in an effort to keep up with posting . . .
I figured I should maybe not let another three weeks go by without posting again, so woo, entry time!
This week has just been ridiculous, let's start off with that. The 3-day weekend was lovely - Brad and I spent a lot of time together, it was relaxing, very enjoyable. But the craziness started first thing Tuesday morning, when I noticed that there was blood in my urine. I had noticed on Monday that there was a bit of burning/tingling/discomfort when I peed, but I had assumed it was just a minor irritation due to the increased frequency of sex Brad and I have been having lately. (I told you this was TMI!) Anyway, like I said, Tuesday morning, woke up to blood in my urine, which was rather worrisome and made me a bit stressed, as I was hoping it wouldn't turn out to be anything serious.
So then, I went out to the garage to get my car and head to work, except my car wouldn't start. Ugggggggh. I tried it a couple times, but it was just doing that thing where the engine wouldn't turn over or catch to actually start. And this just made my stress level shoot sky high, because all I could think about was how we cannot afford anything in the way of car repairs right now. So I called Nissan's roadside assistance, which is part of the extended warranty package I got when I bought the car, and they put a service call in for someone to come out (thankfully at least that much would have been covered). Then I went back inside and woke Brad up to tell him what was going on and why I was so stressed, and he advised me to just wait a few minutes and go back and try to start my car again. And even though I had tried it a few times already, it of course started when I went back out and tried it again. *headdesk* So I had to call Nissan back and cancel the service call, and ended up being over half an hour late to work, but (knock on wood) my car has started up perfectly every time since then, which means I have absolutely no idea what its issue was Tuesday morning. But hopefully it will continue working well because honestly, we can't even afford life right now; we'd be so many kinds of fucked if I actually needed any car repairs.
The one piece of good news on Tuesday was that I finally got an email back from my HR person, confirming that I was in fact getting my step up on the pay grid, that it would be effective as of January 31st (the 97th day of the school year), and that I would see it reflected in my next pay. Except that when I looked at my pay stub in the system for the upcoming pay, it was only showing an increase of about $10, when my step up should have meant me getting about $130 more per paycheck. I didn't even have time to deal with that on Tuesday, so I just noted the weirdness and planned to call payroll on Wednesday.
Wednesday, though, decided to continue the ridiculousness of Tuesday. You remember the nonsense of our garage door? Apparently I never followed up on that here, but our landlord decided that the motor was too old/it was too expensive to fix properly, and so she was just going to have someone come out and disconnect everything to make the garage door manual, and even then, that didn't happen until sometime in the fall. Because of the situation in which there are 3 cars sharing our driveway and therefore someone is always parked behind someone else, I only started parking in the garage around late November, in order to not have my car out overnight in the snow and cold. And the manual garage door has always been a bit finicky and a bit of a pain in the ass, but it's worked. Until Wednesday anyway. I went to open the garage door, and couldn't get it to stay up; it kept wanting to fall back down and I really had to work to get it to stay up. It finally did, though, so I got in my car (and started it just fine! *eyeroll*), but as I was backing out of the garage, the door fell down again, hitting the hood of my car in the process. Seriously?! I get out and take a look at my hood, and while you can see where the door hit, I think it just left some dirt, but didn't actually dent my hood (or if it did, it's such a minor dent that it's barely visible). However, the garage door was then stuck in a half-up, half-down position, and I couldn't get it to move in either direction. Not wanting to be late for work a second day in a row, I just left it that way and texted our landlord to let her know it was broken.
At this point, I had pretty much decided that it was one of those you have to laugh sort of weeks and let go of a lot of the stress. I did call payroll at work on Wednesday, and found out that basically, the pay I was getting on Friday only covered work up through February 1st, and therefore only included one day of the pay increase. The next pay (on March 8) would include the full increase. This makes sense, although I totally was not aware that there was that kind of delay between the periods worked and when we actually got paid for them. Prior to this year, I was contract, and so I was always getting paid for the pay periods I'd just worked, and since our pay stubs don't actually include the dates of the pay period on them, I did not realize that it was different now that I'm permanent. Anyway, it is good to know that I am actually getting this pay increase, even if getting it later than I was expecting has made this month very difficult for us financially. At least I know there will soon be a little bit more income coming in.
The landlord did respond quickly for once, and someone came and fixed the garage door yesterday. It actually seems to work better now than it was before, as it's much easier to open now, which I certainly appreciate. And as for the TMI health issue mentioned above, I already had a doctor's appointment scheduled for yesterday, so I just brought that up then, along with my concerns about the headache of death I mentioned last entry. We're just monitoring the headaches for now (and I recently found a pretty good headache tracker app for my phone, which makes that much easier), and she wrote me a prescription for antibiotics for the other thing, so hopefully all will be well soon.
In knitting news, I started the first sleeve for my sweater last weekend, but just did a regular cast on, and quickly realized that it was going to be pretty tight around my hand/wrist. I kept on knitting, though, hoping that someone would be able to give me a nice magical method for undoing the cast on edge so I could redo it and make it stretchier. However, when I talked to Ilana about it at knit night, she said that while it's do-able, it's really quite a pain and not fun in the least, and that I might be better off just ripping out the whole sleeve and starting over. After some googling of 'how to undo cast on edge' yesterday, and reading that pretty much everyone was saying exactly what Ilana had said, I gave up and resigned myself to restarting the sleeve. I mean, fortunately, the sleeve works up pretty quickly, and I'd only done about up to the elbow anyway, so redoing it shouldn't take a huge amount of time. And while I hate ripping out and starting over, I want this sweater to be something I'm proud of and something I will wear often, which means I have to do it right. So I ripped it out yesterday and cast on with the long tail cast on so it will be stretchier this time, and off I go again. Le sigh.
