It's all downhill from here (August 7, 2008)

Okay, so I'm a little emo today, and yes, that's a song title. (Click here to listen.) That nonwithstanding, I've got work to do, so let's get on with the to-do list.

BiblioPhoenix - Save This Book. Yep, my Save This Book giveaway is still going on - so keep checking in and commenting if you want to walk away with the prize, one book absolutely free of charge.

Comment Speedway - Help These Videos. Hey, videos deserve love, respect, and comments, too. So let's see what we can do to help some of ours out, hmm?

Rating Resurrectionists - Help My Rating. It generally takes a very concentrated effort to push a rating under 8.0 for long; part of the point of Rating Resurrectionists is to help content that has been attacked by the rear-faced Gather trolls. Political articles (regardless of which party) tend to end up needing help most frequently.

Group Moderation. Yes, it's a perennial task - but it's gotta be done, no? The Big Four are going to be my focus today, because I've checked all of my others (and some of Laura's) already last night.

I'm a little frustrated at the moment - in part, because the job market hasn't improved any more than my finances have, and in part because things are continually breaking down and needing to be replaced. Our Toshiba seems to go through adapters like a politician goes through political stances - its current adapter is no longer powering the laptop properly, intermittently supplying insufficient power to recharge it while running (and thus causing the battery to drain even while turned on), and generally being frustrating. Toshiba Satellites seem to be hell on power supply solutions. Laura's desktop computer is suffering from keyboard problems - put simply, the 'keyboard' part of her 'keyboard and mouse' wireless solution seems to have stopped working altogether. I have no idea why. And since this means that neither of her options for using the Internet and getting work done are functioning up to par, she's stressed, and therefore, I'm stressed.

Unfortunately, I can't exactly budget to pay for these things, either, because there's no money to budget. All of our Gather earnings and band lackeydom payments at the moment are going towards filling the gas tank, buying food, making payments towards back rent, and occasionally filling prescriptions when we absolutely need to. I can't really afford to do back-to-school shopping, and since we end up paying for the gas regardless of who's using the car (we don't own it, incidentally), every major trip over the summer is a blow to our pocketbook, and there isn't really a lot that we can do about it.

Hence, I tend to be cranky when someone comes along and tells me the economy is doing just fine. Just a slowdown? Maybe for the rich who are unhappy that their accumulation of vast amounts of wealth is not quite as fast as they're used to, but for the rest of us, we're watching the price of everything go up (inflation, high gas costs, call it what you will) while the available money remains roughly the same.

Maybe a specific subset of society is doing wonderfully, but I do not happen to exist within that subset. It's not exactly a heartening prospect, and at the moment I'm basically watching things continually get worse and wondering whether they'll ever get better.

Oh. And apparently, my application for extended unemployment has been denied because, despite not having lived or worked in Missouri for over eight years, they think I've earned money in Missouri sometime during the past year I've been unemployed. Pardon me while I add 'try to deal with that' to my to-do list.