Alone-ness

In which your Gentle Host goes all emo and ruminates on the concept of “alone,” because, verily, it is a really slow day here at work.

argh IV

Got paid this morning.

Checked the Bank of America website and realized that because our sitter deposited our checks yesterday, and the way B of A does withdrawals to maximize overdrafts, and the way the ATM does fees, that $10 I pulled out of the ATM at the local Sheetz yesterday morning is probably gonna end up costing us $119.

Checked the wife’s car on the way out to my truck…there’s steel belts showing through the sidewall on her left rear tire.  So two new tires this weekend for Stubby.  $100+ that we don’t have down the drain.

And the Durham Arts Council still hasn’t refunded the $160 they owe us for the booth fee of a show we didn’t get accepted to, and they’re late on it.  But we don’t get to charge them late fees.

It just never ends.  It just does not ever fucking end.  Forget getting ahead…we can’t even get less behind.  I am totally out of altitude, airspeed, and ideas.  I feel like I’m just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic watching the Atlantic get closer to the rail as the ship tilts.  And I don’t know how to fix it.

Things that annoy me, special WoW edition

In the fine tradition of my good friend Itanya Blade, let me present a one-item “list” of World of Warcraft Things That Annoy the Moose.

Questing on Quel’danas flagged.

Look.  If you’ve got the balls and the roleplaying understanding to wander around on an RP server permaflagged, go for it.  You’re a gutsier person than I am.  Me, I can’t do it.  I turn my flag on when I want to PvP, which is fairly rare, and then I turn it back off and go on about my business with my happy carebear-blue name over my head.  I started WoW on a PvP server three and a half years ago.  I’m not going back.  No thanks.  I don’t know very many people who do it, but those that do (at least on Feathermoon) tend to be outstanding roleplayers in addition to being pretty good at PvP. 

But I know most of you chuckleheads running around flagged on the Isle of Dailies only think “RP” are the two letters around “Q”.  You’re running around flagged trying to trick people into blueflagging you so they can get pwned.  I’ve seen it too many times.  And yesterday I finally had it happen to me on my failhunter Illithanis.  I rode up into the inn to get the bloodberry quest (sweet zombie Uthas, lady, you don’t have enough of the damn things yet?) and right as I right-clicked on the questgiver, a flagged Alliance cut in front of me and caused me to right-click her instead.  At which point, of course, the guards jacked the shit out of me because I attacked her.

I groused about it for a minute, toggled /pvp twice to make sure I had a 5-minute timer on my flag, then decided to play the odds and went out to the demon-infested area while waiting for the flag to drop.  Sure enough, while I was plinking away at a demon, a feral druid jumped me from behind and used me for a chew toy.  (As an aside:  Dude, we’re surrounded by agents of the fucking Burning Legion and you decide to nomnom on an undergeared blood elf hunter instead?  Priorities, nelfboy.  Priorities.)

Later on, after my flag dropped and I was on my merry way, I had another odd incident.  A flagged human priest kept pulling Wretched and then standing right by my hunter’s pet.  Illy has a windserpent, which has no AOE attack fortunately.  But it damn sure looked like the priest was trying to have me accidentally target her instead of the Wretched that were beating on her shielded arse.  Or maybe she just wanted me to kill them and do her work for her.

Cobags.

XPwned

Anybody who’s ever used Windows knows those dang Blue Screens of Death can pop up at the most inconvenient times.  Like, say, on a giant projection screen during the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics?

I feel for the technicians who had that happen.  As somebody posted on the linked Gizmodo thread, “in China, ‘getting fired’ has a whole different meaning…”

Dude, my hand’s leaving trails

After a highly successful Karazhan raid in WoW last night, Wife Unit and I got to bed pretty late, around 1:00.

We were awakened at the stroke of 5:00 by two things–Fat Cat trying to lie down on my skull to crush it, again, and Nublet having her first genuine night terror.

Between the two of those, I never could get back to sleep.  So I ended up grinding out Quel’danas dailies and some Netherstorm stuff on my druid Amakawa, and shifting money around to get him on the way to his epic flight form.