So yeah, that's been my week. How are you all doing?
This week has just been ridiculous, let's start off with that. The 3-day weekend was lovely - Brad and I spent a lot of time together, it was relaxing, very enjoyable. But the craziness started first thing Tuesday morning, when I noticed that there was blood in my urine. I had noticed on Monday that there was a bit of burning/tingling/discomfort when I peed, but I had assumed it was just a minor irritation due to the increased frequency of sex Brad and I have been having lately. (I told you this was TMI!) Anyway, like I said, Tuesday morning, woke up to blood in my urine, which was rather worrisome and made me a bit stressed, as I was hoping it wouldn't turn out to be anything serious.
So then, I went out to the garage to get my car and head to work, except my car wouldn't start. Ugggggggh. I tried it a couple times, but it was just doing that thing where the engine wouldn't turn over or catch to actually start. And this just made my stress level shoot sky high, because all I could think about was how we cannot afford anything in the way of car repairs right now. So I called Nissan's roadside assistance, which is part of the extended warranty package I got when I bought the car, and they put a service call in for someone to come out (thankfully at least that much would have been covered). Then I went back inside and woke Brad up to tell him what was going on and why I was so stressed, and he advised me to just wait a few minutes and go back and try to start my car again. And even though I had tried it a few times already, it of course started when I went back out and tried it again. *headdesk* So I had to call Nissan back and cancel the service call, and ended up being over half an hour late to work, but (knock on wood) my car has started up perfectly every time since then, which means I have absolutely no idea what its issue was Tuesday morning. But hopefully it will continue working well because honestly, we can't even afford life right now; we'd be so many kinds of fucked if I actually needed any car repairs.
The one piece of good news on Tuesday was that I finally got an email back from my HR person, confirming that I was in fact getting my step up on the pay grid, that it would be effective as of January 31st (the 97th day of the school year), and that I would see it reflected in my next pay. Except that when I looked at my pay stub in the system for the upcoming pay, it was only showing an increase of about $10, when my step up should have meant me getting about $130 more per paycheck. I didn't even have time to deal with that on Tuesday, so I just noted the weirdness and planned to call payroll on Wednesday.
Wednesday, though, decided to continue the ridiculousness of Tuesday. You remember the nonsense of our garage door? Apparently I never followed up on that here, but our landlord decided that the motor was too old/it was too expensive to fix properly, and so she was just going to have someone come out and disconnect everything to make the garage door manual, and even then, that didn't happen until sometime in the fall. Because of the situation in which there are 3 cars sharing our driveway and therefore someone is always parked behind someone else, I only started parking in the garage around late November, in order to not have my car out overnight in the snow and cold. And the manual garage door has always been a bit finicky and a bit of a pain in the ass, but it's worked. Until Wednesday anyway. I went to open the garage door, and couldn't get it to stay up; it kept wanting to fall back down and I really had to work to get it to stay up. It finally did, though, so I got in my car (and started it just fine! *eyeroll*), but as I was backing out of the garage, the door fell down again, hitting the hood of my car in the process. Seriously?! I get out and take a look at my hood, and while you can see where the door hit, I think it just left some dirt, but didn't actually dent my hood (or if it did, it's such a minor dent that it's barely visible). However, the garage door was then stuck in a half-up, half-down position, and I couldn't get it to move in either direction. Not wanting to be late for work a second day in a row, I just left it that way and texted our landlord to let her know it was broken.
At this point, I had pretty much decided that it was one of those you have to laugh sort of weeks and let go of a lot of the stress. I did call payroll at work on Wednesday, and found out that basically, the pay I was getting on Friday only covered work up through February 1st, and therefore only included one day of the pay increase. The next pay (on March 8) would include the full increase. This makes sense, although I totally was not aware that there was that kind of delay between the periods worked and when we actually got paid for them. Prior to this year, I was contract, and so I was always getting paid for the pay periods I'd just worked, and since our pay stubs don't actually include the dates of the pay period on them, I did not realize that it was different now that I'm permanent. Anyway, it is good to know that I am actually getting this pay increase, even if getting it later than I was expecting has made this month very difficult for us financially. At least I know there will soon be a little bit more income coming in.
The landlord did respond quickly for once, and someone came and fixed the garage door yesterday. It actually seems to work better now than it was before, as it's much easier to open now, which I certainly appreciate. And as for the TMI health issue mentioned above, I already had a doctor's appointment scheduled for yesterday, so I just brought that up then, along with my concerns about the headache of death I mentioned last entry. We're just monitoring the headaches for now (and I recently found a pretty good headache tracker app for my phone, which makes that much easier), and she wrote me a prescription for antibiotics for the other thing, so hopefully all will be well soon.
In knitting news, I started the first sleeve for my sweater last weekend, but just did a regular cast on, and quickly realized that it was going to be pretty tight around my hand/wrist. I kept on knitting, though, hoping that someone would be able to give me a nice magical method for undoing the cast on edge so I could redo it and make it stretchier. However, when I talked to Ilana about it at knit night, she said that while it's do-able, it's really quite a pain and not fun in the least, and that I might be better off just ripping out the whole sleeve and starting over. After some googling of 'how to undo cast on edge' yesterday, and reading that pretty much everyone was saying exactly what Ilana had said, I gave up and resigned myself to restarting the sleeve. I mean, fortunately, the sleeve works up pretty quickly, and I'd only done about up to the elbow anyway, so redoing it shouldn't take a huge amount of time. And while I hate ripping out and starting over, I want this sweater to be something I'm proud of and something I will wear often, which means I have to do it right. So I ripped it out yesterday and cast on with the long tail cast on so it will be stretchier this time, and off I go again. Le sigh.
So yeah, that's been my week. How are you all doing?