Somebody To Love

So, I’m doing it again. It’s 2:30am and I’m still up doing a really simple assignment that I just can’t seem to focus on. I officially suck at this school thing now.

I’m really sick of school now. It’s very obvious when writing a presentation on weakness of will and yet displaying that same characteristic. The glaring criticisms in this essay are still not enough to motivate me.

After several failed attempts over the last few days of turning this into some semblance of a coherent presentation, I’m finally getting somewhere but it is slow going. I’ve been sitting here for the last three hours trying to get a handout together for the morning. It’s at the halfway point and I’m really getting tempted to just go to sleep. At first I wasn’t sure that Hill had it right that you feel shame when you realize your will is weak, but right now I’m ashamed that rather than doing my best I just want sleep.

I’ve emailed WPL and told them that I won’t be coming in tomorrow (I’ll most likely be sleeping in preparation for class or still trying to finish this thing) and am so scatterbrained at the moment that pretty much anything is a distraction.

What makes it worse is I know that I probably would have had this done days ago if I wasn’t so preoccupied with WLUSP stuff. Lately there have been a lot of updates to Wordpress and I’ve been upgrading all the sites and trying to keep on top of all the plugins and necessary theme changes. Mix that with creating a hiring website, a lot of customizations to the other to get the Pages feature to behave like the regular blog posts and a main page that just won’t behave no matter what lengths I go to and you have one frustrated and distracted gal.

That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing since Friday morning, with my sporadic attempts at a presentation in the interim. I might have missed my academic counselling appointment on Friday as well, though part of me thinks it might be this coming Friday I doubt I’ll be that lucky. I guess tomorrow before my presentation I’ll find out about that and see what I can do.

There’s still three essays, a take-home exam, and a final to get through before this is over. I hope I don’t have a meltdown before I get there.

My computer has been making this weird buzzing sound pretty much since I got it but I’d been putting off doing anything about it, after the mess that resulted whenever I tried to get Dell to fix anything.

Turns out that was silly and I could have fixed this in November with no problems. I called Apple last Thursday and was only on the phone with them for 5 minutes (as opposed to the hour+ that happened with Dell every time) and they believed what I said and thought that it was my screen inverter being the problem.

I found out all I had to do was bring my computer in to any of the places around that sell them and they could fix it there. Sweet! At first I was going to bring it to UW since that’s closest but their tech guy isn’t around as much as the one at Carbon Computing is. So I dropped it off there.

After taking a look at it Dale (the really nice repair guy) called me and said that he can’t get it to make the stupid noise, but that half of the backlights on my screen were dead. I didn’t realize there was something that major wrong with the screen, but it explained a lot. My screen had always looked kinda dark since I got it, but I thought that was normal since people had said these screens had a tendency to be unevenly lit. Whoops.

So not only did they replace my screen, but the cables and inverter and anything else that might have been messing with my screen. Since I picked up the computer yesterday there’s been no more weird noises and the screen just looks so much BETTER. It’s scary how bad it was in comparison. Dell had taught me to accept crap as the usual way of things. *sigh*

This week I also bought one of those orange iPod Shuffle’s from the Apple Store. It’s so cute and works wonderfully. I had to go pick it up today since it was originally sent to the depot in Guelph and the Purolator guy has tried to deliver it since Wednesday with no luck.

I don’t know what’s up with that. For some reason he couldn’t figure out how to buzz up here or something, since he said he was here on Wednesday and didn’t know the number. It’s the same as the apartment number and they are clearly labelled! They apparently called here at 7am yesterday and woke Katie up, and she told them that the buzzer is the same.

That didn’t help, since the guy tried again and said he couldn’t figure it out. So I called Purolator myself and explained (while trying not to sound angry at the apparently simple people that work there). Instead of trying again today they gave up and dropped it off last night at the Purolator place by Conestoga Mall.

The whole thing just seemed so stupid. I honestly don’t think the guy actually found this place, since he claims to have buzzed but I have the tracking to know around what time and people were here. Hell, three of the four of us were here both times he claims he buzzed. I don’t know what to think. I’m just glad my iPod didn’t end up lost as a result of this.

I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. I’ll either end up going to bed really late or getting up early and not being able to get back to sleep. Yesterday was the worst. I woke up at 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep. When Dean left for work at 6am I tried again, and had just fallen asleep after 7am when my sister called. I might have been able to sleep after that but she was on the phone until almost 10am and I had to be at the library after that. *sigh*

I’m doing all kinds of responsible things today. Like working on my grad school application some more, getting information on which transcripts are required, and….

APPLYING TO GRADUATE!

I knew the deadline was in February. What I didn’t know was that the applications were already online. I discovered that bit of fun while looking up whether I could get transcripts now or if I had to wait until my marks were in from this term.

I also went through and calculated my mark over the last 14 completed courses, since they use the percentage from the last 20 but I’m doing six of them this year. Even with my bad experiences in business classes I’m doing okay.

It’s a 76% despite a D+ and a couple of Cs in there. Considering I’ve got 90s in everything this term (God alone knows how) I might actually get the marks up enough to get scholarships. That I never expected.

