The shopping went fine. As usual, once I was actually prepared, nothing at all happened. We went to Penny's, which has an excellent plus-kids section, picked out three pairs of jeans and four or five new shirts and got out in less than an hour. While we were in the dressing room, I casually mentioned that she looked really pretty in one of the shirts she picked out, and then asked her, 'you know that, though, right?', to which she smiled and said 'yes'. Then I said, 'because you were a little upset at the doctor's office last week, and I was wondering how you're doing with that?'

She - get this - looked at me like I was a complete headcase and said, 'Huh? No, I wasn't.' She meant it, too, I could tell. Hello, anticlimactic; you could practically hear the air squeaky-leaking out of my brain bubble. Of course, since I was prepared, nothing came of it, and my little mental speech I had ready to go went to waste. I'm sure when I least expect it, she's going to come home and demand plastic surgery.

Today was spent at home, paying bills, preparing white chicken chilli in the crockpot and apple muffins, and doing the ever-present trig. This afternoon, I went over to the kids' school to be with them during their walk-a-thon, one of the PTA fundraisers, where the kids do a few laps around the school (at a half-mile a loop) to raise money.

Before I went, I had to personally run some payments over to a couple of doctor's offices. I have tried everything to get these places to send me a receipt when I send checks in the mail, including a pre-addressed and stamped envelope with the check, with a little note on the bill to please send a receipt so we can submit it to our HCRA, which is really picky and demands one rather than using a cancelled check, or just the bill.

I have never once received one in the mail.

What are they doing with my envelopes and postage? Sending their own bills places? Or looking at it and saying, 'pfft! this lady's crazy if she thinks I'm going to do my JOB and all!' and throwing the whole thing out? Piss me off! It's not like it's only $5, either; I had a hospital copay and the remainder of what the insurance didn't cover for DH's last surgery to take care of. So, I drove around town for half a hour like the frickin Billpayer Bunny. Argh.

Now the kids are at karate with DH, and I'm supposed to be working on the take-home bio test, which is actually a redo of the debacle we took the week before last that most people failed (not me, but I got an 80, way lower than usual). She won't let us look at our original test, so we can't just write down the ones we got right and fix those that were wrong; we have to redo the whole thing. If I don't do it, I could keep the original score, but that seems like a waste of a sure A. Oh, AND we have another group presentation to do, this time with FOUR people to a group, on two kinds of cancer. Once again, this has nothing to do with the actual class, she just wants us to relate more to biology in real world. Hello, I have had kids, and created my own BIOSPHERE. I think I understand. Thank you.