Let's Hear It For The New Year

Insert booing and hissing noise here. Sigh.
It's not really that bad, but rather quite comical. After the mismatched shoe episode yesterday, I should have known to keep my sense of humor. By the way, I also did not have on any makeup yesterday, all day long. Not a nice picture. And then I ran out of brown sugar while trying to make cookies last night, so I threw my coat on over my blue with coffee cups flannel pj's and went to the store. John almost had a heart attack. He said it looked "crude." Crude this buddy. Do you want your damn oatmeal raisin cookies or not?
So today while I'm taking a shower, the electricity goes out. No problem, right? Wrong. I put my makeup on (yes, makeup) by the window light, and dried my hair by the fireplace. Unfortunately I do not have "air-dryable" hair. No matter, I came to work anyway. At least my shoes match today. I was an hour late though, because it was in the teens down here, and I don't do wet hair and freezing temps. I ran into a little glitch when I realized I couldn't open the garage door. Great. Now what? Oh, you mean someone thought of that already? Between the two of us we managed to figure out how to open the door without electricity. And then I went to work while John climbed back into bed.
And it gets better.
We still have a house in SC. We don't want two houses, but since we managed to try to sell our SC house in the WORST housing market ever, we still have it. I pay the electric bill up there, and last year I was on a plan where I paid the same amount every month. Let me just stop here and tell you that Duke Energy is a real pisser. They have two plans - one is a fixed payment plan, and one is an equal payment plan. On the equal payment plan you pay the same amount every month, no matter what your bill is, and then you settle up at the end of the 12-month period. The FIXED payment plan is where you pay a certain amount each month, and here's where it gets confusing. The amount is the same each month, although mine seems to have changed each month, but you DON'T settle up at the end of the 12-month period. So it seems that although I was on the EQUAL plan last year, for some reason I'm on the FIXED this year. So I'm paying roughly $100 a month for a house that uses less than 100kw of energy a month. And no, I don't get any of it back. WTF??? And then, to add insult to injury, I had to pay $30 to change back to a plan where I pay what I use. OMG. Kill me now. And I don't even live in the damn house. Fuck that.
Now I have to go dig through this mountain of bills here at work to figure out which of the 25 options of payment plans I have to use to pay them. Nothing like less paperwork and more efficiency. All that means is someone, somewhere is sitting on their ass making a lot of money. And it's not me!