goblinbox

In which I’m trying to figure out this back-to-school thing.

When I hatched my spend-a-year-getting-certs scheme, EUC was a given. The Training Benefits facilitator even told me I’d get them.

Then time passed, and EUC expired 16 fucking days before my benefits ran out, and now I’m using my training benefits months before I’d expected to tap into them.

My school plan depended on getting many weeks of EUC before having to use my 20 weeks worth of Extended Benefits.

I guess it really was too good to be true, the whole go-to-school-for-a-year-while-getting-deposits thing, because now if I don’t get EUC, I’m going to run out of benefits in mid-November and I have to go to school now that I’ve started receiving training benefits, otherwise I’ll have to pay them back.

Long story short: it’s not free money after all, if EUC fails for me, because I’ll be borrowing more than I wanted to. More damn student loans.

The current EUC bill is still in the Senate, and they’re supposed to vote on it tomorrow… problem is, if they make any changes it goes back to the House. Again. Which means it could easily be weeks, if not months, before there might be any EUC relief for yours truly.

The uncertainty is kinda freakin’ me out, but I guess I’ll muddle through somehow or another. If I get EUC, I’ll borrow less. If I don’t, well, the financial aid portal thinks I need $16k worth of aid for nine months in school and I’m nowhere near the borrowing cap, so I guess I’ll be okay even if I can’t find a P/T job.

In which I wanna post but don’t really have anything to say and am doing it anyway!

The latest WordPress upgrade looks nice! I’ll have to upgrade my dad’s installation this weekend.

I’m using a new template. I like it. Do you like it?

Amazon is pissing me off. It’s been three days and they haven’t answered my question about why their custom software DOESN’T FUCKING WORK.

This was my breakfast:

The onion festival is this weekend; I’ll be going to see Vaughn Jensen play Land Title tonight with Becca ’cause it’s her birthday.

I have fewer than three dollars to my name.

I called about my extended benefits; they had me leave a message and said I’d get a call back in two days.

I need to wash my hair more than all of you put together.

I’m spending tons of online time here and here.

Update: I finally decided to RTFM and the Amazon software works fine, I just need to feed it UPCs I don’t have. Bleggh.

In which there’s a recipe. Sort of.

After my last post, I went to the kitchen feeling poor and dejected. I knew I had corn tortillas, some cheese, and half a can of refried beans in the fridge. I figured I’d nuke the beans and have a taco or two. AGAIN.

Instead, I made enchiladas!

Not only was there half a can of refried beans in the fridge, but also milk and most of an 8 oz container of sour cream, and some grated Parmesan that was just about expired. I also had a can of fire-roasted chiles in a cupboard.

I nuked three tortillas to soften them, put in some beans and rolled them up. Then I covered them with a chile cream sauce and nuked them, finishing with some leftover salsa and a chopped green onion.

The sauce loosely follows the one in this recipe, but made use of what I had lying around, so it contained Parmesan and cumin instead of Swiss.

Not only was this totally delicious, but I have enough sauce leftover to pour over eggs on toast in the morning. Yum!

In which I complain about living in a state with a 9.1% unemployment rate.

I just read a job listing at WorkSource. The job is called PT ORDER ENTRY SPECIALIST II.

The description says, and I quote verbatim, The FT Order Entry Specialist II will check accuracy of and enter orders for equipment and parts, balance daily order reports, request closing reports and acknowledgments daily, provide various bookings and shipments reports, maintain integrity of open and closed sales orders. Review initial sales orders for completeness and accuracy and input into log book. Perform file maintenance, update sales orders, balance the “shipment to customer” with accounting daily. Track and verify customer purchase orders for each piece of equipment ordered. Produce weekly order and shipment reports for both business units. Monthly, generate and mail verification of bookings totals and reports to appropriate personnel. Provide support for product specialists and field sales as required.

Yeah. It’s glorified data entry and report-running. Anybody could do it.

What’s fucked up is the part where they list the necessary qualifications to be considered for the job: Two year Associates degree (A.A.) accounting degree, plus four years business accounting experience.

A fucking associate’s in accounting? To enter sales orders? Are you fucking kidding me? Four years’ BUSINESS ACCOUNTING experience? Really? With that kind of qualification, you’re a fucking ACCOUNTANT, not an order entry specialist. Jeez.

~+~+~
I was idly looking at job postings because I haven’t received my EUC (emergency unemployment compensation) ruling yet, it’ll take the EB (extended benefits) people two days to call me back, I’m totally broke, I haven’t been awarded any financial aid for school yet, and:

The EUC program expired on June 2, 2010. The U.S. House passed legislation to extend the dates people can apply for and receive EUC benefits, but the bill is currently stalled in the Senate. The Senate is not expected to take the bill up again until July 12, 2010 or later.

