Goals

[topthemonkey]

The monkey is being slow to work on a few goals I've had set -- she's been better than before, and causing me less stress, but there's still so much room for improvement.

She had been going back to school, but there were financial issues with her registration, due to a past semester (where she had taken no classes due to having out-of-state rates, but the classes never got dropped cleanly). Because of this, her current-semester registration was blocked. Rather than resolving it by getting on a payment plan, she stopped going. Note of course, that we're still going to have to pay for that past semester. So the math would have been:

about a grand (paid over time) + about $300 AND "productive" and student loans are put on hold

or

about a grand (paid over time) AND not-productive, loans in forbearance until march.

I've pretty much accepted that I will wind up paying her student loans. I resent this. I've said, outright, from the start of our relationship, that this was the one thing I wouldn't cover. However, if I don't cover it, she gets stressed, and it damages her credit, which in turn damages our chances of finding a nice place to live (at least, until I'm in a position to buy a place on my own).

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In other news...

• We looked at a couple of apartments recently. We're not at the point of moving yet, and are quite comfortable in our current month-to-month setup, but speaking to the leasing agent slammed home the fact that when that time comes, I want her to have a steady job (even if it's one day a week) with steady pay stubs that can go on a lease application.

• We cleaned up our storage bin a little bit last week, collected a large box of books that can be put up on ebay. While that was a good accomplishment, I'd be quite happy if the monkey spent some of her time at home actually managing the ebay inventory.

• We've signed up for a class at a local community center that has some tools people can use. That's next monday and it looks like fun. Depending how that goes, I hope to do that about once a month or so.

• The monkey made an appointment with a cosmetic surgeon for a breast reduction (she suffers back pain as a result of her chest), and has a few more opinions to get from others -- but she's been doing poorly at making/keeping appointments with her chiropractor and therapist. I've asked her, numerous times, to start using a PDA, or a little black book, or something for all this. I've offered to buy her the device of her choice. Instead, she gets appointment cards, and then misplaces them, writes them down wrong, or whatnot. There have been at least a couple occasions where I think it wasn't her fault, but it still seems like a regular enough occurence that on the rare occasions it's really not her fault, it's little solace.

• She's been working on her writing and poetry a lot. She feels I don't respect it and/or take it seriously. Part of the reason there is: I don't "get" it. I don't have an ear for it, any more than she has the interest or ability to review perl code I've written. (The tongue-in-cheek difference is, the perl code pays her student loans). On a more serious subject, I still haven't read her thesis, so I can't argue completely with her assessment. Yet.

• I keep meaning to shave her hair down again into a more classic mohawk, and one day I swear I'll remember to go get the shave gel. In the meantime, she looks cute.

• She's been keeping the place really clean, which is awesome.

• She's been staying on top of keeping her body shaved, which is also awesome.

I think I'm going to spin up a copy of RT, aka "Request Tracker" on a spare system so that I at least have some basis for a go-to place for tasking.
Even if it doesn't manage everything I'd like yet, it will be better than what we have now. More on this in the next post.