As a result of all the cat-food recalling, I've been making moves toward getting the kitties on a new diet. After a lot (a LOT) of research, my eventual goal is to get them onto a diet of whole ground chicken, turkey, and rabbit, with bones and organs, and some whole chunks of meaty bones. The ground portions would be supplemented with assorted vitamins and trace mineral supplements...The only question, after all that research, is the most elementary one:
Would they eat it?
Preparatory to this experiment, we'd offered all three cats some raw turkey necks; only Cassidy and Snick would touch them. Cass was the most-enthused about the idea; he spent hours ripping and tearing and nibbling and gnawing. Snick took a few bites, then got finicky--apparently he only likes scrupulously-fresh meat, not anything that's been in the fridge more than a couple of hours. Since I intend to freeze the homemade food, the jury is still out as far as how he's gonna take that.
The one I was most worried about was Badcat. He's about 6, old enough to be set in his ways, and as an added problem he's got some dental issues that need a trip to the vet soon. He's the least-adventurous and most-neurotic of all the kitties, and I figured he'd be the worst to convert to anything new--especially when he left the turkey-neck completely alone, giving it a disdainful and thoroughly cat-like glare as he walked away.
One of the websites I've read (http://www.felinefuture.com) says to try finicky cats first on a mix of pureed cooked chicken and raw egg yolk; he says most cats will eat this without complaint. So today, when I stopped at the store, I picked up some chicken breasts (It's now official--the cats are eating better than we are!) with an eye to trying them on this early preparation before going into the purchasing of ground rabbit meat.
On a whim, though, I thought "maybe I'll skip the cooking part of this, and see if Badcat will eat the chicken raw." So I cut half a chicken breast into little nibble-sized bits, and offered one to BadCat.
He responded with a hearty SLURP, reminiscent of a toddler's first encounter with spaghetti-noodles, and gave me an eager look.
I went back into the kitchen and picked up another nibble. This one was a little larger, and required a moment or two of licking and nosing-around before the SLURP was repeated. And then there was much paw-licking, and contented sofa-snoozing, and all the general signs of a cat who may, after all, not be as finicky about all this as I thought he was going to be.
There will be a short wait before I can ascertain whether the other two will be as tractable; they're currently asleep in Tim's room, in a cat-human nap pile. What a way to spend a Sunday!!
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Friday, April 27, 2007
:::SPLAT::::
In almost-total silence for the first time in what feels like MONTHS, I am sitting before my computer with absolutely nothing to say.
I'm here; the cats are fine* ; Tim and LJ are fine**; the job is going reasonably well.
Small annoyances include bad brakes; Metra trains; bills; lack of sleep; lack of time; my effing CPAP machine which insists on dousing me with cold condensation-water three times a night, directly up my nose; that co-worker; and the usual round of boring crap that everyone bitches about.
In other words, I'm totally blessed.***
Maybe I'll have something to say tomorrow. Meanwhile, I am out of socks, and must do laundry.
*Yeah, you'd be fine too if you never had to work, slept all day, and ignored everyone whenever you liked, and yet despite all this someone just bought you a $50 drinking fountain and was going to make all your meals from scratch from now on, because she was afraid to have you eat purchased food.
**Yeah, you'd ALSO be fine too if you worked sporadically (TIm) or not at all (LJ) and somehow you were nonetheless provided with food, shelter, laundry facilities, cigarettes (Tim), and an on-call taxi service.
***I would, however, like to know where I can sign up to be either a) a cat, or b) my own roommate.
I'm here; the cats are fine* ; Tim and LJ are fine**; the job is going reasonably well.
Small annoyances include bad brakes; Metra trains; bills; lack of sleep; lack of time; my effing CPAP machine which insists on dousing me with cold condensation-water three times a night, directly up my nose; that co-worker; and the usual round of boring crap that everyone bitches about.
In other words, I'm totally blessed.***
Maybe I'll have something to say tomorrow. Meanwhile, I am out of socks, and must do laundry.
*Yeah, you'd be fine too if you never had to work, slept all day, and ignored everyone whenever you liked, and yet despite all this someone just bought you a $50 drinking fountain and was going to make all your meals from scratch from now on, because she was afraid to have you eat purchased food.
**Yeah, you'd ALSO be fine too if you worked sporadically (TIm) or not at all (LJ) and somehow you were nonetheless provided with food, shelter, laundry facilities, cigarettes (Tim), and an on-call taxi service.
***I would, however, like to know where I can sign up to be either a) a cat, or b) my own roommate.
Monday, April 16, 2007
The Queen of Snap Judgements Returns
It is Day 6 of my new employment, and already I have decided: There is one of my co-workers whom I do not like.
Of course, laws of nature being what they are, she's the one to whom I sit closest--but then again, if I didn't sit near her, I would have no reason to dislike her.
I would have not, for example, had to listen to her talking to her 13-year-old daughter today, totally enabling her hypochondria, which has been clearly illustrated in at least six conversations since I started working there. I would not have had to listen to her recount her daughter's half of that conversation to one of our other co-workers: "Ashleigh said 'Mommy, you have to come home now. Daddy isn't taking care of me. He only got me a shake, and he wouldn't bring the TV into my room, and he didn't even give me any Advil!!! You said it would be just like having you at home, and it ISN'T!'"
How many things do YOU see wrong with that statement?
1. How many 13-year-olds still call their mothers "Mommy"?
2. On the one occasion which I dared to bring a perceived slight by my father to the attention of my mother, I not only got ZERO sympathy, I got a double-sided yelling-at: once from Mom for daring to suggest that Dad should do the dishes, once for Dad for daring to go behind his back and complain to Mom. In fact, that's one of the few times I recall my dad getting really angry at me.
3. How many 13-year-olds can't take their own Advil? Or am I misremembering my own independence?
4. "Only got me a shake..." Child, be silent.
5. And while you're at it--QUIT WHINING! YOU'RE NOT EVEN REALLY SICK! You have a ding-dang sore throat--not bubonic frakkin' PLAGUE!
THEN, as if that weren't teeth-gnashingly annoying enough: Co-Worker #2, in response to Mommy's statement that "I don't think she'll go to school tomorrow, either," suggests the following: "Well, (Mommy), you could...make her go to school....." (Co-Worker #2 is also a parent, of a slightly younger child--thus his opinion is more valid than mine would be.)
"Mommy"'s reply? "Well, you know, you don't want to PUSH them--then you have to worry about a secondary infection, you know."
