So past couple of weeks have been hectic for me. I survived the birthday.

Ever since though, it seems like a non-stop stressfest. The day we left to visit the fam, Puppy got diarrhea. Which continued off and on for like 2 weeks. Every time I thought she was finally better (for real this time) she would get it again. I figured she was eating one of the plethora of poisonous plants in our suburban backyard, and basically destroyed it trying to figure out what was wrong.

Finally tired of random bouts of the poops, and 4 awakenings in the night for her to make them, I make the appointment with the vet. Turns out that the poisonous plants she ingested weakened her tract so that she was able to contract a protozoic infection from the millions of rabbit turds she snorfs down every time I take her outside. Brilliant. A round of antibiotics later (and two hours of picking up dog poop to make sure she wouldn't reinfect herself on them) I am hoping that I won't have to go through this again any time soon.

Bright spot: At the vet someone told the secretary that her dog was "a little sick". But it sounded like she said "little shit" so I turned to Husband and said, "Yes, my dog is a little shit too."

Health = don't ask. Double dosage is not helping. Still have most of my original symptoms, plus now I am so tired during the day that I can barely function. I haven't taken this many naps in 20 years. And I still conk out at around 8pm every day.

Oh, and the best part is that I've been battling the insurance company for the past 4 months or so to try to get them to actually cover the things they are supposed to cover. The things I asked them pointedly in the beginning if they would cover, and they insisted that they would after a $300 deductible that they are now trying to turn into a $1500 deductible. At this point I question whether the possibility of improved health is worth all this money and frustration.

Sorry for the downer post. Time for my pre-dinner nap.

So this is my third attempt to write something in here today. Going to try to make this one stick. I'm so out of the practice of journaling I never seem to know quite what to write.

Health-wise, things are so-so. Have had 2 appointments with specialist #2. First one, he gave me a prescription that worked really great for about 5 days, and then basically cut out on the 8th day. Not surprising, as I seem to be able to build up tolerances pretty quick. Side-effects abnormal. Second appointment led to a doubling of the dosage. Thus far it has just made me extremely tired. Fortunately the other side-effects have been less prevalent. We'll see how it works out.

My birthday is in 4 days. Not sure how I feel about that anymore. At first I felt old. Then I felt excited. Now I just feel stressed and/or ambivalent because I have to work out how to visit with relatives that I'd rather not visit who are insisting on seeing me for my birthday. I'd rather just keep things low-key, but one thing family is good at is making you worry about things.

Puppy is doing fairly well. She's more than doubled in size (getting closer to triple at this point). For a couple of weeks she was an absolute joy. Obedient, fun. Now she's reverted back to her more rambunctious self. Testing the rules and boundaries. She really makes me appreciate the demeanor of the dog we had when I was growing up a lot more. Of course, she could have been a hellion at this age too, and I just don't remember. Hopefully she'll settle down again soon.

Got the Essential Blender book in the mail yesterday. I am enjoying it so far, but haven't really made it to the procedural sections yet. I'm excited though, because it is more in depth and will cover a lot of things that I've heard people talk about but had no idea how to do it. Seems like it will be a good companion book to my Blender 2.0 manual. Going to try to rededicate myself to my Blender studies as my train kind of derailed earlier in the year.

[Note to self: message people about Blender.]

Still working on getting the house stuff arranged properly. Finally got my desk area set up a little better. Still need to do some cleaning off and finding of things, but it feels much better now. Also, as an added bonus, the area is much more Puppy-proof now. She can no longer stick her head behind my desk and lick the grating where the computer fan blows out. Still not entirely sure why she likes to do that.

Cold and rainy here today. This is an unwanted change from the warmer temperatures we had been enjoying again. Where I come from, this is winter weather. Here, however, this is just the beginning taunts of winter. Not looking forward to visits from Jack Frost. [Note to self: get good jacket out of Husband's car.]

In fangirl goodness: I got the most awesome Darth Vader action figure from walmart. The Legacy collection. Very poseable and his left hand is in the Grip position, which is what I had been waiting for, for years. He now perches on my desk ready to choke anyone who annoys me. Still looking for the perfect Wall-E toy. I want one that can fold all up into a box and have a flap open like his garbage dumper. Not sure they have both in the same toy.

Well, this has gotten pretty long, so I suppose I'll stop here for today. Plus I think it might be naptime now. Hooray for having a cold.

So... it's been a while. I guess now that my computer is once again operational (vid card died in the move) I should make some sort of an update, particularly since my last notice was not so good.

