don't you know by now {you can't turn back}

But also, there is No Time in my life when I don’t have something I should be doing. Something scholastic, usually, as my MCAT scores sucked on this self-timed practice one I did, which scared me all to fuck because my MCAT scores were what I was counting on to get me into medical school since my GPA isn’t impressive and I’m at a podunk state school (also, why does Word want to capitalize “Podunk”?).

Time management is really biting me in the ass atm. Even just trying to conceptualize what I should be doing when (not helped by the fact that the email system we switched to at school that has all my Outlook calendars I made on the old system refuses to connect to the Outlook program on my computer and give me them back).

( A list of what I'm doing (or not doing) lately: )

Met with the chemistry coordinator for my orgo service thing finally today, though, which I'd been putting off finding the time to do to turn in these forms because they were already late and I'm a wuss. She was uber nice. She's pretty old (60 at least, though I'm not good at guessing anybody's age, especially older folks) and reminded me a lot of my two grandmothers combined--sort of looked like my maternal, but had a slight southern accent like my paternal. Glancing at her bulliton board, it looks like she teaches mostly chemistry for non chem majors, which could be fun. It'd be like teaching high school chemistry--you could do a lot of the fun stuff because it's not like these people are ever going to need to know how to identify 1-propyl 4-chloromethyl heptene on the spot. Not that anybody would ever need to (even if you were a chemist, I'm pretty sure you'd have a second to look it up), but still.

Kinda disappointed about the MCAT/GRE practice thing tomorrow—the gay/straight alliance at school’s having a barbeque that I wanted to go to in the afternoon. Considered just taking the MCAT and going to the barbeque, but no. Shall be responsible. Also wanted to take the LSAT again, but it's at the same time as the MCAT, which is too bad, because the MCAT is going to make me want to slit my wrists, but the LSAT and how I rock it is a decent ego boost. (Acronym translation just in case this is baffling: MCAT=medical college admissions test, the pretest for med school. LSAT=same thing but for law school. GRE=same thing but for generic graduate school; more like the undergrad college admissions tests that have english and math and writing and such.)

I'm in the library atm, plugged into the wired connection on the tablet because I haven't downloaded the wireless update since I wiped it a few days ago and reloaded XP Tablet on it instead of the XP professional I had before that wasn't giving me the tablet functionality regularly. When I tried to load XP Tablet on top of the XP-Pro, like you can do with most Windows OS, it stalled on the install, so I had to reinstall regular XP Professional which ended up with me having one XP-Pro install that worked and one that was stuck halfway through being written over by Tablet. It worked fine like that for a week or two, but eventually the whole mess of things got to where I had to boot into the second OS under safe mode to not bluescreen out and blech. It worked, but was annoying. Going to see if I can get the tech people here to decipher their own instructions for setting up the new university mail with Outlook, because they don't work. Frustrating as hell; I've tried it I don't know how many times on the tablet under various hard drives and OS installs. But because I don't have the wireless (tried to download the update, but the wire here is so freaking slow--we're talking sub-dial up speeds for some reason), I've got to get one of them to come over here, which means unplugging my computer and bringing it over to the desk or leaving it here and going to get one of them, and it's just been less work to stay here and keep typing.

Shall do now, though, as bleakone's probably out of class in a few minutes and we'll be going home where hopefully, I can await the return of Tosh, the computer that was stolen by the fucktards at the Toshiba official repair depot for, from the day I sent it off to today, 36 days. And refused to do anything about it when I called and asked them what the fuck was up with them lying to me and saying 7-10 days. I get that it was on hold for parts for two weeks (sort of--shouldn't the official Toshiba place *have* all the Toshiba parts?) and that wasn't expected when they gave me the estimate, but 7-10 days after I sent it off they hadn't even put it on the repair desk, so that's bullshit.

ETA: Tosh is here! The screen works, the keyboard has been replaced, the fucktards wiped it like they said they wouldn't, but I backed stuff up so I'm not that pissed. What does piss me off is that they didn't replace the screen. In fact, they made the artifacting and little bruises and dead pixels worse. Idk what to do now. I think I'll call tomorrow or Monday or something and see what they say, because there's a whole circular bit in the middle of the screen where it looks like the pixels are half blue. (Most noticeable on a black screen, natch.) This was not there before. Displeased.

So. Found my wallet with my school ID and gym card and such tossed in a box like I'd hoped. This is good. The house looks awesome. Also good. Ianto!cat warming up to me. Good as well. I can find my way out of the house and to school by myself (right, then right, then left), which is también bueno, porque no se las calles en la ciudad de Springfield para nada.

Things that are not good.
1. I’m out of money. Paid rent, bought my lab text for a class, bought socks and salad dressing, and that’s all my cash. Scholarship money doesn’t come in until sometime in September. I’ve got my debit card, but there’s only. . . idk, less than $100 accessible (I think minimum balance is $25 or something), and I’m very, very reluctant to dip into that for anything less than dire, dire emergencies. Plus, some of the things I still have to buy include goggles for my lab classes and gloves for one of them (which I’d already gotten and had sitting on top of one of my boxes of stuff to take down here that was sitting in the front room, but I think Mom thought it was a mistake that I was taking them and took them out on a trip to load stuff into the car), and at least for the former I’m hoping to buy a used set from the chemistry department (they sold them last year) for $5, and I highly doubt they take debit cards. Oh, and possibly my poetry (blarg) teacher’s book—the biggest bullshit ever. It’s a mix of literary forms and is therefore less than 1/3 poetry. I’m begging off having it tomorrow because she just added it to the bookstore requirements in the last week, which is unfair, since I did most of my book shopping 3ish weeks ago.