I had to get up and walk to the bathroom at that point, because...When I was a kid, the rule was: unless you're running a fever of 99.6 or greater, or actively barfing more than once every 4 hours, you were GOING to school. End of discussion. And even if you DID stay home, no special treatment accorded to you unless your fever broke 101 degrees. THEN you'd get the popsicles, the milkshakes, the TV-in-the-room (the big black-and-white on a cart, the one we kept in the kitchen.) And when your fever dropped: back to school with you, and no fooling around.
Here's the thing: My parents were LENIENT for their day. There were relatives who considered me a "spoiled only child". What those relatives, or for that matter, my mother, would think of this kind of kid-coddling...
Yes, I realize I sound like a curmudgeon. Yes, I realize I have no children, and am thus without authority to comment on anyone else's child-rearing. But what I do have: I have eyes, and I have a background in teaching, and I can vouch for what this kind of treatment does for/to a kid. This kid is going to turn out like her mother: a raging hypochondriac, whom everyone asks every morning, solicitously, about the state of her indigestion. I mean, yes: people have physical complaints, and not all of them can be ignored or kept private. But fully half of "Mommy"'s conversation is about her health woes, and at least half of the rest is about "Ashleigh"'s issues.
Of course, in an effort to be the Get-Along-With-Everyone Kid, which I have resolved to be in this job, I have to keep my mouth shut, no matter how much I want to rant. So once again I say: thank heavens for the Intarwebz, on which I and everyone else can rant to our hearts' content.
(And occasionally, we even get Zorned for it, which is always a pleasant surprise.)
Of course, laws of nature being what they are, she's the one to whom I sit closest--but then again, if I didn't sit near her, I would have no reason to dislike her.
I would have not, for example, had to listen to her talking to her 13-year-old daughter today, totally enabling her hypochondria, which has been clearly illustrated in at least six conversations since I started working there. I would not have had to listen to her recount her daughter's half of that conversation to one of our other co-workers: "Ashleigh said 'Mommy, you have to come home now. Daddy isn't taking care of me. He only got me a shake, and he wouldn't bring the TV into my room, and he didn't even give me any Advil!!! You said it would be just like having you at home, and it ISN'T!'"
How many things do YOU see wrong with that statement?
1. How many 13-year-olds still call their mothers "Mommy"?
2. On the one occasion which I dared to bring a perceived slight by my father to the attention of my mother, I not only got ZERO sympathy, I got a double-sided yelling-at: once from Mom for daring to suggest that Dad should do the dishes, once for Dad for daring to go behind his back and complain to Mom. In fact, that's one of the few times I recall my dad getting really angry at me.
3. How many 13-year-olds can't take their own Advil? Or am I misremembering my own independence?
4. "Only got me a shake..." Child, be silent.
5. And while you're at it--QUIT WHINING! YOU'RE NOT EVEN REALLY SICK! You have a ding-dang sore throat--not bubonic frakkin' PLAGUE!
THEN, as if that weren't teeth-gnashingly annoying enough: Co-Worker #2, in response to Mommy's statement that "I don't think she'll go to school tomorrow, either," suggests the following: "Well, (Mommy), you could...make her go to school....." (Co-Worker #2 is also a parent, of a slightly younger child--thus his opinion is more valid than mine would be.)
"Mommy"'s reply? "Well, you know, you don't want to PUSH them--then you have to worry about a secondary infection, you know."
I had to get up and walk to the bathroom at that point, because...When I was a kid, the rule was: unless you're running a fever of 99.6 or greater, or actively barfing more than once every 4 hours, you were GOING to school. End of discussion. And even if you DID stay home, no special treatment accorded to you unless your fever broke 101 degrees. THEN you'd get the popsicles, the milkshakes, the TV-in-the-room (the big black-and-white on a cart, the one we kept in the kitchen.) And when your fever dropped: back to school with you, and no fooling around.
Here's the thing: My parents were LENIENT for their day. There were relatives who considered me a "spoiled only child". What those relatives, or for that matter, my mother, would think of this kind of kid-coddling...
Yes, I realize I sound like a curmudgeon. Yes, I realize I have no children, and am thus without authority to comment on anyone else's child-rearing. But what I do have: I have eyes, and I have a background in teaching, and I can vouch for what this kind of treatment does for/to a kid. This kid is going to turn out like her mother: a raging hypochondriac, whom everyone asks every morning, solicitously, about the state of her indigestion. I mean, yes: people have physical complaints, and not all of them can be ignored or kept private. But fully half of "Mommy"'s conversation is about her health woes, and at least half of the rest is about "Ashleigh"'s issues.
Of course, in an effort to be the Get-Along-With-Everyone Kid, which I have resolved to be in this job, I have to keep my mouth shut, no matter how much I want to rant. So once again I say: thank heavens for the Intarwebz, on which I and everyone else can rant to our hearts' content.
(And occasionally, we even get Zorned for it, which is always a pleasant surprise.)
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Repeats: I Love My Cats, I Love My Cats, I Love My...
I just returned from a very brief trip to another room, to catch Snickers in the act of bread-licking.
Having come back from grocery-shopping with a fresh loaf of Italian bread from Jewel--crusty and crumbly on the outside, but squishy and white on the inside, perfect for bread-and-butter--I availed myself of a couple of slices. The first slice was safely consumed when I realized that something in the next room required my attention for a moment. Snickers was occupied in his usual pursuits--terrorizing Badcat and staring fixedly on a certain spot on the wall and meowing--so I thought it would be safe, just for that moment, to leave the room and the bread (unbuttered, I might add) unattended.
I returned to find Snick standing on the computer table, ignoring the half-stick of real butter that was sitting next to him, but systematically licking the bread slice. There were nibbles missing, and the top third of the slice was warm and damp with cat-spit. Now, although I can tolerate many things in the name of my kits, wet bread is not now, nor ever shall be, on that list. Wet bread is just gross, unless it's wet with egg and milk and then fried til it's nice and brown, then doused with butter, syrup, and a smidge of cinnamon. And then it's not "wet bread" anymore; it's French toast--you can call it "freedom toast", if you're a wingnut whackjob O'Reilly worshipper, but even if you do insist on calling it so, I will just as stridently insist that, no matter what you call it, if you called it "wet bread" nobody would eat it, especially if there was any intimation that cat-spit had been involved.
