v-s.net v0.6

Wednesday, 8:59 am in Life

Oh for godssakes…  Of course daylight savings ended just as we were going up to Queensland so of course I forgot to re-set the time on my alarm and of course I didn’t notice until getting into work this morning and wondering why the building door was locked before realising, oh shit, it’s 7am.  No wonder I woke up tired.

It’s ironic that the other day I was talking with someone about how it always seems that all bills come at once.  In the week subsequent to saying this, I had to pay for or buy; my first speeding fine, a telephone bill, credit card bills, a birthday present for ~Mat [h], dinner out for ~Mat [h] and – worst of all – panel beating for Yareth.  Yes, panel beating.

On Saturday afternoon I decided to go out to Jem Aquatics to investigate plants and fish and kill some time.  Of course, after driving all the way out to Belconnen I discovered that they weren’t even open, so no worries, I came back home again.  Now, we have a communal undercover parking lot thing at our apartment and like most developments you couldn’t exactly say they’d been generous with the spaces.  My spot is right next to a pole, and usually this is okay because the car one up from me is also very tiny.  The car one up from that is this massive, planet-raping silver 4-wheel drive that has no place being parked in our tiny car park but of course anyone who owns such a car would never dream that their ‘precious’ might be a fucking danger to every single other person on the road, stationary or moving.

Anyway, on this particular day the people next to me had parked quite substantially over the line (they’re usually pretty good about parking, so I blame you, Mr. SUV).  I’d barely gotten into the car to leave, and and I was parking again I was trying so hard not to hit their car that I mis-judged the swing and managed to scrape my own car on the pole.  Fuck.  So now I’ve got all this big white scratches across the duco over the rear left wheel casing.  It’s not serious damage (the metal/plastic/whatever the fuck the car’s made out of) isn’t dented, but it needs re-painting and now is when everyone tells me that panel beating – any kind of panel beating – is fucking expensive.  My boss used to be a mechanic so I guess I’ll ask him if he knows anywhere good I can take poor ol’ Yareth.  It’s not just the fact that it’s going to cost me money that shits me off so much as that it will require Organising in time I don’t have.  Of course my car is fully insured but there’s the issue of deciding whether or not claiming a couple of scratches is worth losing my no claim bonus.¹

Oh well.  It’s only money.  I feel a little bit less guilty because I’ve got enough to cover everything in my ‘spending’ account, and all my house-savings is secreted away in investment funds so there’s no temptation to dip into that.  I’m going to have to go back to being very frugal for a while after this, though.  I didn’t save up as much money last year as I could have, but I came close which is pretty good considering how terrible I am at impulse buying.

Of course, all this is coming right at the time I decided to splash out and set up an aquarium, too.  It’s going well, incidentally; I bought a new tank (the old one was going to be too hard to light), re-set everything up and this time kicked off the nitrogen cycle by adding a whole jar of fish flakes (they came with the original tank; I wasn’t going to use them to actually feed my fish when I eventually get some) wrapped up in a Wettex.  Food-driven fishless cycling isn’t the best option (the decaying food contaminated the tank with much more than just ammonia), hence the Wettex ball; I left it in overnight and pulled the rotten soggy mass out the next day.  Since the large mass of decaying flakes stayed wrapped up, hopefully the contamination wasn’t too bad.  Anyway, my ammonia levels are up to about 4ppm, which is good.  Before going away I saw some evidence of nitrite and nitrate, but when I tested again last night they seemed to have mostly gone (which indicates they were never there in the first place, since nitrate doesn’t exactly walk off by itself).  Anyway, my ammonia is still climbing so I’ll continue to watch it.  The pH spiked up dramatically over the weekend, too; tap water here is about 7.2, the tank dropped to 6.6 after the first day and now it’s back up to about 7.4.  Friday is technically plant day (more money!), so fingers crossed; the plants are going to be the hard bit.  Fish I’ve done before…

They’ve re-jigged the proxies here at work so I can no longer access websites on non-standard ports.  Of course, non-standard ports is where my webmail is.  Bum.

I signed up for Neopets again the other day.  Lulz.

1. I admit I don’t know a hell of a lot about insurance, but does anyone else thing it’s decidedly odd that everyone gets insurance but no-one claims anything on it so they don’t lose their Mystical No Claim Bonus? ^

• Tags » fishkeeping, money, neopets, yareth
• Comments By » ~Belinda [h]