I had this great blog to post and my computer lost its pretty little head and Poof! it's gone.

And no, I did not send notification to microsoft that explorer puked, thanks for asking. Nosey little bastards. Like I'd actually let them know I had any of their software.

All I know lately is that grad school is hard. The homework is hard, but geez, even just getting a freaking student ID was a special trip. I had to actually *pay* for said ID. I started at the library where I discovered I had to have the ID to use the computer lab. I went to an entirely different building where a humorless woman young enough to be my child, had I chosen to reproduce at 18, took my picture and charged me. I returned to said computer lab with card where I was told I had to have the scan bar from the circulation desk on the other side of the library from whence I'd come. When I returned and wanted to print, I was told that in order to print, I had to pay for a stupid little copy card back at the freakin' circulation desk.

By the time I huffed my way up the hill to the education building, I was completely out of breath, exhausted, but I did have my printout with my one corrected sentence in it and the pure satisfaction that if I want to use the computer lab this semester, I don't have to go through all that shit again.

We are rather broke. I can't afford the $300 for a tank full of heating oil. We're so broke that we had to make two trips to the local hardware store to put kerosene in the heating oil tank to fuel the heater. Of course, lately, the night temperatures have been in the teens, so it's been cold as a witch's nipple here and we're running low on wood. I've been heading out of the house during the day, so I don't have to run the heater, so I can run it at night for the kids. We've been bundling the kids up in a lot of blankets at night and burning wood in the fireplace nearly constantly, especially at night. We had a bunch of big logs, so those have been skating us through this week. I've taken to running the oven on low heat during the day to add a little more heat when I'm here by myself because at least the electric bill is paid for! We've weatherstripped a bunch of windows and broken out lots of flannel. I just hate the oil tank because there is no dipstick and no way to tell just how much oil is in the damned thing, which sucks, so we don't know we're out until we're out. And right now, we're out, shy, 12 gallons of kerosene. (Kerosene is more refined heating oil.)

In good news, however, I should have a check from my contract work in a day or two, so things will get better. Yay! I may just buy us all electric blankets!