Highschool spoiled me and got me used to having As all the time. I never thought that bad marks could be in there and I could still get money for doing well.

I’m getting pretty excited about this term now. I hope it keeps on as it has been.

My parents called me today, bored as usual. Their phone calls usually last for 90 minutes or more, and this was no exception. My mom lost her invitation to her brother’s wedding and made me read mine out to her so she’d know when and where it was. Sheesh.

Then she put my sister on. That was weird. My sister had a joke:

This guy in a wheelchair has cold feet so her asks his friend to go upstairs and get his slippers for him. The friend goes up there and tells the guys wife that he was told to sleep with her. She says he’s a liar and the friend says he was told to sleep with both her and the daughter. He yells downstairs, “Both of them?” and the guy says, “What’s the point of fucking one of them?!”

My response to that mess was a big, huge, “What?!”

She gave the phone back to my mom, who said she had to go to work and gave the phone to my dad.

He talked about the boats and cars as usual. They bought a winch and rigged it so they can use it to put the pontoons on the boat up and down. It’s been tested in the yard and works great, but so has all the “inventions” before this and they didn’t stand up so hot to real-world conditions. With any luck, this one will work and we won’t have to manually crank those things.

The crankshaft on my sister’s car broke while she was at McDonalds in the Drive-Thru. She was right in front of the box so they had her calling in all the other people’s orders until a tow truck could get her out of there. When one finally did come for some reason they only moved her car out of the way and she had to call another one to bring the car home.

My uncle is still pretending to hunt for a job and spending all his unemployment on booze. He’s still using the excuse that he goes to the Legion for the wings, but none of us are stupid enough to fall for that crap.

My other uncle and aunt (siblings, not married) have moved about a block away from him so he’s got lots of drinking buddies now. Oh joy. It’s their stupid encouragement and dependence on him that has him in this situation in the first place.

The man has made $18 an hour for 20 years and is completely broke because his siblings mooch so much off him. It’s sad that he’s ended up an alcoholic to deal. You think he’d know better after their childhood. Oh well. I can’t let that bother me anymore. It’s his own fault for so many reasons and it won’t change until he helps himself.

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It is possible to go nuts from waiting for something for too long? I haven’t gotten anything useful done all day. I’ve been checking the tracking on my computer non-stop, and its been in some sorting facility in Mississauga since Saturday. *grumble*

The estimated shipping time is tomorrow by 6pm, but most people said that FedEx usually ships a day earlier than they estimate. Not in this case. I’m really hoping it comes early tomorrow because otherwise I’ll have yet another hugely unproductive day.

I feel like doing my logic assignment, but I’m also having trouble concentrating. Boo. I guess I’ll just plod ahead with it and then check it over a couple times when I get the computer and get it installed.

My family sucks. The prospects do not look good. More depressing phone calls have just confirmed the fact that people in my family either die a horrible death or off themselves. *sigh* I really need a vacation.

It’s finally happened! After roughly a year of planning/complaining my MacBook Pro is ordered and should be here within a couple weeks. *squee*

The visit home this time was the best one that I’ve had in a while. We drove down this time, and it made all the difference. We could acutally do stuff this time. It was pouring like crazy during the drive down. The wipers acted up a couple times and we had to adjust them, but we made good time despite the rain. On Tuesday we drove to Devonshire Mall so we could get Arrested Development season three from HMV. It’s been a long time since I was in that mall. It’s feels completely different every time I’m in there.

Wednesday we went with my brother to Colisanti’s, wandered around looking at everything, and played mini golf. Then we went to Leamington to Canadian Tire to get new wipers for the car, and wandered around in Wal-Mart for the hell of it.

The rest of the week was spent periodically at the Fair. That’s the benefit of the weekend passes. Thursday we got in free at first since everything wasn’t quite set up and no one was manning the gates. It was very frustrating. I’ve never went on the Thursday before, and having to wait for all the stuff to be judged was making me impatient. I don’t really know what to say about the Fair, since I’ve been going as long as I can remember. There’s lots of animals and food and events. I saw a lot of people I knew, but ignored most of them. I was only concerned with finding my friends. I learned a long time ago that I don’t care for the majority of people in town. They are nosy and worry too much about what I’m up to, when that doesn’t really concern them.

The other benefit for having the car was that we could pick up Leya and Chaz and bring them to the Fair with us on Friday. I helped Chaz get the new books sorted out at the bookstore so they could be entered into the system faster. He had to stay a couple hours later and get picked up after though since his mom was sick. It was a little annoying because she was at work anyway, nagging at him the whole time, but she made him stay and enter stuff anyway even when she knew we were all waiting. I’ve met Chaz’s mom before though, she’s usually really awesome. She’s forgiven because she was sick.

I got to see Meggie and Corinna and Robbie, which was awesome and a lot of fun. Though I feel stupid because I keep losing Meg’s cell number.

My mom is making a surprise wedding present for my uncle. I spent most of my spare time all week making her a pattern for that, and getting it started so she can finish it on time. I hope he likes it.

Overall the week was great. Dean didn’t like having to drive all the way there though. Next time I guess we’ll take the train.