Suburb of Heaven

The first experiment in hair color, a "peekaboo" burgundy color that wound up being almost invisible (too small a portion of hair colored, although the color itself was great) has been in the rear view mirror a while, and I decided I was going to take another stab at putting a funky color in. I went back to the hair college, which has actually been pretty decent for me, and opted to get a stripe of a vivid dark purple put in. My student, a very nice girl who nonetheless worked on me like she was working on disarming a bomb - one wrong wire cut and the whole thing explodes, so better call the manager over to check every three minutes - completed the process and sent me on my way. I had spent three hours in the chair at this point, and was starving, so I opted to let my hair dry naturally. "Come back if the color isn't right!" chirped my stylist.

Uh.

The color isn't right. Instead of a vivid purple, it's a pale, pale, might-as-well-be-grey purple, and even with the top of my hair pulled back to show it off, I suspect it may not even register as a funky hair color. So I'm not sure what to do. Go back and see if they can brighten it? Forget it and never experiment with this sort of thing anymore, since clearly my hair is dark enough to really fight being colored? Get a sharpie and start coloring?

Forty bucks. Blah. Maybe I should go back, but it's always such a pain and things are busy right now.

I kind of want to dye my hair some crazy color. I have dark brown hair and haven't dyed it at all save for a Manic Panic red that did nothing except give me red highlights if I stood in the exact right spot in the sun. The idea of bleaching my own hair seemed like a ticket to bald spots, so I just never tried it. All of a sudden, years after the normal hair experimentation era, I want to do it, but probably via the local college of haircuttery and not a home job I'm liable to botch.

So...completely ridiculous for a lady rapidly approaching 40 to do this? My sister suggested an underlayer of fuschia, which sounds pretty good to me. Or maybe a green or blue. My workplace likely won't object, as I don't have a job that deals with the public all that much.

Anyway. I've spent most of the past week being inexplicably groggy and operating on a sort of low-level grumpiness. Oh, well.

My mood has been downright shitty recently. Up and down, weepy on a dime, hormonal except not at a time when hormones should be crazy. And the anxiety has been fluttering up and down as well, that same sensation of something burning in my chest when I try to sleep.

Was slated to go to Houston with my mom in about a week, but she's cried off and had us cancel everything (taking a hit on the tickets). I'm trying to decide if I'll just take the days as a mini-vacation, or cancel the leave time. It might be worth staying home and doing a spring cleaning and relaxing a bit.

Really, things haven't been so very bad, I'm just being weird. And crying at Lilo and Stitch gifs and every other song on my iPod. Feh.

A day of frustrations, big and small, including a functionally dead home computer, a piece of art that wasn't where it was supposed to be, and a panic attack for Bemo. Feeling upset about my state of fitness. Too many things going on. Prepared to retire to a desert island and make pretty shell necklaces for the rest of my life, even if I have to learn to like fish. Too many things that I don't want to deal with.

Feh.

Here, have a soothing photo of orchids.

I have to get work done, pull art from the vaults, and do epic battle with the insurance company. Here, have a scan from my newest purchase, which indicates that we as a society have made some small progress in that you can no longer buy a monkey from a Spiegel catalog.

(If you still can, for the love of god, don't tell me.)

I would really like to be able to change my LJ's playlist away from Woebegone: Greatest Hits of Woe and Tragedy and Yet More Woe, but damn. When I started to do our taxes on Saturday afternoon, I came across a W-2 from last year that I did not remember seeing. And I knew immediately that it meant trouble, I just didn't know how or when or in what form the trouble would come. Cue my opening our mailbox this morning to discover a perfectly polite notice from the IRS going, "You screwed up, you owe us money, have a nice day!" From Saturday to Monday - not a long time to have to wait for the shoe to drop.

If I hadn't had the warning on Saturday that something was in the wind, I would really been upset. Had kittens. Hit the ceiling. Had a cow, totally, dude. As it was, I saw the envelope, sighed heavily, and went to sit in the car to read it over and when I was done, I sighed again, put it in my purse, and drove back to work.

So tonight, I get to review our paperwork, and see if I did really botch things the way it looks like I did, and then figure out where we go from here. It's five hundred bucks. We didn't actually see a penny of our refund last year, since Bemo's student loans were still in default and they took it, but maybe we can work something out where if we're due a refund this year, they can take the money that way. Not sure. Am already tired just thinking about it.

Meanwhile, I feel like I have once again failed completely at this "adult" shit. And yet, I'm the one who continues to have to handle it. I'm feeling a bit resentful about that, and about the fact that if Bemo is too depressed/unmotivated/purely physically tired to go to the gym, I feel like I should stay home as well, since I'm already away a great deal what with working on the weekends. But it's gotten to the point where I need to either start insisting, or going without him, or something, because my activity at home when I'm not at the gym is cooking and baking, which is not the best thing to replace a trip to the gym with. In some ways, Bemo is doing better. But he's in a much deeper hole this time than I've ever experienced, so, you know, better is still pretty deep in that hole.

Anyway. The IRS and I continue to dance our dance of incompetence and finance. Feh to all of it.

I'm very pleased with myself that I got back to the pool for some laps today, after planning to do it for the past two weeks and continually getting thwarted.

However. Why the hell do I get so nauseated every time I swim after a long break away from the pool? If things proceed as they usually do, if I make it back reasonably quickly, I'll be less-nauseated and by the third time there, not nauseated at all. This first time back, however, I got six laps done and left because I wanted to toss my cookies and felt it was better for all concerned that I not push it. Is my body freaking out from the different exercise? My constant sinus issues making my inner ear go nuts?

At any rate, I finally got back, and will hopefully be able to go early next week and readjust so I'm no longer turning green and staggering back to the locker room.

