Broken and Scraped

Yesterday was one of those days. You know the kind, right? The kind that makes you want to crawl in bed and suck your thumb and hold your blankie in the other? Yeah, that's the kind of day I had yesterday.

It started out with knowing that my car needs new breaks. In fact, I need them YESTERDAY. My mechanic (i.e. my wonderful step-dad) is currently under the weather, so for now I'm driving my car as little as possible. This isn't too difficult for me, considering that I live a total of 0.2 miles from work. The weather has been beautiful for the past couple of days, so I've taken advantage of that and I've been walking to and from work. It's really something I should do more often.

Then, work yesterday was pretty much stress to the max. I try not to complain too much on this blog about my job. I'm thankful for it, even when it's stressful. But yesterday I left work with knots in my back from being so tense. I hate days like that.

Monday nights is community choir practice for me. It's something I can do without being featured (since my voice isn't that great, but not horrible either) and it lets me explore my love of music. When I got to choir practice, I caught my pump on something and SNAP! I broke my pump clip. I use my pump clip all the time. In fact, the only time I don't use it is when I have a dress on and am using the thigh holster or storing it in my bra. And if you know me, my dress wearing is minimal at best.

My pump, and therefore my pump clip, have been through a lot with me in the past (almost) 4 years. I'm not the most graceful person. I even fell down the last couple of steps of my apartment and fell ON my pump one time. And the clip didn't break. But if you look closely at the picture below you can see the scratches where that happened.

But after last night, I was pretty sad about my clip. I can get by, most of the time, with sticking my pump in my pocket, but at night, I clip it to my pajama bottoms, and that's impossible without a clip. So last night I broke out the larger, more bulky holster clip. I hate it. So first thing this morning I ordered another clip. Thank goodness for speedy shipping, courtesy of MiniMed. It should be here by the end of the week.

Well, when I got home from choir practice, I logged onto Twitter to complain about my broken clip, but before I could do that I was tossed into the mix with the many of us in the D-OC who found out we'd been "scraped". Until last night, I didn't know this term, but basically, it means someone was taking out blog posts and posting them as their own with no credit or link back.

To me, this is the ultimate betrayal. It's stealing something from me that can't be replaced. It's someone stealing my WORDS. I was furious, as were many others in the OC. I was switching back and forth from Twitter to Facebook and talking with several other people in the OC. We were trying to figure out who to contact to report the problem. After a while, it was apparent that most of us had done all we could. But I was still upset and it was nearly midnight before I could go to sleep.

I could go into all the reasons why being "scraped" made me feel violated, hurt and angry. But I won't. I'm sure those of you who are reading were probably right there with me. I will just say that this morning, when I got up, the site had taken down EVERY post and posted an apology (in very poor English, but an apology nonetheless).

I had hoped it was the start of a better day. And it turns out that it was. Thankfully. After a day like yesterday, it was nice to have a more calm Tuesday.