Financial Aid Issues AGAIN & Miscellany

Well, I’m home, and can final­ly rest after last night’s crazi­ness (as relat­ed by sam­bear). I put him on a bus that was sup­posed to leave at 6:45, then head­ed across town to the ortho­don­tist. My poor sweet­ie will be on and off the bus all day, arriv­ing at our curiousmay9’s side some­time this evening. This is our LAST exper­i­ment with Grey­hound! I talked to him until his phone lost ser­vice south of Atlanta.

Since we were well over an hour ear­ly for the 8:45 appoint­ment, we tried going by G’s old school to find out why she nev­er received her report card. They were sup­pos­ed­ly mailed out, but we nev­er got one. The records have all been trans­ferred to the mid­dle school she won’t be attend­ing. I spoke with Sam on the phone, and we decid­ed that the best course of action will be for him to go to the mid­dle school ear­ly next week to offi­cial­ly with­draw her and get her records to send back to Cal­i­for­nia with her. That will help avoid any delays in get­ting those records to her new school.

We went on to the ortho­don­tist’s office, arriv­ing 45 min­utes ear­ly. We went on in, and hap­pi­ly, they took Katie right back. She got her brack­ets on. She sees an oral sur­geon on the 18th to have a cou­ple more teeth extract­ed due to just hav­ing too many teeth to fit in her mouth, then she’ll get the wires on about a week after that. G slept through most of the vis­it snug­gled up against me in the wait­ing room, which was sweet.

We went by Mom’s office to see her since we were on that side of town, and she real­ly appre­ci­at­ed the sur­prise. I treat­ed myself to a rasp­ber­ry mocha at Star­bucks to help me stay alert on the dri­ve home. We stopped off at my school’s finan­cial aid office since I’ve been try­ing to get hold of them for over a week. They’ve tak­en to just keep­ing the “we’re closed” mes­sage on the phones ALL the time, and the voice mail­box is full so you can’t leave a mes­sage. The email address that is giv­en to con­tact them on their web­site bounces. The indi­vid­ual email address­es I’ve used just don’t get respons­es. So it was time to go to the office in per­son again.

Sur­pris­ing­ly, there were no ring­ing phones and there was no wait to speak to the use­less receptionist—apparently, she’s just decid­ed not to answer phones, peri­od. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I found out that they have man­aged to screw things up so that the finan­cial aid dis­burse­ment that was sup­posed to hap­pen next week isn’t going to hap­pen for at least anoth­er two weeks. This is Not Good, as we’d sched­uled some impor­tant pay­ments then. The mon­ey will be in my account at school by the 12th—they just won’t release it for sev­er­al weeks after that for some stu­pid rea­son. Since I’m already reg­is­tered for a full-time course load, all the charges for the semes­ter are already on my account. There’s no legit­i­mate rea­son for this unless they’re just enjoy­ing col­lect­ing the inter­est for a few weeks.

I am try­ing to go through the VP in charge of their depart­ment again (as I had to last semes­ter). There’s also the fact that it won’t hap­pen until well after class­es start, which means buy­ing near­ly $300 worth of text­books is going to be very difficult!

Is there some sort of union rule against com­pe­tence in staffers at that school? I’ve encoun­tered exact­ly ONE admin per­son there who is worth a damn, and she’s the depart­ment sec­re­tary in my depart­ment. It’s almost a full-time job just to keep these peo­ple doing THEIR jobs!

Any­way, I took the girls to cop­per­scale’s house to vis­it for the after­noon. It’s pret­ty open-ended—I fig­ure I’ll hear from them when it’s time to go get them.

I’m home, but I can’t real­ly rest. I just can­not sleep well dur­ing the day despite get­ting no sleep last night. I’ve got a migraine now, but the caf­feine cure did­n’t work. So I’m just hurt­ing and rather blah. It’s real­ly good that the kids are elsewhere—they aren’t try­ing to be qui­et. I real­ly hate it when my health crap impacts them.

I end­ed up talk­ing on the phone with Katie’s splen­dif­er­ous Girl Scout leader, Katy, on the phone for quite a while, though. She just absolute­ly rocks! I learned about a way cool pro­gram the GS coun­cil is doing for home­schooled girls ages 7 and up this com­ing year. They have one full-day ses­sion a month at Camp Tim­ber Ridge in either an envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence pro­gram or an out­door adven­tures pro­gram (I know which one Katie will want to do). The girls just have to be enrolled as Scouts (inde­pen­dent­ly or with a troop) and it costs $70 per girl for the year ($10 each for sev­en ses­sions). They’re let­ting oth­er kids in the girls’ fam­i­lies par­tic­i­pate as taga­longs, which is real­ly neat for home­school­ing families.

