The good news is short and sweet: those morons at the Veterans' Administration finally got round to giving Hunter a raise.
And so ends the good news.
Bad news.
First, of course, they still didn't give her as much as they were supposed to. Hunter, being clinically insane, with nerve damage in her wrists, structural damage in her ankles, more structural damage in her jaw, and migraines--all as a direct result of coming into contact with the army--easy qualifies as being one hundred percent disabled. The raise reflects being seventy percent disabled. Which apparently means that, three days out of ten, she can have any job she wants; the rest of the time, she's insane, limping, and hit with a headache from hell.
These people are very simply morons. We knew that.
But it doesn't end there.
So, because these morons took this long to get this to happen, they owe her the money they never gave her over the last couple of years. Which is fine. They can give it to her now. They can send a Treasury Cheque to her, or just drop twenty-odd thousand dollars into her bank account.
Which brings us to more democracy in action.
Two weeks ago, Hunter's licence expired. Everyone told her to leave it alone. Everyone told her not to get a licence in Denver, since that would establish residency here and knock her out of the Emergency Homeless Hurry the Fuck up and Pay Her Now list which got her all fixed up in just under three years. Everyone told her very explicitly not to get a bank account for the same reasons.
So. Hunter now has twenty-odd thousand bucks she can't touch because she hasn't got a bank account to deposit the money into. We know from experience that a cheque for a hundred bucks from the Treasury is suspcious--possibly because Duhmerica went bankrupt during VietNam and refuse to admit it, even though everyone knows it. So a cheque you could trade for a new car will probably be even more difficult to cash.
She can't get an account because she hasn't got a current licence. She can't get a current licence because she hasn't got a current licence. She hasn't got any money because morons run this doomed little country.
Ironically, your taxes go, in part, to her taxfree income. Unfortunately, several trillion dollars more goes to funding the very morons who refuse to let her have the money you paid taxes to make almost available to her.
Without a licence, she can't get a bank account. She also can't get a joint account with any of my bank accounts. She's got more than the average idiot makes in a year sitting here, and the only reason she's got twenty bucks left to her name is that I bought the soda last time.
Something is wrong here. Very, very wrong.
More on this as it develops, I'm sure....
In other news: that could be a while. We had a couple of [predicted] delays, but we're now literally moving. With or without enough cash to just buy a fucking house. Which means that A) I'll probably be offline for six to eight business years until AT&T switch over the cablemodem to the new place, and B) since I'm going to be offline anyway, I'm taking the laptop into CircuitCity tonight to have them SnailMail it to Dallas to have it fixed or replaced now that the DVRom is dicked, the processor overheats instantly and the computer shuts down out of fear, and I'm burning out pixels on the screen. One way or the other, I'll have the thing back within two weeks. Well, back, or replaced with a newer and--regrettably--Intellier one.
Interestingly, the server went offline for a few hours. You may have noticed that. I'm not sure what killed it, or what brought it back; as far as I know, Ondo--the SysOp--is three thousand miles away from the server on business. It's also possible that the server has been fine all along, and the connexion to the 'net just died for a bit; it does that sometimes.
If possible, I'll try to have a new episode of Radio Free Duhmerica uploaded for Sunday. I'll have to use Hunter's computer to record it, and hope that both AT&T and the server remain online for me. I'm not getting my hopes up--particularly where AT&T are concerned.
Strange. Every problem I have right now is an acronym. VA, DoT, USB, and AT&T. And LoL; but that's another matter.
Anyway: we'll see how things work out over the next few days. Keep an eye on CNN.com to see whether I snap and destroy a few people before everything gets done.
More later....
--Gremlin