2002-03-14 - 12:34 p.m.

USPS, money, incompetence, good news, Cobra and Chuckie Heston in a loincloth.

Oh Good Gravy, what's it all about? Can someone just let me know how in this crazy, loopy, work-a-day world a fella, a dude, an ordinary j$ like myself is supossed to do what he wants, I mean really find a way do go about a day that is not mind-numbingly boring and yet still have enough green in the wallet to buy all those bright spangly toys like food and a roof over the head.

Here is the litany of my disasters (which are all, I'm sure, the surfeits of my own behavior -- that's a King Lear joke. work with me, people).

1. Our very own blessed USPS decided that I don't live where I live. Someone somewhere told my mail carrier that I aint there any more. So he stopped delivering my mail. Then he started sending it all back to where it came from. So I (being the incredibly non-observant guy that I am) suddenly discovered yesterday that I have several overdue bills and that my bank was like 24 hours from cancelling my ATM card and who knows what other horrors. This did not go over well. I talked to the mail carrier this morning, and tried to convey to him the extent of my anger. I don't think he cared.

2. Once upon a time when I was flush with money, I had some chunk of money going into retirement investments every month. It was automatically deducted from my account and I hardly ever thought about it. When I left ExactimundoSoftware I put a stop to the withdrawals. Except that they didn't stop. A fact I might have been aware of if I'd been getting my bank statements. So I also discovered yesterday that there's a big chunk of money that I thought was there that isn't there. Which I should be able to get back, but it was not the shock I needed right after finding out about overdue bills, ya know?

3. Um, okay, really that's it. But those first two were serious doozies, man. I was pretty pissed off.

Okay, here's the good (or at least other) news.

I still have the temp job, and BossLady said today that 1. I work too fast (huh?) and 2. that there's a possibility of a three-month contract coming my way.

I figured out that I'm paying waaaay too much for health insurance (seriously, COBRA is evil. And no, I don't mean the bad guys on GI Joe, cause they were wusses. They couldn't shoot for shit. I mean they never, ever hit any of the good guys. And they were always bailing out of their planes and helicopters. And how the hell does someone jump out of an exploding helicopter with their parachute already open? And why weren't they caught in the blades and immediately shredded? Did anyone else notice this stuff but me? I mean, really.) and I'm going to start paying a hell of a lot less for it.

eRoommate had surgery on his shoulder yesterday and is now a slow-moving, groggy, drugged-out mess. It's kinda fun. He rented like ten movies to watch over the next couple of days, so last night I was able to wander in and out of the living room and make comments on movies (like "Hey, Chuckie Heston in a loincloth. Planet of the Apes, right? At the end he finds the Statue of Liberty and a whole new level of over-acting.") to a person who was barely able to focus on the tv.

And now, I really need to get back to work.