Confusion.

Woman charged in fire fatality

That apartment fire is now being treated as a First-degree Murder case, with my cousin Rachel as the victim. Apparently, both she and the person in custody were nursing students at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro. No motive has been publicly stated.

Don't worry - I'll be returning to my regular quirky self, but for right now I'm just trying to grasp what would drive someone to do something like this. I'm not really angry - just utterly boggled and uncomprehending.

Debt sucks.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled complaining...

Ah, the joys of dealing with creditors. After spending an hour on the phone with Discover Card representatives, our credit card situation has improved... sort of. The good news (such as it is) is that we qualify for "hardship" status, which means that they'll waive the over-limit fees, drop our monthly payments to $40, drop the interest rate by 10%, and schedule the payments to come out of my checking account automatically every month. The bad news is that the card is now officially revoked, so we don't get any credit as we pay it off. Oh well... we weren't using it anyway, so now we can at least pay it off and get out of debt.

Some other ramifications of this:

• No more RPG books for a while. Unfortunately, this means no "Way of the..." books for d20 L5R. Oh well.
  
• No PS2. Instead of repairing/replacing it, we let it sit, play on the PSX, and spend that $300 on our credit cards.
  
• No new L5R cards. This means no new Phoenix deck from the next expansion. Blar.
  
• No new movies or games.

Basically, no new entertainment at all for the foreseeable future. Maybe after we get the car paid off in November. Yea verily, this doth suck. But at least Z and I have each other, and we've got a lot of things we can already enjoy, and we can always borrow things from friends, or just spend time with friends. Sure, I'm not going to enjoy falling a bit behind in my games, but I can cope. All I can do at this point is pray for our financial situation to improve.