Moved into the house. That went ok. Adopted a baby of the furry four-legged kind. She makes my life interesting.

Today is the first day it has felt like fall (well, second I guess since it was cold and rainy yesterday) which has sparked my soul searching once again. I have that feeling that I need to start figuring stuff out again.

Health has been so-so. Seeing a specialist who is sending me to another specialist, who will hopefully be able to solve the problem. Hopefully it will all be worth it.

Going to try to restart working on my hobbies, since it's been months to a year since I have done anything with them.

I guess that's good for now.

If life had an undo button, I'd be control-z'ing the shit out of it right now.

In the latest episode of "buying a house will be the death of me.... literally."

Sellers want to move the closing date from July 15th to June 30th, obviously to their benefit. No obvious benefit to us, considering we are already paid to August 4th, which is the end of our lease. Thus far, they haven't accepted all of our repairs, and won't even if we make it a stipulation of closing early.

Husband already has verbal agreement with their realtor (who went through our mortgage officer to contact us about this, since our realtor is in Mexico, instead of contacting our realtor's partner). Husband went directly to their realtor to make the deal, instead of going through our realtor's partner.

This leaves the queen grumpy, because she wasn't really taken into consideration. Secondly I talked to my mom today, who gave us more bargaining ideas, but... yeah, bargaining has been done. Going to have to try to figure out some way to do damage control on this.

So what now? I don't know. Still too raw.

We ended up making an offer on the house. Our offer was about 10k lower than the list price. Their realtor said that they had received many offers on it in the past and were not very negotiable so they all were rejected. Some how the accepted our first offer anyways. I guess our realtor played up the "couple of young kids trying to get off to a good start". That and we had a prequalification letter from the bank.

Anyhoo... Just got the contract back from the realtor so taking it to the bank tomorrow I guess in order to start getting the appraisal and whatever else the bank wants. Trying to find good home inspectors. Need to run a radon test.

Does anyone know if the little home radon tests you can buy at Lowes/HomeDepot are accurate enough? Not sure much how else we could have one done. Not sure if that is covered by the home inspection or not.

Other suggestions? Bear in mind the initial contract is already signed...

I know it's been a while. And I know I owe everyone on planet earth at least one email. Lately I have just felt like hiding. I still feel like hiding, but I have questions.

So after months and months of refusing to look at/discuss houses, the mortgage rates dropped and husband was ready to start looking again. So we do a little driving around where there are signs out, do a little browsing of the internet, and husband picks out 2 to go look at and we go see them on Saturday. One was old and not at all what we were looking for. The other one is kind of (gut instinct was to use the word "enigma" here, but I don't know if it is the correct choice).

2250 sqft, .5 acres, and somehow in our budget. Well, I already know the "somehow" is this. For those of you who cannot view the link, it is a giant powerline that goes across the backyard with the two superhuge wooden poles being inside of the fence.

I don't like them. He couldn't care less that they were there. How much would having those giant powerlines in your backyard bother you?

Other questions are: what percentage of your savings did you throw down into a downpayment? What type of mortgage do you have?

One that renters can answer too: how many places did you look at before you decided on your current place of residence (if you consider this to be a place you will be living for at least a few years)?

Aside from the powerline issue, it just seems wasteful to buy such a huge house, for just the 2 of us, with no children on the (at the very least immediate) horizon. Really, what will we do with 4 bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms? We have enough furniture for a 800 sqft apartment, and pretty much maxed out donations from relatives to have this much. So probably at least half of the house will go empty for a few years while we figure out what to do with it, and build our funds back up again before we can really buy anything.

Ok, so I guess it's time for my monthly update, as it would seem.

The car situation is undoubtedly aging me. Still not resolved, this marks nearly 2 months. I tried to call my local agent again today, and of course she is not in. She is never in when I call, and usually takes a couple of additional phone messages on the days that she is in before she will call me back.

Since my last posting I received a second claim number. Left messages with 2 different people in the claims corporate departments, neither of which called me back. I got a mailing from my local agent that was a form to fill out about how I liked my service and the speed of the solution of my claim. I've decided to give her one last chance to get this rolling before I give her bad marks on everything. Assuming she calls me back.

I don't really know what to say about the grandmother situation that would be entirely appropriate, other than she decided to have the surgery that she insisted that she didn't want to have (unless everyone else wanted her to or something?). It sounds like she'll make a recovery. I don't really want to talk about it.

