Things I don't want to think about

1. My cousin Gail is in the hospital. She's been living with inflammatory breast cancer for a few years, but it looks like she's losing her battle. I don't want to think about it.
2. Money. Don't even want to think about it.
3. My baby not sleeping through the night, or even close. I am trying so hard not to hate resent all those people whose babies sleep and only wake up once or even twice a night. SO HARD.

Hey, I think I forgot my meds this morning. Whee.

10 Things I Hate About My Bank

We bank with a well-known chain. I have hated them for a while, but we are finally taking steps toward leaving them (to the extent that we can, as we still have a loan with them), which feels *fabulous* by the way. Here are just *SOME* reasons why we hate the devil bank.

1. "Free" online bill pay is not free. It's $7 a month.
2. Overdraft "protection" at $35 a pop, even when my paycheck went through the same day, they just retroactively posted the overdrafts earlier than the paycheck, even though the paycheck went through first and the overdrafts weren't even "pending" at the time the check went through.
3. Non-helpful customer service when I call about above overdraft timing (i.e. "there's nothing I can do, because that 5 minutes difference is forever")
4. Not assisting us to get caught up on being perpetually in the hole due to direct deposit advances.
5. This article. NOT COOL, jackasses.
6. ATMs are hard for me to reach from the car with my stubby arms (ok, that's not really specific to this bank, but whatever).
7. Charging a maintenance fee greater than the interest earned on a savings account so that we actually lose money by having the savings account.
8. "Overdraft" credit card interest rate. 30%. For serious.
9. Not free ATMs.
10. They just don't give a flying fuck about how much they are hurting the average person trying to get out of debt. Money grubbing assholes. Plus, dog killers.

C HAS A JOB!!

After months of searching, applying, and hearing nothing, C found an open position at a neighborhood liquor store (one of the largest in the state, sweet!). Since he's recently taken a beer judging certification course, he actually has credentials for working there. So he applied, got interviewed yesterday, and got the job today!

It's going to involve a somewhat hectic schedule for everyone, but it will be worth it to have less financial worry. He'll be working from 3:30pm til either 7:30 or 9:30 at night for a total of 20-30 hours a week. This means that I will be working from 6:30am til 2:30pm. Yikes. However, that leaves me more time to spend with J, and take the dogs for walks, and keep the house neat. Another bonus? C is making more to start here than he did after 2 years at a national baby supply retailer. Um, yeah. Sweet! It's going to be rough for the first month, but then it's smooth sailing and we can even TTC when we planned to! Yay! Can you tell I'm just through the roof? I keep smiling like an idiot.

Thank you, Universe, for listening to my plea.

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.

Happy Birthday to me.

Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 26. About 45 minutes before I had to leave, I discovered that somehow a database with all the data I have collected for one of our studies was messed up. Messed up as in the last 4 months of data are GONE (we have hard copies, but man is that a pain in the ass to re-enter). Panic for about 40 minutes, then realize that there is nothing in there after August 7, and come to the conclusion that somehow the file got switched with an old, backed-up version yesterday, and breathe a big sigh of relief. Hopefully I will be able to find the most recent version on Monday and not have to re-enter lots and lots of data. On the upside though, nobody forgot my birthday! Last year my mom didn't call me because she'd talked to me the day before, and my dad just plain forgot. Add some crazy fun 3 weeks postpartum hormones, and it made me pretty darn upset. This year though, everybody called me! It's the little things in life, really...C made me some fantastic potroast for dinner last night though, and it went very very well with the wine he got me for Christmas.

Onto today. I took today off from work, since I had to process sputum yesterday (if you don't know what sputum is, it's exactly what the word sounds like it should be). The plan: take the car to get the brakes done, take J to get his portrait done at Kiddie Kandids (free portraits for birthdays! You get a free 8x10, or if you're smooth like me you can finagle 2 5x7s instead), then go to the zoo with my big sisters and the kiddos.
Reality: Took the car in at 8:00am, they inspect the brakes, etc and return to tell us that the rotors had been machined down way too thin by the previous brake maintenance that had been done on the car (before we had it), so they wore out much faster than they should have, and that was why we were having the metal-on-metal grinding. Well, that and we waited a while before taking it in. Pricetag? $502. Yep. Bonus? Yeah, our timing belt should have been replaced 10K miles ago. Pricetag for that plus the water pump? $833, after tax. Yippee! Nothing like getting new brakes and a new timing belt for my birthday. So we're taking the car back tomorrow to get the timing belt done. By the time the brakes were done, it was 10:30, which was when the appointment at KK was for. J was getting hungry, and needed a clean diaper, and so I figured it was late enough I may as well take care of him. The family bathroom at the mall does not have a changing table, so I laid J on the counter and he promptly flips his legs into the sink. The automatic sink. Which promptly turned on and soaked his pants. Paper towels to the rescue! Nurse the toddler for a few minutes and off we went to the studio. Since we missed our appointment, we couldn't get in until 11:15. We were supposed to meet my sisters at 12:00, which ended up being 1:00. We did get some really great pictures and I got my 2 free 5x7s (no need to even buy a package).
Onward to the zoo! There were my sisters and I, plus two almost-4-year-olds plus an 18-month-old, plus J, and my sister N is pregnant with twins so she was more than a little worn out by the end. In all though it was lots of fun. We went through the Tropical Discovery, which was really cool. J liked looking at the fish and the turtles. I don't think he actually noticed the other stuff too much, other than maybe the giraffes. Plus we saw the Malaysian Tapir dancing and playing around, and making squeaky snorty noises. The older kids kept asking what would eat them or kill them (morbid, I know), and a peacock actually stole part of J's sandwich right out of his hand. The kid didn't even react, but the rest of us got a good laugh out of it.
And that was my busy, busy birthday celebration.

