The hockey game last night was amazing. The Sharks beat the Blue Jackets 4 to 1. By the end of the game, the Sharks had put about 40 shots on net; almost made me feel bad for Denis (Columbus’s goalie). They dropped the 2003-2004 Pacific Division Champions banner at the beginning. Unfortunately, the downside of hockey games made itself known loud and clear this morning. I awoke with a pounding headache and the rest of me felt as if I’d been beat up all night. See, being around thousands of screaming people with loud music and such sucks the life out of me through a Pearl Tea straw. It was fun… it was exciting… I’m exhausted.

Since I was at the hockey game last night, there’s no new knitting news and no new knitting pictures (I failed to bring a camera to opening night hockey after a season long lock-out, you expect me to actually take a picture of the shawl I’ve had finish for almost a month now?) I really don’t know what my problem is when it comes to taking pictures for my blog. Either I take them and it then takes forever to get around to uploading them, or I keep saying I need to take them and never do. *sigh*

As I was nearing what I believed to be the end of straight knitting on the second Ribby Cardi sleeve, I pulled out the previously finished one to compare. Since I was feeling giddy from the prospect that this sweater may actually be done before winter is over, I gave into the happy feeling and pulled the first finished sleeve on so as to admire it. This is when The Husband found The Hole. Yes, one of those beastly buggies apparently found my nicely finished sleeve and chomped a hole in it. So, once the second sleeve is finished, I will be ripping back the first sleeve to fix it. Thankfully, the hole is near the top of the sleeve, so I only have to rip out about 4 or 5 inches, figure out where I am amidst the raglan decreases, and go from there. *sigh*

Last night I drew up my cleaning plan. I listed off each room of the apartment and what I felt needed to be done in order to bring the apartment up to cleanliness standards in which carpet beetles will be repulsed. I think I will be beginning with the living room, since that is where the first sleeve had been residing (it got shoved down behind one of the couch cushions, and there meet its fate… I think… cause it hasn’t ever been into the fiber room… meanwhile I’m trying not to think to hard about creepy, crawly buggies living in my couch). First, I will clean up the clutter. Then, I will vaccum the carpet and the furnature like a black hole has come to live in my living room. I am considering getting something that kills buggies but is less toxic than the stuff I have unleashed in the fiber room… I don’t know that it would help though.

As Stephanie has instructed, I have been trying to research carpet beetles so that I may know my enemy. Aside from using poisons and good housekeeping, there doesn’t seem to be much you can do about carpet beetles… they just are… they’re just everywhere. The good housekeeping seems to be key… carpet beetles are attracted to lint, hair, wool, animal protein kind of stuff (it was interesting to find out that they are a huge problem in museums because they like to munch on insect exhibits, which makes sense when you find out that carpet beetles tend to lay eggs in old spider webs and wasp nests because the larvae eat the dead bugs left behind). Okay, I need to stop thinking about buggies now… for some reason whenever I read up on bugs and such it makes me feel itchy everywhere… creepy crawly… *ugh*

Sunday started like most other Sundays… get up, have breakfast and tea, and decide what to do with the day. This Sunday The Husband and I were going to go to Macy’s to look at watches for him, head to Target to get me new workout clothes, and come home by way of Safeway to get whole wheat egg noodles. But this Sunday had other plans…

I went into my fiber room to put away my newest yarn acquisition (two skeins of Cherry Tree Hill Possum Lace in Blueberry Hill and a skein of Cherry Tree Hill Supersock in Birches) in my fiber room. I don’t know what made me go across the room and fuss with the two test skeins (from two fo my fleeces) that were sitting atop the bookcase in front of the window, but I did… and I am glad I did…

I picked up the small white skein I made to sample my Southdown Babydoll fleece… foddled it a little… turned it over… WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!

There was a bug… on my wool! Sonofabitch! (Insert a lot more cursing here.)

I quickly check the other wooly items sitting inches away from this one… no other buggies. I could only think of removing the buggie from my fiber room, so I took it to the kitchen. Thinking only the worst, I prepared a destroy the small skein while mentally running through the work ahead of me. The Husband smooshed the buggie (it fell off of the skein and I wanted to make sure it died), and applied some lamp oil to the wool, which was then taken outside and set alight in the firepit. Boy, did it burn…

By now I was started to feel sick to my stomach… a buggie in my stash… I began to prepare myself mentally for the idea of having to throw out wool… my wool. No wonder I felt sick to my stomach.

