At a loss...

With the advent of new book shelves (which are not for books) and an account on Library Thing I've spent the last two weeks cataloging, which led to the realization some boxes are missing from the garage. I went through a phase about two years ago with a program that did the same thing as Library Thing only it did it on your computer, and putting books in numbered boxes so I could have more books without having to get rid of others.

Some of those numbered boxes have gone missing. Boxes 4 and 5 were the ones I couldn't seem to locate in the garage, and when I finally did find 5 it only had three books in it (granted, they were all ones I liked and wanted but the boxes generally fit 20-something books). 4 has yet to surface. While I was trying to think what was missing I came up with Thomas the Rhymer, and two Christopher Snow novels (there's obviously more than that, but that's all I could think of not seeing as I've been cataloging).

And what I did find in the garage after pulling all the rubbermade totes off the shelves and sorting through some tapes was two large unnumbered boxes full of the books I was thinking were missing. Except I don't remember putting books in the garage in unnumbered boxes.

And I still can't find box 4.

Is the garage to books what the dryer is to socks?

Blah

Despite the June 1st deadline coming up I can't seem to muster any sort of get-to-it for my novel. I know how it goes but I feel like blah when I think about opening the file. Even after finding Sophie's actress finally...



Started reading Orphans of Chaos finally... But there's a point where there's just too much... It's cool when you've got a private school full of children with mysterious pasts who don't know who they really are and have various reality altering powers... but the story started to feel caked on after you find out the school governors are Grendle and Ares and some Kitsune Japanese Gods...

At least my knitting is coming along well. I learned to cable! Which is that braided stuff on sweaters, not CAT5 cable. Which people keep getting confused about.

Weekend of Awesome

Went to the Georgia Aquarium this weekend with Kevin and John, which was totally awesome since I haven't been able to meet John before and I hadn't been to the Aquarium and we had the whole day there to ourselves.


Giant freaking whale shark. And you can go diving with it! (for hundreds of dollars, but omg diving with whale sharks in an indoor ocean!!)


Deep sea spider monster crabs!


A very clever looking alligator.


Vicious stinging jellyfish! It was awesome watching them swim around behind a wall of acrylic- they're actually beautiful like that, graceful looking. In real like they're horrible minions of the devil. I've got the scars to prove it.

And then we went by Borders so I could spent the Borders Rewards Bucks I'd been sent- They only had one stitchionary but it's a chunky little book with over three hundred stitch patterns in it sorted by type and difficulty (it actually looks like this one chocolate cookbook I have). I kept looking at all the cable patterns and the fake basketweave things and thinking OMG I WANT TO DO THIS. I showed it to Mom and she just sort of looked at the braided cables with terror.

(wouldn't the clever alligator look cute in a navy blue cable sweater?)

What Bentochan has been doing the last week

-Realized she bought the wrong amount of yarn for a project.
-Went to the Jewish History Museum for class and got lost in the Holocaust section.
-Got really lost in Atlanta.
-Made plans for Coraline in 3D!
-Learned about the Vikings invading England.
-Painted my room and got new bookshelves (that are, apparently, not for books).
-Read more of Circuit Rider's Wife.
-Wondered what happened to Anna Short.

Yes. Bookshelves aren't really for books. They're for photographs.

My mistake.

There's a book sale tomorrow at one of the Atlanta Libraries. Woot!

RIP

Last night my backup external hard drive died. Sort of. It's still dying, in a way.

Depending on what computer you plug it into it'll work anywhere from 20-30 seconds to maybe five minutes. After that you have to unplug it, plug it back in, and wait for the computer to recognize it again, and after that the amount of time it works is less. I've managed to save most of the pictures I've taken of my family, things like that, so it's not such a total loss. And funny enough yesterday morning I went up and backed up all the things I'd ever written.

The Dead Travel Fast

My Moonlight DVDs are here already. Three days before the release date.

Books, books, and text books.

Crystal Soldier continues to be one of the best reads I've had in years. It's one of those books you want to hit people with because they're not reading it.

Circuit Rider's Wife has been assigned for Documentation and Interpretation of a Historic Site class (we're going to be working at the Corra Harris house...doing something...) and it's a better read than you expect. Sort of weird, and raw, and her attitude towards the people around her is eye opening, especially for the late nineteen hundreds. This and the book we had three semesters ago of Diary and Letter excerpts are nothing but primary sources- one of my favorite things about being a History Major.

And then there's the textbook that came in the mail today that wound up being topical to the news. Mom says there's some big to-do about having Southern Belle dress up people at the inauguration since it could be seen as racist, but it's the only thing besides people dressed up as cans of Coke that could stereotypically represent the South in my mind. It's Slavery and Public History. I've got another one coming about the fiasco at the Smithsonian when they showed the Enola Gay; History Wars.

Prize winner for weirdest book discovered this week is Bones: Burried Deep. It's for a tv show based on a series of books by Kathy Reichs about a forensic anthropologist named Temperence Brennan. In the show Temperence writes books about Kathy. And now you can get a book written by a guy, based on the tv show, since the books are a bit different from the show. It's so chicken-or-the-egg I was baffled to see it.

Innovation

It actually took me two minutes to realize that was a joke. It was the part where the guy said he'd buy anything shiny and made by Apple. *shakes head*

Loathing

I had this bad moment of crushing defeat last night. There was this knitted shawl I saw on the Anticraft site months ago, and I fell in love with it, only I didn't know the stitches involved. While I was in Italy I looked at the pattern again, fell even more in love with it, decided as soon as I got home I was going to make it. And once I got home it became 'get a job before getting all the yarn' so it just kept being put off and off and more off after I couldn't learn the stitch the way it was described from Kevin's Mom. Eventually I got the missing yarn. And then I found online how to knit videos that showed the two stitches I needed.