I need to see about updat­ing my First Aid cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in case it’s need­ed for any troop activ­i­ties. I think the rest of my train­ing is up to date, though I still need to fin­ish the camp­ing stuff. Katy asked if Sam and I would help out, though, and I just can’t see refus­ing. I think Sam will real­ly be more use­ful to her than I will, and I fig­ure he’ll be hap­py to fin­ish up the train­ing he start­ed last year. They have 18 girls in their troop this year, so they need more adults on hand! I’d love to talk curiousmay9 and word­can­dlemage into doing the training—they would absolute­ly ROCK as GS leaders.

I passed the typ­ing test (ooo, big sur­prise) for the data entry work I men­tioned to isar­ma and did the paper­work for their back­ground check. I’m not entire­ly sure I want to do this—I’ve already had one seri­ous RSI. Hon­est­ly, anoth­er job pos­si­bil­i­ty a friend brought up last month would be bet­ter all around. Still, I felt like I would be irre­spon­si­ble if I did­n’t real­ly check this thing out, though. It’s sea­son­al, so I should be able to do it here and there, and we can­not afford to pass up any legit­i­mate income oppor­tu­ni­ties at the moment.

I already miss my man ter­ri­bly. I want him to be there for curiousmay9 and regret that I can’t be with her as well, but I miss him!

There’s some pos­si­ble health stuff going on for word­can­dlemage that has me con­cerned, too. Every­thing is prob­a­bly just fine, but I wor­ry any­way. He’s fam­i­ly, and I’ll feel bet­ter when the test results are back next week (as he will, I’m sure).

I’m feel­ing real­ly anti­so­cial, though. I’m just drained. I’m tempt­ed to com­plete­ly pull in my horns and not talk to any­one I can avoid for the next few days. Maybe I just need some intro­vert recharge time. I’m def­i­nite­ly not going to Choco­Laté with the Pol­ySE folks tonight.

Oh—Mom informed me today that one of Dad­dy’s broth­er-in-laws, my least favorite rel­a­tive on that side of the fam­i­ly, is very like­ly to die in the next week or so. He has what start­ed as lung can­cer and spread because he 1) did­n’t get it checked on soon, and 2) he refused to fol­low his doc­tor’s orders. She made it very, very clear that Dad­dy needs ALL of us kids to attend the funer­al when­ev­er it hap­pens. I sang at the last funer­al on that side of the fam­i­ly, since I’m pret­ty much the only singer they have around (they are not the musi­cal part of my roots, obvi­ous­ly). Some­how, the thought of doing that if asked is much eas­i­er to con­tem­plate than just going and hang­ing out with­out hav­ing a task. Since he was­n’t a church-goer, I fig­ure it’s unlike­ly that they’ll have a church mem­ber on hand to do it, although I’m 100% sure that this will be a Bap­tist or Methodist funeral.

I don’t do hang­ing out with­out a task well. I don’t do mix­ing well. I have no inter­est in casu­al con­ver­sa­tion with a bunch of peo­ple who nei­ther under­stand nor approve of most of my life’s choic­es. I have no inten­tion of hid­ing any­thing from them—which makes even the most casu­al con­ver­sa­tion full of poten­tial for difficulties.

One of my cousins on that side is a lit­tle viper, and she sent me an email last year after read­ing my web­site that seemed to be a threat to call my par­ents about the stuff that was there about pagan­ism and polyamory. Um, so? It’s on my web­site, twit—I’m not try­ing to keep it a secret! I don’t know if she ever did, or not—I cer­tain­ly did­n’t hear about it if she did. But she likes to be the cen­ter of atten­tion and stir up crap, so she might try some sort of stu­pid­i­ty at a fam­i­ly event. And yes, she is lack­ing in class and clue­ful­ness enough to do some­thing like that at a funeral.

Sam said some­thing to me this morn­ing when we were jok­ing around, “I’ll nev­er com­pete against you in the Red­neck Olympics.” I’m not red­neck, but I sure as hell know the “cul­ture,” such as it is, bet­ter than he ever will. He has no accent because he large­ly learned to speak from watch­ing exces­sive amounts of TV as a kid. I watched very lit­tle TV but had a first-row seat for extend­ed fam­i­ly soap operas. Is it any won­der that my dra­ma cir­cuits are com­plete­ly burned out?