As the stomach turns...

Friday afternoon the company announced (via email) a “temporary” additional 10% pay cut for the month of April. On top of the 5% they have already put in place.

Fabulous.

It is as if this company knows I’m going to break up with it, and is now just behaving badly. What it really serves to do is send the morale around here, which was already pretty awful, spiraling around the toilet bowl. Mondays are generally cheerless here, but today is truly morgue-like.

Fifteen weeks! Yippee!

Good news: the quotes I’ve started to get for the “full service” move I am planning are not astronomical. I spent about $2500 last time, which included the ABF truck, the rental of a U-Haul here, and paying a couple of teenage boys that my mom knew to help unload here, and gas for the U-Haul. With the change in circumstances going back, I am having a professional company do the loading on both sides and the truck driving. I can pack a truck like a pro, but I can’t carry all the stuff by myself, so I am going that route. I was worried that it would cost a lot more, but so far, the estimates are reasonable (I had budgeted for twice as much). Other than the anxiety I will inevitably feel having strangers moving my stuff, the comparative ease of this method will be worth every penny. And everything (nearly) is packed up already and in neat rows in the storage unit.

Ugh, I HATE having a storage unit. I feel like I’ve bought my own stuff over and over again. Almost $6500 for four years of keeping boxes in a bigger box. I got rid of so much when I moved out here; a lot of it I gave to R and I’m pretty sure he abandoned it soon after, but I try to separate myself from the attachment to stuff. I am planning on selling or donating my entertainment center (funny name for 3 massive oak pieces) and my refrigerator, as well as the cherry hutch that was my grandmothers. The pieces are just so big and heavy, and I doubt very much I’ll have space for them. I visualize a much lighter, sparer environment in the future. I’d like to get some simple wood pieces and refinish them and keep it simple.

I want light and space and privacy, the absence of freeway noise, and my own damn kitchen.

Pony rides, $4

We had our first “homework free” weekend in a long, long time. It was great. Even with the beginning of Daylight Savings Time, which robs us mercilessly and unnecessarily of a precious hour, it was a relaxing and enjoyable weekend.

It didn’t rain. That helped a lot. We drove down to Sacramento and spent time with our friend S, and hung out in his lovely home for a while, sipping coffee and hot chocolate, and then took off for Funderland! It has been there for many years, and shows it, but for a kid M’s age (almost 5) it was perfect: An amusement park for little kids. As we approached the entrance, we saw a corral with ponies, and M spotted a girl her age riding a horse.
“Oh, Mommy – I want to do that!” she declared, her voice full of longing.
It was a fabulous feeling to be able to say “Ok, honey” and feel zero anxiety about how much it might cost.

When I was a kid, money was always tight. Now I understand that my parents lived beyond their means, tried to pretend they had more than they did, and generally played a grand scale game of Keeping Up with the Jones’. But then, as a little kid, I knew that we children were draining the money out of my father’s wallet, and I was made to feel bad every time I grew out of my shoes or clothes. We were often the only kids who didn’t get to have or participate in something that the other kids at school did. We lived in the Bay Area in the 60s – a time of Brady Bunch suburban abundance. My dad taught public high school and had good insurance. But the other dads worked at Hewlett Packard and Lockheed and Intel. My mother sewed most of our clothes and my play clothes were my brother’s hand me downs. Now, there is nothing wrong with the way we lived, it was the way they felt about it and framed it for us kids that sucked so bad. They wasted a huge amount of energy and money pretending, and my mother worried and complained and I was the one she stressed out around, being the girl; lucky me.

I was never going to make my kid feel bad that her feet grew and she needed new shoes. I was never going to put my kid in the position of being the only kid whose parents couldn’t afford to send me on a trip or something that was part of school. My parents should have lived somewhere else, had fewer kids, or bought less crap, but they always said it wasn’t in their control. Just another of the lies that I learned growing up in that disaster of a childhood.

I’ve worked so hard to have a good job, a balanced life, and a healthy relationship to money. I know what it can and cannot buy. I earn it, I save it, and I respect it. When my baby wanted to ride the horse, all I had to say was “which one?” It felt great.