In other news, Annie from Community leaping out of a trash can with two paintball pistols icon! Woo!

I know I've been a little mom-heavy here in the ol' journal recently, but seriously, she is driving me and my sister up a collective tree. Last night I had a conversation with her that was less fraught than most (that is, she wasn't yelling incoherently) but in the same conversation she asserted that:

- She has no money and therefore no estate, and therefore no need to see an estate lawyer of financial planner before she marries
- She has plenty of money and therefore can spend gobs of it on a wedding if she wants to
- Spending money on a bus to ferry relatives from Virginia to Pennsylvania so they can come to the ceremony doesn't count as spending a lot of money, because it's a good idea!
- Her husband-to-be's plan of limiting the budget for the wedding to $3,000 is an excellent one.
- She doesn't intend to stick to that budget because it's far too small.
- She doesn't want to sell her house and move to Pennsylvania because it's colder there, and anyway she loves her house.
- Her husband-to-be wants to sell the house so they can live in the Pennsylvania countryside. How they will reconcile these two opposing desires, we have no idea. Cage match?
- My sister and I are "money-faced." (Apparently it sounds better in Tagalog.)
- Husband-to-be's family are mostly composed of immoral money-grubbers, but they won't be able to touch her money even if they get married. This despite having no actual idea what happens once they are married and he becomes...her heir? Closest next-of-kin? Automatically entitled to half the house and so could pass it on to his kids if mom dies first and then they force us to sell it so they can get their half? Which would go against mom's desire that we keep the house? We don't know. She doesn't know either, and doesn't want to ask.
- There is no difference between a wedding in Pennsylvania and a wedding in Virginia, because that's just silly.
- Getting married is about love, not money, therefore seeing an estate planner or financial adviser is a waste of money. (This from the woman who matter-of-factly calls herself a high-maintenance woman with ABSOLUTELY NO IRONY.)
- All of this makes her tired. Why do we want to make her tired?

My sister and I have no real expectation of an inheritance from mom. Our assumption all this time has been that the house would finance her retirement once she was older, and anything we inherited would be stuff like pieces of furniture and the Le Creuset pots we intend to fight over. We're not exactly money-grubbers, either of us. However, the last thing either of us want is some sort of protracted legal brangle where suddenly Husband-to-Be's six kids sue us over some part of mom's estate and end up forcing us to do things we don't want to do. And frankly, the only reason we have a bit of a dubious view of this guy's kids is because HE HAS TOLD US THEY ARE HORRIBLE PEOPLE. Seriously. He's the one telling us they're leeches, while at the same time feeding his martyr complex by bankrupting himself to give them money (apparently he put 26K on his credit cards to put an son-in-law through rehab, and then the guy went to jail as soon as he got out for doing...something, and now he's out of jail and babysitting the kids and OH MY GOD DO WE WANT TO BE INVOLVED IN THIS FAMILY'S DRAMA? DO WE?)

So. These are a few of the things my sister and I have been dealing with.

I feel like I've become such a bore recently. When trouble happens, it tends to just suck things up, so although I'm still reading books, watching tv, having things happen, when it comes to saying anything witty, vaguely interesting, or hell, articulate, my brain goes blank.

I've signed up for Yuletide. Have actually decided not to ask for Sayers this year, but I'm requesting Dresden Files, Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, Constantine (movieverse) and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, because...well, because. Although I nominated the Matthew Swift books, I realized that what I really want is more of them, and since I've only read the first and there are two more out there, I should probably head in that direction first. Have offered MacGyver, Dresden, Constantine, Life, Kage Baker's The Company books, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Am wishing really hard that I had nominated Judith Merkle Riley's work in some form or another. Blast.

Work is busy busy. Lots of time in the vaults, pulling out stacks of photography to review. Also new policies and forms to write.

I continue to swim about once a week, and have worked up to a solid half-mile in about a half-hour. I kind of enjoy the ritual of the locker room and the shower and the smell of chlorine on my skin for the rest of the day. I do not enjoy forgetting my damp towel is wadded up in my backpack and the way it smelled when I found it again.

Aikido test will probably happen first week of Dec. Have gotten to the point where I know everything that will be on it, but want to work on my smoothness. Plus, dear god, I'll have to practice my back rolls, because they're sad floppy sideways things and I take forever just setting up to do them, because I'm convinced they'll come out wrong.

Have absolutely no money. Worried about the whole Christmas thing. However, we did successfully rehabilitate Bemo's student loans that were in default, which means that the credit agencies get a nice letter about us, that we can put the loans in deferment for a time, and that we also will start getting IRS refunds again. It was a big frickin' difficult deal, and I'm amazed we managed to pull that one off. Considering framing the letter that announced it.

Wish Bemo's brain chemistry would sit down and shut the fuck up, already. And I know that he wishes it five times as hard as I do. Sadly, there is probably more of it in the future, as meds are tweaked.

Off to find lunch.

Bemo and I are not going to go lob something heavy and brick-shaped through the window of our old apartment. This even thought Old Landlady has, after sitting on it for three months, finally cashed that rent check from back in July, causing our current rent check to bounce and making me the recipient of a stern letter from our current rental agency. I don't know why our automatic overdraft thingy didn't kick in like it's supposed to - it's possible that over a certain amount and it doesn't, but I'll have to check - but this totally counts as one of those those moments that proves I'm not in any way, shape, or form a responsible adult.

Have dropped off a new rent check earlier this evening (with groveling handwritten note on the back of the envelope explaining what happened), and will have to live with the hit this delivered to the savings account. I knew the check was out there, but I probably should have been watching for it more closely, or something.

I swear, if I knew how, I'd totally hex Old Landlady with a bad case of hemorrhoids.