moriath

Went to Central Park today. Went to the zoo. Got a FANTASTIC picture of me feeding a llama.

Apparently I didn't save it. I am very angry at myself right now.

Real entry when I'm not ANGRY.

Apparently no one in my family eats real food anymore. Or maybe they never did and I've just lived away for so long I've forgotten?

Seriously, the only entrees in the house are one giant effin' porterhouse steak, and some frozen Digiorno pizzas. And I'm pretty sure my brother would attack me with a pizza cutter if I dared make one of his pizzas.

Everything else in the house is snack food. Moderately healthy snack food (mmm, watermelon!), but not enough to eat as a meal.

And yet, that is what I've been expected to live on since I got home on Tuesday night.

I am so hungry.

It's also probably why I'm so tired even though I haven't done anything but sit in the garage, tending the family's garage sale all day.

Plz to be giving me food now, kthxbai.

Oh, also, family? Please mail in the check to repay my loan. Like you said you were going to A WEEK AND A HALF AGO. No wonder they've been calling 3+ times a day.

Me=not happy camper.

My mom is coming tomorrow to move me back to Holland (~adds calling Mom to find out WHEN exactly this is happening to my massive to-do list~) and I don't think I've packed up even half of my crap.

To make matters worse, Billy is sick (insert VERY frustrated sigh/grumble here) so he's not any help at this point. Which leaves packing the entire apartment up to me.

If I weren't such a loving woman, I would pack up just my stuff, and do minimal cleaning so he was left to do the rest on Tuesday/Wednesday (the day we HAVE to be out of the apartment).

But no, I'm going to be a good wife-to-be and pack up everything I'm physically capable of.

Okay, enough bitching ~crosses it off to-do list~. Here's what still needs to be done

• Bitch on IJ
  
• Call Mom; when is she coming tomorrow?
  
• Call towing company to take away my car
  
• Clean/patch walls
  
• Clean bedroom
  
• Pack up kitchen
  
• Pick up crap in the entry way
  
• Clean around the computers
  
• Vacuum
  

If only I had words to thoroughly convey how much is actually involved in this short list....

Complete collection of Fraggle Rock coming to DVD

I've spent the last four years meticulously buying every Fraggle Rock DVD that's come out, from the original three-episode DVDs to the season sets.

And NOW they're coming out with ALL of the episodes on DVD? With new bonus features? That just doesn't seem fair to all of us who've been diligently collecting the individual box sets, the ones we were urged to buy to prove there was still a market for Fraggle Rock.

Also, this release is coming one week after the fourth season is due to be released on DVD.

Of course, that "one week" is also exactly one day after my next birthday. Do I ask for the fourth season on DVD for my birthday? Or do I ask for the whole shebang? (I am, apparently, missing a disc from my first season box set that needs to be replaced...)

All in all? Very disappointed in you, whoever made this decision. I feel slightly betrayed. And manipulated.

Apparently, you can now create google pages that don't rely on your gmail address. This would have been nice to know BEFORE I printed off all of my save the date cards with angela.craft.googlepages.com as the address. Now I look like such an ego-centric bride :-(

It gets a little bit harder to get out of bed.

I'm seeing Indiana Jones at 12:10 tonight :-D That should make sitting through work a little more bearable.

7 more days of work and then I'M FREE.

I picked up my package from UPS this afternoon. I pried apart all of the tape sealing the box while I was in the parking lot to discover a bottle of wine. I was still confused 'cause Billy and I aren't exactly wine drinkers.

When I got home and could inspect the package fully, I discovered a card inside. From our photographer.

SHE IS AMAZING. I LOVE HER.

This is in stark contrast to the fact that, according to the electronic copy of the invoice from the hotel, I should have a hard copy of my hotel contract in my hands TODAY. Instead I have a 2005 Smoking Loon Chardonnay that I have no idea what to do with. But it's the thought that counts, right?

Going out to Ichiban with Billy, James and Rachel soon. Good. 'Cause I'm starving.

Oh! My computer is back at Best Buy. They had to replace the hard drive. Boooooo. But that means all of the repairs were covered under my warranty. Yay! Now I'm just paying $29 to have them optimize it because I really don't want to sit through hours of Windows updates. It's a small price to pay for convenience.