Needless to say, I sliced off the soggy part; even though Snickers waited for his portions, I quietly explained to him that HELL no, I wasn't rewarding him for drooling on my lunch.. Instead I threw away the soggy part, and buttered and ate the rest.
(What?? I was hungry.)
The moral of this story is:
if you ever find yourself eating bread in my house, you might want to hold onto it at any cost.
Having come back from grocery-shopping with a fresh loaf of Italian bread from Jewel--crusty and crumbly on the outside, but squishy and white on the inside, perfect for bread-and-butter--I availed myself of a couple of slices. The first slice was safely consumed when I realized that something in the next room required my attention for a moment. Snickers was occupied in his usual pursuits--terrorizing Badcat and staring fixedly on a certain spot on the wall and meowing--so I thought it would be safe, just for that moment, to leave the room and the bread (unbuttered, I might add) unattended.
I returned to find Snick standing on the computer table, ignoring the half-stick of real butter that was sitting next to him, but systematically licking the bread slice. There were nibbles missing, and the top third of the slice was warm and damp with cat-spit. Now, although I can tolerate many things in the name of my kits, wet bread is not now, nor ever shall be, on that list. Wet bread is just gross, unless it's wet with egg and milk and then fried til it's nice and brown, then doused with butter, syrup, and a smidge of cinnamon. And then it's not "wet bread" anymore; it's French toast--you can call it "freedom toast", if you're a wingnut whackjob O'Reilly worshipper, but even if you do insist on calling it so, I will just as stridently insist that, no matter what you call it, if you called it "wet bread" nobody would eat it, especially if there was any intimation that cat-spit had been involved.
Needless to say, I sliced off the soggy part; even though Snickers waited for his portions, I quietly explained to him that HELL no, I wasn't rewarding him for drooling on my lunch.. Instead I threw away the soggy part, and buttered and ate the rest.
(What?? I was hungry.)
The moral of this story is:
if you ever find yourself eating bread in my house, you might want to hold onto it at any cost.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Update: Week One
So, I hear you clamoring, how’s the new job?
(Okay. Actually I don’t hear a damn thing. Mostly this is because I haven’t been on the web at all, practically, since Monday. There are a lot of reasons for this, but we’ll get there.)
Short answer: The job is awesome. I love it. The people are cool, and even the commute isn’t as horriblicious as I thought it would be. And atmosphere-wise, it is a million, billion, trillion times better than that Hole Where I Used To Work. I think I’m gonna like it here.
That’s the short answer. The long answer, predictably, is a little more complicated and a teeny bit more equivocal. None of my small misgivings is insurmountable, and none of them is even the least bit able to shake my unutterable joy at having a job again, after 5 ½ months of unemployed-ness….I suppose all I’m saying is, the place itself weirds me out a little bit. And I can see one or two of the people becoming small thorns in my side—but again, nothing of the magnitude of weirded-out, thorn-sidedness that was the last job. Mostly I’m just happy to be there.
I’ll start at the beginning, then. Monday morning I got up bright and early, put on my going-to-a-new-job outfit—slacks, a top, a blazer, trouser socks and nice shoes—and left the house at 6. Work starts at 8, but I wasn’t sure about the commute; better early than late, I thought, and thus was parked out front of the building at about 7:15 AM. This was a good thing, since I’d parked where I thought the building was, not knowing that the little door in the side of a shop building was leading to my new workplace.
The office itself reminds me of that passage in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where someone says a particular object was “on display on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory, with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'” That’s a fair description of where this company’s office is: behind the restaurant, through the door next to the old house, up the stairs, around the corner, past the company with the incomprehensible name, then finally past the bathroom, past the kitchen, down towards the cul-de-sac, through the door on the right that says “Please knock.” The inside of the office is even better—rooms leading into rooms, rooms twisting around corners, a general riot of confusion. It took me the better part of the first day to find my way to the supply closet.
My desk is in a large communal room, occupied by all the other techs. There are ten desks, but not all of them are occupied at any one time; there are some who work at home, others who work here only on certain days. There seems to be a core of six of us who have been here every day—the other new guy and myself, plus four veterans. There are two other women in the tech department, plus the boss, whose office is down one of the twisty halls.
So far, along with getting acquainted with my co-workers, I’ve been working on getting accustomed to the first program I’ll be supporting. It’s for the educational market, and it’s something I wish I could have used when I was a teacher—very comprehensive and, I would imagine, very helpful. Oh, and very, very complicated. My boss has given me worksheets full of questions to answer by reading the manual and working through demo files, and it feels wonderful to have any kind of training at all! (Contrast #1 with Place That Fired Me: I spent my first two weeks there puttering around at someone else’s desk because they didn’t have a space for me, they didn’t have a computer for me, and there was no one there to train me because my boss was on vacation.) Apparently, they schedule training thus: first and second weeks, working on increasingly-harder demo problems, then Monday of the third week you start taking calls. It’s a really quiet time of year right now—spring break—but apparently it gets more hectic in late spring, and wildly insane in September and October, to the point that vacations at that time are frowned upon most emphatically. So I should be well-trained and ready to go by the time the rush is upon us.
My co-workers are an interesting mix (Contrast #2 with Place That Fired Me: there are actual MINORITY people here! More than one of them, even!). Most of them have kids, which is unfortunate; I’ve found that, just like people with cats talk about their cats, people with kids tend to talk about their kids. And the part of the office in which I sit is populated solely with parents—one woman with 2 kids and one on the way, one woman with a daughter, and one guy with a son. Yesterday I got to overhear about Adventures in Potty Training—who poops when, and under what circumstances, and the whole “sitting down/standing up” issue with little boys—and today, it was the Trials and Tribulations of Raising a Tween in Paradise. A quote: “Well, you just have to tell her that you’re okay with her being a B student, if she feels she wants to focus on her extracurriculars, but that she has to keep in mind that a B student is NOT gonna be a doctor!” (The child in question is in seventh grade. Yesterday I heard about which of the girl’s friends have incipient eating disorders. The school’s solution? They’re going to enable parents to monitor their childrens’ school cafeteria purchases online, so the parents can see if their kids are eating enough. And college administrators wonder about where these “helicopter parents” are coming from…)
Personally, I’d rather talk about my cats. And luckily, one of the guys at the other end of the room is a cat-person; he’s also one of two office smart-asses, and one of the veterans here. (No, there’s no potential there; there’s no potential in any of these guys, I don’t think. They’re either married, or substantially older, or substantially younger. And really, I’m not looking—though of course, if someone of the caliber of the Brit were to appear, I’d certainly consider changing that tactic. But not every guy, alas, is a Brit.)
