I linked to here said that some people say they actually throw their pennies away, in the trash! Why do that, when instead, you can send them to Adam, and help him attain his goal of going to college?

Every day, Mike and I both dump our pocket change into a jumbo-sized Transformers cup, which originally held a soda when we went to see that movie. It’s a good-sized cup, bigger than the jar we were using before. When it’s full, I usually just take it to Shaw’s and dump it all into the CoinStar machine, and use it to buy groceries.

But now, I will go through what change is in it now, pick out all of the pennies, and send them to Adam. Then I’ll start saving pennies in another container for him. The thing about saving pennies like this is that you never really miss them in the first place.

Adam comes off as a very intelligent, personable young man. And he’s not relying solely on the donations of strangers on the internet…he also works a part-time job to help save for college. But he came up with a very clever idea to raise funds, and I sincerely hope he meets his goal.

If you don’t want to bother putting pennies in the mail and paying for postage, he also accepts donations via PayPal. There’s a donation button on his blog, as well as his home address to which you can mail those pennies.

Good luck, Adam!

Wanna be a criminal? Move to Massachusetts!

Seriously, criminals have more rights here than the law-abiding citizens do. First of all, did you know that under state law, if someone breaks into your home, you are expected to make an effort to escape first, before trying to fight off the poor widdle cwiminal? Yes, it’s true. In other states, if you have a gun, you can shoot to kill if someone breaks in. But here, I would be expected to try to run away, which would mean abandoning my cats here, for the sicko to perhaps torture and kill.

No thanks. If anyone ever broke in here, and Mike was not at home, damned straight I’d fight back. I’d probably hit the intruder upside the head with one of my cast iron skillets; that would probably kill him. Mike says that if this happens, he will visit me every week in Framingham, which is the women’s prison where I’d probably end up, just because I chose to defend myself, my home, and my kitty family.

Also, it seems that level 3 sex offenders are allowed to run around loose. There was this guy, who peeped at some woman under a restroom store at a Borders bookstore in Braintree, who turned out to be one of said level 3 pervos. And look at what delightful judges we have here…the same judge that released this guy, also released a pedophile in New Bedford. Charming, huh?

Once again…if I’d been the woman who was being peeped at, at that bookstore, I’d probably have reacted by giving him a good swift kick in the head with my size 11W…and once again, pervo would be the innocent victim, and I’d be doing time in Framingham for *attacking* him. That’s the way it is here in this not-so-great state.

Now there’s all sorts of talk on Beacon Hill about reforming sex offender laws, but I doubt it will be enough. The registry system isn’t working; these pervos need to be locked up for longer than they are. Recidivism among sex offenders, be they pedophiles or those who rape adults, is VERY high. Many are beyond help, and need to be locked up forever. Yes, it costs money, but I’d much rather see these wastes of DNA locked up, than having them be free to walk the streets and re-offend, over and over again.

Yet this state worries more about the rights of the criminal. And they wonder why people are leaving the state in droves. This sort of thing is just one reason why we want to leave, there are tons more. The laws here are so ridiculous…I wanted to join one of those mail-order wine clubs, and was told that I wasn’t allowed to, due to state laws. Great…I can’t enjoy good wine that they don’t have at my local Kappy’s store or anywhere else, but sex offenders are running around loose.

Charming.

Review: Stop & Shop Supermarkets

This is going to be an occasional feature of this blog, where I review various stores in New England, and let you know whether I think they are good, or if they suck.  This may also include online stores that happen to be located in New England, as well.

Today, I am talking about Stop & Shop…not so much the entire chain, but the location at 99 Charles Street in Malden,  near the T station.  Although this is the closest supermarket to where we live, and very easy for Mike to stop in and pick up a few things on his way home from work, we’ve been boycotting this place specifically, and the whole chain where possible, for quite some time now.

Why?  First and foremost, very rude employees.  I could go on for days about this, but I won’t.  But one incident that sticks in my mind was this time I was buying big bags of cat food and litter.  This smartassed teen bimbo cashier asked me how many cats I had.  I told her (we had nine cats at the time, we have six now).  She then laughed at me and said I was crazy, and not in a nice way, I might add.  Yep, this is what they allow to work in their stores and deal with customers.  If I were her boss, and I happened to hear her talk like that to a customer, she’d be out on her ass within two seconds.

Also, the store was a bit run down and skeevy, and the quality of the fresh food wasn’t so good.  It seemed that they were catering to people who didn’t cook, and just bought overpriced processed junk food all the time.  Also, you go there to look for something in the sale flyer, and it was hit-or-miss whether they’d have it or not.  And this location also has a full license to sell beer, wine, and hard liquor…a rarity here for supermarkets.  But try buying it there…all of their cashiers seemed to be 15-16 years old, and therefore not old enough to ring it up.  They’d have to call for a manager, and said manager usually acted as if it were some sort of great imposition for them to have to come over and ring it up.  Sheesh, if you’re gonna sell booze, at least have some cashiers on duty at all times who are old enough to ring it up.  There’s a Kappy’s right down the street, easier to just go there, because everyone there is 21+ and old enough to ring up the merchandise.

And finally, the prices weren’t all that great.  We’d started shopping at the Market Basket store in Tewksbury, which is not far from where we have a P.O. box, and found we liked it a lot better, quality, service and price-wise.  When we don’t feel like going all the way up there, we shop at the Shaw’s in Melrose.  The prices aren’t as good there, but everything else about the place is better than Stop & Shop.

At the time we decided to boycott the place, they had been starting to remodel the place.  They were in the process of painting the walls this ghastly shade of piss yellow.  It made me depressed to even want to be in that store, and after the last negative experience with a surly cashier, we agreed that we should shop elsewhere.

When Stop & Shop started their new ad campaign, which features supposedly real people talking about how Stop & Shop works for them, I was skeptical.  One of the ads features a young family, where the husband and wife are both schoolteachers.  But the wife was out on maternity leave, and they were getting by on just the husband’s income, with two kids  I know that teachers do not make a lot of money.  Yet the woman was going on and on in the ads about how Stop & Shop was good for young families, how it fit into their budget because their prices were lower than other stores.  I wanted to know where these people lived, and what other stores they had nearby.  For all I knew, they could have lived someplace where the only other grocery store around was Whole Paycheck…then S&S would be cheaper, for sure!

To be fair, though, not all S&S stores are skeevy.  When we spend weekends in Sturbridge (we are members of Old Sturbridge Village, as you may know), we visit the S&S there to buy their premade subs and other munchies.  I originally didn’t want to, I wanted to boycott the entire chain completely (we’ve also had rude employee/crappy quality issues in the locations in Medford, Saugus and Lynn, as well as the other Malden location on Broadway).  But there’s really nothing else there that I know of, so we bit the bullet and went in there.  It’s actually a nice store, with none of the issues we’ve had at stores closer to home.  I guess it depends on who is managing it.

But anyway, back to the Charles Street store in Malden…

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