Gothic Peach

Life has been rather crazy these past few days. It’s been almost a week ago (it will be a week ago tomorrow) that the circuit breaker box in our house decided that it was going to stop working properly. We don’t have power to the house because the power company disconnected it to prevent an electrical fire from occurring until the breaker box is fixed.

We’ve tried two electricians so far, neither of them as come through with an appointment or even an estimate as to how much it will cost to fix the breaker box. We’ve asked at church for any electricians, we’ve looked in the phone book. We’ve made calls, but haven’t gotten anywhere – only two of the electricians even resulted in a successful contact attempt – one actually came to the house to look at the breaker box, then told us it was a mess and that he couldn’t get anyone on it for “a while” and that he would send us the estimate. Unless it’s come today, we haven’t gotten it yet.

The other “successful contact” is more a one-sided contact – I was able to send off an email request for an estimate on what fixing the breaker box will cost. They haven’t contacted me back yet, and I’m hoping they do so soon. I’d like to be able to get an estimate, make a payment arrangement if needed, and get the damn breaker box fixed so we can go home.

So we were pricing fencing the other day and man is fencing material expensive. We’d been thinking of possibly fencing in the front yard, or part of it, so Panda could have a fenced yard to run about in. But with the price of fence material, I don’t think that’ll be happening anytime soon.

I mean, how expensive does it need to be? I’m fencing a front yard, I’m not trying to fence houston or anything like that. Sheesh! So I guess I won’t be fencing the yard.

The other thing I’d love to know why it costs so much is college. Tuition went up again this year – and when I got my financial aid, it said that I wouldn’t have enough money to pay for the whole term, yet I should? I thought the $10,000 and some odd dollars was for the full 8-class year, I’ve only 4 classes left before I graduate with my Associate degree. (I will finally be a college graduate – take that family who said I’d never do it.) Plus, I’m going straight into my Bachelor degree program, and the amount that I’m listed as getting for “term 1″ is only half my financial aid, so is the other half coming when they see I’m actually doing my Bachelor program? I’m confused…but when aren’t I?

So I’ve been up at at ‘em since about 1PM (remember, I don’t sleep on the “normal” schedule and all attempts to put me on a “normal” schedule have failed miserably). It is now 3:56 AM and I am ready to crash out. The problem is, I just know if I lay down, I’m going to have my eyes wide open even though they’ll barely stay open right now.

I did some housework, fixed dinner, then did homework for school. Our new phone & internet were turned on today, but until we can find the splitter, we can’t hook it up. For some reason we only have one working phone jack in the house, and the cost of installing a new jack or having one fixed is way more than we’re willing to pay – and way more than a splitter would cost.

Another reason I’m so tired is it is so darned hot! It got to 93° F today (about 33.9° C for my non US friends) and frankly it is way too hot! We have an air conditioner, but it doesn’t work that well. We think the filter needs cleaned, but at the moment it appears to be frozen to the A/C unit and right now, we need whatever little bit of air it will throw out at us or we’ll roast to death in here.

I will say that dinner was nice – I made a taco salad recipe I’d made last month. I got the recipe through Pinterest, but the recipe is actually from Taste of Home. It’s pretty good and not your normal taco salad – as you mix ketchup, oregano, and chili powder with the hamburger instead of taco seasoning. It’s really good, we like it a lot.

Now I think I am going to just go to bed. It is 4:22 AM now, and I should be able to fall asleep. At least, I hope I can.

I logged into my WordPress dashboard here on Gothic Peach to discover that WordPress 3.4 has been released. Knowing how my host likes to jump the gun and send out pester-notices about WordPress needing to be updated, I went through and updated all the blogs to 3.4 as soon as I saw it was out. I’d been waiting for it to come out. As per usual when a new WordPress version comes out, only two of my blogs actually told me 3.4 was out and that I should upgrade. But when I checked the updates page for WordPress, all the blogs showed that I needed to upgrade, so I finished that a bit ago.

While that was going on, I started checking out Spotify and decided to give my Lady Gaga playlist a listen. Lady Gaga is one of my favorite artists, although rock/metal is my favorite genre of music. I’m hoping to be finished with this playlist by the time LaShawn and her mom get back from church. Yes, I’m being naughty and skipping Wednesday night services again. I’m just not into them that much. I love Sunday services and being on the worship team, but I don’t care much for Wednesday nights.

For a final point, I’m doing well so far in my algebra class, although I do have a few things I am not particularly getting. I’m frustrated with algebra because I don’t get it, but I’m even more frustrated with my Web Design class – we’re using a textbook copyrighted in 2003 that has a version copyrighted in 2011, neither the textbook or the instructor give one iota of a care about the fact that each designer has a personal style they use when they design web sites. Oh, and let’s not forget being told to write the first part of “professionally written web site plan” without every once covering, even in the textbook, how to do so. Brilliant.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. What have you been up to?