Saw the forensics team off this morning. And by "off" I mean I was there until the bus arrived, 'cause the bus didn't even show up until the time I had to leave. I delivered little notes of encouragement to all of the students. Wrote most of them in the span of a couple of hours last night (it would have been less, but I spent some of that time talking to Rb, then taking a shower and watching Eli Stone); practice for thank you notes, I figure. It was fun writing out all of the inside jokes I've accumulated with people over the years (oh, and I TOTALLY rickroll'd Jon Stowell. A real life, text-based rickroll. 'Cause I'm awesome like that).

I miss the team already :-( I so wish I'd been able to go with them! Work SUCKS like that. But I know the team is going to do AWESOME. Hey, Lauren, if you read this: are you sending your letter to the Hotmail address? I never got a chance to print mine out and in the craziness that was this morning I never had a chance to ask Amy where I should send it.

Okay, I think I need to find a snack before dinner, because yes, I am THAT hungry.

I got home from work this evening to find a note from UPS on my door. Apparently I have a package from here waiting for me. That's my best guess, at least. When you Google "GB Russo & Son" that's the first hit, and the package originated in Grand Rapids. So...yeah.

In case you haven't guessed yet, I definitely did not order anything from them. I've never even heard of them until I Google'd it. I have no idea what's going on. I can only imagine my mom sent me something, but no one's home answering the phone so I have no way of finding out.

I also don't get to pick it up until tomorrow after work. Boo. And since they're only open until 6, just like the bank, I need to go there INSTEAD of the bank, which THUS means I'll have to wake up obnoxiously early on Saturday to go to the bank to deposit my paycheck. Stupid UPS. Why can't I choose what UPS location I use to pick up my package? 'Cause there's a place that's actually on my way home from work where I could have picked it up. It's so convenient that I probably could have gone there AND the bank in one fell swoop. And even if I couldn't, that place is open on Saturdays.

In short, UPS=Lame

Work also=lame because the team leaves for Nationals tomorrow. Without me. THAT SUCKS. I'm going to get to see the team off, though, which will be nice. Wish them all luck one last time and all that.

Dammit. That means I'm going to have to e-mail my letter. I meant to write it while I was at work today so I could print it out, but we are crazy overloaded so no writing for me. And since I still don't have my computer from Best Buy, the printer on my desk is pretty much worthless.

In other news, Billy has convinced me that I need to start writing romance novels. Especially for these people. Any thoughts?

My job requires me to be on the phone for roughly half of the day. Every couple of minutes I'm on the phone talking to publishers, customers, etc.

...

I'm sorry, I was distracted by a Burger King commercial. Morning tongue?! Ew.

Anyway.

So today after work I went and got dinner with Billy. And then got home and I was so proud of myself 'cause I got right to work with wedding stuff. Yay me. One DJ has called me once every day this week, so I figured it was about time I called him back.

It was a pretty good conversation. A long one (half an hour). But he actually already has Pirates music in his repertoire...pretty spiffy.

He also was the cheapest DJ I'd talked to so far. Until I got an e-mail from someone offering 7 hours of DJing for $450...which is so cheap I have to wonder what's wrong, lol.

Okay. So long day at work on the phone, then half an hour with the DJ, then another half an hour with Billy, in which I passed the buck on the DJ search. The DJ is super important to Billy so...why not make that his wedding chore? I'm sure I'm going to do all of the actual scheduling. Not because I don't trust Billy but because I am ANAL RETENTIVE when it comes to this wedding planning stuff. I am going to drive people BATSHIT INSANE on the wedding day because I'm going to want to set up all of the tables myself. I'm trying to do 99% of this thing myself, not necessarily to save money, but because I want to be in complete and utter control.

At some point I am going to have a nervous breakdown. But tonight is not that night.

I topped my day of phone calls off with a call home to beg for money, lol. I want to put down my deposit for at the very least the photographer this week, if not the DJ as well. So I asked my parents for some of the wedding money to be put in my bank account so that Billy's family isn't paying all of our deposits. Next budgeting task: figure out what I should ask Billy's family to pay for and what I should ask my family to pay for. So then I'll know who to turn to as deposits are needed.

Oh, update on ditzy Amanda at the hotel: there was an e-mail waiting for me in my work e-mail box this morning (she sent it at, like, 5:02 yesterday). She'd "forgotten" about the deposit because she gets so excited about the actual planning process. Yeah. She's going to have as little to do with the planning as I can possibly get away with. She said she'd send me an invoice...which I still don't have. I don't know if I'm going to bother e-mailing her back; I might just go to whoever is above her and say I'm tired of dealing with her and her flakiness.