We still had errands to run, but The Husband suggested we make a stop at Home Depot where my LYS owner works to see if she was still there. We found her in her dept and she said she’d be with us as soon as she was done with a customer. She comes over and asks what’s up. I answer, “I found something eating my wool.” And here is why I love my LYS owner… she looked properly horrified, then proceeded to ask me what it looked like. A tiny, fuzzy buggie. Without missing a beat she informs me it’s a carpet beetle. She then starts going through what I need to do… go home, check everything, see any buggies — kill them. She mentioned freezing, but we have a very small freezer (we’re now looking at getting a small chest freezer for yarn and food). She then tells us we should be able to find no-pest strips at OSH, and asks if we can meet her at the yarn store in about an hour; she has mothcakes that don’t smell too bad, and they’re good for carpet beetles, too.

I got through most of my stash Sunday night, and put the perfumed mothcake in place as well as the no-pest strip. No buggies were found in my yarn, and my fleeces look alright as well. I did find 2 cast skins (carpet beetle larva molt) — one in a box of rug yarn and one on a wool sweater that was hanging in the closet (although I couldn’t find any holes). I’ve only seen (I think) 2 live larvae in the whole apartment — the one eating my wool, and one in our bedroom a few weeks before.

I think what I found is a Varied Carpet Beetle (the picture at this site looks almost exactly like what I found… when I said fuzzy, I meant it). Thankfully, I also think that since I only found the one, I don’t have to worry about an infestation at this point. I am going to check my stash again in a few weeks to make sure. I’m definitely going to have to get more serious about the vaccuming though.

And since I wasn’t on edge enough already, I saw a moth in my fiber room last night when I was finishing up with the last of my fleeces… smooshed that sucker real good, but unfortunately, I didn’t get a good look at him. I’m not sure if he flew in from the other room or if he flew out of the plastic bag I had just opened. So, that fleece has been put back in the bathroom, and will get checked again in a week.

Just thinking about all this… I could use a hard drink…

I have an terrifying tale to tell that will elicit gasps of horror… I just need to write it. So, for now you get an interlude…

It is slowly dawning on me that my insurance company is out to drive me crazy (I do hope they understand they would be paying for my mental hospital stay).

I got home from work on Friday (the day of the phone delivered stupidity) to find a processed claim form in my mailbox… from my insurance company… saying they are covering my ER doctor’s bill in full… the exact thing the insurance person had told me not 6 hours earlier wasn’t going to be happening. The claim adjustment went through a week ago (9/30), and I have yet to come up with a reasonable explanation of why they told me it didn’t exist (I have thought that they have computers from the 1980s, or they don’t know how to train their employees to read the computer screen). The nice HR person gave me a call this morning to tell me that she had indeed received information that it was going to be paid (and in fact has been… which is why I’m going to be calling the hospital tomorrow and asking “What the Fuck?”), and she’s going to be inquiring as to where the breakdown in communication occurred. *sigh*

Meanwhile, work is just odd. My company’s user conference is this week, so this place is dead. My manager is off at a different conference as well, which means I’m “in charge.” Yes, it’s as funny as you think it is. I know nothing about our systems should they go down, and my manager being gone even for just 3 days means something is going to break. This is why I felt no surprise whatsoever when I went to check on our import script this morning and found it crashed sometime Friday night. If I don’t fix it, it won’t be able to run tonight. *sigh* I have a very strong feeling it only crashed cause it knew it could piss me off.

Wow… an insane amount of bitch got strewn about the blog yesterday didn’t it? It’s just when there’s so much of it laying around, it’s hard to clean up properly.

I set the alarm 15 minutes earlier than usual for this morning (yeah, 15 minutes… I didn’t need to bitch that much, now did i?), and dragged my ass out to the computer to sit around for a few minutes waiting for the form to go live. Three minutes later it was filled out, printed out, and submitted. Now, the waiting game.

Of course, since the begging for classes registration process went rather smoothly, something else had to go wrong today. A couple days ago, I received an odd message on my home phone just saying the call was for me, from Kristen, with a 800 number. Sounds weird, yes? I googled the phone number and discovered it the phone number for the hospital’s billing office. Even odder… I sent them a check for my co-pay for my ER visit in June, and they cashed it. Turns out, it was a call to inform me that if I don’t pay them the $175 they say I owe the doctor, my bill will be turned over to a collection agency.

Here’s the problem… I went to an in-network ER and was seen by a… wait for it… out-of-network doctor (who I had no choice over). When the insurance company first said that they would only pay for his services (which amounted to him looking at my knee (and no other area I said hurt) and saying “It’s bruised; here’s some pain killers.”) at the out-of-network scale. My response to this was to sic my HR person on them because my insurance plan says my ER visits are covered 100% after a $35 co-pay as long as I go to an in-network hospital. The nice HR person told me they try to pull this a lot and that they are wrong. I sent her the claim info, she sent it on to her insurance contact, who emailed back saying that yes, indeed the visit should be covered 100% (minus co-pay) and the claim would be adjusted within 48 hours.