All this is to say, if I post something today and it makes even less sense than usual?  It’s sleep deprivation, baby.  The cheapest buzz there is.

Oh, and I get to tank a Tempest Keep run tonight.  GO GO GADGET CAFFEINE.

If you give a moose a muffin…

We’re broke as hell, having trouble keeping up with our bills, getting pummeled by stupid little stuff like mystery bank charges and failing hard drives and depression and difficult daughters.  Some days, both of us are barely hanging on by our fingernails.

But right now, none of that matters.

Because my wife made me some homemade baked-from-scratch banana nut muffins to take to work for breakfast.  And these things are awesome.

Love ya, baby.

(If you’ve got kids, you’ll probably get the title reference.  If not, here you go.  It’s one of Nublet’s favorite books.)

Argh, interrupted

As posted below, my wife’s hard drive abruptly shuffled off this mortal coil late in the morning.  Fortunately, I had a spare drive handy–a 100 GB Maxtor IDE workhorse that used to be the boot drive in my old Athlon.  I figured I could just install Vista x64 on that, copy some software down, drop my World of Warcraft folder on her drive, and get her back up and going.

Except we couldn’t find the Vista DVDs.  Either of them.

Now, that Maxtor has a perfectly useful and functional installation of Windows XP SP2 on it.  But one thing I always heard was that you simply do not swap a boot hard drive from one machine to another with completely different hardware.  It won’t work.  Well, I had nothing to lose by trying, so…

Booting her machine with the Maxtor in it produced a 15-minute stream of “found new hardware,” but it did boot, and after one restart, came up with no errors.  Next problem:  drivers for the motherboard’s Ethernet.  Problem was, I can’t find the jump drive I bought along with the new computer parts three months ago.

Enter improvisation #2.  I’d been messing with our digital camera earlier in the day, trying to clean up some pictures my wife took.  It’s got a 128 MB memory card in it.  Those memory cards, as it turns out, are nothing more than a Windows filesystem.  20 minutes later, in addition to 30 pictures of bead jewelry, the card had Realtek LAN and audio and nVidia video drivers on it, and was being read by a portable all-in-1 flash reader that my stepfather-in-law gave us months ago, and my wife just found last week.

It worked.  Then the next step was to clean all the garbage off the drive so I could defrag it.  65 GB of deleted stuff later (mostly my Flight Simulator 2004 installation) followed by a defrag, it had a nice clean 80 GB of space available.  Then it was a trip back across the room to my machine to get my WoW folder copied over, and final installation in the wife’s.

And now, five hours after she first saw SYSTEM BOOT ERROR pop up, she’s got functional World of Warcraft and Internet again.  It’s not as fast as the old setup, but it’ll do for now until we can get the Seagate repaired and find our Vista DVDs.  It should still be fast enough to raid. 

I’d rather be lucky than good…but it’s better to be both.

More argh

The wife’s three-month-old hard drive just shit itself.  Dead as a post.  Neither of our systems will see it, and it’s been working perfectly fine up until now.  And we don’t have the money to replace it.

YOU CAN STOP TEABAGGING US ANYTIME NOW GOD.

Outrage of the day

In 2004, a guy named Peter Tubic got a $50 “zoning enforcement” fine for parking his van without license plates in the privately-owned driveway of his parents’ house where he lived.

Four years later, the city of Milwaukee is seizing Tubic’s $245,000 home because he never paid that fine.

Tubic first got the fine for parking his Ford E150 with no license plates in the driveway of the home, which belonged to his parents at the time . The radiator had broken and Tubic couldn’t get his plates renewed unless the van passed an emissions test. He didn’t have the money to make the repair and had more pressing worries, he said.

His father was suffering from dementia. His mother was battling cancer, and he was their live-in caretaker. He needed to shop, cook, clean, maintain the house and tend to his parents’ needs.

The van repair could wait, he thought.