Okay. Shower then sleep. All alone :-( I miss Billy.

(Wedding rant ahead; I totally understand if my wedding woes are of no interest to you)

So on Friday the 14th I called the wedding coordinator at our hotel to check on when/how we're supposed to do the deposit/contract/whatever stuff. I caught her on her cell phone while she was in the car, but she said she was totally going to get back to me later that night with the final estimate and she'd reserved the date for us.

I heard nothing.

Last Friday I called again. And e-mailed.

Nothing again.

Today I called during lunch and left another message. A short while later I got an e-mail from her about how she was "hesitant to give a final estimate" because we wouldn't have the final head count until closer to the reception. But she'd give me a call after dinner to touch base!

It's quarter after nine. It's no longer "after dinner" in the eastern time zone. It's night. And probably too late to call her (she does have a kid, after all, and as pissed as I am right now I don't want to wake the kid up or something).

So unless there's an e-mail waiting in my work e-mail box tomorrow, she's getting a stern phone call from me demanding some straight answers. Because really, shouldn't some sort of deposit on the ceremony/reception venue be one of the first things we pay for?

I'm so freaking close to just walking away and finding another location. But the only other one we liked was ultimately going to be more expensive and didn't have our date free...I really don't want to go back to Holland and look for another venue.

I think I'm going to send her an e-mail tonight. Screw waiting for tomorrow.

GAH. SO FRUSTRATED. I want to get this the fuck out of the way so I can move on to booking my next big vendors: photographer (just need to send her the deposit; she's super awesome and communicative!) and the DJ (I was supposed to start comparing DJ prices tonight...instead I spent two hours working on a mockup of my save the date...I'm officially lame)

Lj-mood: pissed off



So, I've documented my computer woes here before. How much I hate Best
Buy, they suck, blah blah blah.



I woke up this morning and my computer is doing the exact same fucking
thing that it was two months ago. It looks like maybe the computer had
to re-start to install a Windows update (Billy's computer had that alert
on it when I got on his computer this morning. And can I just register
for the record how much I HATE those automatic updates? I'll admit, I'm
lazy; I leave shit open on my desktop all the time because I never turn
my computer off. So to have that shit fucked with because Windows
decides it needs to update some shit pisses me off) and now...it won't
load completely. Just like a month ago.



So I think what I'm going to do is call Best Buy and ask them to explain
exactly what they did to fix it last time and/or get one of their lovely
Geek Squad people come to my place to look at it. And then I will
either call Nick Burden or Circuit City to actually help fix it.



Of course, the latter means that ONCE AGAIN I won't be able to save ANY
of my paycheck, as it will all have to go towards paying immediate
expenses. I'm never going to get to New York at this rate.



I hate life.

My computer got virus bombed somehow last night. It was working all fine and dandy and then Billy downloaded a fucking WORD file (yeah, I know, evil and malicious file type there) and POOF. No more working computer. It froze, so we restarted it and it would only get to the XP loading screen before it crapped out. When we tried to start it in SafeMode a bunch of gobbledygook appeared on the screen.

Took it to BestBuy this morning (since it's still - thank god - under warrantee. I was worried that I'd only gotten the 1 year, which means the warrantee would have ended last week). For $99 my data will be backed up - hopefully (I realized on the way home that I'd saved my file of wedding notes in a different place than I usually save my text files, which means that it might not be saved. This makes Angela VERY sad). But I'm without a computer for "a couple of weeks."

A couple of weeks.

I haven't been that long without a computer of my own since I started college.

Kind of want to die now.

Why the hell aren't they answering their phone(s)?

Opening night was last night. My least anticipated one. Ever.

I came out after the show to see my parents and Billy. They all loved me...but it was a unanimous agreement that 90% of the rest of the show sucked. Either there were mic troubles, or the plot was incomprehensible or...everything just sucked.

I just keep telling myself I only have to put up with this shit for two more days.

But it was nice seeing my parents. They gave me money! I mentioned to them that I had blown through way too much money in my bank account in the last two weeks from eating out for at least one meal every day (I made sure not to mention that "way too much" was $300). Between getting paid yesterday and the money they gave me, it's now like I only spent $60 this month, a much more manageable sum.

Call is supposed to be at five tonight. We go on at eight. I'm going to pull a diva move and be late for call. Because there is no reason that call should be longer than the actual show is.