Mostly I'm just mentioning that much to set the stage for this bit: I'm pretty much avoiding my family right now, because the stress of dealing with them has gotten to great, probably as a result of the added strain of my grandmother. My mother sends me emails that not so subtly aim guilt in my direction. My father sends lonely sounding emails because he is stuck in NJ with grandmother, and she's never been a very nice person. Basically I feel like I'm failing at my familial obligations, I think that they are accusing me of that.

I can't take care of them anymore. Especially right now. I had decided that this year I needed to start putting myself first so that I can heal. It got to the point in the first couple weeks of this year to where any and every conversation I would have with them (particularly my mother, but if I talk to my father, she'll get persistent about why I am avoiding her, so he gets pushed out too) would make me so stressed and upset that I would feel physically ill, and it was probably a contributing factor in why I got sick so much.

But the guilt...

The fact that they're all online (including my brother, who is never online) makes me feel worse. I'm currently signed in as invisible, otherwise I'm sure I'd probably would have had to leave the computer by now entirely due to the stress and sickness. Well, brother needs the brownie points right now anyways, to make up for his other behaviours. And they might all be visiting in a few days, so I'm not sure how I'll weather that, especially when my mother brings the inevitable "where have you been" accusation to the table.

I could probably go on many more paragraphs about it.

Had my first GI specialist appointment. Essentially it was a waste of time. She gave me 2 OTC med samples. One worked, but not the way I thought it would, and the other I am too scared to try due to the high risk of dependency associated with it, and the possible side effect of crapping one's pants at random. Would have been nice if she mentioned those things in the office. I'm glad I can research online.

On the good things side: I adore my husband, and he adores me. He gave me a brand new project to work on as what he wanted for his Valentine's present. It's going better than I thought it would, but still trying to get everything to go together. Edited the first 3 chapters of the novel I started ages ago. Husband is helping me with a new line of studies. I am trying hard.

Sorry if this is all TMI or inappropriate or whatever. I really need someone to talk to, and sadly this journal is my only way to do it anymore. My one good friend is in Italy right now, and the girl who is local never messaged me back. Sadly, everyone else I know seems more distant than a bunch of strangers I know on the internet.

Addendum: local agent called me back, and started giving me the business about how she doesn't handle this stuff and I need to talk to the other people who never call me back. Well, I out-bitched her, and now she said that she will call the claims people and get them to tell her what is going on. I think that as soon as we get this settled, we might be switching companies.

I'm in a rather bitchy mood right now. That's a forewarning.

Car problem not solved yet. Playing fun phone tag with various people and everyone tells me I need to call someone else. The adjustor is in theory looking at my paperwork now, and was supposed to call me back. Has not yet, so I will be calling again this afternoon, probably to be told I need to be more patient. It's been a month. My car is rusting in the snow. I'm annoyed.

In new apartment. Found out after we signed the lease that Towlie (the bad upstairs neighbor) got evicted for his felony charges. So in theory he has to be moved out in less than 2 weeks at this point. Glad we don't live there anymore though.

Christmas was ok. I just don't much get into it anymore. Especially since by the time Christmas was here, we had already had 2, and all the presents were distributed.

New year's was kind of made to suck by my mom who called on the eve to say "you're one surviving grandparent is in the hospital and 'it doesn't look good'. oh yeah, happy new year." so now I'm kind of more mad at my mom than I was before, and I cringe every time my phone rings thinking it's her and she's going to bug me about this some more.

Why does everyone have to die around the holidays?

And while I'm already upset about various other things, I find out today that this girl I used to be friends with until the whole bridal shower issues finally set her wedding date. (Don't think I mentioned her Stockholm syndrome fiance before, but anyways...) It annoys me that she chose May 16 for her wedding date. We chose May 18 because it had significance to us. She chose 16 because it's the first Sat after her graduation. I doubt she gave us a passing thought though. We probably won't be invited anyways, so it won't matter.

Yes I am petty.

So combined with all of my other worries and health problems, I'm pretty bummed out at this point. Dreading the 'what next' in some of these situations, because I know there just isn't a way for them to end well.

Sorry.

Ok, car problem is very nearly solved at this point. And thank God it's working out in my favor now.

About a half an hour ago, as I am starting to write this anyways, husband called me. Apparently the officer on the case had called him to let him know he had talked to the owner of the truck we suspected, and they admitted it was them.

Well, actually he said the two occupants were blaming each other, but that they both admitted it was that truck. And it is insured.

