What's Interesting Today?

In the interest of keeping up with posting without much substance, here are the articles I found interesting today.

- What is the deal with stealing statues lately? Yesterday, it was a Jesus statue and today it's Charlie the Tuna. Sorry, Charlie, indeed.

- I just want to know which pawn shop has these recently recovered gold bracelets so that I can make sure not to buy them. I know where they've been.

- Apparently, cute can only get you so far before you get caught...impersonating a doctor!

- This woman gets points for having a designated driver, but loses major points for the driver being a one-year-old.

- In celebrity news, Jessica Simpson's relationship woes continue because of her father's meddling. Joe Simpson asked Tony Romo to drop his agent so that he [Joe] can manage his $67.5 million contract. Are you serious? What idiot would drop their manager for their girlfriend's dad-ager, especially since his area of "expertise" is in sub-managing pop careers. The last straw was offering to sell their engagement and wedding like he did for Ashlee. Romo wasn't having any of that, and that's why their relationship is in the crapper. They're back together, but there's not much hope of it getting back to where it was before Joe started making waves. The best part of this article? The fact that Joe doesn't exactly deny that he's doing all of these things. He thinks it's good management, and isn't family better at managing than a professional? Um, no.

- On a serious note, a Time article asks us all why are we able to look away from those who are struggling here in the U.S.. I'm not sure I agree with the author's assessment that these changes will happen with a Democratic president (because I'm a cynic and nothing is guaranteed), but I think it's a good read that probably won't be available for too long on the Internet.

- Also, the fashion world came out to say goodbye to Yves Saint Laurent today. I was going to link to an article about it, but I closed it hours ago. It's easy enough to find, so I'm not really necessary.

I've got a headache to get back to; I've been letting my money woes take its toll on my health, and since my baby has to be my biggest priority, I need to take better care of myself. My stupid Tylenol only lasted two hours, and I can't go home until I've worked my hours (because somebody has to take this shit seriously) so I'm stuck. But it beats getting dressed down by an IRS employee. I called the IRS to find out about their policy of taking money without proper notification, and the first man I got talked to me like I was a little girl who didn't know that the Economic Stimulus Package was a one-time thing. When I demanded to speak to his supervisor, he hung up on me! I wanted the supervisor because I was on the verge of losing it and ready to cuss his sorry behind out, so I wanted to talk to someone before I got to that point. I didn't even start the hostilities (because if I had, I would've deserved some of the blame for his behavior). The second man I spoke with gave me reasonable answers that I could accept without treating me like shit. That was my Tuesday. Fun.

I'm going to get back to work, finally.

Thank You, IR Freakin' S

We finally got our economic stimulus check today but, unfortunately, we only got $266 because we owed taxes this year and the government took out its chunk first. I had a feeling they were going to do this, but we really needed that money to pay our rent and the letter they sent to us informing us of the check that we were to receive made no statement whatsoever that the owed taxes would come out of the stimulus check.

So now we are most likely going to bounce our check and even if we don't, we are going to be in a hole that we won't be able to dig ourselves out of because of the fees that we will get if they do cash the check.

Why couldn't they just say "Oh, by the way, we're going to take our 900-some-odd dollars out of your economic stimulus check"? I'm not even asking for them to give me a chance to tell them "no", I just would've like to have known so that we may have either held off on turning in our rent check (and incur the $20 late fee for being a day late) or we would've tried harder to make other arrangements. God damn it, I'm tired of this. We're never going to get the money back that we spent on my grandmother's funeral (which was, roughly, eleven grand), and I can't pick up more hours at work because of the limits placed on the Research Assistant position, so other than having my husband work more hours (and if he had worked his full shift, the pittance from the government would've been enough to help us squeak by), I don't know what we can do. I'm a little furious that he refuses to ask his family for money when his parents aren't in financial hell, but he's more than willing to constantly bring up trying to get the money back from my family despite the fact that my mother doesn't have a job and my uncle's savings is what is paying the bills right now.

I'm really tired. I just can't keep going like this. We'll have to conserve as much as we can because we'll have no money by Wednesday (assuming the check gets cashed), and we only had enough gas to get me to work today. I'm still convinced he's doing something stupid with the car to waste gas when he only has 4 miles to go to get to work but uses more gas than I do going 20 miles to my office. $10 can only get you so far, and there is no bus that I can take to work (this town's transit system needs a lot of work) or I would do that instead of drive which pisses me off anyway.

I'm going to bed. I was going to call the IRS to bitch about this, but there's no point in yelling at someone who had nothing to do with this. I don't see why they would care. I don't see why anybody would, so...whatever.