Alas, At Last

I quieted myself. No, I didn’t go underground in isolation. Sometimes, you just need to step back and reevaluate, seek clarity of mind, and step into your own light.

My covid winter was abuzz with activity even though I rarely left the house. Volunteer work for a local community organization was and still is my link to the outside world. I edit their 10 page monthly newsletter. Articles and other content arrive via email so it’s mostly copy, paste, arrange and format. I write the fillers; look for things to fill pages that might be of interest to readers. I also serve on the board and virtually chair a committee.

This old house got my stimulus. I bought lumber, flooring, paint, tools & supplies, some art supplies, a new ceiling fan, chair height toilet, and a frikkin 5 burner stove.

New stove, old floor.

New floor, fake countertop.

Yeah, the counter is fake. It’s temporary, just laminated with contact paper because a sink and new countertops were not in the budget.

It’s a work in progress. What I want to do and can do are not the same. Straight up, disability sucks as it is hard to find people who actually follow through on what I hire them to do.

Everyone thinks their time is worth 40 an hour, too. Now I expect to pay professional rates when hiring licensed skilled professionals or independent contractors with legit businesses and normal overhead, but when I’m hiring someone’s unemployed weedhead brother to do simple things a 12 year old could do, I don’t want to pay more than 15 an hour. Actually, 9 to 12 is fair… that’s what a contractor would pay if they got hired to do the exact same things.

I called a temp agency and asked about hiring part-time day labor. They don’t do that. Maybe I should hire a 12 year old, my granddaughter. I can argue with her when she thinks her time is worth 20.

Advertisement

September Lingers

Here it is, the end of September. I woke up on the 23rd whispering words to the wind, a happy birthday to an old friend, even though our paths will never cross again.

The painting is done. For now. I was tempted to keep on going when I painted the hall side of the door trim, which would result in painting every inch of baseboard in the entire house, all the doors, door trims, the vanity in the bathroom, and the hallway cabinet. That can wait.

First things first… I have to get that room done. It’s still a mess of bins and boxes, and other things needing to be neatly put away. I have an old closet organizational system (shelf units, drawers, and a kiddie cube bin thing) set up along the wall that is painted solid light blue. It looks dingy white, could use a nice coat of paint or something. I still need help to hang the birdie wallpaper border up next to the ceiling on the solid darker blue wall as I’m not able to climb up ladders or stand on tables or anything. Still need to do some touch ups, clean up splatters… one section at a time as bones allow. That’s life trying to do things with disabilities; everything goes in slo-mo. It takes me weeks to get done what someone else can do in a day.

Here is a peek of the cleanest corner.

Yes, I got the table in there. I had my grandson’s helping me. They got the “lefty loosey, rightie tightie” lesson with wrenches and screwdrivers as we put the doorknobs back on, too.

I have “before” photos but I can’t bring myself to post them as this room was the bedroom I shared with the vet and his shit is in the photos… piles of his clothes, his shoes lined up, stuff on stands, etc. That’s what launched this project. I couldn’t sleep in there as I’d wake up thinking he’d walk in the room any minute, as if he just went to the bathroom. The only way to stop crying was to pack up his stuff and flip rooms, make my little office the bedroom and turn this one into work space.

It’s been almost three months… might take me till Halloween or maybe Thanksgiving to get it all set up good.  Yeah, my life rolls in slow motion.

Oh, here’s my temp solution for the kitchen: two outdoor chairs and a little oak desk that I found on the curb awhile back… I snapped the photo to show my sister my 74 cent mixer.

Yes, this red Hamilton Beach stand mixer cost me a grand total of 74 cents because I cashed out $25 of my Ibotta funds as a Walmart gift card (mixer was $24 on sale online, plus 1.74 sales tax) and opted to pick it up at my local store because I was too cheap to pay for shipping.

My kid got me started using that Ibotta app… it’s kind of like using coupons to save on groceries and stuff, only instead of getting cents off, you get cents credited for buying what you were going to buy anyway. What I do is check the app when I come home from a store (long list of participating stores, even the dollar stores) and see if there are offers on anything I got… click, click, snap photos of the receipt or square thing on the receipt and UPC’s on products, IF requested (some brand names want proof you bought it to make sure you’re not trying to use receipts found in parking lots) and it all adds up. Some things are worth more than others… few cents for this, buck for that, etc. Once your total tops 20 bucks, you can cash out via various options.

My sister doesn’t trust anything that wants to “link” to a bank, not even PayPal, so to show her that it’s totally legit and you have options… if you don’t want your Ibotta funds deposited in your PayPal account, you can choose from a long list of gift cards… I choose the Walmart this time and bought the mixer online as a “Show & Tell” hoping she would sign up, too.

If you are interested in trying the app, here’s my link…

https://ibotta.com/r/wecqckn

They offer a $10 welcome bonus… and yes, if five people sign up via my link (or my referral code of WECQCKN), then I get a $25 bonus. That’s why I’m plugging it…I’m aiming higher than a mixer for my next cash out. Yeah, between the referral bonus and using the app myself, I might be able to buy myself a kitchen table, maybe a sweet little bistro set.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Mind Shift

Stepping back or to the side even just a little bit can render drastic changes to how you view things… sunlight filtering through tree branches may shift from being a glare in your eyes to a dance of light and shadows across lush, colorful textures of moss and bark.  It’s time to do a mind shift, to step back and look at everything from other angles so I can see what is going on here from other perspectives.

From one perspective… it is this song:

Change the word “mom” to “man” in the lyric that goes “I don’t get angry when my mom man…” and that’s what is going on here… and I’m waiting (again) for him to “come back to me” as he’s been MIA since yesterday morning. Oh, he did call last night, melting my irritation on “hey beautiful…” Sheez. Thing is, “life is too short so love the one you got” and I know he really does love me, even when he is three sheets to the wind before nine.

Step to the side a bit… what changed recently?

Frequency. What used to be once or twice a month comes faster and harder now.

~

COUPLE DAYS LATER (waking up alone again): Shift again… what am I forgetting?

Duh… he doesn’t live here… total complete brain shift.

Okay, so let us examine the facts… ignore that he has been here at least 330 days of the past year, has a lot of clothes and stuff here, does chores here, cuts the grass here, has keys to the doors and acts like he lives here… does he actually, really truely officially, live here? NO… he has his own apartment downtown. Does he get any mail here? NO… his mail goes to HIS address. Does he chip in or pay any of the bills? NO… he pays the bills for HIS place. Considering that he would be the first to say that you are supposed to “pay where you stay” and credit his dad for teaching him that lesson soon after he got his first job as a teenager, by his own rule or definition, call it whatever you want, he doesn’t really live here.

I’m going to have to mull this over and think about it for awhile.

If he doesn’t really live here, I need to stop thinking that he does… is this the beginning of the end? Can two people go from living together (or thinking they were living together) to NOT living together without one thinking that the other doesn’t want them?

I don’t know… time will tell.

Thanks for reading.