The thing that has struck me most, though, has nothing to do with the company. I’ve touched on it above—this office is located in the middle of an exceedingly wealthy northern suburb, one of those suburbs that always appears near the top of the “quality of life” and “highest property values” lists. I thought that Two Jobs Ago Place was fairly swanky, but this ‘burb, although it’s only a few miles north of that one, blows it completely out of the water. Even just taking the train up here is a revelation, let alone walking to get something for lunch…let’s just say, for now, that I’ve never before been intimidated by a grocery store. And also, that I will be grateful beyond imagining when the company moves downtown this summer.
That story, and my other musings on this place, are subjects for another post …if I can ever get enough peace and quiet at home to write one. Every time I sit down at the computer, Tim takes that as his cue to come out of his room and talk. Now, I love the bejeezus out of Tim, but I am by nature a solitary soul, and I have been CRAZY to write something all week—and I can’t write in the presence of a talking Hovercraft! He was out last night, but last night I didn’t get home til nearly 8 (I missed my damn train) and I was tired beyond reason and went pretty much straight to bed. He works tomorrow night, thankfully, so perhaps I shall have some time then.
Until then: It’s going well, yeah. Very, very well. Thank heavens.
(Okay. Actually I don’t hear a damn thing. Mostly this is because I haven’t been on the web at all, practically, since Monday. There are a lot of reasons for this, but we’ll get there.)
Short answer: The job is awesome. I love it. The people are cool, and even the commute isn’t as horriblicious as I thought it would be. And atmosphere-wise, it is a million, billion, trillion times better than that Hole Where I Used To Work. I think I’m gonna like it here.
That’s the short answer. The long answer, predictably, is a little more complicated and a teeny bit more equivocal. None of my small misgivings is insurmountable, and none of them is even the least bit able to shake my unutterable joy at having a job again, after 5 ½ months of unemployed-ness….I suppose all I’m saying is, the place itself weirds me out a little bit. And I can see one or two of the people becoming small thorns in my side—but again, nothing of the magnitude of weirded-out, thorn-sidedness that was the last job. Mostly I’m just happy to be there.
I’ll start at the beginning, then. Monday morning I got up bright and early, put on my going-to-a-new-job outfit—slacks, a top, a blazer, trouser socks and nice shoes—and left the house at 6. Work starts at 8, but I wasn’t sure about the commute; better early than late, I thought, and thus was parked out front of the building at about 7:15 AM. This was a good thing, since I’d parked where I thought the building was, not knowing that the little door in the side of a shop building was leading to my new workplace.
The office itself reminds me of that passage in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where someone says a particular object was “on display on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory, with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'” That’s a fair description of where this company’s office is: behind the restaurant, through the door next to the old house, up the stairs, around the corner, past the company with the incomprehensible name, then finally past the bathroom, past the kitchen, down towards the cul-de-sac, through the door on the right that says “Please knock.” The inside of the office is even better—rooms leading into rooms, rooms twisting around corners, a general riot of confusion. It took me the better part of the first day to find my way to the supply closet.
My desk is in a large communal room, occupied by all the other techs. There are ten desks, but not all of them are occupied at any one time; there are some who work at home, others who work here only on certain days. There seems to be a core of six of us who have been here every day—the other new guy and myself, plus four veterans. There are two other women in the tech department, plus the boss, whose office is down one of the twisty halls.
So far, along with getting acquainted with my co-workers, I’ve been working on getting accustomed to the first program I’ll be supporting. It’s for the educational market, and it’s something I wish I could have used when I was a teacher—very comprehensive and, I would imagine, very helpful. Oh, and very, very complicated. My boss has given me worksheets full of questions to answer by reading the manual and working through demo files, and it feels wonderful to have any kind of training at all! (Contrast #1 with Place That Fired Me: I spent my first two weeks there puttering around at someone else’s desk because they didn’t have a space for me, they didn’t have a computer for me, and there was no one there to train me because my boss was on vacation.) Apparently, they schedule training thus: first and second weeks, working on increasingly-harder demo problems, then Monday of the third week you start taking calls. It’s a really quiet time of year right now—spring break—but apparently it gets more hectic in late spring, and wildly insane in September and October, to the point that vacations at that time are frowned upon most emphatically. So I should be well-trained and ready to go by the time the rush is upon us.
My co-workers are an interesting mix (Contrast #2 with Place That Fired Me: there are actual MINORITY people here! More than one of them, even!). Most of them have kids, which is unfortunate; I’ve found that, just like people with cats talk about their cats, people with kids tend to talk about their kids. And the part of the office in which I sit is populated solely with parents—one woman with 2 kids and one on the way, one woman with a daughter, and one guy with a son. Yesterday I got to overhear about Adventures in Potty Training—who poops when, and under what circumstances, and the whole “sitting down/standing up” issue with little boys—and today, it was the Trials and Tribulations of Raising a Tween in Paradise. A quote: “Well, you just have to tell her that you’re okay with her being a B student, if she feels she wants to focus on her extracurriculars, but that she has to keep in mind that a B student is NOT gonna be a doctor!” (The child in question is in seventh grade. Yesterday I heard about which of the girl’s friends have incipient eating disorders. The school’s solution? They’re going to enable parents to monitor their childrens’ school cafeteria purchases online, so the parents can see if their kids are eating enough. And college administrators wonder about where these “helicopter parents” are coming from…)
Personally, I’d rather talk about my cats. And luckily, one of the guys at the other end of the room is a cat-person; he’s also one of two office smart-asses, and one of the veterans here. (No, there’s no potential there; there’s no potential in any of these guys, I don’t think. They’re either married, or substantially older, or substantially younger. And really, I’m not looking—though of course, if someone of the caliber of the Brit were to appear, I’d certainly consider changing that tactic. But not every guy, alas, is a Brit.)
The thing that has struck me most, though, has nothing to do with the company. I’ve touched on it above—this office is located in the middle of an exceedingly wealthy northern suburb, one of those suburbs that always appears near the top of the “quality of life” and “highest property values” lists. I thought that Two Jobs Ago Place was fairly swanky, but this ‘burb, although it’s only a few miles north of that one, blows it completely out of the water. Even just taking the train up here is a revelation, let alone walking to get something for lunch…let’s just say, for now, that I’ve never before been intimidated by a grocery store. And also, that I will be grateful beyond imagining when the company moves downtown this summer.
