W.T.F.

I don't even know where to begin. Obviously, things have been stressful lately. Ok, stressful is an understatement. This is going to be long, rambley, and probably at least a little incoherent.

Ok...so the car. Brakes needed new rotors, fine, there goes $500. We had to get a credit card through the mechanic to pay for it, but it's 90 days same as cash, and we get roadside assistance for a year, and it's got a $1000 limit. Next thing: the timing belt. Okay. To replace the timing belt and the water pump, the quote was about $800 after tax. This includes 6 hours of labor. Well, come Saturday when we took the car in, they couldn't actually do the work in just 6 hours, since it's a 9 hour project. They said they'd honor the original quote, which at $85 an hour for labor, I won't sneeze at. Fuck I'd like to make $85 an hour. Maybe I should be a frigging mechanic. Fuck the Master's degree. Anyway, so we took the car back in on Monday by 8:00 to get it done by 5, which means that we left our house at 6:45am to get me to work by 7:20 to get DH back to the mechanic by 8. DH and DS meanwhile walked home from the mechanic. DS slept the whole way, and spent the whole day sick and developed a fever. More on that later. I got a call Monday afternoon (wow, I guess that was yesterday...) that our water pump actually had a hole in it, and was leaking on the idler, and as a result both the idler and the tensioner needed to be replaced. Add almost $200 to the price tag for this trip to the car doctor, and voila, suddenly we have to max out every credit card we have, and take $300 out of checking that we needed to pay our mortgage (more on that later), and there we go.

I am also still bleeding/spotting. This makes 22 days out of the last 32 days that I have been bleeding/spotting. Woo. So I called the midwives last night to see if they thought that this was standard for me on Implanon now that J is not nursing as much, or if this was just an adjustment, or what. So the MW (one of my 2 favorites, though I like all 3) says she's sorry this is happening, I make a joke about the purpose of birth control being to prevent you from wanting to have sex, she gives me a free pack of Yaz to try to get my body to adopt some kind of cycles. Hopefully that will work. Who knew you could be on 2 kinds of hormonal BC at the same time? Huh. Anyway, this hopefully will prevent me needing to go get the Implanon removed, which would be a $45 copay that we don't have. That reminds me, I was supposed to make an appointment with my psychiatrist for this month. Well, that's another $45 I don't have. Maybe I will call and see if I can just come in next month. Holy hell I want to...something. Well, not really. I just...I don't know.

J is sick. The poor kid is much better today, a bit clingy, but better than yesterday and Sunday when he had a fever. It breaks my heart to have a sick baby.

C is still looking for another job. He's been applying for at least 1 job a day for months now. So far he's had one interview that didn't go anywhere. The last couple weeks he's been applying to a minimum of5 jobs a day, everything he can find online. He can't go to the actual locations because we have only 1 car, which I take to work, and he has J. So he's stressed out. He's making less than 1/10th of what the car repairs cost per week. We keep hoping his music will take off, but lord knows we've been hoping for that for a long fucking time. And in this economy, nobody is going to hire a jazz group to do anything when they can't even afford to keep all their employees, and nobody is dining out because they can't afford to spend extra money in case they lose their job(s). I have a coworker who, along with his roommates, likes to play poker online as a source of income. Legality aside, it really pisses me off that some jackass that does NOT have the same level of education that I do sits on his butt all day in front of the fucking computer and plays poker, and brings in more than I make in a month from a single week's worth of his "work." I get it. Life isn't fair. I should quit bitching because I have a job, we can't lose our house (basically, we bought it from my grandma, she owned it outright, so she is the "bank" and she's very flexible on payments if we need it. Which we obviously do).

I have a sample that I have to process in the morning. C is working from 6-10, my thing is at 9:15. I have to leave home by 8 to guarantee getting there early enough to set up. I have had this on the calendar for a few days now. C found out on Sunday that he was working those hours tomorrow, and was all excited because it's an actual 4 hour shift instead of the 2 hours they've been giving him during the week. Usually, when he works til 10 I just stay home with J and go in to work late. Obviously that won't work tomorrow. So I called my sister M to see if she could watch him, since she usually can when we have an emergency like this. I didn't hear back from her until 7:30 tonight. She can't watch J tomorrow. My mom can't, my stepdad can't, and we don't have any other family close enough to make it convenient. We don't have a daycare, and we don't have a sitter. So I was totally kicking myself for not reminding C of this problem earlier, and I didn't call anyone til tonight because J was so sick yesterday I didn't know if I would even be ABLE to go in to work since I get paid sick leave and C doesn't so it would make more sense for me to take a sick day and him to go in to work, even though I couldn't really take the day off anyway since I don't have a fucking backup person for me at work, so pretty much short of me being hospitalized I don't get to take a sick day if we have a study patient coming in. Ugh. So I should have starting calling around yesterday. Shoot me. C couldn't go in tomorrow, or call tonight and say that our sitter cancelled and he has to leave 1 hour early. No, god forbid he give up one fucking $8.35 at his shitty job. BRU CAN FUCKING GO TO HELL. They cut hours, and they cut hours, and then they randomly pick one fucking day a week to go back to the old early morning hours of 6-10 instead of 8-10, and don't give any real notice on it, and we're so fucking poor that we have to take every fucking penny they give us. Even if that means that C is working a whole 10 hours a week, it's better than 6 hours. We can't even afford to pay a babysitter anything decent (apparently they make like $12 an hour now) because they'll be making more the C makes, so what's the fucking point of him working if he comes home poorer than before he went to work?

Anyway...back to the whole who to watch J thing. My sister couldn't watch him, my mom and stepdad couldn't watch him, so finally I called my mother-in-law. Bless her heart, she was willing to come up, which includes 90 minutes of driving each way. I got off the phone with her, feeling awful that I had to impose on her that way, and on the verge of tears, and C says "I hope you feel bad." Nice. You asshole. WTF.

I just don't know what to do anymore. We have no money. We are trying to sell our entertainment center. We only have our cell phones, no landline. We have the slowest high speed internet there is, because it's cheaper than buying a landline to have dialup. I don't know if anyone even sells dial-up anymore. And I just smelled something burning...C had put some water on for me to make spaghetti for lunch tomorrow, and I totally forgot. So there's been a pot boiling away all it's water for about 30 minutes. Fanfuckingtastic. Fuck. In case I haven't used enough profanity, fuckity fuck fuck fuck. Haha. Maybe I ruined the pan, that would be just so fucking awesome I just want to jump up and down with glee. FUCK. I wish I could cry. I haven't had a good cry in so long. I just can't cry...what the hell is wrong with me.

Somebody help me. If there's a god, or whatever, help me. Give me strength and patience and for fuck's sake, give C another, better, job.