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.

Calling it what it is

I’ve been looking at Real Estate Porn quite a lot lately. I guess I like to torture myself... After the Great Financial Debacle, I don’t think anyone legitimate is going to approve me for a mortgage until 2012, so I realize it is what passes for entertainment. I miss my garden deeply, so much that I don’t think about it too much, but I believe there is only a townhouse in my future. The responsibility of my house used to give me strange, disturbing nightmares. My “money problems” weighed me down for years. I don’t want to revisit that.

I don’t burden M with details or want her to wrestle with stuff she won’t understand, but I also believe in being honest with her. So it kind of cracks me up when I hear her say that I had “money problems.” Part of me cringes and wants to deny it and call it something else. But (fortunately) the healthy stronger parts of me are grateful that I don’t have any secrets and that part of my past is behind me, and besides... I DID! Having that out in the open makes it lose its teeth.

She also asked me why I wasn’t married. That to me could open a can of worms that she isn’t old enough to handle, so I just say that I didn’t want to. The great thing about her age is that “I didn’t want to” sounds perfectly reasonable to her, and the conversation moves on to something else. That, too, is the truth, but it isn’t quite that simple. But I don’t have to deal with that right now, thank goodness.

The fog is back

The fog came back this week. Rain and fog all day and night, making the drive to and from work more stressful and unpleasant and making me that much more anxious to leave. The damp gets into my very bones. The noise of the wipers and the hiss and splatter of water on the highway grinds on my nerves.

When I lived in Colorado I used to hear people talking about the dry air and how they worried it would age their skin, but I found the dry to be great for my skin – it finally cleared up – and the blue sky and sunshine was such a great contrast to the dreary grey of the Bay Area that I’d left behind. Northern California has lots of areas that are dismal to someone who is sensitive to the weather. I lived in the Silicon Valley until I was 23, and smog and haze was the norm. Now I’m living and commuting along I-80 and the sky is rarely blue. It is so depressing to not see the sun for weeks. Even clear days the air pollution is ever present. Today we are completely socked in – we can barely see across the street.

Such a week at work. The projects I’m working on are a mess, and the emails have been flying back and forth. We’ve had several meetings and changes of direction. The budget problems are making everyone crazy. One of the senior project managers told me yesterday that she’s looking for another job; she can’t take it any more. I’m worried about what the job market will be like in Denver when I get back, but I really hope I never have to work in an environment like this one again. Not one person I work with is happy, and these are the good, talented, dedicated people. The stress level is just exhausting. It makes people act stupidly and make bad decisions, and doesn’t foster creative thinking AT ALL.

I’ve got school to pay for and M’s daycare, so I am that much more grateful for the paycheck, but once I’ve graduated and she’s older, I won’t have those expenses anymore and that is something I’m really looking forward to. Those two take up almost 30% of my gross income.

OBAMA!

I’m so excited about tomorrow! M is old enough to have picked up on the Election, and she says she is excited too. She says she wanted Hillary, but she likes Barack, and so she’s okay with it. From the mouths of babes...

We talked on the way to daycare about why it is exciting that Barack is going to be our President. I told her one of the best things – besides that he’s a good guy – is that they used to say Black men couldn’t be President. And now we’re getting one. So maybe we’ll get a woman someday soon. We agreed that would be pretty great. I want her to get the message that just because some people think you can’t or you shouldn’t do something doesn’t mean they’re right. It doesn’t mean things can’t change.

When I was a little tiny girl, Kennedy became the President. He inspired people. I was too young to remember him, but I remember the way people talked about him when I was a kid. I do remember MLK and Bobby. I remember how their assassinations and the Vietnam War took away a lot of people’s hope for the future. I remember thinking that you couldn’t count on anything. In my life at the time, that was the truth. It shaped the person I became.

I want my daughter to feel like her future is wide open. At this moment in time, she is a happy, confident, socially graceful child (and whip-smart, but that’s something else). I don’t want anything to take that away from her. I know all too well what can happen to damage someone in ways that haunt them for the rest of their life. I also know that despite my stance that “they’ll have to come through me, first,” that I can’t be everywhere and every moment. But I am very, very careful about who she spends her time with. My past gave me some gifts, one of which is a pretty strong bullshit detector and crazy radar. And I am absolutely unmoved by surface things like how much money you have or what kind of house you live in. Some of the most corrupt, nasty, soul-less people I’ve encountered in my life were physically attractive, shiny, popular, and gregarious. I don’t buy for a second the excuses that people make about the people they hang out with, either. My sister is a prime example of this. She has picked some real winners. She’s so intent on finding someone that will both take care of her and put up with her that she lets some pretty skanky people through the net. It is hard to watch. Eight years younger than me, she’s been married and divorced three times already. But she’s really more her own post, so I’ll stop there.