That story, and my other musings on this place, are subjects for another post …if I can ever get enough peace and quiet at home to write one. Every time I sit down at the computer, Tim takes that as his cue to come out of his room and talk. Now, I love the bejeezus out of Tim, but I am by nature a solitary soul, and I have been CRAZY to write something all week—and I can’t write in the presence of a talking Hovercraft! He was out last night, but last night I didn’t get home til nearly 8 (I missed my damn train) and I was tired beyond reason and went pretty much straight to bed. He works tomorrow night, thankfully, so perhaps I shall have some time then.
Until then: It’s going well, yeah. Very, very well. Thank heavens.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
My Last Day Off
I just peeked at the clock and realized that it's now officially Friday, April 6, 2007, which makes it my last day of unemployment. (Weekends don't count.) I start the new job Monday (eek!!) and it'll be a long time before I get even a couple of days off, let alone an extended block of time; and so I'm embarking on the last free business day I'm going to have for quite some time.
I can't believe I was out of work for five and a half months. Looking back now, of course, I see a million things I wish I had done with this time--work on the house, for example. There are rooms that could have been painted, repairs I could have made, even simple things like installing shelves or building a bookcase. I comfort myself by remembering that there was a big cloud hovering over most of that so-called "free" time--the question of whether or not I was even going to be able to keep my house. That's still a question, actually, but I'm confident that I'll be able to work with the mortgage company. Now I can start planning to do all the things I put off--seeding the grass, hanging blinds, buying shelves for the basement--without thinking What's the point? it'll be gone in a few months anyway.
Looking back, I realize how truly lucky I've been. It's been bad, sure, but it hasn't been a period of total destitution and deprivation. Except for the mortgage, I've had money to pay most of the bills; we've had enough money to buy groceries and even afford a pizza every few weeks. Granted, bringing Tim into the picture turned out not to be the financial benefit I thought it would be during this time, but I don't regret it in the least; he's been incredible moral support, just by being his goofy self. He's great company, a lot of fun, and he never lets me get too complacent or too satisfied with myself. (*note ) And say what you will about LJ, at least he's come through with the car payment since he's returned. So unemployment was bad, yeah--but it could have been a WHOLE lot worse.
I'm very glad Tim is here; I'm even more glad that he finally has the promise of steady work. He went to training today for an event-staffing company, where the manager recognized the amount of serving experience Tim has and promised he'd be getting a lot of jobs. That's a huge load off his mind, and off mine as well.
So things are looking up, financially. And in all the other areas of my life, despite the recent stress of unemployment and the current fear of the unknown, I can't say things were ever really looking down--not lately. I still miss JP, of course--this time of year more than most, filled with memories as it is--and I still have a lot of things I want to work on about myself, my relationships, and my life. But for every bad thing I can find about my life right now, I can find many more good ones. Tonight, watching Tim teasing the cats with the laser-pointer, I looked around me--my friends, who forgive me for all my shortcomings; my house, which I'm not going to be kicked out of; my cats, who I love beyond all reason; and the Big Unemployment Cloud, becoming wispy and forgettable in the distance--and I thought to myself, Right now, right this minute, I'm completely contented. And that's a damn fine feeling, all things considered.
Unlike the last time I was about to start a new job, I'm actually excited about this one!! I'll let you know how it goes...and in the meantime, to those of you who celebrate it, have a happy Easter. (Despite my agnostic/pagan leanings, I can't turn down a good meal, and so I'll be eating roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and cheesecake over at Mom's--which almost makes up for there being no NASCAR race scheduled this Sunday, on account of the holiday.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*note: Tim and I had a long talk last night, in which he told me that while he was homeless, he'd felt like all his friends had abandoned him, including me. I felt really bad, hearing that; I had thought I was being such a good person, putting aside my irritation with him and trying to be there when he needed me...but evidently I didn't do such a good job at putting aside my irritation, because he said he could tell it was there. We talked it out, though, and in the end we decided that any misunderstandings and/or miscommunications between us, now and forever, would be laid at the doorstep of CR, who screwed up a perfectly good living situation several years ago and really hurt my opinion of Tim, and Tim's opinion of me.
I can't believe I was out of work for five and a half months. Looking back now, of course, I see a million things I wish I had done with this time--work on the house, for example. There are rooms that could have been painted, repairs I could have made, even simple things like installing shelves or building a bookcase. I comfort myself by remembering that there was a big cloud hovering over most of that so-called "free" time--the question of whether or not I was even going to be able to keep my house. That's still a question, actually, but I'm confident that I'll be able to work with the mortgage company. Now I can start planning to do all the things I put off--seeding the grass, hanging blinds, buying shelves for the basement--without thinking What's the point? it'll be gone in a few months anyway.
Looking back, I realize how truly lucky I've been. It's been bad, sure, but it hasn't been a period of total destitution and deprivation. Except for the mortgage, I've had money to pay most of the bills; we've had enough money to buy groceries and even afford a pizza every few weeks. Granted, bringing Tim into the picture turned out not to be the financial benefit I thought it would be during this time, but I don't regret it in the least; he's been incredible moral support, just by being his goofy self. He's great company, a lot of fun, and he never lets me get too complacent or too satisfied with myself. (*note ) And say what you will about LJ, at least he's come through with the car payment since he's returned. So unemployment was bad, yeah--but it could have been a WHOLE lot worse.
I'm very glad Tim is here; I'm even more glad that he finally has the promise of steady work. He went to training today for an event-staffing company, where the manager recognized the amount of serving experience Tim has and promised he'd be getting a lot of jobs. That's a huge load off his mind, and off mine as well.
So things are looking up, financially. And in all the other areas of my life, despite the recent stress of unemployment and the current fear of the unknown, I can't say things were ever really looking down--not lately. I still miss JP, of course--this time of year more than most, filled with memories as it is--and I still have a lot of things I want to work on about myself, my relationships, and my life. But for every bad thing I can find about my life right now, I can find many more good ones. Tonight, watching Tim teasing the cats with the laser-pointer, I looked around me--my friends, who forgive me for all my shortcomings; my house, which I'm not going to be kicked out of; my cats, who I love beyond all reason; and the Big Unemployment Cloud, becoming wispy and forgettable in the distance--and I thought to myself, Right now, right this minute, I'm completely contented. And that's a damn fine feeling, all things considered.