Knit knit knit.

It looks good. Everyone is impressed. I've got the tassles cut, the colors look great together, everything is working until I get to the bind off.

And I realize something has gone horribly wrong because there aren't enough tassles. And it's not like I cut too few. One of the stitches was a stitch that adds more stitches and apparently I used it too much, and the shawl is now six stitches wider at one end, which is six inches longer, which means I'm six tassles short. And I'm out of yarn.

It's not even something I'd want to fix by getting more yarn and making more tassles because it's lopsided and I screwed up, and I finally got so angry I had to throw the shawl in the dark corner of the garage so Mom would stop talking about how it looked perfect just like it was and that I could just use another color to make more tassles and no one would notice.

Lest We Forget Part Three

This morning I went to the International Studies Office.

Where I was told the problem was I hadn't paid for my study abroad yet.

*sigh*

Pulled out online receipts, printed things, had a chat about how ineffectivly designed the whole payment system is, and after visiting two offices had my hold removed. At which point the lady advised me to go "check it out" online to make sure it had actually worked, so I sat in the hallway (that's how frustrated I get about these things. School starts in two days, I have no classes, and I'm not going to go two buildings over to a lounge where I'll find out I have to come back.) and pulled up the KSU site.

Most of the classes are still showing up red for full, but since I'm looking for upper level history classes it wasn't impossible to get a complete schedule. And since the England to 1688 was absolutly way too full I went to the History Department and got Professor Shealy to write me in anyway. So now the class is at least eight people more full than it should be. Dropped Italian, picked up the paperwork for the Public History Certificate, and now I'm feeling like it all went way too smoothly for this to have been a success.

Treachery is suspected in the Finantial Aid office. It's just lying in wait. I know it.

Lest We Forget Part Two

Having gone up to Campus, receipt in hand for the bill paid, I was met with a blank, dull stare of a Bursar's Office employee.

"What is your problem?" She asks in a mostly pleasant, if bored tone.

I paid this weeks ago and now I can't register for classes and this is the receipt.

"Oh. Ok. What's your student number?"

Blah blah blah.

She types stuff, bobbles her head around a bit, types more stuff. "Ohhh. Yeah. Ok. I removed it. If you still have trouble, which I think this is all clear, you'll have to go see the International Studies Office."

So, I'll be hitting the International Studies Office tomorrow, since I still can't register for classes. (England to 1688 is seven students past full, and I'm going to get a write-in to that class from the Prof, so at least there's hope)

Lest We Forget

I have had a long and annoying enmity towards the Bursar's Office, Financial Aid Office, and Admissions Office of Kennesaw State University. At *least* once a semester I nearly get thrown out of school because the FA office has lost something or not filed something- It's gotten to the point I go up there at least every two weeks throughout a semester to make sure things are running smoothly (and regardless of how many "things are great" reports I get something still goes wrong). And to fix any sort of problem it requires trekking back and forth from Financial Aid to the Bursar's to Admissions, back and forth across the Green at least three times, since each office will tell you the problem is with another office.

This time the thing that went wrong was my Study Abroad. The school credited all my student loan money to the school debit card we're all assigned, and the school debit card (I later learned) has a spending limit on it. Lower than the tuition.

So, while I was over in Italy I tried to pay off my Study Abroad, oh, six or seven times. Each time the transaction would sort of go through, you'd get an online receipt for the purchase but two weeks later it would come back saying they couldn't complete the transaction and could I try again. Which for a while gave me the heebee jeebies that they'd send me home while I was in the middle of Pompeii.

I get home, try to pay again (at the time I thought perhaps the spending limit was because I was in another country) but no luck and another two weeks go by before I know it didn't work. So I head to the Bursar's Office, nest of surliness though it is, with a bill KSU sent me in my hand and explain I have been trying to pay them for months. I get a sort of blank stare and...

"Well, you can pay it in check or cash right now. Do you have the cash now?"

Right. Guess how much is left of the Study Abroad? No. I do not carry around that much money. I don't think anyone does.

She tells me I can use the school ATM right behind me, so I lose my place in line to go check the machine out, and guess what? It's broken. Or off. I tell her so and she's like *shrug* and goes back to whatever she's doing.

So, I head to my bank, find out what the transaction limit is (finally), see if the bank can circumvent it, find out they can't, start a campaign against all the ATMs in the area for two weeks to pull all the cash I need. Mom deposits all of it, then writes a check, and I go back to the Bursar's Office with both.

They take them, I get a receipt. Looks like it's all well and done, now doesn't it?

Wrong!

Since I didn't pay the money back in... September or so, I couldn't register for classes during early registration which was in November. The next registration (btw, classes start this Thursday) starts today. Monday. 10AM.

I log on to check my registration time and hey, guess what, there's a hold on my account because...

I haven't paid for my study abroad.

And I have the receipt in hand. To make matters even more... Whatever adjective you want to use to describe this... The same site I'm on, if I go to the part that itemizes my tuition semester by semester it shows the money I paid as having arrived. With the totals of cash and check and all that. And besides the note on there claiming I haven't paid yet, there's a notice of a fee.

Funny. There wasn't a fee when I went in there and paid the thing in the middle of December. There wasn't a fee on any of the bills they've sent me. There wasn't a fee when I was in Italy trying to pay the thing five months ago.

So, I've got to head up there, bills and photocopies of receipts in hand, will probably be met by employees that are more jaded than third shift waitresses in the bad part of town, do some yelling and paper waving, and hopefully I'll be able to register for classes if this all gets cleared up today. And since this is late registration I'll be happy if I can get into Underwater Basketweaving 1101 and whatever 4000+ level History classes I can get Professor Shealy to write me into.

bento-chan is

*happy*