Coming up for air

This past week has been a more eventful and stressful one than I've had in quite some time. Let me begin with last Saturday...

I woke up with a dull pain in one of my hips. Where did this come from?, I thought to myself. I had no reason to believe that I had done anything to injure myself, so this sensation came as a bit of a surprise. However, as the day went by, the dull pain gradually got worse. Yet I hoped that it might go away as quickly as it had come, and so I delayed talking with anyone else about it. But by Sunday night the pain was not gone, and I was beginning to get rather worried about how inflamed the spot had become. Thus I did some research, talked with Mom, and came to find out that I had trochanteric bursitis. *LOL* I just love throwing around big terms. Anyway, if you want to know what "trochanteric bursitis" is, you can check out this link: bursitis. The upshot of this story, though, is that it was rather painful for me to walk during the first half of last week.

Monday through Wednesday was rather uneventful; I did school, preped for the ACT and helped out at the garden - all the usual stuff.

Thursday was the real stressful day of the week. Mom announced to me that morning - just after I had finished making my "To Do" list for the day - that we were going to go run a few errands in town and get my State ID on the way. (I needed a picture ID in order to take the ACT that Saturday.) I already had all of the necessary documents preped ready to go, and a visit to the DMV shouldn't have taken more than 15-minutes. No problem, right? Wrong. We were in for one surprise after another that morning. It turns out that some branches of the Illinois State government - the DMV, for example - view my parents' original copies of their children's birth certificates as "keepsakes." What they wanted a was certified copy of a birth certificate (meaning they wanted more money - which they got). So Mom and the woman at the desk went around for about half an hour on this, Mom arguing that an original copy should be good enough, and the other woman flatly refusing to accept my birth certificate - all because it wasn't a "certified copy." OK, I may not be the smartest person in the world - but where is the logic in that? Anyway, so off we went to the McLean County Government Building to try to get a "certified copy" of my birth certificate. We went around and around with them for over an hour. However, we did get what we wanted: a certified copy of a "Live Birth" document. But it had neither my first nor my middle name on it, just the date of my birth and my parents' names - and those weren't even spelled correctly. Ironically, the DMV still accepted it because it was certified. *smirk* I was SO angry with the state of Illinois by the time the day was over. I can't tell you how stressed-out Mom, Dad and I were for the better part of the morning. We spent $38 and 3 hours doing something that should have taken $20 and 15 minutes. All because of our lovely civil servants in the Secretary of State's office and at the local DMV. Makes me want to run for a government office just so people down the road can have a better experience with their government... honestly, it's saddening how people seem to have forgotten why we're here and what truly matters in life. Actually, the county clerk actually told me to run for Senate during the course of events - but that's another story. *laughs*

Well, that is part one for this week. I'll update more later when my eyes don't hurt from strain. :-)