Wednesday...Unfavorites?

     Yeah, that doesn't exactly have the same ring to it, I know, but sometimes you just need to have a good complain. So! Before we get to Friday and back to being all positive and stuff, here's some of the things I have not been enjoying lately. (This post dedicated to Jen, who suggested this be the post for today, and who is also a cluster of stardust and rainbows and happiness wrapped in a human husk.)

THIS HURT SO FREAKING BAD

     That, my friends, lurking beneath the bandage I put on because I'm not actually gonna fill this blog with minor day-to-day gore, is a cardboard cut. Akin to the paper cut, except more horrifying and sucky. I was opening a package from Amazon and I screamed obscenities so loud that Amanda thought I'd cut my finger off with the boxcutter. Nope. CARDBOARD. Ugh. I don't even know how this is a thing that happens; it's like cutting yourself on a pile of cooked spaghetti. The whole function of a cardboard box is to provide a degree of protection from harm when shipping an object. If I mailed you an apple in a cardboard box, it would not arrive shredded to ribbons from that sharp, slicey cardboard (it would probably be a little past ripe though. Post is so slow these days. Unless I paid for premium shipping, I guess, which let's be real, I'm not gonna do. Can you even mail fruit? Is that allowed? As long as you're not shipping internationally I guess, since customs doesn't want anybody shipping fruit-borne insects and plagues and funguses on accident. What is this post even about? I forget). Oh yeah.

GOOGLE BETRAYED ME, WHICH ALSO HURT

Here is an unrelated picture of Evie being cute but disgruntled to get you settled in, because I'm about to rant for a WHILE. 

     Last week I woke up and checked my email as per usual, and discovered a lovely little present from Google saying my Adsense account (what puts the ads on the pages and gives me a couple cents when people click them) had been suspended for "invalid click activity." Usually what they mean by that is clicking your own ads, asking people to click them, that sort of thing. I hadn't done any of that. I had actually told everyone under this roof "don't click the ads on my blog, it'll be on the same IP address and Google will think it's me being tricksty." So I immediately sent off an appeal form and started panicking. Why my account? I hadn't done anything wrong, and it's not like I was raking in the big bucks and they didn't want to pay me or something. You don't actually get any money until you hit $100, and over the course of months and months and months, I'd gotten up to almost $80. I was really freaking excited about it. So I was pretty upset to think that not only would I lose any opportunity to ever make money from it again (once they kick you out, that's it. No new accounts, no trying again), but I'd never see my eighty dollars. I know to most people that's not even that much money, but I'm a freelance editor living at home. Eighty dollars is a fortune to me. That's like ten trips to Chipotle. Gone right out from under me. But they said they would look at my appeal and the additional information I'd given them, and I'd hear back in about a week. 

     The very next morning I got an email saying they looked at it and couldn't reinstate my account. Which basically means a real person didn't even look at my case, my stats, my blog, at all. Because if a real person had looked at it, surely they would have realized "Oh yeah, this is just some girl writing silly rants about mattress commercials and drawing pictures of anthropomorphized animals, she's probably not the mastermind of some grand scheme to con us out of like 14 cents a day." And I know they must have an insanely high volume of cases to get through, so if a real person was looking at them it would have taken a little longer to get to mine. So. That's that.

     I went through like, the honest-to-God stages of grief about it. I spent a lot longer in "Anger" than I think you're supposed to, but whatever. I dealt. It is what it is, and it ain't what it ain't. And all that anger led me to discovering a new favorite thing, which I'll tell you about on Friday (don't worry, it's just an app, it's not like "shooting birds out of trees with a bb gun" or anything disturbing).

THERE SHOULD PROBABLY BE A THIRD ITEM TO AT LEAST MAKE THIS A PROPER LIST BUT IT TURNS OUT BEING NEGATIVE DOESN'T REALLY COME NATURALLY TO ME

     Uh...yeah. I'll do better on the favorites list.