Can't get a break

I can't seem to get a break these days. I must have irritated a higher power somewhere, or else Murphy's Law is having a really good week.

Sat down just now - halfway into El Burrito's nap - to print out all the paperwork for getting the camera fixed. Printed the first page, and it came out blank. Out of ink. We have another ink cartridge somewhere, but darned if I can find the stupid thing. So DH may have to buy one on the way home, which means that the first one will be tripped over about fifteen seconds after he walks in the door. Sigh.

And the Quicken gremlin is really tormenting me lately. We run everything through Quicken for tracking purposes and such, but we do it manually instead of downloading the transactions (which I don't mind; otherwise, we wouldn't know that there's a $30 trip to Target that never hit the credit card). Normally, it's fine, but the last six months or so, it's torture. Every time I sit down to reconcile either the bank statement or one of the two credit cards, it takes at least an hour to get things to work out. Last night, it was 90 minutes with DH's credit card, and I threw in the towel at 1:30 a.freaking.m.

It's bizarre - I'll get the statement to work out every month, but the next time I sit down with it, something's off somewhere. Sometime's it's a transaction that got put in as income instead of outgo, sometimes a date gets put in wrong and the transaction goes in for six months ago instead of this month. Sometimes, there's no freaking clue what's wrong. DH and I are the only ones who play with Q (mostly me), the laptop never goes online, so my only conclusion is that there's a gremlin. DH's credit card will not add up; things are fine with the August statement but not with the current one. And I swear, everything was just fine two months ago. Where's it coming from? I don't know, but I'm ready to pull my hair out. Or go the "easy" route - just pay the stupid bill and don't worry about reconciling anything. Heck, there are people who brag about not balancing their bank accounts at all for the past ten years.

But DH and I are too nitpicky for that to happen. So I'll keep fighting with it and threatening to throw something off the roof.

Now El Burrito will be waking up any minute, and I need to find that rotten ink cartridge. So much for getting anything actually accomplished today. (I shouldn't be surprised. It's been that way every day for the past two weeks. It's very discouraging.)