Okay. Football has been a bit disappointing lately (yes, I am the queen of understatement). But there's still hope. The Bears do okay when Grossman sucks and they do great when he's good. I see an easy fix here. GET RID OF GROSSMAN! I'm tired of him showing up and choking. I'm tired of getting excited when he rocks only to be crushed when he plays like a high school freshman. We need some consistency here. If he sucked all the time, they'd fire him, but because he really shows some awesome talent sometimes they stick with him. If he played to his potential more often than not, then I'd have no problem with that. But it really is hit and miss. Literally. Sigh. Okay, on to my other team. The Irish. We did better this time, so the training camps last week clearly helped a lot. I mean, we did get 2 (count them 2!) offensive touchdowns in on game, and in one half even! That's more points than we've had all season up to then. Then it got nasty - for us. Our O-line still needs a lot of work, but at least they were able to do some blocking and gave Clausen a chance to actually throw the ball. He needs to learn to throw the ball away rather than get sacked with the ball and lose yardage. The receivers need to learn how to actually catch the ball. You know, receive the ball. Our defensive line did a good job, and thankfully they weren't out there the whole game as was previously the case. It helps them a lot to have the offense on the field for more than one play. I was still disappointed in the game, but relieved we weren't blown out.
So for the Bears, it's still dodgy. We could win, we could lose. Who knows? As for the Irish, we look poised to start winning.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Monday, September 10, 2007
.JPG)
Saturday, September 08, 2007
When It Rains, It Pours
When is rains it pours. So my week has been a real ....... trial.
Nasty Surprise #1: I took the car in for maintenance, expecting about a $500. bill. Well, it's been a while since anything was done to it, and all the little things added up to $1000. in brake work and various other things. Trust me, I looked to see if I was being cheated, but nothing was a surprise or over-changed. Fine. The car hasn't needed any repairs beyond simple maintenance, and it now has almost 130,000 miles on it, so okay. I can handle that, albeit grudgingly.
Nasty Surprise #2: I got a call from the office of my directorate at LLNL and they were trying to let me know in advance that payroll messed up my last paycheck and were going to take it back and reissue my paycheck. They weren't sure how that would happen, but thought I should have the chance to call them and make arrangements for how it would work in case I didn't have the money in the account any longer. So I checked my bank. They already took the whole paycheck out by direct withdrawal. Apparently they have the right to do this since it's a direct deposit. I, of course, had paid a month's worth of bills with this month's worth of pay and so didn't have the whole paycheck available. The remainder of the paycheck was taken out of my savings account and a fee assessed do to overdraft, and not all of the checks have cleared, the house payment for example. I called the payroll department to find out if they were going to make a direct deposit in the correct amount and was told they had mailed me a paper check since the direct withdrawal had cleared. So my paycheck should arrive next week sometime. Keep in mind this is after 5:30pm, so the bank is closed. I then set up a transfer out of my money market account to cover the checks still waiting to be cashed, but that will take 2-3 business days. This means that some of the bills may come in before I have any money to cover them. So Michael and I went to the bank to talk to them and see what we could do. The bank is going to honor all the checks that come in, so our credit will be fine, but that fees will still be assessed for overdraft and that since this is caused by the sudden removal of my paycheck, without warning, that it is legally LLNL's responsibility to reimburse me for those fees. So, I will be letting them know that I expect them to pay for the fees. After some internet research, apparently it is legal to take money out of an account for which there is a direct deposit, but that legally, any fees incurred from doing so are the withdrawer's responsibility. So a pain in the butt, but not something for which we cannot recover.
Nasty Surprise #3: A storm blew in yesterday afternoon. It was a normal storm, nothing more violent than usual for around the Great Lakes. But the power kept going on and off. And not all the power, just certain areas. The stove, the three plugs in the kitchen, the tv, another plug in the livingroom, and the airconditioning. Then, overnight, the power stayed off. So I called an electrician and he came out and charged me $145 to tell me it was the power company's fault since only one of the two lines coming in was working. So I called the power company, went to the bank and handled Nasty Surprise #2, came back and waited for them to show up. It didn't take long. He looked things over and agreed with the electrician that the wires going onto the pole were being disrupted/damaged/or something by the tree branches all over them. So he called a crew in to cut away the branches and redo the wires. And they arrived an hour after the first guy left, worked for a little over and hour, asked if we had power to everything (we did) and were gone. The power is still stable and the pole can now be seen and the wires aren't being tackled by branches with every gust of wind.
