Halloween and credit cards

So I seem to have hit a patch of utter and complete disorganization, which has a lot to do with the shitty blog posts of the past, say, week or so. Today for example I got up twenty minutes early for work, but still left twenty minutes late...and I don't even have the excuse of having kids! It's just me! Of course, I put the dogs out when I first got up when it was all dry outside, and then got in the shower, and it started pouring when I was showering, so I wound up dealing with three soaked muddy dogs...

Halloween was lots of fun, at least the Halloweeny part. The picking my grandmother up on the way home from work bit wasn't so great. My grandmother is old and very overweight and arthritic and diabetic and, God love her but she's not all that bright, and she wears a lot of perfume and is codependent like a left arm, and will tell you in great detail about all her pains. I sat in horrendous traffic and finally arrived at her house where I loaded her into my wee little Honda (no small feat) nearly gagging on the smell of "Ben-Gay meets perfume supposed to smell like roses that maybe did in 1973 when it was new." I rolled down my window and she asked me to roll it up because she was cold (it was about 65 degrees). Oy, Granny, it's a good thing I love you...

We went over to my parents' house and I took pictures of the haunted yard of horror that my brother had rigged all up. He goes allll out. He even built this skull-topped scarecrow thing that was about twenty feet tall, complete with fog-machine effects. He also built a mummy and a coffin that he hid in and scared kids from and a big witch and a zillion other scarecrows, and rigged up this rat thing next to a strobe light that would jerk out in front of you when you walked by it...we had hundreds of kids come this year. People actually drove to bring their kids to my parents' house to go through the yard. There was a traffic jam getting in the gate. My other brother dressed up as a gorilla and lumbered around behind people, scaring them.

Lots of fun.

I really am planning to update my template. That just got sort of pushed to the back burner here lately.

The camera stuff I ordered over the weekend arrived yesterday, already, which is very nice. Unfortunately it's been raining and I haven't had a chance to take any pictures with my nifty new UV and polarizing filters. When I get home from work, it's already dark outside, so there's not a lot of opportunity here to do any cool stuff...hopefully next weekend I'll get a chance to play around.

Oh yeah--click on any of these pictures for the larger view. They're all from last night. I particularly like the skull one. The clown grosses me out. I don't find clowns scary, even this one--it's just gross to me.

So today's the day NaNoWriMo starts. Ha ha ha! I have no idea what I'm going to write about. That's pretty sweet. I did take a few pictures of my keyboard after lunch today.

Things are still a little cool between M and I. Our fight was about dental insurance. Dental insurance. That is just utterly stupid. I'm only writing it down now so I can come back in a month and laugh about how utterly stupid it all is.

So this morning when I was frantically trying to get my crud together for work, I realized that my credit card statement was sitting under the enormous pile of "do something with this crap" crap on the kitchen table, and that it was due tomorrow. There's a $25 fee whenever it's late, which I have had to pay 2 times because I forgot to pay the stupid thing in the one-week window between when you get the statement and when it's due (yet another reason I usually maintain a balance of zero on my credit card). Figuring I would save myself the fee, I tried to sign up for online statement paying, which I did successfully, and I clicked the "make payment now" button and was told that it takes up to six days to process online bill paying setup. Excellent. It suggested I call the number on the back of the card to pay the balance over the phone. So I tried that and the automated voice told me there's a $14.50 fee to pay your balance over the phone. I just hung up and started cussing. I mean, I know credit-card companies are inherently evil and all that, but $14.50 to pay a bill over the phone? For fuck's sake, man. That's just unreasonable.

But, looks like it's either do that or pay the $25 late fee. Bastard credit-card companies.

Okay. Life awaits.