Lots of work to do, no money to be found

I know that on Sundays you aren’t supposed to worry about work.  Let it all wait until Monday and just take some time to relax.  Right…

I’d been joking for a few months about going to work at Hooters to get a little extra cash flow.  When the adoption went through, we lost about $1k a month in income because we didn’t want to wait for the special needs waiver to go through on A.  It would have put the adoption off for another 8 months or so and from experience we’ve learned that a lot can go wrong in 8 months.  LJ’s had gotten approved two days before we signed intent to adopt but being A is younger, we didn’t have enough documentation to get the rubber stamp.  It was better to just get the adoption finalized even without getting the special needs care she qualifies for.  We did, however, get federal Medicaid on all the kids until they’re 19 or out of high school.  It covers mental health treatments and that’s what we needed to ensure.

Note to potential adoptive parents:  make sure you get the adoption assistance.  It’s wounding to the pride, but you’re gonna need it and use it.

Back to Hooters.  I found out today that I can’t work there because I don’t meet protocol – tattoos are out of dress code.  Damn, that means I may have to find work where I use my IQ instead of my T&A.

Unless I find somewhere I can flex-work or work part time, work just isn’t a viable option yet.  I say yet, but the truth of it is that I’ll probably never be “cured.”  Shaun has intermittent FMLA leave enacted in his job because the next migraine could literally kill me.  Reading that on paper scared the crap out of me, even though I knew it.  The MVP puts me at a higher risk of stroke, syncope, and fatal arrythmias.  Being the migraines are severe enough to take out my vision and I often can’t keep anything down, dehydration is a major risk.  Not enough blood running through the heart equals regurgitation and syncope.

I want to just scream that it’s not fair.  I’m 28!  I’m one of the smartest, most talented people in the workforce (mathmatically speaking,) I have the will and want to work – but I can’t.  I can’t even lift my head some days.  When I feel like that though, I verbally tell myself to shut up.  One of the kids I went to school with just died from cancer this past week.  He wasn’t one of my friends, but we ran with the same crowd.  Well, as much as a socially-impared art geek can run with a crowd. I’m blessed beyond belief.

I think I’m just feeling older than my age.  Wednesday, I have an appt with the OBGYN to start talking about a hysterectomy.  Friday is Shaun’s and my 10 year anniversary.  September is the 10 year high-school reunion.  I have three kids, ages 9, 5, and 4.  Two of them have PTSD and the laundry list of abuse related and drug-exposure related mental illnesses.  The last one is trying his hand at tantrums, but doesn’t have the stamina to keep up the 4 hour fits his sister is capable of.

The kids keep bringing up in therapy that they’re scared because I’m sick and they don’t want to lose another mom.  I can tell them again and again that it’s just a headache, but they know.  Kids are really good at not accepting bullshit and I’m really terrible at lying.  I don’t believe I’m going to die but I do believe that I’ll probably battle this well into my 90s. I grew up taking care of my mom through the same thing and I’m a productive member of society.

Some days are great and I feel like I did before I got sick… or until the sickness that I was born with caught up with me enough to take me down.  I have energy.  I laugh and smile.  My grammar doesn’t suck.  I have patience and want to conquer the world. I think about another child.

Yesterday was one of those days.  We went out with the kids to thrift stores and antique stores.  We picked up some pipes for Shaun to restore.  I got some $3 keyboards at Goodwill to modify and some clock parts.  We spent the kids’ Toys’r'Us gift card and their McDonalds gift card.  It was beautiful and sunny and great.

This morning was the same way, but a bad night’s sleep and too much caffeine caught up with me around 4 pm.  I got out and cleaned the wheels and chrome on my Durango now that the local road work is done.  I started teaching A how to work the shower since she’s going to start school in 3 weeks.  I took apart one of the keyboards and started cleaning it and sanitizing it.  We had pizza with the big family at Mom’s and the cousins all got to play and we made hand puppets out of paper bags.  I finally gave the digital picture frames back to my dad (one we couldn’t set up without an SD card port… blah) and set up the one for my mom.  I sorted through jewelry with my sister and stole some of her stuff.  The stupid gate at the family’s place was deactivated so we didn’t have to wait to be buzzed in.

