Things That Made Me Happy This Week, Week One-Hundred-Thirty-Three

[glenniebun]

• I thought I'd screwed myself out of a day's pay last week (long story short, I forgot about the Labor Day holiday when filling out the timesheet for the week I was on vacation, so the temp-agency people wanted to yank eight hours of pay I got for that week out of my next check), but when I got my check on Thursday it turns out that they were completely wrong, realized it before yanking anything and were just kicking the goddamn-I'm-stupid sectors of my brain into overdrive for nothing. Hooray!
• Non-evil uses of autotune tools continue to stack up.
• This might be one of the prettier bookstores around.
• From art repurposed for practical use to something used practically now repurposed into art: this time, humongous images made of differently-colored rice plants (with more here).
• Two different blogs I read have linked to this article on the state of LGBT teenagers. While there's obviously a great deal of abuse and discrimination and pain, the degree to which these kids feel able to come out (and the degree to which they sometimes find acceptance) is simply amazing...and I hope can only get better in the future, on average, as LGBT kids feel safer and straight kids view them more as peers rather than The Other Kind of People. (It also makes me think back to my experience in middle school, back when I began to think I was gay but was still able to "pass" enough to mostly escape the witch hunt going on in the halls.)
• How I Got Out of Writing an Essay on H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.
• The Giants are now 3-0, heading into two more games that should be relatively light on pressure. Things heat up again after that, but for now the outlook is looking pretty good.
• A few days ago I was really frustrated about having to get my furnace fixed--again--since it meant laying out a couple hundred dollars on short notice, but after making out my October budget I feel a lot better about it. By the end of October it looks like I'll be close to paying off the credit balance that swelled when heating oil, car repair and my vacation all hit in the same two-week period, plus, in the next three months, I'm going to meet my savings goal for the year with a couple hundred to spare. (Of course, my savings goal for this year isn't as high as it was last year, due to not saving much at all while paying off my Chase card (for the first five months of 2009 I saved less than one week's pay each month; since then I've managed a little more than double that), but as long as I can avoid mammoth surprise bills I should do better next year.)