Unlike the last time I was about to start a new job, I'm actually excited about this one!! I'll let you know how it goes...and in the meantime, to those of you who celebrate it, have a happy Easter. (Despite my agnostic/pagan leanings, I can't turn down a good meal, and so I'll be eating roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and cheesecake over at Mom's--which almost makes up for there being no NASCAR race scheduled this Sunday, on account of the holiday.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*note: Tim and I had a long talk last night, in which he told me that while he was homeless, he'd felt like all his friends had abandoned him, including me. I felt really bad, hearing that; I had thought I was being such a good person, putting aside my irritation with him and trying to be there when he needed me...but evidently I didn't do such a good job at putting aside my irritation, because he said he could tell it was there. We talked it out, though, and in the end we decided that any misunderstandings and/or miscommunications between us, now and forever, would be laid at the doorstep of CR, who screwed up a perfectly good living situation several years ago and really hurt my opinion of Tim, and Tim's opinion of me.
Monday, April 2, 2007
Strange Days, Indeed
Note: It has taken me four days to get enough privacy, peace, and quiet to complete this post. This having-roommates thing ain't no joke.
I don't know if I've become more of a softie as I age, or whether depression or the medication used to deal with it are making me "girlier" or what, but I simply can't stand much of what's happening in the world. And I don't just mean people hurting each other--that, at least, gives me something to get angry about!--but even just plain old Mother Nature at work has become hard for me to swallow. I can't stand to hear about animals dying--particularly cats!--and so this pet-food recall has been making me completely nuts. I've never fed my guys anything but Cat Chow, but who's to say that Purina won't be the next brand added to the recall? Accordingly, I've spent the past hour researching the extensive topic of What To Feed Cats If You Don't Want To Give Them Commercial Cat Food Anymore. It looks, just from the initial reading I've done, that I'm gonna be chopping up a lot of raw chicken and entrails. Which, eewwww, but I'd rather wrestle chicken-guts than have anything happen to my kits.
See, although I've always been a cat-person, I've discovered that pet-relationships differ in degree of intensity. Ever since LJ's friend brought Snickers into this house, I have been the Original Paranoid Cat-Mother. In fact, I'm going to have to concede a hard fact here: I am now one of Those People, though I try very hard to repress it in public; privately, however, I treat my cats like children. I even remember their birthdays (though in BadCat's case, I've had to approximate, since he came from a shelter; Snick, on the other hand, celebrated his first birthday yesterday by taking an extended nap under my bed, then playing "string" with Tim. And in further proof of how much I am really one of Those People, I actually told several people yesterday that it was my cat's first birthday. I disgust myself.)
The upshot of all this is, every time I read about a sick cat, or a cat who's died, it makes me sad. Even if I don't know the owner, even if I don't know the cat, it makes me tear up a little. I am such a total wuss. And even though I'm biased in favor of cats, I do have the same sort of sensitivity about other animals as well--which is what makes this next story so infuriating to me.
Last week, on Thursday, my mom got a phone call from our across-the-alley neighbor's daughter, who was watering the plants while her parents were out of town. "You're going to think I'm crazy," said the daughter, "but I have to tell you something." And she proceeded to relate the following:
Last Sunday afternoon, she said, she was in the backyard when she heard a car driving down the alley. It stopped, and she saw three or four men in it; one got out of the car, holding a large object. The men looked to be in their 20's, she said, and the one with the object placed it in my mother's yard, looked around, jumped back into the car, and sped away.
The object, as the neighbor's daughter discovered when she want to investigate, was a large cage containing a very pretty, healthy-looking white-and-brown rabbit. The neighbor's daughter wasn't quite sure what to make of this, but she must have assumed that there was some arrangement for this rabbit to be dropped off at my mom's, and so she thought nothing more of it til Thursday morning.
Thursday, when she returned to the house again, she looked out the back door, which overlooks my mom's yard--and the rabbit cage was still there! At that point, she went into the house and called my mother, to let her know that she had apparently been the victim of a drive-by rabbitting. My mom went out to investigate, and lo and behold--cage and bunny, somewhat less happy now but very much alive, are sitting in the shadow of her garage. It was at the only point in the yard that can't be seen from the back door, and since she lives alone, Mom hadn't had an occasion to take out the garbage between Sunday and Thursday--which is the only other way she would have seen it. Sunday and Monday had been warm, but the rest of the week had been cold and rainy, and the poor rabbit had been out there in the elements all alone. Needless to say, the rabbit had eaten any food that had been left in the cage, and the water bottle was empty--but here's the kicker: Whoever dropped this rabbit off, had also dropped off a full, unopened sack of rabbit food along with him, in a plastic bag next to the cage.
Mom brought the bunny into the garage and gave him food and water, and called back the neighbor's daughter, who'd told Mom that if the bunny wasn't hers, she had a friend who would take it in. Mom said she'd be happy to pass the rabbit along to a good home, and Friday afternoon the friend came to pick up her new pet from my mother's garage. (They promised to name the rabbit after my mom, which will be funny if the rabbit's a male; talk about a boy named Sue!)
Which leaves me with the question, despite the happy ending: Who the hell takes their pet rabbit in a very nice cage, drives it off, and abandons it, randomly, in the backyard of a total stranger? I mean, in this case, the rabbit got a good home--but what if nobody had seen him? Or if nobody had wanted him?? Wouldn't it have been better to take the poor animal to a shelter or a vet's office, to give him up for adoption rather than just trusting to the kindness of the stranger whose backyard you've picked? In fact: who would just abandon a pet like that???
Meanwhile, in another backyard in a very different part of the city...
When Mom called on Friday, to tell me that the rabbit had been picked up, I would imagine she might have found me rather...distracted. Not that I wasn't interested--I just had a lot on my mind. Apparently, getting hired to a new job brings down the Clouds of Undue Weirdness upon my home and all who live there...
I shall explain.
When LJ came back from out of town, he brought with him a friend, who apparently unloaded some items into my garage, with LJ's permission. (I will identify these items only as "sacks of potatoes"; at the very least, the items were vegetable in origin.) I had also given permission, albeit in a roundabout manner; I was under the impression that the potatoes belonged to LJ, and that the quantity was very small. As it turned out, neither of these beliefs were correct.
