In which I present you with a list of my recent accomplishments! Yay!
1. I finished knitting the first gauntlet.
2. I applied for a job at Cambridge.
3. I wrote a letter to Brumbaugh & Quandahl, PC, LLO, Rat Bastards about the levy on my checking account, inviting them to either provide evidence that they were legally able to attach my account or to kindly get their fucking garnishment off my account and refund my NSF fees toute suite else be hearing from my lawyer.
4. I made coffee and drank it with Silk brand French Vanilla Creamer in it.
5. I read several chapters of Hyperion, and OMG it’s sooooooo good.
6. I added additional items to my Wishlist because God knows I don’t want to be at a loss when I get a job and need to start spending money again.
[Possible 7.] I’m thinking of going to the store to buy ingredients for chole (aka chana masala) (aka kabuli chana) (aka chickpea curry) because the recipe over at Dykewife’s looks freakin’ delicious.
In other news, the weather ’round here is expected to turn reeeeeeally shitty tomorrow.
Update: I made the chole after all, and served it with rice, papadums, cottage cheese, and green chili chutney.
Instead of following a specific recipe I combined both of the linked recipes above, adding some of the pre-mixed chana masala powder I found, in the surprisingly awesome International section at Easter’s, for less than two dollars.
It was so good! I had seconds. Truck had seconds too. When AmmZon gets home, I bet she’ll also have seconds. That’s how good it is.
In which I discuss the fascinating and perplexing details of poverty.
I had had a credit card through Capital One for many years. (Yes, yes, I know that’s a bad idea because their interest rates are astronomical, but whatever.) When my household’s income dropped drastically for over a year, I was forced to make executive decisions about bill paying. I basically quit paying the bill for this card.
The account went into in-house collections. I make token payments of $5 or $25 at random intervals, to show willingness to pay. Eventually the account went to an outside agency which was aggressive as hell and harassed me constantly. I had to tell the chick handling my account never to call me again because she was such a horrifyingly stone-cold cunt.
Via fax (because the agency wouldn’t use email and I couldn’t speak to my agent over the phone without wanting to kill myself), I made payment arrangements. I didn’t keep to them — because of the whole let’s-go-to-Indy-and-make-money fiasco — so the collections firm levied my checking account to the tune of almost three thousand dollars.
Today I logged into my online banking portal for the first time in months. Mysteriously, my account balance is -485.69.
*blink*
Now, WTF? Where did the garnishment go? I looked through all my statements since last July: no levy. It’s gone, like it never happened… except all of my NSF fees due to the garnishment are still there.
Oh, but wait. On January 3rd of this year, there are two transactions: a $50 “GARNISHMENT FEE” and then another charge, “PAYMENT OF GARNISHMENT SCSC016413,” for $238.47. How did the garnishment amount drop from three grand to $238.47? Why is there no record of the account-killing garnishment in the first place? I mean, I owe my bank hundreds and hundreds of dollars in NSFs because of the fucker, and now it’s gone? And what the fuck is this $238.47 number?
They garnished me, fucked up my account, then ungarnished me. And now they’re garnishing me again. People, if you haven’t lived without a checking account since you were fifteen, let me tell you: it’s nearly impossible to live without one. You can’t cash checks. You can’t use a debit card. You can’t do shit. Garnishing someone’s checking account is the very best way to marginalize them entirely. Without a checking account, one can barely function in the world at all.
$238.47 and a $50 fee?!?!! Clearly I need to send some faxes.
Update: My friend informs me a garnishment without authorization is illegal. I’m gonna send a bitchy fax, demanding the garnishment be removed and all my fees paid. Oh yeah.
In which IE drives me apeshit.
If you came by earlier, you saw that I was working on a new template. I can’t get it to render properly in Internet Exploder, though, so we’re back to the old standby until I can get it worked out.
I emailed my resume a few times today, worked on the gauntlets I’m knitting, watched TV, made tomato bisque, visited Baby Girl at the bar (she gave notice and won’t be working there much longer so’s I’s gotsta go visit her), and received two paperbacks off of my Amazon Wishlist in the mail (!!!).
A friend of mine was DDing for a drunk friend of his, so I was recruited to follow him in his friend’s cage to the friend’s house and then take him back to his car. I got free McDonald’s out of the deal, so that was groovy. It’s snowing out right now* but doesn’t look like it’s going to stick.
Now I’m off to bed; I’m trying to get back onto a ‘normal’ schedule so if someone decides to actually interview me it won’t feel like the middle of the night to me.
In other news, that Indian dude on Heroes is SO PRETTY. Omfg.
*The time on the server seems to be wrong; I’m actually posting at two-thirty, not four-thirty.
In which Katanas are cooler than Razrs, neener neener neener!
My brother, who rocks, sent me a cell phone for my last birthday. It was a pink Katana and I love the holy living shit out of it. Well, now he’s gone and gotten himself one too, and he sent me an email so loaded with phone geekery that, for your edification, I reprint it here:
“I just got me a blue Katana. Wow this phone is badass. I only got to play with yours for like 20 minutes, so I didn’t get to check out how bad it was. You are the luckiest sister ever.
“There are some pretty badass FREE apps you can get… go to wap.getjar.com on your phone’s browser, select ‘browse software by platform’, select ‘java’ then select any of the phones that have 240X320 next to them.
“You should definitely get “Opera Miniâ€. It lets you browse real websites on your phone!! You can even look at the ‘box, I’m reading tiny little Rants right now!! (So is dad the only one who uses it?)
“Also, you should look into an app called “Reporoâ€, I guess it lets you text message and IM for free, with like MSN, AOL, Google, and Yahoo… I haven’t done it yet but it looks cool. I’m thinking that the free texting would be an alright deal for you.