2. None of my clothes fit. Dreaded, but understandable, as Stupid Metabolism Fail has continued. But I’ve still got them all down here, and not enough hangers (something else I need to buy), so my room looks horrid with boxes and such. I did not think enough about how hard getting dressed for school was going to be when I have all of 5 pants/skirts/shorts that fit, only three of which I’m positive I packed. Plus, it’s so fucking impossible to go buy clothes without wanting to, you know, kill myself when I see the sizes. (I know I’m a whiner about this and plenty of people can go “you think you’ve got it bad”, but when you’re used to yourself in one way and then a few months later you’re 40 pounds heavier, it’s a bitch.) My making my own skirts needs to be worked on more, because then there will be no size tags, XD.

3. I’m in the computer lab at the moment because my 1pm organic lab isn’t meeting because it’s the first day of school, but por supuesto, my 4pm biomol int lab is for only 15 minutes or so. I thought about just asking if I could come to the 1pm meeting of my 4pm one, just for today, so I could get out of here, but if we got seats and lab partners and such it would be awkward to come to the next one at the right time.


And the major one.

5!!!!!. After exactly a month grace period where the bizarre computer screen fritzing stopped, last night it started up again. Began slowly, just blue jaggy lines at the bottom of the screen, spread throughout the whole thing (though you could see the background beneath it), then went to the whole screen covered with thick colored lines/blocks, but when I left it alone, it’d resolve for a bit before starting back up again. It finally decided to cooperate last night, and I turned it off and went to sleep eventually. Started it back up this morning in organic chemistry to take notes and it did the same thing, but then went to the grey of it being backlit but with a totally black screen, then went totally black. Rebooted a bazillion times, gave up. Two hours later, tried it again in biomolecular interactions (sort of biochem, I think, hereby known as “biomol int”) and it booted right up with a good screen and everything. Random. Made the mistake of letting it go to screen saver (I was running out of battery and wanted to let the screen turn off so it wouldn’t die), and when the screensaver popped up, so did the blue fritzy lines, and then it went black. That was 2.5 hours ago, and the periodic rebooting I’m doing as I sit by a desktop in the computer lab hasn’t helped.

So. Last ditch, I check out the Toshiba website again, hoping that there’s some kind of magic fix that’s been posted since the last time I looked around to try to fix it. Happen to check the warranty thing, and lo and behold, it didn’t expire in May (right around when it died the first time) like I’d thought. It expires tomorrow.

Natch, the closest warranty repair center is 3 hours back to St. Louis. At this point, I’m mentally calculating time and such to see if I can get out of my last class and drive there before they close. (Answer: probably not. Plus, seriously, I’ve been here for what, not yet 48 hours?) Shipping it to the Toshiba depot won’t work either, as that obviously takes time, but I call them up (thankfully looking like a dork on the campus phone outside the computer lab rather than on my cell as I was on hold for 90% of the 25+ minute call) hoping I can plead my case and have them start a repair ticket for me today that will work under warranty even though it expires tomorrow, and lo and behold that’s exactly how it works. They’re shipping me a box, I’ve got to call UPS and get it picked up (maybe just find a UPS store and drop it off?), and it’s 7-10 day turnaround (hopefully days days and not business days).

They’re telling me to backup my important stuff, as well. I wanted to hold on to my hard drive, you know, just in case, but the guy said that they’d do some tuneup thing too. It worries me a bit—sure, I have problems with Firefox lately I figured I’d take it), and I’m not even sure how I’m going to be able to do that since I can’t see anything to do that. I tried to plug it in to the monitors on the computers here, but no such luck as they’ve got some freaky-arsed digital plug that doesn’t fit.

That’s the suckmost sucky part of it. And why I’d never sent it off to get fixed during the summer like the idiot I am. I didn’t want to be computerless for 10 days. (Plus, I did very, very little during the summer since I slept straight through normal business hours 9 days out of 10 and mostly couldn’t bring myself to leave the house. Fail, I know.) If only I’d done it then, though, because I’ve got note taking things all set up and homework to do and tests to study for (yeah, quiz in biomol int sometime this week) and one of my textbooks is actually on the computer. Also, we have no TV hooked up yet (DVD player, yes, actual broadcast TV no) and as far as I’m aware, not even an ETA on that, so boredom central.

I kind of still want to cry, I’m so frustrated. School and being in a new place and all is stressful enough without my computer dying on me.



ETA: This is what I mean by blue lines fritzing: ( (picture) )
You can see my icons on my desktop underneath a bit on the left. That’s last night, when it would resolve on its own and then do it again, rinse and repeat.
Then it went to. . . idk, think of a shirt with different sized vertical blocks of color. Sometimes it looks like this:
( (another picture) )
Not my computer, obviously, but similar display. It jumps around between being thin lines like that and ones thick enough that only maybe 6-10 of them fit. Of course, now it’s completely black, not even the grey of it still being backlit but with no display.


Also? The bluefritzing picture was taken with my new phone (demonstration purposes being why I didn't resize it like I did with the rest). Pretty good for a $60 (with $30 of minutes included, so more like $30) Net-10 thing, huh? They fixed a lot of my issues with the last one, like actually being able to connect it to a computer (only can access the micro SD card--not included, natch, but I pulled the one from my MP3 player that I kept audiofics on--and it can only take ones up to 2gb, but you can transfer pictures to the card fairly easily and then get to them on the computer) and taking custom ringtones. (Doctor Who theme FTW. I keep getting people to call me to test it and just not picking up so as to LOLOL.) Still can't get to the internet, just the Net-10 website, and it still charges you eight bazillion dollars to even do that when you accidentally hit the button, but you can lock the browser feature so you've got to type the code to open it, so that's saved me quite a few minutes, LOL.
(It is this one: )