That was a week ago. Hence my surprise to get a call from the hospital demanding money. I called the insurance company to request that they please inform the hospital that the claim has been readjusted and I don’t owe them any money. But according to the lady at the insurance company, there’s been no new adjustment and I owe the doctor money. She also then told me that the plan I had up until April 1 would have covered the claim completely. This is interesting because the only change that happened to my plan was it went from a 100/50 POS to a 100/50 PPO… nothing changed except I can now see the PPO doctors and I don’t have to have a Primary Care Provider. (Isn’t this all terribly exciting?)

Unfortunately, I have been unable to get ahold of the HR person. I left a voicemail, and sent an email when I hadn’t heard back after several hours. This is driving me crazy with frustration… I need to go home and spin some more… although I don’t know how much spinning I can get done while watching a hockey game.

This week has been a pain in the ass plain and simple — annoying “post a short review to the discussion board” assignments, the Sharks lost to Nashville last night after being the only team to have no losses in the preseason… first freaking game of the season *gah*, this week has been appreciation week in my dept and apparently we can only celebrate with things like pizza and root beer floats (to hell with my diet), and last but not least, “registration” (and I use that term lightly) opens tomorrow morning at 7 am.

Accepting that I’m an adult now (that’s a whole other post I need to write), I will be glad I’ve done the annoying assignment, I will be hopeful for the next 81 games of hockey because it is 81 more games than were played last year, and the food is free and I managed to have a cookie instead of a root beer float (I haven’t had a soda in like 4 months and I kind of like it that way)… but this farce of a “registration” gets my hackles up every semester.

Every semester SJSU MLIS students drag themselves out of bed on the appointed day before 7 am in order to beg for classesinform the dept of our class selections. Now this wouldn’t be so bad if it were done on a first come, first serve basis (I think I should get privilege for dragging my ass out of bed before the usual time). No, the dept waits 2 weeks before even touching the forms. Then, they give the first person their first class, and the second person their first class, and the thrid person their first class… you see where this is going, right? You understand that even if you are the first person to sumbit your form at 7:00:30 am, you may not get the classes you request? For some reason, the dept feels this is more fair than the system the university already has in place (you get a registration time, and you register at that time, getting classes or not as the case may be). After some time… and I think they wait as long as they can… they email out permission codes for registration, and each student has 6 days to use it (you don’t use it, you lose it).

For some reason, this whole process makes me want to scream. It’s already going to take me twice as long to graduate because I am only able to take 2 classes a semester so I don’t go completely loony while trying to get my degree, work 40 hours a week, and have a married life. But this whole beg for classes system makes it doubly harder for me to even get the classes I need to get out within 4 years (this is a 2 year program) because most of the classes I need only have one session a every other semester, so I can’t try to just get in with a different professor/day. I’m shit out of luck. And to top it off, I have to have at least 2 classes or I lose my financial aid and what loans I do have go into repayment.

*gah*

Now, I need to try to magically guess which of the classes I hope to take in the spring are the most popular versus those I desparately need to get into…

I think I must resign myself to never getting my hands on a couple skeins of Cherry Tree Hill Possum Lace in Java. (Of course, that’s not going to stop me from picking up a couple skeins in another color… it’s being discontinued…) I believe I have Snow and Deb to blame for pointing out that Little Knits was having a sale on the last of their Possum Lace stock. I was rather excited when I noticed they still had a few skeins of it in the Java colorway, so I ordered quickly. Unfortunately, I found a message when I got home last night telling me that the second skein was nowhere to be found (sadly, Sue, the owner, believes it walked out the door not of its own volition). So, after a little bit of phone tag (a busy yarn store, what a nice thing), I was able to tell Sue that I’d just take a couple skeins in Blueberry Hill instead. She told me she felt bad about the whole situation, so she asked me to pick out a pattern for the yarn as a gift. While I fell a bit guilty over this (I think they handle the issue rather well just by letting me know quickly that there was a problem), I’m not going to turn down a free shawl pattern. 🙂 I’m unable to get the color I like, but there’s a giftie… I guess my customer karma is returning to its usual equilibrium.

I’m currently working on the second sleeve to my Ribby Cardi, which is crawling alongsteadily growing. Two more increases then I work straight for a bit before beginning the shoulder shaping. Maybe I’m making it go slower to avoid having to sew it together… At least I eliminated several of the seams by knitting it in one big piece and knitting the sleeves in the round.

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.)