So on Friday we can go down to the police station and get a copy of the report so I can give it to the insurance, and hopefully get everything finalized.

This news came at a good time, because I had talked to my mom earlier today who had talked to her agent (I could not get ahold of mine. I guess she does not work Wednesdays) who said that if no one could be found, this incident would count as an accident for me, and my rates would go up and I would lose my accident free discount.

So I'm very glad that this is working out, and I feel so happy and relieved they admitted to it. That's one thing I can stop worrying about now.

Ps: new apartment is ready, just have to sign the paperwork and we can start moving. Praying that it will work out better.

Well, I guess chronological order is usually best.

Thursday around noonish, I hear upstairs neighbor throwing a huge fit with screaming, swearing, loud crashing/thumping, and complete with death threat to unknown person(s). Police notified, office notified. Police come and talk to him for about 20 minutes, but leave. Office does not give a rats ass, however does tell me that a different apartment is available.

Friday morning, leave with husband for doctor's appointment to see that my car was involved with a hit-and-run during the night. Go for craptacular doctors visit in which they screw just about everything up and are stuck there for 2 hours. Doctor unhelpfully tells me I need to see 2 different specialists, have a test for something she doesn't believe that I have, and need to take anti-anxiety pills because I had a total meltdown in her office on account of the shitty day I was already having. Oh, and I have high blood pressure. Big surprise, right?

Come back to apartment, contact police about car. Officer takes pictures, measurements, and runs my DL. No points, no priors. Go me. Unfortunately after he inspects all the other cars in the parking lot, he determines that none of those present looks like a likely candidate. Call insurance, get sent to repair shop. Get estimate for $2000 worth of body damage, and some minor structural damage to the door that they think they can just hammer back into shape.

Decide to take the other apartment. Begin shitty process of packing and looking for moving helpers. Very happy we made this decision though, based on what comes next.

Saturday evening neighbor goes for the superloud music again. Call cops. When officer arrives the music is still playing. Hear neighbor screaming at him. Then suddenly there was a several minute long scuffle with much pounding and yelling, sounding like they fought their way down the stairs. Neighbor is escorted away in handcuffs. It looked like every on-duty officer in the city was in our parking lot. Scariest experience of my life.

He came back to his apartment roughly 12 hours later, but I think it was just to get some belongings, because (with a prayer) it is remaining quiet since then.

This morning was filled with unhelpful phone calls about my car. Although we do think we have found out who did it, have to wait until tomorrow for the officer we made the original report, since he was not on duty today. Insurance is being frustrating, I guess I should not be surprised. Have to take car in for an estimate (again) because the repairman did not take pictures the first time and would not submit anything to the insurance without an assignment for repair from them. I'm not going to get any repairs done until I get the police report, because I don't want the insurance to be able to back out on me and stick me with a huge bill, when I'm not sure I want to have everything repaired to "good as new" condition when I'm mostly concerned about just the rusting.

I feel like I am taking this all rather well, considering I have not had to be hospitalized yet. Just standing here with my broken umbrella, waiting for the pouring to stop.

Closest thing you'll get to a drunk post from me is this one... Decongestant post.

I've got some sort of thing. It started off as a chest/cough thing for a few weeks. I think it has migrated to the sinuses now. Took some decongestants for the first time in probably a year. Now I remember why I don't like them. Totally brain-fried. They should be wearing off soon, but it's kind of screwed up my day.

I guess since I've admitted to husband's entire family that I am writing now, I can admit it to the rest of the world. Kind of embarrassing really, especially since they will probably continue to ask me questions about it. (holy crap, it just took me like 5 tries to use the spell checker to fix the word "embarrassing", I am that out of it from the decongestants.) It's killing my word count, which I am already behind.

Context: http://nanowrimo.org/

So now everyone knows but my family. I'd feel bad about that, but whatever. Reading that book that everyone's always suggesting to me made me realize it's kind of their fault that I don't really know what I'm doing.

I want to take a nap.

I was wondering if anyone else was using the new Minefield Firefox beta. Husband "upgraded" mine last week, saying that it ran better on his computer than the full release version before it did. Not so much the case for me though. Today it crashed and burned twice, which the other version had not done for me in quite a while.

Anyways, main question is memory usage. Husband said that this was supposed to correct a lot of the memory problems that Firefox has had in the past. On his computer (64 bit ubuntu I believe) Firefox has a bad memory leak which caused it to crash and eat all his memory etc. Firefox did slowly eat memory on my 32 bit ubuntu, but not to the excessive rates the Minefield is doing.