“I can’t stand how fucking cool this phone is… I kinda wanted the black one for the knight rider effect but the blue one had my name all over it. All my friends are jealous and I’m soooo glad I didn’t get the stupid Razr.”
So there you have it, straight from my little brother: Razr = stupid. So sorry, Razr people.
The Opera Mini browser totally fucking rocks. Go get it!
In other news, here’s a song I sang at the holiday benefit last month. It’s a little wobbly at first, but it tightens up.
In which I know what I need! I know what I need!
I was over at Copperred’s this morning and he’d posted about watching Pinky and the Brain and suddenly I realized… that’s what I need! Some Pinky! Some Brain! Hell yeah!
Therefore, someone (ideally someone with more cash than sense) should rush immediately over to my Amazon Wish List and buy me Pinky and the Brain, Vol. 1. This will need to be done right away, of course, considering that I won’t be receiving mail at this address come three weeks hence. Not that I’m being demanding or anything.
I’d take Vol. 2 too while you’re at it. It’s a screaming deal, really.
NARF!
Yesterday I did laundry, applied for two jobs, brushed my hair, bathed, and successfully kept two meals down. Today I intend to crest Mount Everest before lunch, visit the post office, and then do a little knitting in the afternoon while various companies blow up my cell phone with calls for interviews.
In other news, you may have noticed that now when you mouse-over external links, there’s a groovy pop-up preview thingy. (It’s from Snap and I installed it yesterday and I saw it first over at Jake’s blog.) I just wanted to say that if you decide to install it on your site and you use WP, don’t bother with the plugin because it doesn’t appear to work; just paste the Snap code into your Header template and save yourself the bother, yo.
In which there’s a bug.
I woke up at 8 o’clock in the morning on the first day of the new year running a temperature and wanting to puke. It went downhill from there, and I spent the whole day battling the stomach flu.
What’s that? Oh, well, of course it was both ends. Why wouldn’t it be?
AmmZon went to the store and got me a gallon of water and some orange Gatorade so I wouldn’t dehydrate. The aches and pains sucked.
You have no idea how far the bathroom is from my room. It’s, like, a jillion miles. Uphill. In the snow.
Update: Mid-afternoon today I roused my sick-ass self for a trip to Drug Town, where I bought three packets of Thai noodles and two bottles of Powerade. I spent four dollars. I came home, ate some noodles, and was so exhausted by the ordeal I had to sleep for five hours. My guts still hurt, but the fever’s broken and I once again have control of my excretions. Happy fucking new year, indeed.
In which I party myself into the ground! (Eh, like THAT’S news.)
This morning I emailed a bunch of cell phone pics to my Flickr account, only discover that one cannot send an email to Flickr with more than one image attached. Ergo, each of the six images that actually made it to the target web site represents four to six more that did not make it. What a pain in the arse it is, to get one’s photos off of one’s cell phone!
The party was fun. A bunch of women stood around in the high school parking lot introducing themselves to one another until the bus arrived. (AmmZon had to speak with the driver three times before he found us. Eek.)
We all piled onto the bus, decorated it with blown-up copies of the bride’s yearbook pictures, and started drinking immediately. (The hostess had put mixed drinks into water bottles, and brought coolers full of them. Brilliant!)
We picked the bride up at her house, then went on a tour of her life. Some of the girls put on wigs and did skits at various locations — one skit involved the bride’s sister in the role of the bride and Amazon Blonde [the original one, not my roommate] as herself, reenacting their meeting, which apparently occurred while the bride lay on the sidewalk in front of Wolfgang’s place, drunk, and said to the approaching Amazon, “Hey, I know you! We fucked the same guy.” After that vignette we piled back on the bus. We stopped at the hotel bar and more women joined us. We visited various landmarks important in the bride’s formative years, including: a couple of fields, Wal*Mart, the golf club, that huge ugly mansion with the bowling lanes downstairs and the caves over the pool, and the street in front of a few houses her boyfriends used to live in. The bride got properly shit faced. A fabulous time was had by all, and I remember remarking several times that the bride has KILLER friends, and also that there were a lot of really nice boobs on the bus. (Seriously. The majority of her friends have remarkable racks. Go figure — her own are freakin’ gravity-proof themselves.)
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In which the outage is over.
There was some bookkeeping issue with the hosting provider, but it’s all better now.
Christmas day I slept until five, then I went to NLW’s and we ate chips and drank coffee and knitted and talked about knitting and watched a couple of movies. It was awesome.
Yesterday I was supposed to go to a bridal shower, but it was at 11:30 AM and I slept through my alarm… by about five hours.
Today I had lunch with my TM teacher. I used to be in love with him. He’d completely forgotten he’d taught me to meditate, which is the best part. He told me to meditate more.
Tonight I’m going to a bachelorette party. There’s a bus, so I’ll probably get drunk. Right now I’m going out for Mexican food with AmmZon to build a nice foundation for the evening’s booze.
At four o’clock this morning I made breakfast: scrambled eggs, sauteed spinach, hash browns, and veggie sausage gravy. I had an icy cold Coke. It was delicious.
In which I wish you a merry Xmas!
There are people in town, so I’m gonna go out and see some of them. Tomorrow, I’ll hang with Nasty Little Whore at her house; her man’s leaving town so she and I are gonna make a girls’ night in of it.
My roommates will be gone for two nights, so I’ll have cat-feeding duty. Truck bought AmmZon an iPod nano for Xmas and boy-oh-boy is it tiny and cute!
Oh, and Merry Xmas! *smooch*
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Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
