Getting A Life

Ch-ch-ch-changes

My lease here in Columbus is almost up. I was going to find another apartment anyway, because with the poor maintenance on this one (when I called them about problems, they did the least work possible to fix them, resulting in unsolved problems) and with neighborhood problems becoming worse, this place has become well-nigh uninhabitable. But my grandmother got sick with pneumonia and has congestive heart failure on top of that and my mother, pretty much her sole caretaker aside from whatever visiting healthcare they get, is becoming overwhelmed. And I was more or less cheated out of a real relationship with my mom as a child, and my daughter needs to be around more people than just me and her father, so we’re moving down there again. How long we’ll be in Louisiana is anyone’s guess but as my little girl’s dad wants to relocate down there to be near us, that gives us one less reason to come back here. I hate to say it, because I love Columbus, but there it is.

In other news, for the first time in almost ten years I’m getting a side of the story with a certain group of people I know that I never got before: an outsider’s perspective. Very interesting. I’ve heard enough to convince me that I don’t care about one of my personal debts which was incurred with that group of people. I cannot put a price tag on how much they’ve hurt me and I could drive them into bankruptcy and still it wouldn’t be enough. So I am merely going to dismiss what I perceived as $3000 worth of debt and leave it at that. And I am going to make plans to hire someone to look for my son in another almost six years. Short of committing Social Security fraud or killing my son, there is nothing his dad’s family is going to be able to do to put off that day. Let’s hope they prepare for it in honorable rather than dishonorable ways for the first time in their miserable lives.

For those of you facing difficult decisions having to do with a child in your life, let me make it easy for you: It’s not about you. The relationship between a child and his birth mother is a primal one, and short of abuse or orphaning there is NO excuse for severing it. Anyone who lets their ego or bad morals get in the way of preserving that relationship is a scumbag, pure and simple, no matter how infertile they are or how much the birth mother’s hurt their feelings or whatever the lame excuse might be. And no, turning the birth mother into a pen pal does not constitute “trying to preserve the mother-child relationship.” Unless you think you would be content with writing letters to your child after someone takes him away from you. Somehow I doubt it.

(I know some adoption rights advocates don’t like the use of the term “birth mother,” but it’s a term a lot of people understand, and some folks like to get into stupid semantics arguments about the definition of “natural,” so there you go. I considered “genetic mother” as a possible term, but what about certain types of surrogate situations? The baby is going to be emotionally attached to the woman who carried her, plain and simple, regardless of genetic origin. Which is why I’m not crazy about surrogate motherhood either, but that’s another topic.)

Too many people let their egos get in the way of doing the right thing. I could have done that. I could have said, “Wait… it would be too hard to turn my husband in for breaking the law. And what about his pay? What about our house? What will the neighbors think when they see him arrested?” Some of us are capable of making the right decisions even when it’s hard. I used to feel guilty about having done that. I don’t anymore. Not when I look at what I could have become. It makes me feel a lot better.

Homesteading: urban or rural?

This post got me to thinking again about some options I have been considering for a while, and even more now that I am inching closer to the end of my lease. I have been wanting to move more in the direction of homesteading for a while but it has been very difficult to even get started, given my life circumstances since I left my husband in ‘99.

The bottom line is that whether or not we are in a recession, whether or not food prices are climbing faster than usual, I’m very discontent with the mainstream way of doing things. It has already taken its toll on my psyche and threatens to do the same to my daughter. I know that we can do so much better for ourselves and derive so much more real satisfaction out of life than we do, and of course as a mother I want what’s best for my child. While I will not say that the usual 9-to-5 work grind for me and the 40-hour-a-week daycare for her are the worst options we could have (not that we are utilizing them now, but they’re the option most people seem to choose in the United States at one time or another), they certainly aren’t optimal. And if we can do optimal, why settle for less?

Although I am low-income with my assets eaten up in debt, I have one advantage that people with better financial lives than mine often do not yet have: access to a decent home and a piece of land out in the country, zoned agricultural, in a state with very liberal homeschooling laws. And I have been thinking very, very hard about whether it might not be a good idea to take advantage of those resources. Not to mention the fact that a good chunk of my extended family on both sides lives nearby.