I have the system monitor for memory set up, and it shows that I am using 66% of memory (before I would not use above 50%) and Firefox starts saying that it uses less than 100 mb, but then jumps to 400 or 500 on the tally sheet. But closing it does not return the 400 that it is using, only the 100, and the system monitor continues to say I am using up a ton of memory.

This has only happened since using the Minefield version. But husband has looked at it and says that the new memory usage reports are correct. I think he thinks I am misremembering the usage from before.

I am not sure what else would be causing this, or even any reason Firefox would be doing this unless it is using the ram as cache even after being closed. And closing out all active programs does not return me to low memory usage. I have not tried to run blender since this has started going on, because I am pretty sure it would crash a lot.

Second part: Is there a way to download gmail chat messages off of the gmail web interface thing? I've noticed that apparently all of my messages sent by my gmail account on pidgin (I hate pidgin, I much preferred gaim. I can tell a difference) and gaim before it show up on the web interface, but not vice versa. I much prefer to have them on my computer where they are more easily searched and whatnot.

"Good feelings gone."

All though the rage is slowly disapating as well.

I am so frustrated right now with the apartment people. Again.

We had a few days without music, but then last night it was blasting again. The general loudness never stopped.

So I go back to the office with a pair of complaint forms filled out. I have to talk to the bitch office lady because the nice one was on the phone.

I'll have you know she raised her voice first. She's always so rude. The "you don't stand a crap's chance" phrase will stick in my mind forever.

Essentially she's now passing the buck onto her boss, and she wants us all to have a nice sit-down and work things out.

I don't think he'll be willing to do this because he doesn't answer his door when we go to ask him to turn it down.

I am unwilling to do this, because then he will know for a fact what we look like and that it is us that have been complaining, and I fear retribution.

I also know that this meeting isn't going to solve anything and that things will be the same way afterwards as they are now. Experience with other assholes taught me this.

Besides, husband made our desires known to the idiot upstairs in a notice he left him our second week here. "Quiet between 11pm and 7am." Not unreasonable.

Also, I call bullshit on him "only having a little am/fm clock radio" because it is louder than that. He must be playing it through his TV on a dvd player or something, and his TV must have very large speakers.

Or else he never did remove his stereo. Or he has it back. And I'd bet money that no one went up there to check on it.

So now office bitch wants us to work out "some kind of 50/50". I don't want to work it out. I shouldn't have to be the one to compromise when I am not bothering anyone.

Why do nightmares always repeat themselves?

First of all, sorry everyone for the rather emo posts last week. I had an epiphany this morning. I feel a lot better now. So hopefully I'll be able to get on track now.

Now to the tech questions. I had two, but for some reason I can only remember one now. It's about the new release of Ubuntu.

My upgrade to Feisty had gone off without a hitch earlier in the year. The one thing that it kept prompting me about was the fact that it couldn't load my icons, which I guess had just been relocated, because on reboot everything was fine. The upgrade to the new release, which I will call Grumpy (I say they should have named it Grumpy Groundhog, which ended up being more appropriate anyways) was not smooth.

During the install, which husband had me do from a disk, it continuously prompted me about things that were broken or missing, etc, and husband had to set the installer back on track several times because it was messing around and not using the right repositories.

Anyways, to the point. I didn't use any of the terrible eyecandy for the desktop effects. They make me dizzy, so it should not have been installed for the computer to upgrade. But it apparently went and installed and activated Xgl anyways. Even though I don't have desktop effects on (that I know about, it may have gone and done that for me too) this nice little Xgl is eating my ram up. And it keeps taking more and more. And then it crashes X so I have to log back in again. Today it didn't do a very "clean" crash so that when I logged back in, I couldn't use firefox or anything that had been running before because the computer helpfully informed me they were already running, and I had to restart.

Has anyone else had this problem? (I don't know how many Ubuntu users there are on my list here, and I'm beginning to think I'm the only one who does not want to use these fancy desktop effects.)

The reason it makes me so mad, is that it crashes every time I am using blender, and sometimes I don't get to save my work before it goes bye-bye.

And it was released with a nearly non-functional "Release candidate" for the Gimp. There's probably more. They shouldn't have been so chained to their release schedule. If they had just pushed it back a couple more weeks it would have been much better. I'm hoping that Hungry Hippos will be better.