decidedlyodd

As Jenn so assiduously points out, yes, I did fall of the blogging wagon. Anyhow, I guess I’ll just try to write when I can and not worry so much about my position with regard to proverbial wagons.

Last week was a bit crazy. My students of course had a project due Friday, a homework Sunday and an exam Tuesday. That of course meant I had to write a new project Friday, a lab Sunday night, the exam before Tuesday and a new homework on Wednesday. Whew. Anyhow, things are starting to come to a close. I’ve spent most of this afternoon and evening getting a solution to the third project done. The first piece is done. Now, I need to go onto the second one. It’s already fairly late, but it would be good if I could get a solution to the second part pounded out tonight. That would then leave all of tomorrow to finish writing grading standards and automated tests for the second project and the fourth through seventh homeworks.

Hilary invited me over for dinner on Sunday night and we had a great time. It was me, her, her roommate and another one of her other roommate’s (who’s out of the country right now) dad. Lots of great food. Hilary of course is the modest cook, but it was a full blown meal: tasty chicken, orangade, nice salad, pita bread and the coup de gras homemade blackberry pie! Wow. I can’t remember the last time I had a home cooked meal like that. After dinner, there was lots of interesting conversation on everything from theology to computers.

Sara Lee and I met up last night and went down to Naan-n-Curry. That place is great. Affordable Indian to go that’s open sorta late. Definitely fills a gap in the Berkeley student food landscape. We talked a lot about France or should I say Sara complained a lot about France. It’s not bad at all though, because these complaints all come with great, crazy stories. She’s talking about going back to Germany now actually, which I find funny, being that she complained so much about Germany while we were there. I guess things often look a lot better in retrospect.

For me, I suppose I feel pretty settled back into my American lifestyle. Germany is more and more of a distant memory somehow. Or maybe it’s just that I’m really too busy to be missing it.

Today I also went down to Bank of America, to get this whole thing with my new account straightened out. It turns out that the check they issued and sent to my other bank to fund my initial deposit had some problem. It appears that a leading zero somehow got left off on the check and it bounced. A couple days ago, I went to check that my new ATM worked and I had a lovely -$5 balance, because my account had no money and I’d been charged a $5 returned item fee. That same day I got a letter, which talked in more detail about what had happened.

Naturally, I call Bank of America to get everything fixed. Now, I have to be careful about calling them, because if I just call the main number, I get connected to an office which cannot handle my account, since it was opened in North Carolina (and not California). Anyhow, I call the correct office and they tell me I need to redo the deposit, which means paying in cash at a branch or mailing in a new check. As for the returned item fee, they say they can’t waive it over the phone, but I can talk to a branch manager to get it taken care of.

So, I went down to the bank to take care of all this. I show the lady the letter and the returned check and she gets all perplexed. Apparently, she can’t even pull up my account on her computer, because it’s been opened in North Carolina. It turns out that the merger between Bank of America and NationsBank at least at this point has not resulted in any actual merger of their day-to-day operations. Hence, my “Bank of America” account is not really one at all for the purposes of a California branch. The lady didn’t even recognize my account number that was on the form, because I guess the format is completely different from the true BofA account numbers. In the end, she couldn’t really help me although they could take my cash deposit and forward it onto North Carolina (at no charge or anything, but I had to fill out this special form). Very, very weird. So, I paid in the money again and called the NC number again. This time they referred me to the complaints department and the guy made the fee go away. Crazy, weird, but in the end things worked out.