If the bill becomes law people will be able to apply for EUC until November 2010 and receive benefits until May 2011.

Long story short, I don’t know yet but I might not be able to do the school thing if I don’t get EUC and/or a financial aid award.

Which would suck, because I was really looking forward to a year in community college, taking computer science classes with twenty-year-old geeks.

~+~+~
I haven’t paid my rent, I’m a month and a half behind on paying my settlement company, I need new glasses, I want new books, I need to pay my dentist, and my dog’s eating shitty grocery store brand kibbles.

My debit card is ten dollars overdrawn, I’m about to disable my Netflix and eMusic accounts, and the only reason I can drive anywhere is because there’s still half a tank of gas in the truck from when dad was here and filled it up. (I don’t drive much.)

G’ma lets me eat her eggs and bread and has offered to buy me groceries when I run out of my own, but I Do Not Want to cost her money. I’m stalled on my little data entry project for NLW because the Amazon Seller’s Desktop application isn’t working and their ticketing system is backed up. My next paying gig isn’t until August.

Long story short, I was surfing WorkSource because a part-time job right now would be freakin’ excellent, and data entry is my bitch.

Now please excuse me while I figure out the best way to spend my last $20 at the grocery store. I’m thinking tofu, ramen, and beans. Maybe some lentils, too; they’re cheap protein.

Hopefully poverty will help me dominate next week’s competitive diet stats!

In which I do a meme.

A quick google doesn’t reveal to me where it came from originally, but the 12 of 12 idea is that on the 12th day of the month you take 12 pictures and put ‘em on the innertubes. Vuboq does it sometimes. It’s what I did today.

Behold, twelve images of my twelfth of July:

I made eggs for breakfast. Mexican eggs. This is mainly because all I had in the pantry was tortillas and a can of tomatoes, and not because I love huevos rancheros. Honestly I’m pretty indifferent to the dish, but it fills the belly. Plus: it’s Mexican food.

I worked on a data entry project for NLW. It was pretty fun until the upload failed and I couldn’t fix it ’cause I had no freakin’ idea what to put in the PID field, since there were successful uploads with blank PID fields. I was all, WTF, AMAZON DOT COM, YOU COQUETTISH BEAST, YOU.

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In which I had a really great gig this weekend.

Saturday, I joined the Coyote Kings at the Pastime in Ritzville for the 17th annual Blues, Brews & BBQs festival.

It was a fantastic time. Great people, great weather, great music (and a fully-stocked green room, so I didn’t have to starve or beg someone to buy me food), and I met tons of great musicians.

I’d write a big fat descriptive post about it, but I’m lazy and I have a movie to watch. (In a nutshell: I rode up with Curt & Shelly, gigged, had some drinks, ran around, got mildly sunburnt, drank gallons of water, met players, and rode back with Frank.) If you want moar you can click the picture for the photo set!

Tomorrow’s to-do list: 1. Get paid for the gig; buy groceries and pay the Internet bill. 2. Work on NLW’s little data entry project. 3. Call the unemployment office and be all, WTF, OVER? WHY DID YOU SEND ME AN EB APP WHEN I’VE ALREADY BEEN APPROVED FOR EB? WHY WON’T YOU GIVE ME ANY MONEY? DO YOU LIKE THAT I’M LIVING ON LENTILS AND RAMEN?!

In which I’M dieting, so YOU get to look at pictures of food.

Here’s my breakfast! Only 400 calories!

Here’s some soup I had the other day!

That soup was good! GAWD I MISS THAT SOUP!

Hmm, soup.

Oh, yeah, this was really good, too:

And this:

And this:

And this:

AW HELL!

Oh, wait! Guess what! I’ll be having this for lunch today:

Argh!!! All I wanna do is eat, and I JUST ATE.

This dorky, obsessive post brought to you by
the bastards evil geniuses over at:

In which it is July the 7th and I haven’t left the house all damned day.

Okay, first of all, NLW hired me to do some data entry for her AND the Ritzville blues festival gig is this weekend, so I’ll be able to buy foodz, like refried beans and tortillas and stuff, which is A Very Good Thing. Not to mention that my rent and bills are all late.

Second of all, I have a lunch date tomorrow with a local woman I met on Twitter who needs a web site built. That one will be for charity, but it’s not like I a.) don’t know how to build web sites and b.) HAVE SEVERAL METRIC FUCKTONS OF FREE TIME.

Third of all, the boys over at Cocky & Rude totally nagged me into doing an online group weight loss thing so now I have to drink a lot less alcohol because god hates me and filled alcohol with EMPTY CALORIES OMG WHAT WILL I DO WITH ALL OF THESE EMOTIONS?!?!

