Belated Monday morning blues

Today isn't shaping up to be the greatest day.

• When I got home last night, my first tuition bill from Simmons was waiting. Suffice it to say, I am in severe sticker shock. I knew it would be bad, but somehow it hadn't percolated that it would be this bad. I'm suddenly more interested in that fellowship that would pay a big chunk of the tuition. Otherwise, I need to start applying for student loans real soon now.

  Part of the damage comes from getting slammed for Massachusetts-mandated health insurance. I think I need to investigate whether it would be cheaper to hang on to my current insurance under COBRA until this summer. Hmm.

• My Linux box (which was becoming my primary desktop computer) seems to have died a horrible death. It started out with much unexplained sluggishness. It then became clear that there was a problem with one of the drives in the RAID. When I rebooted the first time, the system attempted to reconstruct things and then froze. Now it can't even find a bootable partition. Argh. I don't have time for this right now.

• We had a grand plan where my brothers were coming down to help me move. Only problem is that they had booked their flights on the soon-to-be-defunct Independence Air. So my brother is now trying to book replacement tickets on Southwest (the cheap ones have already been snapped up), and we're trying to rearrange the plan to fit the new airline arrangements. (For any volunteers who may be reading this, the plan is still to load in Nashville on Sunday the 15th and unload in Somerville on Saturday the 21st.)

• Speaking of all that, I'm realizing how much I have to get done in the next two weeks, which is when I'm supposedly leaving Nashville. I started making a list on a sticky pad last night, and then decided it was going to take too many pages. Seemed like I had tons of time before Christmas. Now it seems like there's no way I'm going to get it all done.

Have to go walk to work now, because my car is still being held hostage at the body shop. The door was starting to fall off, which should have been covered under the CarMax warranty. But the CarMax people said they couldn't do it and to take it to a body shop. Then the body shop people said they couldn't deal with the CarMax warranty people. Much telephone hillarity ensued last week. Supposedly it's all worked out now, but I guess I'll find out later today.