Bah

Not cool. Today, in two words: NOT COOL.

First and foremost, my cell phone bill - normally 57 euros - was 250. This is due to travelling and lots of international phone calls, and also not knowing that I was charged at over 1 euro/minute.

Soooo... I already was having a hard time trying to scrounge up the cash to pay for a ticket to visit my friends - as promised - in New Mexico this summer. And now I REALLY can't afford to tack on a trip to see my sister and her glorious new house. The phone bill just sealed the deal. I am very, very unhappy about this.

One positive note was that I spent the morning taking care of administrative shit. This is always a pain, but oddly cathartic. My pile of do-something-with-me papers disappeared, I finally sent out two letters I wrote over a month ago, and so on.

I also spent the morning preparing a list of books I wanted to check out at the library later this afternoon. I read some abstracts, yada, yada. With my list prepared online, I went to print it and discovered we had no ink. Motivated as I was, I wrote down the title, author, and reference number for the ten top picks, and then packed up TheBoy's laptop and my books before heading out towards the library.

I quickly realized I would not be able to take my bike (laptop does not fit in basket; is too heavy to ride around with on my back), and shortly thereafter realized I had left my bus pass upstairs. I couldn't bear to walk all the way back to my house and up the stairs with the heavy-ass bag, so I sucked it up and paid 1,40 euros for the one-way fare.

On the way, the busdriver messed up the route and missed his turn, only realizing it when the mood on the bus turned to one of confusion several blocks later. At a stoplight, he turned around and asked the passengers "Was I supposed to stop there?" to which we unanimously said "Yes!" with the bitterness of hurried Parisians in an ugly neighborhood. Several blocks from the original stop, he dumped us off sheepishly, and I carried the damn laptop much further than I would have had to otherwise. I felt bad for the driver (I think he felt pretty stupid) but I wasn't really cool with the error, either.

Of course, when I got to the library, I found out that all the rooms that my books are in are reserved for Special Researcher Types on Mondays. So I couldn't go in. I could have gone to the super deluxe research center, but as I only have the right to 12 more entries in those rooms, I wanted to save my entries for a day when I could spend six or seven solid hours there. So great. I packed up and went back home.

All in all, over an hour of transportation time, 2,80 euros gone, a missed bus stop, and an unneccessarily heavy bag made me a pretty grumpy cat.

Then I came home, ate some cashews, got a blistering headache, and fell asleep for two hours.