My plans for today were that I was going to get up early and clean my apartment. I need to throw out a whole bunch ‘o stuff before I move. There’s just no point to my packing up everything in this place when the fact of the matter is that most of the stuff lying around here is stuff that I no longer use. I have two—count ’em, two—computer monitors that I either don’t use anymore or don’t work. I guess part of me keeps thinking that at some point, I’ll get it fixed or I’ll find a use for it, when I know deep down that it’s pointless and if I don’t throw them away they’ll just sit there collecting dust in my storage room. And speaking of my storage room, I have about six big 13-gallon trash bags full of old soda and beer bottles that I never bothered to take to get redeemed. Potentially dozens of dollars’ worth of old plastic and glass that I just couldn’t be bothered to do anything about. Why? Because, dear readers, I am a lazy-ass son of a bitch.

So yeah, getting to my whole getting-up-early-and-cleaning thing. Didn’t happen. Well, that’s not entirely true. I cleaned today, I just didn’t get up early. It’s not that I didn’t try or anything, but I didn’t anticipate that when I went to bed at 11:30 last night (getting to bed before midnight on a Friday is quite a feat for me) I would actually sleep until ten the next morning. But I did get up, watched a little TV, and then after lunch I really did clean. I actually cleaned quite a bit of my living room up, filling up a whole gigantic trash bag with stuff for which I no longer have a use. Made me feel good and horrified at the same time. I mean, I had a whole trash bag’s worth ‘o stuff lying around my living room just collecting dust. How awful is that? But hey, at least it’s gone. Now I just have to redeem those bottles and empty out my storage room, then throw away just about everything in my bedroom that doesn’t either sleep two (well, potentially two) people, hold a synthesizer on it or keep a computer monitor above the floor, and I’ll be all set for the move.

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Speaking of the move, I got a call from my property manager the other day. She told me that they had received my letter that said I was moving out, but because I had not given them 45 days’ notice, I was going to forfeit my security deposit. I wasn’t too blown away by that, and had sorta been expecting it, but my security deposit was only a hundred bucks, and I’d easily be saving that after a single month in my new apartment, so I wasn’t torn up about it.

But then she gave me the whopper: My security deposit wasn’t only a hundred bucks; it was six hundred and thirty bucks.

All of a sudden I was a little torn up.

I guess I’d just not realized how much I had actually given them as a deposit. It just so happens that the six hundred and thirty bucks she had described to me was the same as one month’s rent plus a hundred bucks, back when I originally moved in. So part of me just assumed, way back when, that I had given them my first month’s rent plus a hundred dollar security deposit. I was mistaken.

The funniest thing about all of this is that had she not informed me of the actual amount of my deposit, I never would have realized it, never would have gotten upset and wouldn’t be posting this right now. I wouldn’t have even missed it.

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Friday, while driving to work, a tire on my car went flat. I pulled off the side of the highway, nearly got killed by cars going by at 80 miles an hour, jacked the car up and put the spare on. I found the nearest tire place and waited nearly two hours before being told by the guy at the shop that I had to get a new tire. There had been a slow leak on that tire for a couple weeks, and God knows how long it had been leaking before somebody had told me about it. At any rate, it had apparently developed some bubbles on the sidewall that made it basically completely unfit for driving.

Sixty-five bucks later (after a discount because I bitched about having had my tires worked on only a few weeks ago and nobody mentioning anything about this), I was back on my way to work.

It just bugs me that what was under normal circumstances a perfectly good tire—that was still under warranty, mind you—wasn’t any good.

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Random musing: Why is it that every time the movie Sideways is on, I feel the need to drink some wine? Also: Know how I can tell I’m not an alcoholic? I have a bottle of opened Cabernet Sauvignon on the counter in my kitchen, and a bottle of Riesling chilling in the refrigerator, and what do I go for when I look in the fridge? Crystal Lite Lemonade.