In the immortal words of Socrates, "...I drank what?"

We got back at 3 this morning. I have been home for less than 12 hours. Why is this important contextual information? Because I have just (11AM) finished cleaning up the mess from Will (oldest younger brother) breaking the ceiling lamp in David's room, the room where I sleep when I come home to visit. There was glass all over the floor. Thankfully, the room was pretty clean in terms of stuff on the floor, so I'm pretty sure that there aren't any residual shards hiding anywhere, like in my suitcase with all my stuff for the next four days in it. I'm so lucky that:
a) nothing happened to my dress that I need to wear to my friend's wedding
and
b) nothing happened to my computer which was safely tucked away in a bag

It seems as if all the shards have been accounted for. Hopefully I won't find any when I walk around barefoot/sleep in the bed. I would say that this sounds like a record, and it may be in terms of amount of time passed and severity of offense, but honestly, it seems like stuff like this happens in this house far more frequently than other places I have spent time.

In conclusion:
Yeah, I'm still never having children.

I need to do laundry. And make some phone calls. And buy a gift.

*peaces out*

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!

SO. Frustrating. Strikes drive me absolutely nuts. I have been in France for five and a half months, and have now experienced no less than three train strikes (and witnessed a hairdressers' mini-strike/protest thing in Tours). I was gonna go to Nancy again today, and so was looking for trains on the sncf website. It kept giving me a message saying that certain trains I was viewing might be delayed due to perturbations. Gah. Ok. I won't go into detail, to spare you and myself, but basically what happened is that certain train times appeared at the beginning of my search, and then disappeared and were replaced with other times during the second part of my search, and then, when I tried to click on those, it kept giving me the 'perturbations' message and telling me to pick another train, except ALL the options they were giving me just recycled the page when clicked with the perturbation messages all over the place. I checked the traffic info for the region and saw that something happened yesterday with a commercial wagon skipping the tracks (I think?) on one train line and that traffic around there would be running around 30 minutes late.

However, this didn't seem to explain the problem I was experiencing, because the area affected is quite a few kilometers southeast of where I want to travel, and not the same line at all, as far as I can tell. I thought, hm, perhaps there's a strike? Again? Sure. It's France, why not. So, I looked up sncf strike on google (grève sncf) and found that they started a strike on Wednesday the 12th (meaning it actually started on the 11th, Tuesday night vers 20h). So, great. Another strike. I think they are complaining of the same problem, the revocation of their early retirement privileges (that were put in place ages ago when constantly being on trains/conducting trains was hazardous to one's health and therefore railworkers died at an earlier age). I could be wrong, though, I don't know. Argh! So frustrating.

Anyway, one news site said I should check the TER site from SNCF. So I did, and all of a sudden all of my train options were back. I went back to the news site and they said that for the most accurate traffic info I should go to SNCF's infolignes site, where I had first been that explained the track-jumping car that shouldn't affect me at all. Further reasearch suggested that none of SNCF's traffic information could be trusted. So. I am almost back where I was when I started my search over an hour ago, except more thoroughly confused and having missed the train I was intending to take at the beginning (assuming it was running at all). So. Yeah. Awesome.

I think I may go to the station anyway, just to see if there's any info there. Except I won't use my bus pass to get there, cause if I lose a bus ride over this shit without being able to take a train, I will be mad.

Goodness gracious.

I just watched the Last Man teaser on youtube, and, all I have to say is ( WHAT?!?!?!?!?????? (This contains spoilers, obviously, which were in the teaser thingy. Ranty.) )

Goodness, I am ridiculous.

Well, I just spent over an hour writing an email to the detergent-happy students. It was kind of exhausting. It is behind the cut. I shortened any names to first letters.

( Another pointless waste of time )

Goodness. That was a French language workout. I really hope everything is worded in an appropriate manner, the last thing I need at this point is an accidental escalation.

Gah!

The icing on the cake? I sent an email at four this morning to JPS asking, basically, 'what's up with my bus ticket compensation from Longwy? did you receive the tickets I sent early last week?' with an undertone of 'I made copies, bitch, so even if somebody 'loses' them, I have backup. Quit fucking with me.' I received a response this morning saying, again, basically, 'oh, well, now it seems they want a bank identity slip (relève d'identité bancaire), so you'll have to send one of those as well.' So. No problem, I had two left, I am sending one, the thing is, when was he going to tell me this? Never? It's a good thing I said something, because otherwise I'm pretty sure they would have just forgotten/swept it under the rug.

I would be extremely amused if I weren't so annoyed/disgusted.

This really is the winter of le suck.