Cleolinda everywhere

Let me show you them, my books. ( Read more... )

Meanwhile, I will be watching the Twilight Zone marathon (OH CRAP IS IT ALREADY ON?) as usual, which has gone from "sad because I have nowhere loud and flashy to go" to "venerable homebody tradition, I do what I want." I would like to cheerfully drink my way through it, but I'll probably end up asleep by 10 pm if I do that, so.  

ETA: Having a bit of a posting glitch problem, please bear with us.

I have a huge, partially-drafted backlog of books and/or texts I've read and meant to discuss, so let's have a couple now:

( Read more... )

Not that I have particularly Deep Thoughts, but I know people have wanted to talk about it.

( Minor spoilers )

So the McJackass clan has passed two more checks--this time at Target and Home Depot--so they're up to something like $2400 now. But that's not $2400 coming from us--as raven_feathers succinctly pointed out, "It's not about your money in your bank. It's about the swag." They're actually stealing from the retailers, not us, since banks tend to back their customers up, it seems. Of course, if the McJackass clan starts applying for credit cards under our name, we're screwed, but there you are. And it's already hellaciously inconvenient to go around with certified bank letters explaining what happened to everyone my mother's written checks to in the last two weeks. Plus, any automatic payments made on that account will have to be updated to the new debit/credit card as well.

(Since people brought the issue up: my mother does drop checks off to be mailed at official USPS boxes, so they weren't poached from our mailbox.)

I'm starting to worry about my mother's health, actually--my grandmother's had shingles for nine weeks now, and while they're almost gone, this has necessitated my mother and my aunt taking turns to go by her house to fix each meal and help her with the ointments, and the strain of constant running-around is starting to get to both of them. So then we have the Great Check-Washing Scam of 2008 and all the crapfulness that's entailed, and today my mother had to stand in line on her lunch hour (after taking care of my grandmother) at the DMV to re-pay for the family car tags, since those checks had bounced. Since it's the first of the month (which was particularly galling, since she'd gone out of her way to pay for our tags early), there were about a hundred people in line. And then the presiding deputy told eight of the ten women working the counters to go on to lunch. All at once. 80% of them. With a hundred people in line. "You have another story to tell your people," she said grimly when she stopped by the house (she calls y'all "my people"). "I'm standing there with steam coming out of my ears afraid I'm going to sink down through the floor because it's melted underneath me." That's not really a story; it's more just "a thing that happened without any climax or comeuppance or dénouement," but I wasn't about to tell her that.

My point is, I'm really worried about her stress levels. I mean, she's always been a type A personality, but I think she's got an overload of fuckery on her plate at the moment. I'm really hoping that I can finish these annotations (which I originally thought, somewhat hilariously, would take me a weekend) a few days before Mother's Day, so that hopefully I can write her a check and wrap it up in a pretty box and give it to her as a surprise. Any little bit I can pull together would help at this point, I think.

Oh, and the police department here said they would need to go to Columbus, Georgia, to file a report. The bank's already dealing with it, obviously, but they'd suggested we go to the police as well. So my mother's going to talk to her people--the UAB police department, whose benefits she administers and firing squabbles she mediates, to get their advice. (See, she has people, too. Everyone should have people, I think.)

Another massive linkspam--sorry about my spam management, you guys. : ( I've got some reader links, but I'm saving them for tomorrow so they're not completely lost in the tidal wave of awesome. ( Read more... )