Location

It is raining cats and dogs. M thinks that’s a funny saying, and I can’t tell her why we say it, but I think it’s funny, too. One of the fun parts of being a parent is explaining things to a little kid, especially a smart little kid like M. She asks amazing questions. It is always a joy to see how her mind works. I don’t always have a good answer for her, though, and she can get frustrated with me. That part isn’t fun, especially while I’m driving. We spend a lot of time commuting every day. I have her in a great daycare that is half way between work and home, so she gets a half-hour ride each way.

I worry about being on the freeway, but there aren’t very many options here. They just didn’t plan this area at all, and all the improvements have been retrofitted to the bizarre layout that came about from the gold-mining past. I will NOT miss this rain.

Four months of this job left. It sucks so much, it is mind boggling. In the past couple months, I’ve worked on several projects that didn’t go anywhere due to conflicting legislation, poor communication, and changes in requirements that no one knew about. Thousands upon thousands of dollars wasted. The state of California is in such a financial quagmire right now. It will take years to rectify the mess. I don’t have that kind of patience, or the desire to pay crazy out of control prices for things just to avoid snow. That is what most people say when they learn that I’m moving – “but it snows so much in Colorado!” Yeah, and that keeps the population and the real estate prices down. There is a great little elementary school by M’s daycare that I would love for her to be able to go to. The housing in that area costs easily twice what it would in Colorado. Even now, with housing prices tanking, California is unaffordable. The jobs don’t pay better. How do people do it? Twenty years ago I couldn’t afford the Bay Area; how does anyone now? Here is bad enough. My friend S lives in Sacramento, and his neighborhood is nice, but I can't afford it there, either.

The Rats are back!

There is a real estate rule of thumb that you don’t want to put a lot of money into a house that will make it vastly different (more valuable) than the surrounding houses. Of course, my parents don’t make decisions based on rational thinking, so they sold the home they had in the Bay Area for 30+ years and bought this monstrosity here a few years back. Their Retirement Home. Complete with stairs that rival the Winchester Mystery House, an architectural design that makes it impossible to heat and cool efficiently, and to make it really, really special, it is on a narrow little road right off the frontage road of Interstate 80. The noise is constant, day and night. Just down the street is a major freeway exit, with its requisite multiple gas stations (I count 6), fast food entities, and other miscellaneous businesses that tend to cluster around freeway exits. Nothing remotely resembling a neighborhood. The road we are on is narrow, as I said, without sidewalks or a shoulder of any kind, and features a ditch on both sides that some of the homes have installed a pipe and covered. Most of the other houses are “modest” as they say. The neighbors think of my parents’ house as the Big House. When my parents first moved in, they held an Open House each Christmas for a couple years, acting like the newly landed lords of the manor, but instead of bonding with their neighbors it simply provided a way for the neighbors to satisfy their curiosity by poking around. When I moved in with my baby I squelched the idea. It was gross. No one misses it.

All of this would be bad enough, but just after my parents moved in, the little house next door went through an unofficial change of ownership. The hillbilly (their word, not mine) who had lived there ended up letting someone they were somehow related to move in and that cracker proceeded to “remodel.” What was once a little, slightly run down house on a weed filled lot now looks like what is left after a cyclone hits. The house and adjacent outbuilding are partially covered with plastic tarps. There is some chicken wire surrounding the porch. Huge piles of what looks like a combination of construction debris, garbage, tree branches, discarded parts and old broken appliances, odds and ends of lumber and cardboard boxes, and lots of unrecognizable junk fills the lot. The weeds have grown and there are bare patches of dirt and gravel, too, and – yes, litter (fast food wrappers, crap like that) strewn everywhere. M calls it the Trash House. Twice in the past, rats from next door have found their way into this house. Big rats. Aggressive Big Rats.

They are back.

Pay Cut

The company I work for just announced a 5% pay cut. I am not pleased, of course, but I’m not surprised. This is a big company and we were just bought by an even bigger one, and there would have been changes even without the sucky economy. I had hoped to keep what I had intact until I’m ready to leave. Realistically, though, it means a loss of less than $1000 to my bottom line, since I plan to quit at the end of June.