Yeah, I know, I dropped off the face of the planet for awhile. Because my schedule is crazy busy. Wanna see?

Monday:
11-12:15 - Senior Seminar (crazy stupid English class)
12:30-4 - Work
4:30 - 7:10 (theoretically) - American Musical Stage (have yet to have a full class since the professor is directing the fall show)
7:30-??? Forensics meeting(s)

Tuesday/Thursday:
11-12:15 - American Cinema
12:30-3:30 - Work
3:30 - 4:45 - Mixed Media (DUMB DUMB CLASS)
5:30-??? - Rehearsal and/or coaching

Wednesday:
10-11 - Coaching
11-12:15 - Senior Seminar
12:30-4:30 - Work
5:30 - ??? Rehearsal and/or coaching

Friday:
Morning - Coach (sometimes)
1-4 - Work
BLESSED NIGHT OFF

Saturday:
10 - ??? Rehearsal

Sunday:
CATCH UP ON HOMEWORK

That is why I never post here. Because all I'm doing is rehearsing and when I get home I'm too tired to bitch about it.

But some of this shit is paying off. I attended my first forensics tournament as a judge this weekend. Our novices did AMAZINGLY well (two of them broke into varsity rounds! Damn impressive). But it was like being at an entirely different tournament from the ones I attended as a competitor. For one there was a lot more down time, lol. I only coached two prelim rounds each day. They had me judging crazy shit: persuastion and P.O.I. Y'know, the only two events I managed to go 4 years without competing in. (I got to judge finals in prose and impromptu, which was awesome; I judged impromptu with two other coaches from my school and we all agreed on the rankings for the top two and the 6th place competitors, which was reassuring. It means my opinions aren't COMPLETELY off base.)

Did some good coaching yesterday. Got two people on the way with Crit and helped a novice have a major breakthrough with her prose. Poor girl; she was really successful in high school where the winning formula is JUMP AROUND AND DO AS MUCH CRAZY SHIT AS POSSIBLE!!! College forensics is MUCH more subdued and she just couldn't figure out how to get into character without being all CRAZY. But I think I helped her get over that hurdle yesterday, which was great :-)

I'm up insanely early thanks to some jackass laying on the horn for about a minute at 5:20 this morning in the parking lot. WTF? So I laid in bed for another half an hour, cuddling with my kitties (Billy had to go down to Ohio for the day for a dumb dentist's appointment) before I conceded defeat and got up. Been screwing around on the internet and cleaning house for when Marisa and Richard come over this evening to watch a movie to cut for their duo (Yay interp coaching! I've been coaching PA almost exclusively).

Ugh, my kitten is crying :-( And her meow sounds almost exactly like Coyote's. So when I just hear her meow, I start freaking out because Coyote only makes a noise if it's serious, and then I turn around and see Cricket staring mournfully at me. I really wish cats could talk.

So...finished registering for classes this morning. Dumb. Am currently double-booked for two classes because...EMU is dumb. I took AP Psych in High School, got a five on the exam, but...that score doesn't seem to be here at EMU. I think I might be able to get that sent in, but in the meantime I'm going to see if I like Research Writing enough to stick with it.

So, schedule!:

Monday/Wednesday:
11-12:15 Senior Seminar (final english class for majors. Read some stuff, write some stuff, I might get to earn credit working as an editor for a class journal)
Monday:
4:30-7:10 American Musical Stage (history of musical theatre)
Tuesday/Thursday:
11-12:15 Research Writing (No clue what this will actually entail yet)/Psychology 101 (ohpleasegoddon'tmakemetakethis)
3:30-4:45 Mixed Media (Some writing class that I'll be taking with Billy)

And that's it. The shortest schedule I've taken since the first semester of Freshman year; every other semester I've been taking at least 15 credit hours. Fall semester last year I was taking something stupid like 18 (they max us out at 19. And most of those were ed courses that are now WORTHLESS. 'Cause the ed department can suck it).

School stresses me out way too much. However Billy is lovely and sweet and makes everything better :-)

On the plus side, I don't think I'm going to be "that" forensics coach that never gets anyone to sign up for her. I have to e-mail Marisa a copy of a prose and I'm going to cut a duo for Richard. Or I'll try. Need to go Netflix the movie. And return the movies I've had for...a couple of weeks. Thank goodness they don't give you late fees.

Argh. My kitten is driving me crazy.