Now, there are many good reasons to stay in the city. One, I like the climate here better; the rural homestead to which I referred in the previous paragraph is in southwestern Louisiana, and it gets pretty dry (ground) and humid (weather) down there. Not to mention the bigger bugs, which gross me out, so I won’t. Two, the library system here is excellent, which would be a big help to my daughter especially if I homeschool her. Three, gas prices won’t affect us as much if we can walk to most of the places we need to go.

But there are good reasons to go to the country. One, the growing season is much extended down in zone 9, and we get citrus during the winter, and I’d have lots of gardening space. Two, when I was growing up, I was more likely to read the books in my house than check them out from the school library, and it isn’t like Louisiana doesn’t have a library system. (They do. I just have no idea how good, but a bad library can be improved.) Three, I wouldn’t need to Take My Child To A Place in order for her to be able to play and get her wiggle out; she can just run outside. Four, I wouldn’t have the state breathing down my neck to make sure my daughter goes through the same educational cookie cutter as everyone else. And of course, Five, the family bit, and Six, being able to have things most people take for granted in the U.S., like easy access to a washer and dryer without turning it into a $20+ afternoon excursion that leaves me exhausted and crabby at the end, or a free excursion that leaves me covered in cat hair with the smell of cat yuck in my nostrils and dragging my and my daughter’s behinds home in the wee hours of the morning, similarly exhausted and crabby. Oh, I’ve got another one. Seven: a severe reduction in the number of wacked-out neighbors!

And there are lots of other reasons to move, and there seem to be more of those than reasons NOT to move. I mean, I also have financial considerations. It’s easier to start your own business down in Louisiana; a sales tax certificate, for instance, is free. I’d already be on land zoned agricultural, so I wouldn’t be stepping on any toes. And I wouldn’t be paying rent, so paying off debt would be far easier.

So I really don’t know what I am debating with myself about. But I do anyway, because as always I am afraid of making the wrong choice and making myself and others suffer unnecessarily for it later.

Checking account woes pt.2, and other money grumbles

So I have gone through my checkbook register and a printout of my checking account history from April 1 to May 2. Lo and behold, I forgot to fill in a Kroger transaction from the 24th. *gasp* Not an insignificant amount either: $12.03.

But. That’s not the best part. So am I balanced now? Nah. Nope. I’M STILL OFF BY EIGHT CENTS!

How does that even compute? I swear, I had the stupid thing balanced! Now I’m eight cents off! And, specifically, I think Kemba’s system believes I have eight more cents than I actually do! And I have no idea why!

I’ve got half a mind to do an eight-cent adjustment in the register and just cope with it. But if I do that then inevitably somebody or other will notice an error and I’ll overdraft by eight cents.

*headdesk*

And yes, I know it’s a stupid idea to spend the account that far down. Yes, I’m aware of that. If you have income such that you have a spare couple hundred to leave in there. May I remind you that I am not one of those people? Yes? Good.

Meanwhile, the day before my little girl’s dad got paid I wound up taking most of my savings out of my savings account to feed us all. Why? Well, I had laundry to do and had mentioned it to him and since he was loaning me his car for the afternoon for my daughter’s speech therapy, he suggested I come over to his place afterward and start the laundry early. This was good advice, because far too often I have started laundry too late and kept my daughter up way past her bedtime, much to our collective sorrow.

There were just a few problems:

1. His ex-girlfriend, who thinks for some strange reason she’s still his girlfriend even though she dumped him and they never discussed reconciliation, and who sits around on her butt at home because she has fibromyalgia which won’t let her stand to do dishes but will let her walk to get her meds and go to her doctors’ appointments, had not done a decent load of dishes in days.
2. As a result there was virtually nothing upon or in which to cook, although he had planned to fix dinner for us all.
3. Their hot water heater is developing a leak.
4. At the same time, their washing machine picked that time out of all the times I have ever used it to develop a glitch that kept it filling and filling and draining and draining but never progressing to the next stage of washing.
5. As a result there was no hot water, which made it extremely difficult to wash pots that had food caked and dried on them.
6. So, as I was the one with any money left before payday, guess who got to treat everyone to dinner?