This isn’t where I want to work. I’ve known that. I hope I will be able to find something that works out when I move, but I don’t want to be desperate. I want to be able to get M settled and have a sense of home and get used to Colorado again and establish a routine and make friends. We’ve been “enduring” for so long, and that’s no way to be happy and thrive.

I’ve been so fortunate that I’ve made friends here, at work, M’s daycare, and out and about, that have really saved my sanity. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without them. I wish I could take them with me.

I am so glad it is almost over, though. Especially this winter, what with the dismal weather, Mom getting sick, and the tough school work and stressful work situation, I am exhausted. I don’t think I could have gone on much longer.

The move intimidates me because I’ll have M with me and this time I’ll be without another adult. But we’ll figure it out.

Mean Old Man

It was a particularly difficult weekend.

Why do I forget sometimes that my father is such a mean man? I really, really think that this illness of my mother's is kharma. For both of them.

It just sucks that - as ever - my daughter and I are being sucked into the cosmic black hole that is their life.

My father turns out all the lights. While we are in the room. No, this is not because he is senile. He’s always been this kind of bastard. My four year old daughter, who is a remarkable, smart, and wonderful child, goes around with a flashlight. My parents allocated one whole shelf in their refrigerator to me and my daughter – and I keep anything that won’t fit out in my refrigerator in the garage. I share the freezer part of mine with them. My father – now that he has been forced to (gasp!) feed himself – has put all kinds of big stuff out in my refrigerator in the garage. I mentioned it to him this morning and he denied it.

The laundry is in the pool room (yes, they have a pool table they never use. It is now covered with a ping pong table top that they never use. I fold laundry on it.) The pool room is not heated, and has been about 40 degrees. I turned a space heater on down there this weekend so I would be able to fold laundry in relative comfort. My father came down and turned it off. Yes, he knew why it was on.

My mother’s tea kettle died and I bought her a new one. She hasn’t been out of bed in 4 weeks and so I told my father about it, and he said he uses the microwave because it is “easier.” But he had taken the old one to his workshop to try to fix it, apparently, with no success. So he just decided they don’t need one?

*sigh*

I wouldn't treat - I haven't treated - people I thoroughly dislike the way that my parents treat me. And they think what they show their children is love. It is confusing to be around. It really is. I wish it wasn't. I don't know if that is a sign that I've still got normal healthy impulses or a sign that I am irrevocably damaged.

Either way, nineteen weeks, and then I can go on a long vacation and then move.

Mom is sick

It’s been a hellish 3 weeks. I didn’t mean to let so much time go by. I keep thinking all I’m doing is bitching and moaning, when what I intended to do was document my current situation and the move and the transition. This whole time living here is such a “time out of time” kind of time, in a way.

But then my mother got a really bad respiratory thing, that kept her in bed for 5 days, and that was unusual in itself, but then she was hospitalized! I don’t think she’s ever been hospitalized for an illness (for some other things, but not being sick). She was there from Monday until Thursday last week, and when she came home it was right back to bed.

My dad is having a hard time feeding himself. That’s not as tragic as it sounds; he’s having a hard time because he’s never had to do it. My mother scurries around him cleaning and cooking and shopping and doing, and Dad spends a lot of time watching bad TV. Now that she’s bedridden, and I am not available, he’s had to fend for himself, poor baby. First it consisted of eating all the leftovers in the refrigerator, then a lot of sandwiches, and finally he went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of Marie Callendar frozen dinners. I’ve watched him carefully reading the back of the box for directions on how to microwave them.

If he hadn’t always been such a bully, such a short-tempered, impatient, self-absorbed know-it-all, I’d feel kind of sorry for him. He has stated petulantly more than once “I can’t go anywhere,” and self-righteously “I’ve got one person to take care of, I can’t deal with anything else!” (This last one after I found my daughter in the cold, dark pool room watching Harry Potter without so much as a throw around her, let alone the space heater on that my nephew used down there.) He has complained about having to do a load of laundry and of being “up all night” because of my mother.

He says these things to me – the one person in the house who has a full time job, and hour-plus each way commute, a full course load of homework, and a four year old. And there is no sense of irony, whatsoever.