I woke up yesterday morning from a dream about a shapeshifter who was embedded (as a cow, of all things) in some off-world ranch operated by bad guys. It was there to shift into bipedal form and then help an agent escape. The shapeshifter’s real form was this awesome bizarro giant shrimp thing. AND it was a romance, although how you’d Do It with a giant shrimp escapes me. The cow was REALLY WEIRD LOOKING. This is why it’s better that I rarely remember my dreams.

So far today I’ve only had 550 calories and I’m star. Ving. Excuse me while I go hork down a couple tacos and half my physical volume in lettuce.

In which this is a blog post containing words and pictures.

I spent most of last week reading, knitting, and watching old television series. I watched all of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and a season of Black Books and a season of Spaced.

I worked on wisp and the art nouveau poncho.

To celebrate Independence Day eve, I went out with a couple of friends and got drunk. This happened only because they paid for everything. There were shots of Jäger.

On the 4th, I went to my aunt and uncle’s and ate macaroni salad and about four pounds of melon.

This morning I finished the poncho, and (as soon as I take it off) I’m going to block it in hopes that blocking will solve the rolling problem at the bottom. If not, the thing may end up with fringe to weight down the hem. Srsly. Seventies brown poncho from hell, people! FRINGE! Whoo hoo!

In other news (because this is the sort of shit that happens when you have zero cash flow), my brother dumped the unlimited data portion of our cell phone contract because we’re poor, and so naturally last month my phone used data all on its own and I’ve been charged $42.09 for 1,403kb worth of data transfer. (Yes, you read that right: kilobytes of data. That’s less than a megabyte and a half.) Now I’m watching stupid fucking FAQ videos for my phone, trying to find out what application is using data and how to turn it the fuck off.

Later, I will knit more and watch more old British television. I will probably walk my dog. I will make some rice and Japanese curry, once the tofu is defrosted. I will do situps I don’t want to do. I will try to figure out what I’m going to do if it’s really true that I’m not eligible for EUC. I will be glad I’m too poor to buy booze because if I weren’t, I’d probably just drink myself into a hellatious hangover because there’s no work here and I might not be able to go back to school after all and I don’t really want to move because my dog’s old and I don’t have a car and damn it I like it here.

And by then the poncho should be dry and I’ll put fringe on it. Whee!

In which there’s a free-form ramble on the topic of writing. This is a zero draft with only basic editing.

People keep telling me to write, that I should write, that I should “be a writer,” and I do write. I write hundreds of thousands of words every year, but the secret I know is that I’ve read great writers and I’m not one.

I loathe my own mediocrity, I suppose, though I grok the math of the curve and accept my position here in the middle with everyone else. It’s cool here, it’s groovy and chummy; we can’t all be the cream in this pail of milk, the world just isn’t made that way, it’s made of gradations and variations and grades and levels, and if I’m to be allowed to be very good at something then it follows that I must also be not good at something else, those are just the rules. If I’m going to be average, why can’t I do it in an office somewhere, an office with a big fat OC3 pipe to the Internet and a 401k and phones that don’t ring very often? Why do I have to write?

Like I’m not writing? I am writing. I write all the time! You’re looking at nine years of writing right here, and it’s not brilliant: I know brilliant. I eat brilliant for breakfast. I’ve read a hundred pounds of brilliant books and what I do here, my noodling, sure, it’s good in places, really good in others, I’ll give you that, but if you want to read a writer, a real writer, someone who shines, a proper real life honest-to-God writer, well, I have a list for you. In the world there are paragraphs that change the way your brain works, chapters that make you weep, phrases exquisite and ephemeral and surgical like the light in a Caravaggio.

That is not what I’m doing around here.

Just thinking about “being a writer” makes me think of the writers I’ve read, and let me tell you something, buddy: there are the brilliant, yes, but then too there are the rest: a whole big bunch these days that are crappy banal crap. So many people devour so many words each day that embarrassingly common strings of them are just available for sale any old place, just as cheap and poorly-made as any cheap poorly-made imported t-shirt with the thin fabric and the crooked seams and a flaw in every single one of the damn lot of five thousand.

My point is this: even though they sell, no one wants to make those cheap fucking t-shirts because the work sucks!

You can get bad writing all over the place, and be just as pissed as I am when I snuggle in, expectant and open, to read, only to discover that I won’t be enjoying it. If I were a writer, if I were writing I would be only slightly better than that. I love to read, I love it perfectly and without reservation: how could I stand myself to sully it with a torrent of words only barely lyrical? What is the fucking point of that, I ask you!

I do write. I’m writing right now! What you’re actually asking me to do is monetize it, turn it into a job, and do the best I can at a volume of labor that forces me, enforces me, to work at my own median level, which is the very median of all possible writing, the mean, the middle, the mediocre, and I can’t figure out why I should do to the world something like that.