Out of pure cussedness I decided that since I was being tapped for this dubious privilege (OK, I volunteered, but I didn’t have the heart to let them fall on their own sword, and I didn’t want to leave my laundry at their place–although I wound up doing that anyway), I was going to stay in the goddamn front seat when we went back from withdrawing my money to pick up the ex-girlfriend. So she got to sit in the back next to my daughter and get her legs squished for once. And I’m not the least bit sorry.

Maybe next time she’ll do what she’s supposed to do instead of expecting him to be her life support system even though she has a master’s degree in creative nonfiction and has been here since 2003 and still has no writing career, but now has plenty of time to develop same and isn’t bothering.

And I expressed my displeasure at him that I can’t ever seem to keep money in savings. Maybe he got the message and maybe he didn’t. But mostly it is my responsibility and I need to just pretend the money in savings isn’t there if I want it to ever get anywhere at all. Especially when I’m not 100 percent sure where my daughter and I will be living by the end of July.

And I’m pretty sure that was more of a glimpse into my personal life than the three of you out there reading this blog wanted to have, but whatever.

Messages from the universe

I have a really bad habit of hanging on to things long after I should have let them go. Not by anyone else’s standards, but from my own point of view, since I would know better than anyone else when it is time for me personally to let go of something. Anyway, I did a dumb thing the other night: I went looking somewhere I had not looked in over a year to see if the dust really had settled. I should have stayed away.

On the other hand, I got another pretty clear message from the universe, or God, or who/whatever, that I was right about that person to begin with and that I should probably stop worrying about it and feeling guilty about my part in things. My philosophy is that a lot of so-called sins are easy to fall into through lack of boundary-setting, and so one’s participation in them is sometimes passive. For instance, an opportunity to commit adultery might more or less fall into one’s lap. But thieving is always an active sin, as in the thief must make an active choice to steal and then seek out the coveted item(s). As such I hold thieving to be a more serious sin than most others a person could commit. (I’m not letting passive sinners off the hook, just paying them a little slack because people don’t always actively seek out wrongdoing, and setting boundaries and defending them is not the easiest thing for some people to do.)

As you might have guessed, I found out that a person with whom I share a long history of drama and heartache is a thief on top of everything else–by her own admission, and in a tone which said that she didn’t consider stealing from me to be wrong. And I had a lot of doubts about my part in things with her, and I still think I was a jerk and behaved immaturely in some instances. But considering that her household was always a lot messier than mine and I never once got the impulse to steal anything from her, I think it is telling that she bragged about taking something out of my apartment and that she used the fact that my apartment was a mess to excuse her behavior. And it wasn’t something minor, like a bookmark or a nickel. It was an inkjet printer.

So I’m just not going to worry about it anymore. I had suspected for quite a long time that when she put on a public show of caring about me and wishing me the best that it was just an act, and that her behavior indicating that she didn’t care how she behaved or how that affected others was closer to the mark in terms of her true character. Now I know that is true, so as far as I’m concerned, all bets are off. I feel sorry to a certain extent for the people who are in her daily life now, but at least one of them has known her since 2002 and ought to be savvy about her by now, so too bad for him. The rest of them will have to find out how she is sooner or later and it probably won’t be a fun experience. But that is not my problem anymore. Frankly, it never really was.

Unfortunately, though, I still have to associate at least a little bit longer with two people who were close to her, and one or both of them knew she stole my printer and neither of them told me. They then had access to read of her boasting about the theft, and still said nothing. She didn’t have keys here, so one of them would have had to let her into my apartment in the first place, and this after she had not set foot in the place for almost a year and had written me off as not worth her time (so she had no reason to be there to begin with). So I’m looking askance at my association with both people and wondering when the other shoe is going to drop (or another one–we’ve been suffering from footwear avalanches around here for quite a while now), and also wondering exactly why I should trust them to tell me what the weather is outside, much less in matters like helping me care for my daughter, which both have expressed interest in doing.

