Frustration.

Boy, has it been an interesting week. To begin, I am already sick of school. I feel as though I’m constantly going schoolwork in addition to working 44+ hours a week. I wake up early to do schoolwork. I do schoolwork during any spare moment while at work. And then I come home and do schoolwork. Needless to say there was no down time during this week. I guess it’s the price you pay for getting to where you need to go but it sucks to say the least. I was hoping for a great weekend, but it didn’t get off to a good start. We went to Chet and Matt’s for dinner. David left early to go to a Madden Tournament (I’ll explain that later) at the La Quinta Inn, and I had to pay for the meal. No big deal, just give them our bankcard as usual. Well, the waiter comes back and says, it doesn’t look as though it’s going through. I hand him a new card while thinking to myself, “I know we have money in our account. I just checked it a few hours ago.” While I swallow the embarrassment of everyone looking at me and feeling like an idiot, I move on and receive a phone call from David at the Madden tournament. For those of you who do not know what Madden is, it’s a NFL game that is on game systems such as Xbox, etc. So he entered a tournament so he could play other individuals in the area just for fun. To enter the tournament you paid $45 and got a room for the night. So back to the phone call….David called and said the manager said he would upgrade our room to the jacuzzi room and we could bring the dogs because it’s a pet-friendly hotel. Sweet. Since we were able to bring the dogs I had to change their litterbox so it was nice and clean. I remembered we didn’t have any litter left so I headed up to Pet Supplies Plus to get some. When I arrived at the counter I explained that I’m not sure if my card will work as it didn’t just a few moments earlier. Nope. It doesn’t go through. I head over to our financial institution and figure I’d try getting money out of the ATM and see what happens. I enter my pin and select the amount I want and then all the sudden a red screen pops up saying that my card has been retained and then goes back to the main screen. And the machine prints out a receipt that says, “You are an unauthorized user of this account.” WHAT??? Give me my card. What the heck? Um? What should I do? I have people waiting behind me so I have to move. So the whirlwind begins. I call David, stop by the hotel and grab his card to get the numbers on the back and start making phone calls. 5 calls later I find that I can’t do anything and no one can help me. It’s pointless to cancel the card, as my bank has it. I checked our account online at home and it looks as though no one has charged anything onto it. So I must patiently wait until the morning. At the same time I’m trying to patiently wait for a phone call from David saying he’s done with the tournament. At about 9:30 I finally receive a call saying that he’s only done with his first game and that he already has the card to the room. He went on to say that he’d call when he’s done with the next game and head over to pick me up with the kids. At 10:30 I receive the phone call and we all head over the hotel. The room was nice and I was all excited to use the jacuzzi, but said I’d wait until David came back, expecting him to be back in about 1-2 hours. I sat up watching old Roseanne episodes, channel surfing, and playing with the kids. And at about 2am I decided it’s time for me to get to sleep so I could get up early to head to the bank. David finally arrived at 4am. I was too tired to even wake up to see that he won and didn’t open my eyes until 8am. I woke up to find that he won the tournament and some money along with it. Cool, but I was too focused on getting to the bank. He surprised me by waking up and joining me to go to the bank. We took the pets home and then headed over…yep, if you didn’t catch it, we never did get to use the jacuzzi. Bummer. We got to the bank to find that our card had been cancelled because there was some form of dispute with the TJMaxx Company and individuals’ information being stolen. Since there was a possibility of our information being compromised they closed our card and supposedly sent us 2 letters (that we never received) letting us know about the situation. We then asked about David’s card to see if his would work since he had used it earlier in the day on Friday. They stated that if it had worked earlier in the day that it should work now. Not trusting them, we headed to the ATM to see if it’d work. Surprise, surprise. It retained his card too. So that leaves us no access to our account with the exception of a checkbook. Are you serious? After that we went to a dealership to check out trucks. We found one that was a possibility but it was a total beater and considering the financial state our car is in the banks probably wouldn’t finance it due to the amount of miles, age, and the amount of the loan that we’d have to take out. So we moved on to a new truck, which was a stick shift. There’s one thing wrong, we both don’t know how to drive stick. So we called Alpa up and headed to the mall to learn. Due to my amount of frustration already for the week, I decided to sit it out and learn another time. David learned quickly. We decided to wait on the decision of getting it or not and went home. The afternoon went well, as we went down to Columbus with the ‘rents and we met up with Ande’ and ate at PF CHANGS! Woohoo! It was totally worth the wait. I loved every bit of it. And I have some leftovers. We checked out the rest of Easton, stopped by a scrub store for me to stock up on work gear, and then went home. In the end it was a good day. This morning we slept in and went out to the country looking for trucks. We came home, I did schoolwork, David played his XBox, and now we’re chilling, trying to decide where to eat. As usual, I hope this finds everyone well and I hope to write more this week, depending on the situation.