(no subject)

Okay, I'm annoying everyone else around me by whining about this, so I may as well whine here too...

My poor radio is comatose! My poor, wonderful, AM/FM/shortwave/longwave radio! It shows a few signs of life--I turn it on, it tells which station it's supposedly tuned to, displays a bar showing that the station comes in perfectly, indicates that headphones are plugged in (whether they are or not), obediently shows different frequencies when I fiddle with the buttons and knobs... but no sound comes out, whether I'm using headphones or not.

Fortunately, the clock & buzzer still work fine, so I don't have to rush out and spend some of my meager cash on an alarm clock. Still, I can no longer listen to the radio and it hurts. Sure, I dearly heart LAUNCHcast and other Internet radio sites, but now I can't listen to news or music when I'm waiting for a phone call, or when the power is out, or when my connection speed is ridiculously slow (as it so often is).

Waaaaah!

Okay, end of the whine. Now I must get offline to wait for a phone call.

::sigh::

Could be worse

The radio situation: I did discover that there are at least 2 stations with strong enough signals that my antenna-free amplifier/receiver can get them in. A local AM news station and an FM classical station come in well enough to be listenable. Yay! Still useless if the power goes out, of course, and I'm really missing the shortwave already. But things aren't quite as bad as I thought. (Isn't it amazing how little things like this can change a person's mood so drastically? Especially when said person is stressed out and volatile like I've been?)

The shoe situation: Tuesday, weather insanely hot and humid. Good thing I had something to do in a nice, air-conditioned space--went with my vocational rehab. counselor to a Northern Virginia mall to hunt down a pair of dress shoes. After many trials and tribulations, I finally found some, too. But merely finding shoes that fit well enough that I don't need to kick them off within 5 minutes of putting them on isn't the end of the story. Oh, no, life can't be that simple.

See, the vocational rehab guy was using the agency credit card, which is in his supervisor's name. Since his supervisor is female, the observant store clerks immediately recognized that he wasn't the owner of the card. So the clerks, the counselor, and half the customer service department had to speak with the supervisor on the phone to complete this transaction.

Well. The supervisor was not happy with my counselor. Why not, you ask? Apparently the woman is not familiar with the difficulties in finding wearable shoes for skinny feet. She thought we should have gone to one of the cheap shoe stores in Maryland to spend taxpayer money, and it took some time to get through to her that we had gone to the less-expensive stores and found nothing. Why did it have to be Nordstrom? she asked. Let's see... I'd been seeking shoes in ten different stores, none of which had low-heeled shoes in my size, and the managers at several of the places suggested Nordstrom. When the competition tells you where to go, eventually you give up and go there. So I'm afraid that the amount of taxpayer money spent on these shoes was not a small one--but I got shoes! Yes!

Can't walk my usual miles in the dress shoes, alas. Still need athletic shoes, which will have to be paid for out of mine own minuscule pile of pocket change. My poor blistered feet aren't atall happy since the demise of my Nikes.

Other news: I got through to someone who actually has experience helping disabled people who have never worked find jobs! There's an offshoot of the national MS society that helps folks with adult-onset disabilities in preparing for work. Unfortunately, this is not a fast process--he needs to send me some paperwork, I fill it out & send it back, he calls me & we make an appointment to meet one day, blah blah blah. I need to buy me some athletic shoes so I can go stand in line at social services to apply for disability benefits for the zillionth time. Hopefully they'll give me at least a little bit of cash now that I don't have life insurance anymore. If that should fail, maybe I can borrow food from my housemates for the next few weeks... it's not like they really need all that Rice-a-Roni...