Haven’t done what you’d call getting a sign from the Universe about that, and I’m not a paranoid schizophrenic who reads signs in everything she sees and hears–it just seems like I get a clear signal every now and again as though something way bigger than me is clocking me upside the head and yelling, “Hey STUPID! Yoo-hoo! Lookie here!” In this case I haven’t got a whole lot of good alternatives, at least not as far as I can tell.

However, I have gotten more signs about the feasibility of staying in this neighborhood another year.

The first was what for all the world sounded like a semiautomatic, or more than one, going off in the alley behind my building early yesterday morning. I had already stayed up late and gone to bed after 3am; when the noise went off I had not yet gone to sleep, although I had begun to drift. Thea jerked and snuggled close to me, my heart started racing like mad, and after that I couldn’t sleep at all. To top it off, she had gone to bed early and after the noise happened she gradually woke up and stayed that way. So I was well and truly screwed.

We get a lot of talk around these-here parts about how the neighborhood’s going to be revitalized, but the truth is that what we really need are good cops and an effective anti-gang program here, and we have neither. It’s as if they take all the bad cops with attitude problems out of Upper Arlington and dump them here, and we don’t have enough police, either. (Maybe they send the absolute worst ones to Cleveland and Detroit?) We’ve already had one gun go off next to my building, about two and a half years ago. I know for a fact that one was, because I saw the shell on the sidewalk the next day. We’ve been lucky here so far in a neighborhood where I hear the gangs shoot back at the cops, but our luck is going to run out eventually, so it would be really stupid from a safety standpoint if I renewed my lease for another year.

On top of that I have had almost-constant problems with plumbing issues in this apartment since I moved in, and apparently the landlord’s idea of “maintenance” is to grab random scruffy-looking guys off the street, hand them tools and pay them to come into my apartment, look at the problem, tinker with it a little bit, and leave, and the problem is always the same or worse after they leave than it was when they came in. Except for when they installed a new central heating system, but for all I know they screwed that up too and it just isn’t obvious yet. Although they smoked in my kitchen that time without asking me, so they’re still jerks.

Right now it’s water leakage under the bathroom sink, apparently involving one of the intake pipes (or whatever you call it–one of the pipes bringing in water, not the drainpipe). Maintenance guy showed up yesterday to look at it, said he had no idea what was going on, tightened a few things, told me to call him when the leak happened again (it’s intermittent) and left. After he left, it happened again.

But what is that? A real plumber would come in, look at the problem, go “Hm, I can’t tell where it’s coming from,” and then do something to find out. But I don’t think I have ever had a real plumber come in here in the over three years I’ve lived here. It’s always some yo-yo with a toolbox who would fit in better out on the street corner with a sandwich board.

At this point I’m inclined to just not bother anymore. It’s not my building. Every time I call them about a problem there has to be stupidity and incompetence. And I don’t even like those guys, and I sure don’t want to have to keep calling them back about the same issues over and over again. And if the landlords don’t want to take care of their building, it’s no skin off of my nose. Not my problem. They’re probably just waiting for the neighborhood to turn around so they can cash out, anyway–even if they ruin the building with their negligence, they’d still get a pretty penny for the lot.

So it’s as if both the building and the neighborhood are telling me to get the hell out while the getting’s good. And I hate to do it, because this is the first home of my own I’ve had since I left Memphis in 2000, and this is where I brought my daughter home from the hospital. So far she has grown up playing in this living room. I know a few of the people around here, I recognize people at the grocery store and the laundromat, I mourned the passing of a neighbor who died in a bad way… we sort of belong here.

Only… not. And between the demonstrated lack of support from people who ought to be supportive of us, and the demonstrated lack of suitability of this neighborhood, could be we’ll be making a long trip come July. My mom still needs my help, I’m pretty sure, and my daughter needs to be around my family. At least, some of them.

Restless

My camera is acting really weird. I have a serious beef with Kodak digicams anyway; they used to make good cameras, but they seem to have lost their touch. Both my digital Kodaks have been gifts and the first one broke in a very stupid way which required me to tape the battery door shut, while the second one’s automatic lens cover went on the fritz after my daughter touched the lens and I cleaned it. (Hint: Never apply lens cleaner straight to the lens of a digicam with an automatic lens cover. @#$%ing modern electronics…) Things went downhill from there. First the motor in the zoom lens started acting up, and now the beast is draining batteries well before their time–and it isn’t the preview screen either, I’ve always used that in exactly the same way and I’ve been using my camera lately less than usual.