Sometimes, though, sometimes: sometimes I do approach something lyrical with these words here. I’m such a late bloomer, though. Now that I’ve glimpsed it and named it and scritched it under its chin do you suppose it will take me another thirty years to tame it?

In which I ain’t got no money.

I knew my UI benefits were about to run out so I checked my post office box once a week. But then they didn’t run out, and I got complacent and blew off getting my mail for a few weeks.

Until today, when my deposit was uncharacteristically late.

I logged into the Employment Security Department website, and lo it did say these horrible words: Your claim for the week ending on Jun 26, 2010 was processed on Jun 28, 2010. No payment was made because your benefits are exhausted, or your benefit year has expired. Your remaining balance is $0.00.

Aw, FUCK.

I found and re-read the information about EUC (emergency unemployment compensation) and discovered that I am – oh crap – not eligible for EUC because my benefits weren’t exhausted between May 22, 2010 and June 2, 2010. They ran out on June 19, 2010: seventeen days too late. I also learned that I will have to apply anyway, if they send me an application.

(Congress may extend EUC benefits, but the bill’s currently stalled in the Senate. As of May 2010, Washington state’s unemployment rate is at 9.1%. If I don’t end up getting any EUC at all, I have only 20 weeks of benefits left and no idea how to accomplish the going-back-to-school plan: it depended on receiving the EUC I was assured I would be eligible for.)

(Christ! SEVENTEEN FUCKING DAYS. If my first claim had been exhausted seventeen days earlier, I would have gotten the damn EUC.)

Anyway. I assumed that I must have been sent an application, because otherwise wouldn’t my EB (extended benefits), for which I have already applied and for which I have already been approved, be paying out?

I went to the post office and yup, I had received an application. I brought it home and filled it out. I read the small print. Guess what’s awesome [where awesome equals utter crap]? What’s awesome is that the EUC processing office doesn’t accept faxes or online applications. I have to mail my application in, and of course everything’s closed on Monday for the holiday, and they’re going to deny me anyway. Still, I have to apply, because if I don’t Washington state won’t give me my EB. Even though they’ve already approved them.

Long boring story short, my total net worth is less than $1 in change and my next paying gig isn’t until July 10th.

Oh, and without EUC I have to see if I can either 1.) borrow five grand in student loans, or 2.) bag the whole school idea altogether and bail to ANY TOWN I CAN GET A STUPID JOB IN, ANY TOWN AT ALL.

Aw, fuck.

My rent is due tomorrow. I have maybe three or four days worth of food left before I have to start stealing from G’ma. It will probably be two weeks, minimum, before I get another deposit. My cell phone service will probably be suspended in the interim. Thank God the DSL is paid up for the next three weeks, at least.

Um. Yeah. So. Remember that one time a few years ago when my marriage failed spectacularly, leaving me homeless and jobless and broke, and how much that totally sucked? Well, this is kinda like that, except that now I’m about to start mooching off my 87-year-old grandmother.

Related: ApPROVED, bitches!

In which I wanna bitch about financial stuff.

As you may or may not know, I’m not a legitimate adult-type person. I’m actually one of those financially marginalized creatures who literally cannot cash a check on her own. Anywhere. Ever.

In fact, I’m so marginalized that I can’t use my own money without paying fees because I don’t have enough of it.

Below a certain point, poverty is inevitable because it just plain costs extra to be poor. If you don’t have a checking account, you cannot cash a check for free. Even if you walk into the bank with seven pieces of ID, they’ll charge you a non-customer cashing fee. If the bank the check was drawn on isn’t local, you have to go to a check cashing place, and their fees are as high as the state you’re in will allow.

If you don’t have a checking account, you have to pay fees in order to pay your bills: money orders cost $2 or more apiece these days, and even pre-paid debit cards’ BillPay services cost $1 per check.

If you don’t have a checking account, you pay transaction fees. Every single time you swipe your pre-paid debit card, it costs $2.

I can’t get a real account at a real bank because I’m listed on TeleCheck. My last checking account was literally seized by an unscrupulous collector, and the bank reported me for not paying overdraft fees or something.

I’m still really pissed off about all this, because putting a lien on my checking account wasn’t strictly legal, and my bank certainly wasn’t authorized to let some strange company take all of my money. By the time I discovered that the collector had done it all bass-ackwards (the judgement should have come first, you dickwad, and I hope you suffer a terrifying and painfully fatal heart attack quite soon for fucking up my life like this for six hundred dollars) and that my bank was probably culpable too and that I could, with sufficiently herculean effort, make them all undo what they’d done it was three years later and I didn’t even try.

Anyway.

The point is that I have a pre-paid debit card, because that’s all I can get.

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