Inasmuch as the garage is not very sound, structurally speaking, I have very little property stored there, nothing valuable, and so I have almost no reason to go out to the garage unless I'm looking for the lawnmower or a rake. And so on Friday, when Tim opened up the curtain of his bedroom to let the cats sit in the window and get some air, I was surprised to hear him ask me, "Hey, G--did you leave the garage window open?"
"No," I said.
"Do you think LJ left it open, then?"
"No," I replied, as I looked out the back window to see what he meant. Sure enough, the one window on the garage, facing into the backyard, was open. Ohsheet, says brain, and remembers potatoes. "But I'm gonna call him and find out..."
LJ sends me out to the garage. "How will I know if what should be there is there?" I ask him. "You'll see it right when you walk in," he replies.
I go out to the garage. I see three very large rectangular hefty-bags, and think Damn, that's a lot of potatoes; go inside the house and call LJ. Relieved, I report to him that there are three bags of potatoes, so apparently nobody took anything.
"I'll be right there," he says.
Ten minutes later he arrives home and heads for the garage; when he returns, it's clear all is not as well as I'd assumed. He is on the phone, talking to the friend to whom the vegetables in question belong...."Yeah, you better get over here RIGHT NOW," he repeats into the phone, more than once. Snapping the phone shut, he tells me: "There was a lot more than that out there."
"Like how much?"
"You couldn't even WALK in that garage when we put everything in there," he informs me.
His friend arrives. "Tell him what you told me," LJ directs me. Conscious of the gravity of the issue, I tell him the bare facts of the story: I'd heard what I thought was the front gate at about 7 that morning, but uncharacteristically I'd stayed in bed instead of getting up to check; then midafternoon Tim had noticed the garage window open; at LJ's behest I'd gone outside and discovered what was there, which I'd reported to LJ; that was the end of the story for me. "And I never even told her what all was back there," LJ interposed, "'cuz I knew she'd flip out if she knew how much we had."
LJ is convinced it's someone off our block, someone who's been watching and has seen LJ go in and out of the backyard; the potatoes' owner is convinced that it's one of LJ's friends, someone close enough to have been told that LJ was going out of town a day or two before, someone close enough to know that LJ was holding potatoes, and in what quantity. We all agreed that it had to have been someone with a truck or a large vehicle, and someone who knew they wouldn't be observed--according to LJ's friend, it had taken two people about 30 minutes to unload the cargo when it first came here, so obviously there was more than one individual involved.
Either way, LJ's friend is out about $100,000, and consequently so are the people who subsidized the potato shipment. He's sure he will find out, someway and somehow, who the culprits were; he even admits he can't be upset with LJ, since LJ had told him repeatedly to come and pick up his property, and he'd been too busy.
So everyone is fine with this, apparently, except for me; I informed LJ that it would be a very bad idea to store such a quantity of vegetables on my property in the future, especially without letting me know it was there. That's all I said to him; privately, though, I'm livid. There's the legal implications, for one thing; I could have been one of those garages you see on the news, with a bunch of proud-looking ATF guys looking as though they'd just saved the world from destruction--and meanwhile, who's got her mugshot on the screen as the owner of the Garage of Iniquity? That's right--good ol' Gladys. And I haven't lost enough weight yet that I'd want a mugshot publicized. Give me 40 more pounds or so, then we can talk.
LJ, needless to say, is on thin ice; of course, since he's kept to the letter of our agreement, paying the car note monthly as his "rent" of his one room, I'm not comfortable kicking him out--and since that money is the only wiggle-room that will allow the mortgage company to rearrange my payments, I can't really afford to lose it no matter what. And, to his defense, both he and the guy he was storing it for acknowledged that LJ had called him several times and told him to get his potatoes out of our garage; apparently it was supposed to be only for a couple of days. That does make me a LITTLE less mad, but not much.
Personally, I'm just looking forward to getting back to work and getting out of the house; the cabin fever is starting to make me crazy.
I don't know if I've become more of a softie as I age, or whether depression or the medication used to deal with it are making me "girlier" or what, but I simply can't stand much of what's happening in the world. And I don't just mean people hurting each other--that, at least, gives me something to get angry about!--but even just plain old Mother Nature at work has become hard for me to swallow. I can't stand to hear about animals dying--particularly cats!--and so this pet-food recall has been making me completely nuts. I've never fed my guys anything but Cat Chow, but who's to say that Purina won't be the next brand added to the recall? Accordingly, I've spent the past hour researching the extensive topic of What To Feed Cats If You Don't Want To Give Them Commercial Cat Food Anymore. It looks, just from the initial reading I've done, that I'm gonna be chopping up a lot of raw chicken and entrails. Which, eewwww, but I'd rather wrestle chicken-guts than have anything happen to my kits.
See, although I've always been a cat-person, I've discovered that pet-relationships differ in degree of intensity. Ever since LJ's friend brought Snickers into this house, I have been the Original Paranoid Cat-Mother. In fact, I'm going to have to concede a hard fact here: I am now one of Those People, though I try very hard to repress it in public; privately, however, I treat my cats like children. I even remember their birthdays (though in BadCat's case, I've had to approximate, since he came from a shelter; Snick, on the other hand, celebrated his first birthday yesterday by taking an extended nap under my bed, then playing "string" with Tim. And in further proof of how much I am really one of Those People, I actually told several people yesterday that it was my cat's first birthday. I disgust myself.)
The upshot of all this is, every time I read about a sick cat, or a cat who's died, it makes me sad. Even if I don't know the owner, even if I don't know the cat, it makes me tear up a little. I am such a total wuss. And even though I'm biased in favor of cats, I do have the same sort of sensitivity about other animals as well--which is what makes this next story so infuriating to me.
Last week, on Thursday, my mom got a phone call from our across-the-alley neighbor's daughter, who was watering the plants while her parents were out of town. "You're going to think I'm crazy," said the daughter, "but I have to tell you something." And she proceeded to relate the following:
Last Sunday afternoon, she said, she was in the backyard when she heard a car driving down the alley. It stopped, and she saw three or four men in it; one got out of the car, holding a large object. The men looked to be in their 20's, she said, and the one with the object placed it in my mother's yard, looked around, jumped back into the car, and sped away.
The object, as the neighbor's daughter discovered when she want to investigate, was a large cage containing a very pretty, healthy-looking white-and-brown rabbit. The neighbor's daughter wasn't quite sure what to make of this, but she must have assumed that there was some arrangement for this rabbit to be dropped off at my mom's, and so she thought nothing more of it til Thursday morning.
