The Good
I found Steph’s newest book in the wild at my LYS last Saturday and proceeded to read it in a matter of hours. Very fine writing. 🙂

I got a check for $100 unexpectedly from the university. Not knowing why random monies had been sent to me, I called the Financial Aid office. It turns out that a online scholarship application that I thought I had cancelled out of was actually submitted… not even half complete… but obviously complete enough to get me free money. Woot!

It dawned on me this morning that I have been at this knitting blog thing for a year now.

I sent an email to the Public Service office of the City of Mountain View at the beginning of this week because I have encountered a few left turn light sensors that aren’t trigger by my scooter. This is very frustrating because one of them is a block from my work and I have to go through that intersection, turning left, to get to work where they pay me for my time. I wasn’t expecting a reponse, so I was pleasently surprised when I got an email from a nice city traffic engineer informing me that sometime today a traffic engineer will be inspecting the intersections I complained about. Just wow… I have a problem and it’s being taken seriously by people with the skills and authority to resolve the issue. That’s quite a rush.

The Bad and the Ugly
Unfortunately, the email from the nice city traffic engineer apparently burned up my current customer service karma. The Husband and I went to the new Best Buy in Sunnyvale to return our boxset of the first season of Deadwood because it contains 2 disc fives and no disc six. After being left standing around for 20 minutes, we were informed that because we didn’t have a receipt we couldn’t return it there even though we were trying to do a straight exchange for a non-defective version. We told them it had been a gift (truthfully, we can’t remember where we got it from for the life of us… it very well could have been Best Buy), hence the lack of receipt. The snooty, little customer service supervisor was no help whatsoever. No receipt… blah blah blah… it was a gift? maybe we can look up the receipt in the system (note: for some reason I find this disturbing)… oh, the people who gave it to you didn’t get it from a Best Buy, then we can’t take it even though we have 20 copies on the shelf and this one would be returned to the distributor as a defective item. I was moments away from asking to talk to her manager, but it was 8 pm and I was hungry for dinner. “The system won’t let us return things without a receipt.” Bullshit. I can’t believe that the manager can’t override that feature… that’s what managers are for. So, we left, and I think we’ll avoid that Best Buy… and I’m going to take every opportunity to tell other people not to shop there either because apparently Customer Specialist Supervisor training at Best Buy doesn’t include the adage that people rarely tell others about good experiences, but will tell at least 10 people about a bad one (hence this post).

Lastly, there sadly has been no knitting the last few days. Hopefully, the weekend will solve this problem.

Here I am crawling out of the hole that is September just in time for October to notify me it’s coming for a visit soon. The beginning of September was swamped with learning once again to cope with school work, work work, and never having enough knitting time while dry textbooks glare at me for ignoring them. This was, of course, all part of the signal that it was time for me to get sick (I only really get sick twice a year, but it’s usually from the germs that are not hampered by my frequent hand washing, so the colds are usually dozies). And, of course, I got sick just in time to start my vacation from work work.

The Husband and I took last week off from work for our third anniversary. My cold started the Thursday beforehand (you know you’re getting sick when several people ask you several times within a 48 hour period, “Are you okay? You look kind of pale.” I’m a natural blonde, so for people to remark that I’m pale it must be bad). I wasn’t really myself again until the vacation week was half over. At least we still got some fun in. We made a trip to The Tech Museum, which was sort of fun… the best part was it was completely empty because we went after school children were returned home. We went hiking on Friday. The Husband cooked two fantastic meals on Thursday and Friday for the equinox and the anniversary. Overall (aside from the cold/cough thing that made me sound either like a sultry actress or a two pack a day smoker) it was a rather nice full nine days of downtime.

There has been knitting… but there is no photographic evidence as of yet. I hope to have some soon, especially since I actually have a finished object to show off.

There has even been some spinning… I managed to finish off the green stuff I last worked on before my accident in June. Now to spin up the other color I plan on plying it with.

I had forgotten how nice spinning is for calming my nerves… and I had tons of nerves to calm yesterday. I attempted my motorcycle license test yesterday… I failed (There are three automatic failures… stalling the engine, putting a foot down, and going outside the lines… I put a foot down). The sad part is I’ve been riding for 6 months and thus far have not been in a situation where I needed to drive in tight circles… hence, my inability to perform that skill when the nice lady from the DMV instructed me to do so. It was frustrating and disappointing. I’ve decided to just sign up for the CHP motorcycle saftey training, which gets you your license automatically. What’s nice is I should get more out of it than just my license… I should pick up safety tips, and learn how to ride a motorcycle (my scooter is an automatic, so it’s like riding a bicycle with a big motor on it).

Trying to settle back into the grind of a semester is turning out to be a pain in the ass.

I found out a few days ago that my secret pal for SP5 was Becky! Yea! I got my last package from her on Friday of last week, but have been lazy had homework to work on. This package was stuffed full of Knitpicks Gossamer in Sweet Peas (I think… it might be Sunrise… I can’t remember and the yarn is sitting in my living room while I am at work) along with the Twin Peaks Faroese Shawl by Sivia Harding. There was a gorgeous card that you can’t see cause I haven’t taken a picture of it yet, and a small thing of Vegemite… yes, that Vegemite. I have no idea what to do with it… I have a complete lack of knowledge when it comes to Australian foods. Any suggestions, Becky? 🙂 I’m willing to try anything once… I am curious to see what it actually tastes like.

My sister and brother-in-law rode out Katrina in Pensacola. They lost power for 12 hours, and the roof had some holes that needed to be repaired. But, Pensacola didn’t see the same kind of damage that Mobile 30 miles away did. I think the only real bad thing for my sister to come out of this is she might have gotten food poisoning after eating something from their freezer, which they had packed with ice to weather the power outage. And, now Pensacola seems to have no gas… at all… in the whole town.

I tried to get through to the Red Cross site 5 times yesterday, but I couldn’t even get the front page to load. So, I went off in search of other places that need my money. I put a donation in to the Houston SPCA since they have taken in over 200 animals from the Louisiana SPCA. (Well, I think I put in a donation… there might have been a problem with their page as well… if I don’t see the charge in a few days, I’ll do it again.)