Nasty Surprise #4: The basement flooded due to the power to the sump pump being out. Then an hour later it flooded again due to the rod in place to keep the little floaty-ball from sticking and not triggering the "flush". So we are going to get a sump pump cover (yes a real one) so it won't stick anymore, and the Husband put a night-light in the outlet so that if the power goes out we can see by visual inspection that there's no power to the sump pump and to not run any water so we don't flood.
Now we need to do a few things to take care of all this stuff, but it's all manageable. Yay! It's really strange though how things seem to happen all at once.
Nasty Surprise #1: I took the car in for maintenance, expecting about a $500. bill. Well, it's been a while since anything was done to it, and all the little things added up to $1000. in brake work and various other things. Trust me, I looked to see if I was being cheated, but nothing was a surprise or over-changed. Fine. The car hasn't needed any repairs beyond simple maintenance, and it now has almost 130,000 miles on it, so okay. I can handle that, albeit grudgingly.
Nasty Surprise #2: I got a call from the office of my directorate at LLNL and they were trying to let me know in advance that payroll messed up my last paycheck and were going to take it back and reissue my paycheck. They weren't sure how that would happen, but thought I should have the chance to call them and make arrangements for how it would work in case I didn't have the money in the account any longer. So I checked my bank. They already took the whole paycheck out by direct withdrawal. Apparently they have the right to do this since it's a direct deposit. I, of course, had paid a month's worth of bills with this month's worth of pay and so didn't have the whole paycheck available. The remainder of the paycheck was taken out of my savings account and a fee assessed do to overdraft, and not all of the checks have cleared, the house payment for example. I called the payroll department to find out if they were going to make a direct deposit in the correct amount and was told they had mailed me a paper check since the direct withdrawal had cleared. So my paycheck should arrive next week sometime. Keep in mind this is after 5:30pm, so the bank is closed. I then set up a transfer out of my money market account to cover the checks still waiting to be cashed, but that will take 2-3 business days. This means that some of the bills may come in before I have any money to cover them. So Michael and I went to the bank to talk to them and see what we could do. The bank is going to honor all the checks that come in, so our credit will be fine, but that fees will still be assessed for overdraft and that since this is caused by the sudden removal of my paycheck, without warning, that it is legally LLNL's responsibility to reimburse me for those fees. So, I will be letting them know that I expect them to pay for the fees. After some internet research, apparently it is legal to take money out of an account for which there is a direct deposit, but that legally, any fees incurred from doing so are the withdrawer's responsibility. So a pain in the butt, but not something for which we cannot recover.
Nasty Surprise #3: A storm blew in yesterday afternoon. It was a normal storm, nothing more violent than usual for around the Great Lakes. But the power kept going on and off. And not all the power, just certain areas. The stove, the three plugs in the kitchen, the tv, another plug in the livingroom, and the airconditioning. Then, overnight, the power stayed off. So I called an electrician and he came out and charged me $145 to tell me it was the power company's fault since only one of the two lines coming in was working. So I called the power company, went to the bank and handled Nasty Surprise #2, came back and waited for them to show up. It didn't take long. He looked things over and agreed with the electrician that the wires going onto the pole were being disrupted/damaged/or something by the tree branches all over them. So he called a crew in to cut away the branches and redo the wires. And they arrived an hour after the first guy left, worked for a little over and hour, asked if we had power to everything (we did) and were gone. The power is still stable and the pole can now be seen and the wires aren't being tackled by branches with every gust of wind.
Nasty Surprise #4: The basement flooded due to the power to the sump pump being out. Then an hour later it flooded again due to the rod in place to keep the little floaty-ball from sticking and not triggering the "flush". So we are going to get a sump pump cover (yes a real one) so it won't stick anymore, and the Husband put a night-light in the outlet so that if the power goes out we can see by visual inspection that there's no power to the sump pump and to not run any water so we don't flood.
Now we need to do a few things to take care of all this stuff, but it's all manageable. Yay! It's really strange though how things seem to happen all at once.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.JPG){kind=link}