Thursday, when she returned to the house again, she looked out the back door, which overlooks my mom's yard--and the rabbit cage was still there! At that point, she went into the house and called my mother, to let her know that she had apparently been the victim of a drive-by rabbitting. My mom went out to investigate, and lo and behold--cage and bunny, somewhat less happy now but very much alive, are sitting in the shadow of her garage. It was at the only point in the yard that can't be seen from the back door, and since she lives alone, Mom hadn't had an occasion to take out the garbage between Sunday and Thursday--which is the only other way she would have seen it. Sunday and Monday had been warm, but the rest of the week had been cold and rainy, and the poor rabbit had been out there in the elements all alone. Needless to say, the rabbit had eaten any food that had been left in the cage, and the water bottle was empty--but here's the kicker: Whoever dropped this rabbit off, had also dropped off a full, unopened sack of rabbit food along with him, in a plastic bag next to the cage.
Mom brought the bunny into the garage and gave him food and water, and called back the neighbor's daughter, who'd told Mom that if the bunny wasn't hers, she had a friend who would take it in. Mom said she'd be happy to pass the rabbit along to a good home, and Friday afternoon the friend came to pick up her new pet from my mother's garage. (They promised to name the rabbit after my mom, which will be funny if the rabbit's a male; talk about a boy named Sue!)
Which leaves me with the question, despite the happy ending: Who the hell takes their pet rabbit in a very nice cage, drives it off, and abandons it, randomly, in the backyard of a total stranger? I mean, in this case, the rabbit got a good home--but what if nobody had seen him? Or if nobody had wanted him?? Wouldn't it have been better to take the poor animal to a shelter or a vet's office, to give him up for adoption rather than just trusting to the kindness of the stranger whose backyard you've picked? In fact: who would just abandon a pet like that???
Meanwhile, in another backyard in a very different part of the city...
When Mom called on Friday, to tell me that the rabbit had been picked up, I would imagine she might have found me rather...distracted. Not that I wasn't interested--I just had a lot on my mind. Apparently, getting hired to a new job brings down the Clouds of Undue Weirdness upon my home and all who live there...
I shall explain.
When LJ came back from out of town, he brought with him a friend, who apparently unloaded some items into my garage, with LJ's permission. (I will identify these items only as "sacks of potatoes"; at the very least, the items were vegetable in origin.) I had also given permission, albeit in a roundabout manner; I was under the impression that the potatoes belonged to LJ, and that the quantity was very small. As it turned out, neither of these beliefs were correct.
Inasmuch as the garage is not very sound, structurally speaking, I have very little property stored there, nothing valuable, and so I have almost no reason to go out to the garage unless I'm looking for the lawnmower or a rake. And so on Friday, when Tim opened up the curtain of his bedroom to let the cats sit in the window and get some air, I was surprised to hear him ask me, "Hey, G--did you leave the garage window open?"
"No," I said.
"Do you think LJ left it open, then?"
"No," I replied, as I looked out the back window to see what he meant. Sure enough, the one window on the garage, facing into the backyard, was open. Ohsheet, says brain, and remembers potatoes. "But I'm gonna call him and find out..."
LJ sends me out to the garage. "How will I know if what should be there is there?" I ask him. "You'll see it right when you walk in," he replies.
I go out to the garage. I see three very large rectangular hefty-bags, and think Damn, that's a lot of potatoes; go inside the house and call LJ. Relieved, I report to him that there are three bags of potatoes, so apparently nobody took anything.
"I'll be right there," he says.
Ten minutes later he arrives home and heads for the garage; when he returns, it's clear all is not as well as I'd assumed. He is on the phone, talking to the friend to whom the vegetables in question belong...."Yeah, you better get over here RIGHT NOW," he repeats into the phone, more than once. Snapping the phone shut, he tells me: "There was a lot more than that out there."
"Like how much?"
"You couldn't even WALK in that garage when we put everything in there," he informs me.
His friend arrives. "Tell him what you told me," LJ directs me. Conscious of the gravity of the issue, I tell him the bare facts of the story: I'd heard what I thought was the front gate at about 7 that morning, but uncharacteristically I'd stayed in bed instead of getting up to check; then midafternoon Tim had noticed the garage window open; at LJ's behest I'd gone outside and discovered what was there, which I'd reported to LJ; that was the end of the story for me. "And I never even told her what all was back there," LJ interposed, "'cuz I knew she'd flip out if she knew how much we had."
LJ is convinced it's someone off our block, someone who's been watching and has seen LJ go in and out of the backyard; the potatoes' owner is convinced that it's one of LJ's friends, someone close enough to have been told that LJ was going out of town a day or two before, someone close enough to know that LJ was holding potatoes, and in what quantity. We all agreed that it had to have been someone with a truck or a large vehicle, and someone who knew they wouldn't be observed--according to LJ's friend, it had taken two people about 30 minutes to unload the cargo when it first came here, so obviously there was more than one individual involved.
Either way, LJ's friend is out about $100,000, and consequently so are the people who subsidized the potato shipment. He's sure he will find out, someway and somehow, who the culprits were; he even admits he can't be upset with LJ, since LJ had told him repeatedly to come and pick up his property, and he'd been too busy.
So everyone is fine with this, apparently, except for me; I informed LJ that it would be a very bad idea to store such a quantity of vegetables on my property in the future, especially without letting me know it was there. That's all I said to him; privately, though, I'm livid. There's the legal implications, for one thing; I could have been one of those garages you see on the news, with a bunch of proud-looking ATF guys looking as though they'd just saved the world from destruction--and meanwhile, who's got her mugshot on the screen as the owner of the Garage of Iniquity? That's right--good ol' Gladys. And I haven't lost enough weight yet that I'd want a mugshot publicized. Give me 40 more pounds or so, then we can talk.
LJ, needless to say, is on thin ice; of course, since he's kept to the letter of our agreement, paying the car note monthly as his "rent" of his one room, I'm not comfortable kicking him out--and since that money is the only wiggle-room that will allow the mortgage company to rearrange my payments, I can't really afford to lose it no matter what. And, to his defense, both he and the guy he was storing it for acknowledged that LJ had called him several times and told him to get his potatoes out of our garage; apparently it was supposed to be only for a couple of days. That does make me a LITTLE less mad, but not much.
Personally, I'm just looking forward to getting back to work and getting out of the house; the cabin fever is starting to make me crazy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)