Happy Wednesday and/or Merry Christmas, if you’re into that

@Universal Kami, sorry :(. I hope that things start to improve for you soon (the weather and everything else). It is indeed a hard time of year for so many of us, which is why the rain helped me feel a bit better – but I’m sorry if it came across as insensitive.

Hello! I hope everyone had a great Christmas, Hanukkah, Hog’s Watch, etc! My Christmas was a bit lonely, because all my family is in Adelaide now and I only had 3 days off and I can’t afford to take more time off work to visit them this Christmas. ? I will be visiting early next year, though! ?

I hope you all had wonderful days! I enjoyed my Christmas extremely. My family and I went to church and my husband loved the lighter I gave him. I got it engraved to say “love you like an eternal flame”. It was a wonderful day.

@kupo
https://youtu.be/WcSXbvzW91U?t=34

((Alright, I have no idea what WordPress was doing to my first comment, so I deleted it to try again.))

For those who are remotely interested (all two of you 😛 ) in an update on a couple of problems I mentioned here over the last few months, here it is.

First, the unemployment overpayments. I finally bit the bullet and called the collections department, since I figured that getting a garnish on my paycheck would hinder me the next time I’m looking for a job. Turns out that I did manage to not report my other job’s income on my vouchers. Oops. (I suspect I didn’t understand one of the questions being asked when filling those out.)

Long story short, I now have to pay unemployment $175/month for the next couple of years to get this debt out of my hair. Along with all my other bills to boot.

((Pt. 2 coming soon))

ETA: WordPress ate the majority of this comment; fix hopefully coming in a few minutes. >:|

((Oooookay. Now let’s try the next part. My apologies for the spamming; WordPress isn’t letting me do this any other way tonight.))

In other news, I had a visit with a doctor who specializes in brain things (forgot the exact name of her specialty). Long story short(ish), one of my sisters deals with several veterans (administration, not hands-on) who’ve suffered concussions in war. Recently she realized that a lot of the behaviors those guys exhibited were quite similar to some behaviors I exhibited growing up (I was hospitalized with a concussion for several days when I was five), and wondered if that was the cause of many of my issues later in life.

So my sister paid for a visit to the brain specialist (since I can’t afford anything like that on my salaries), and the doctor said I was definitely showing signs of something neurological going on, but she’d have to run several tests to see what it might be. She did say she doubted it was autism, though. Just couldn’t say what, yet.

So I’ve been siting here the last few weeks with the knowledge that yeah, there really is a physical basis for some of my oddities. On the one hand, it’s a bit of a relief to be told that by a professional. Explains a fair bit of certain things about myself, at least.

On the other, I’m not looking forward being treated like I made certain decisions about my life because of this condition, not because I had a plan laid out and going where others wanted me to would have wrecked it. Or because others decided for me what my priorities were going to be, and couldn’t be arsed to take one second to see if said priorities would mesh with my finances at the time.

And/or decided that all I needed to do was learn how to ‘grow up’, pull money out of my butt like all true adults know how to do, and ‘learn how to sacrifice and budget’ and everything would magically fall into place. Because that’s what adults do without being told. And if you have to be told then you’re not an adult and will be treated accordingly. (Yes I’m still grouchy about certain things; why do you ask?)

As an aside, does anyone have a way to set up an account on the IRS website that doesn’t involve handing them a loan number? They want to verify that you’re really you by doing a ‘soft’ credit check (one where it doesn’t register as an inquiry, so your credit score isn’t affected). And I don’t have any of the loans they want for this (student, auto, home, etc.).

And when I click the button for an alternative way of proving who I am, I just get sent back to the ‘Hi; would you like to make an account today?’ starting page, which is less than useful, you know? >.< So does anyone know a way around that feedback loop? My thanks in advance if anyone can help here.

ETA: Again, I apologize for the spamming, but for some reason the Blockquote Mammoth was hungry for words tonight. :\

Does anyone else find it at least a little bit odd that many of the people here talk about WordPress as if it were a force of nature, rather than a machine built and controlled by human beings?

It is neither of those things. It is a piece of software; a service running on a machine in one location sending information to a program installed on your computer. That’s all I see people talking about it as, either. Seems most people recognize that sometimes software and/or hardware doesn’t always perform as expected.