Around the time Mom went to church with Grandma, I was a snippy bitch.  I even snapped at my mom.  I snapped at the kids for singing Spongebob’s “idiot friends” song.  I came home and took a bath, finished a stupid book, and tried to steady myself with working on fixing a flatbed scanner.  What I should have done is taken a shot of Zomig.

Now I’m going to attempt to sleep it off after I get Cali cleaned up.  Nola got pissy and and started a fight.  It looks like Cali lost a toenail.  Shaun’s putting the kids in bed and I’ve got the cameras charging so I can download the photos in the morning.

I don’t know who is harder to raise: children or German Shepherds.  They’re all too damn smart for their own good.

Love Poetry to Excel

I’m building an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of my lace inventory and love poetry dedicated to the program has been popping up in my head.  It goes like this:

Oh, Excel

How your name astounds me

To be based on excellence

Even though you’re a fucking bitch

If you were more user friendly

You would make good money as a whore

Um, that didn’t work so well, did it?

It’s always like this when I first start a spreadsheet.  It goes from “I hate your guts” in the beginning.  Then, when you’re in the middle of it actually being usable, you think “this is pretty cool.”  Afterwards, when you use it to analyze stuff and make graphs, you think “fucker, why won’t you work the same way two times in a row?!”

I better go ahead and build in the data validation coding so I don’t screw something up during the entry part so that the analytics part will work later on.  Fun, fun.  I used to do this for money… now I do it for free.  Damn.  Hopefully my lace will be easy to find when I need it.

Procrastinating

Procrastinating

or

Suddenly, I have 9000 other things to do

Last Sunday, my dad sent me home with a very simple request and two digital picture frames.  My job: to load them with pictures.  Simple, right?

This puts a project I have been avoiding since I left ATC in the forefront of my “things I do other than parenting.”  See, I was like the first person in the family to have a digital camera.  I actually have three on my desk at this very moment.  I have not been so lucky with computers – it seems like I get all the pics burned to disc or moved to a portable drive right before something really freaky happens to the computer.  It never kills the PC outright – it just turns everything in the memory banks into gobbledy-gook.

Fast forward through 7 or so different computers, and I have all the photos on a portable 500G MyBook, backed up onto another drive.  It’s just every folder has a name like “laptop photos” and is 7G big.  It’s a filing nightmare – and now that people actually want to see those photos – it’s a photo editing nightmare.

My project is to organize these photos, delete the duplicates, and then optimize each image.  I also have scanned photos I need to separate, file, and optimize.  My excuse for the scanned photos is that my scanner doesn’t like talking to my home network and will only work if you send it a request from the computer – instead of hitting the “scan” button on the scanner.

Last Sunday, my dad sent me home with a simple request.

This Sunday, I still have not gotten the frames out of the back of my car.  I’ve added some lace to a glasses case, then removed it because the glue looked funny behind the mesh part of the lace.  I’ve painted a paintbrush hot pink.  I’ve reorganized the shelves that hold my BookMooch inventory.  I’ve read Catherine Coulter’s new novel Knock Out.  I’ve played about 1000 levels of Bookworm on Shockwave.com. I’ve watched Season 3 and Season 4 of House twice each.  I’ve dreamed about my next tattoo and changed the blog settings on this blog.  I’ve thought about doing freelance analyst work.  Am I at 9000 yet?

I did download the photos off the Nikon camera, so hey, not a total loss!  I really like Nikon’s transfer software – it creates subfolders by date, so that if you haven’t downloaded in a month, it separates Easter from LJ’s birthday party.  It’s nifty stuff.

Now, I’m going to take a nap.  All this not doing what I’m supposed to is making me sleepy.

Spam

I checked my spam filter just now because I wondered if I was getting mostly trackbacks or stupid links on my blog posts.  I do weird stuff like that… it comes from being an analyst and hating having questions unanswered.

I had a spam from someone offering a DDoS for pay service.  The deal was you paid this guy to assassinate someone else’s site for x amount of hours for x amount of $.

My thoughts on it range from “pretty smooth move, shithead” to “it’s probably a scam to get people who use AOL to hand over their paypal info” to “how stupid do you have to be to PAY someone to do something you could do yourself with open-source software after 30 seconds on Google?”

Really, though, most people probably just see it and go “what’s a DDoS?”