In one note of good news before I get into today's trainwrecks, Dave went yesterday to check out a business school that trains people in property management and real estate (having given up on the computer idea because of everyone else out of work), and apparently made a very good impression and high test scores while there. He plans to beg the unemployment people to pay for him attending the school now. Unfortunately getting them to agree to this is going to take until the end of the summer at least, but whatever, so long as he gets some kinda training in something.

Man, I'd like to go a few minutes at a time for a change without someone feeling compelled to tell me really horrible things that will make me miserable.

Yesterday was a kinda crappy day (more on that below), and I had just managed to cheer up a bit when Mom had to call me up to complain that I forgot about her again. She then whined about how the closet repair guy is coming tomorrow, and Uncle Bruce and Cousin Ron have decided to show up at the same day and time to mess around with Dad's ramps, and how she doesn't WANT them to know that she hired a repair guy and not them, but she can't possibly tell them that she's busy and not to come over then...blah blah blah. And you wonder where I get it from.

Then she proceeded to tell me in great detail about how someday (one doctor claims "within a year," another claims "he's doing so much better than he should be, no, that's not true") Dad will no longer be able to swallow and will either have to go on a feeding tube or just die.

I kinda inevitably know this is going to happen, but I'd really rather not discuss or think about it ahead of time if I can avoid it. Then again, Mom can't.

I proceeded to spend the rest of the night whining to Dave about how if we don't get married soon Dad won't be at it and we may solve the whole wedding planning problem by having to elope at the hospital bed, and how if I ever get a disease like Dad's I plan on killing myself before my brain goes. He wasn't real thrilled to hear that.

Oh well, one good piece of news from that depressing call: my tax refund came in. Of course, that means I have to go home to get it.

As hinted at above and on the notify list the other night (I was finishing the entry when the fit hit the shan), Dave and I had a big ol' fight the other night. (From what I hear in chat, lots of people seem to be doing that of late. What a week, eh?) I had just gotten my bank statement and was going through it and going "Yeesh" at myself- not that I didn't know, mind you- and yet still pondering buying various items of 3WA merchandise.

At which point he well, snapped and started going off at great length about how come I never save for anything- I don't have much interest in seriously saving for a computer even though "you're afraid to use yours" and it crashes a few times a day, nor am I trying to save for an eventual wedding (God only knows when that would be). He can't really save, but I have no excuse, he says, and he doesn't get why I don't stash away more money than I do (not to mention, go spend a shitload on books and jewelry and anything else fun). He seemed to take it personally, along the lines of "Do you want to get married or do you just want to buy books all the time?"

It was pretty ugly, and we didn't talk pretty much all day long after that.

I know I have issues with this. I was pretty good (for me) the first few months of the year. I kept telling myself all the time that I was going to get laid off and I couldn't spend any money, really rammed it into my head that my life had to go on hold until July when I found out the news. And then in the last few months I have crashed, gone insane, said "fuck it," got sick of waiting and waiting in suspense, and proceeded to go hog-wild. It probably hasn't helped either that I've been stressed out and miserable for one reason or another on weekdays (weekends I've been out of town and distracted from my life) most of this time. I want to be absorbed in other things that don't remind me of life, and rereading my old books for the 50th time just doesn't cut it after awhile.

I am not dealing well.

And to top it all off, saving for something that's long term and going to take at least a year or two to pull off doesn't seem real to me. Nor am I all that cool with the idea of being on total austerity no-fun-at-all budget for that length of time, feeling depressed because I can't get things because of Big Ticket Item. Hell, who knows if I could even GET Big Ticket Item? Life seems to like to come along and take that sort of thing away after awhile. Dave having to worry about paying stuff off and getting employment before he can even join the saving spree does not help either.

In the end, I agreed to stash more cash and not go have so much fun spending.

Then I proceeded to er, spend a shitload on a lot of short-lived or expiring merchandise. (The latter is for my er...eventual laptop, of course.)

It's my last splurge. Really. Honest and for truth. Because my beloved 3WA is finally ending, and I must memorialize it er, somehow, by buying a bunch of cute shit for myself and Dave.

It's like the end of an era. (And I had to pick this timing to get myself banned from another message board, didn't I?) This is my third site shutdown (old Squishy boards, Hissyfit), but this site was always my favorite of all, and the one I had in "reserve" when all others went away. Now, well...

We all kinda knew it would happen at some point because the financials have been bad for ages, and I got an inkling when Sara said yesterday the Crazy merchandise wouldn't be sold for long. Of course, it costs too much fucking money to run a site any more of this magnitude if you're not a big corporation. Even if we did a paid subscription thing, it couldn't be enough. (At any rate, I went on Motley Fool after they went to pay and it's semi-empty in a lot of places compared to what it used to be, I think. Though I guess the major cut in bandwidth usage with less people would be an improvement.) We can't all migrate somewhere else and not utterly wipe out that site as well. So what the hell do we do?

Die off, I guess. Or at least go to non-message-board communication.

One person's started a mailing list, some are working on lining up an alternate chat room, people are listing contact info, and there's discussion of a LiveJournal community- I'm gonna have to go get me one of those so I can join in, even if I always thought it was weird to have two similar journals. (Oh well, at least I could follow the Hellmouth News or something.) So hopefully it won't all utterly end, at least not for some of us. We might end up like at the end of Pump Up The Volume, with new mediums and voices popping up in different places.

We shall see. But right now, I'm bummed that I won't be able to just wander into chat and see everybody who's been a better friend to me than most of my IRL ones. As spygirl might say, we're losing our neighborhood bar.

Other farewells so far: Claire, tainn, alicat, Jason.

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