I wasn’t happy with the way the camera rendered some colors anyhow even though I could get around some of the problems by adjusting the white balance, but these latest issues are going to sink it for me because it’s already been refurbished once and if they didn’t get it quite right that time, they won’t this time either.

The camera is a creativity outlet, poor as my creativity is, and a possible source of income. At minimum I don’t want to have to miss anything cute my daughter does because the stupid camera has died, and I have enough old dead rolls of film around this apartment that I need to see if I can salvage in some way. Plus digital cameras imprint the date taken in the photo file so that I can go back later and make sure everything’s organized where it’s supposed to go.

So I am doing something I should not be doing, and acquiring a new camera if possible. This is better than expecting my little girl’s dad to get it for me, which will make me feel like I owe him, which is somehow worse than owing a faceless entity. Plus it’s a possible credit-score boost later.

Meanwhile I am contemplating just not bothering with this town anymore and going down to live with my mother if that is still a viable option, once the lease is up in July. I have all kinds of reasons to do that, all kinds of reasons not to do that, and so I feel sort of paralyzed. There have been times I’ve made the leap and taken the chance and all that rot, only to find my reach had exceeded my grasp and if I trot out one more cliché I think you all are going to reach through your intarwebs connections and strangle me. Sorry. Point is I’m afraid of falling on my face again. Oops.

If nothing else we would have more people around us, we would have real nights again, my little girl could play outside relatively safely, and I wouldn’t hear random weird people knocking on the downstairs apartment door at 3am, like I just did. And I wouldn’t have to overextend myself financially to make it happen (well, except the move, but I have a free place to stay at the end of it–in a house I may be inheriting, no less), so that’s a plus too.

I just wish it were easier to decide what to do. We’ll see.

Miscellany

Fun with PayPal

Soon after PayPal reinstated my full account access, I got a survey invitation from them about my account limitation experience. Rather like handing a flamethrower to a pyromaniac. The best part was where they asked me whether my questions had been handled courteously. On a planet where the proper response to an email is utter silence, I suppose they did. This, however, is Earth. I leave the rest of it to your no doubt amused imagination.

More pages?

Although I am focusing a lot on personal finance right now, this is not a personal finance blog. It is more a chronicle of my efforts to get my life back on track. (First I have to find the track, but never mind.) As such, I should probably put up a couple more pages about other areas in my life I feel need work. Look for that soon, if you’re interested and if I get around to it. (Another area to work on: Procrastination!)

Weigh-in

Is going to be late. I forgot to do it both Saturday and yesterday. Not that I think it will impress anyone, least of all me.

Major changes?

I have been looking at the job ads a bit more lately. Still debating fiercely with myself whether I want to go back to work (if I even can go back to work) and, if so, what that’s going to mean for myself and my daughter in the long run. The financial benefit is obvious. I’m kind of emotionally a mess about it, though. I wanted to raise her myself, and I wanted to homeschool her eventually; looking back, I can see serious gaps in my education that I would like to head off at the pass with her, and I don’t think public school’s version of “socialization” is very good for kids. So if I can avoid having to put her in a preschool, I will endeavor to do so. But it’s going to be interesting trying to figure that out.

Old friends

I figured out where one old friend from junior high is living now, although I’m extremely iffy about contacting him because we did not part on a good note and I don’t want him to feel stalked. I guess at this point I just kind of feel happy that I found him at all, and I wish him well.

Another old friend, this time from my days in the Army, has tried to look me up. Unfortunately, he looked on Reunion.com and I was not yet listed there. When I set up an account there a couple days ago, the site told me one person had looked for me. Yesterday, I got an email with some hints as to his identity. I plugged in his last name and the town and state they gave me and bingo.

I left a message on his Classmates profile, as I got a great deal on the Gold Member account for one year, and I hope to hear back from him. I’m kind of excited, actually. He’s in New York state, so a visit would not be out of the question, although he would have to come here, at least at first.

And that is pretty much what’s going on, in a nutshell.