Then a man from the city showed up and told him otherwise. It was February 2004. Tubic would have to move the van or get license plates for it within 30 days, per city zoning codes, the man said. Somebody had complained.

Several days later Tubic’s dad died. Tubic was overwhelmed, he said.

“It was a combination of things financial and emotional, my caregiving role, all heaped themselves on me at the wrong time,” he said. “I still don’t function well.”

Month after month the city Department of Neighborhood Services sent an inspector to the house to see if the van had moved or had license plates. Each time a new fee was assessed. And a letter was sent to Tubic’s home.

At no time did Tubic call or write to object or explain his circumstances, city officials said. So the bureaucratic cog kept turning.

Tubic’s $50 fine escalated to $1,475, and after it was clear he wasn’t going to respond, the city filed a tax lien. While Tubic paid the property taxes, he never paid the $1,475 for the zoning violation. With interest and penalties, he owed $2,645 before the city foreclosed on Monday.

So let’s get this straight.  This guy gets a $50 ticket for parking his van on private property with no Wisconsin license plates, because he can’t get the plates until he gets the van fixed and he can’t afford it.  Speaking as someone who grew up with a forest of junked cars in the woods beside his parent’s house, that’s the first thing I don’t get.

But ignore that for a second.  He doesn’t pay the ticket, pulling out a long laundry list of medical and psychological conditions that basically boil down to “I can’t handle this so I’m going to ignore it.”  OK.  The ticket eventually reaches almost $1,500 with penalties and interest, at which point the city of Milkwaukee files a tax lien on the house. 

Now, please note carefully:  HE PAID HIS PROPERTY TAXES.  Why didn’t he pay the ticket?  Hell, who knows.  But he didn’t.  And because of that–a four-year-old $50 ticket for having a van with no license plates parked ON PRIVATE PROPERTY–the city of Milwaukee has seized this guy’s house.

What part of the concept of private property do these morons in Milwaukee not understand?  Why are they allowed to do something like this?  You want to come after the guy for the $1500 he owes you on the original ticket?  Go for it, even though I’m not convinced of the legality of most “zoning enforcement” bullshit tickets in the first place.  But taking a man’s dwelling and land because of it when he’s kept up the property taxes?  Nuh-uh.  Straight-up first class bullshit.

Didn’t we fight a war about, oh, 230 years ago over something like this?

argh.

So a couple of days ago, I sat down and worked out a budget for the next three months or so.  It wasn’t a fun exercise, because it clearly shows just how utterly and truly fucked we are financially, thanks to me not keeping a tighter grip on our tax refunds and running up some expenses before realizing we’d run out of money.  It wasn’t a pretty picture, but it was, nevertheless, better than random flailing and panic.  It showed us where we had to delay things, where we could pay right away, how we could get caught up on everything, and which creditors we basically have to tell “sorry, we don’t have enough plasma to sell, call back next month.”  If we could stick reasonably close to it through this month, we might be able to start to turn the corner in September, and have enough money to head down to the Mossy Creek show in October and possibly sell enough of the wife’s beadwork to get back on track.  In order to even make the 1000-mile round trip to Georgia, after all, we’ve got to have several hundred dollars saved up for hotel, car rental (neither of our rides will make it), booth fee, all that fun stuff. 

So of course I get into work this morning and hit the ol’ Banco del America site…and see that somebody has got a withdrawal pending out of our checking account for $119.95.  We don’t know who.  It’s a “hold”, not the actual payment; that’ll come out tomorrow.  But whoever it is, in one instant, all the careful calculations have gone out the window, and here comes another torpedo putting yet another hole in the side of our financial Lusitania.

One of these days, I’m going to finally figure out how I can make the money I make–which by all objective standards is pretty damn good–and we can still be broke all the time.  A few months ago, even after buying the new computers, we had a nice chunk in the bank.  Not enough to head to Cancun on, mind, but enough that we didn’t have to worry about paycheck-to-paycheck for a while.  And I think that was the problem.  I stopped worrying.  I shouldn’t have.  And thanks to that, now I really get to worry.