Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Oh crap. I hate when a near miss turns into something big. It looks like I misccalculated how much I had in my checking account when I went to the pharmacy after going to the ER, by about two cents, which caused a five dollar payment elsewhere to bounce, which elicits a $27 fee from my credit union. So instead of a two-cent mistake, it turns into a $27.02 mistake. Feh. It always seems so unfair that the largest fees I ever see at my credit union are imposed specifically when -- because -- I don't have the money to pay them. There's a sort of wrongness to that.

And the timing ... this is just after I got a politely ominous letter from Baltimore Gas & Electric, mentioning that the temporary dlay in electric service terminations mandated by the Maryland Public Service Commission is no longer in effect and I've still got an overdue bill. (I'd been making small payments hoping that a pattern of paying something would nudge me to the bottom of their turn-off list, but have not caught up.)

Okay, so I'm not buying groceries or cat food today ... I have just enough in my purse to return my checking account to a non-negative balance. Now if I can find where the leather pouch of quarters migrated to, I can at least pick up a loaf of bread, and I'll cut the good cat food with the brand Perrine doesn't like quite as much for a few days.

Whee. I'd planned to write about the BGE situation later today anyhow, after a more careful look at the situation, but the overdraft notice has me a bit off balance. If any of you feel like helping me with a situation that is partly (the overdraft part) caused by my own careless mistake (yeah, my record-keeping suffered while I was having that two month dizzy spell, but I really should've done the math first anyhow), I wouldn't say no to a bit of PayPal help to buy some bread, milk, chocolate, cat food, and cat litter. In the meantime, I'll try to get through to the phone numbers in the BGE letter for energy assistance.

This might work better if I hadn't stayed awake all night tossing and turning (and wrapping my leg in an elastic bandage and unwraping it again, to try to get twitches & cramps to go away and let me sleep). Wish me luck.

Maybe it's time to put my TeleType on eBay. I don't really want to get rid of it, but most of the other things I have that might possibly be worth any money are guitars, and those are my tools. I'm not using the TeleType for anything; I just like knowing that I have one and can read or punch paper tape if I ever need to, or show younger folk what the old days looked like. (Not that an ASR-33 will fetch much, compared to what I need.) It's got an RS232 interface, so I'd planned to get around to connecting it to a Linux box someday just to post to Usenet from it.

Allrighty then, grab me a bite to eat, then try to overcome my paralyzing dread of dealing with bureacracies. %cringe% I really want to sleep.