What a pain in the ass

I don't know what to do. I am supposed to work M, T, F approximately 9-5, and W and Th I come in later because C works those mornings and I stay with J, so I end up working about 11-7. Which *seemed* to be fine, but lately every week on either W or Th or both I have sputum to process or a bronch to collect samples from at like 8 or 9 in the morning. So I have to find a sitter for J, which is a pain in the ass, because none of our family is really very close by (at least, none that can babysit, my mom is close but works 50+ hours a week), they are all 40+ minutes away from our house. The closest is my older sister, but she is 40 minutes from our house and about 30 from my work, so my commute time about doubles. She's great, but I cannot drive that far more than once every few weeks, so it's insane to try to use her as our emergency sitter every frickin week. We could put J in daycare, but what's the point for 3 hours at a time? Also, if we had to take him to daycare a couple days a week, there goes everything C makes, so therefore defeats the purpose of him having a job.

I am just so fed up with this bullshit. I need a new fucking job but there's nothing closer to our house that I am qualified for, and we can't sell our house in this market and even if we could we wouldn't be able to afford anything else. This institution claims to pay within the average range for technicians, but that's a load of crap. We looked on the state's website, we get paid in the 10th percentile. Yep, they sure love their research bitches. I could earn 40% more at another place doing basically the same job if I was willing to have an hour long commute, but I'm just not willing to spend 2 hours a day-minimum- driving instead of 1 to 1 1/2...I also can't quit right now anyway because I am indispensible. I would have to train my replacement, which would probably take a couple months. In the meantime, our money is all going to pay our bills, we don't really have enough for all that plus gas and food.

Oh, and C didn't get that job we were hoping for after all. And Sarah Palin scares me, and she gives Alaskans, women, and hunters a bad name.

Yeah, I'm just having a fan-fucking-tastic day. Is it 5 yet?!

Argh!

C is a musician, a bassist more specifically. He plays jazz, usually, but can play other genres if he so desires. Anyway, he was in the process of working with a local singer in trying to get a small group together for gigs, probably by next summer. If this were to work out, 10 gigs a month would replace my income and I could stay at home part time, and cut back my hours at work to half time(ish). Well, it turns out the singer isn't going to be able to do it after all. On top of it, we have no money. What else is new, right? Yeah...so we're going to try everything we can to get some money to make it through this month, but that's what we do every month. I am going to sell (hopefully) my MK inventory to another MK consultant, which will help somewhat, and we're going to sell our entertainment center. Between all this, somehow, we are going to pay our mortgage. Hmm. Not sure how that's working out, but I guess we'll manage. We are very fortunate that our mortgage is financed through/by my grandmother, since we bought the house from her, so payments are more flexible than they would be with a bank. I am just really frustrated and stressed about all this right now. But hey, at least my meds are working so I'm not fighting off a panic attack as well.

I'm also really not so thrilled with my job anymore. I mean, the people are okay but I don't really have any friends here. Well, I have one friend. I really don't have many friends in general, at least not that I see on any sort of regular basis (like more than once or twice a year...). It's really hard to have friends and do stuff with them when you live far away from them, when you are the only one with a kid, and when most things friends do cost money (i.e. shopping, dining out, meeting for coffee, etc). But I digress. My job is really not very interesting. I process samples that come from people's lungs, one way or another. I listen to the other people in the lab bitch about things that I have no interest in, or make plans with each other for the weekend, or whathaveyou. I feel isolated. I know they aren't doing it on purpose, but my part of the lab is naturally isolated; I work on human samples, and with our research clinic, and the rest of the lab does not. They have other projects and collaborators, and they have a different boss than I do. So there's sort of a natural division there, and I know that nobody is consciously pushing me to the periphery, but I really does feel that way. I miss my grad school lab, we all got along great and had a blast together. Of course, I don't miss anything else about Seattle, but that was a big thing. I am now in such a quandry, because I need the money from my job, and I need something close to my house (which my current job is not especially, but it is the closest job in molecular biology that I could get), and we need insurance, but I am not happy at my job. I could get a higher paying job elsewhere (maybe) but it would mean spending 2 hours a day commuting instead of 1.5 hours a day. I want to teach, but that requires getting certified, which requires classes that cost money (though my work reimburses up to $2000 a year for full time employees to further education) and I don't want to teach while I am actively having children because I've heard maternity leave is a pain, and pumping is near impossible to manage while teaching. *sigh*

In happier news, J started crawling yesterday! I was at work and missed it, of course, but I will see it soon.

Idiots

I had to send a sample to a central processing center in Kansas, because I have to prove to the company that I am trained and know how to process the samples for their studies. I sent this sample, on 5 kg of dry ice, on Monday. It arrived in Kansas, and they promptly forwarded it to...Quebec, Canada. Why? Because they are stupid and do not read the shipping labels addressed to them. Now I am trying to track down the person who called me from the pharmaceutical company in Quebec (she didn't give me her contact information, and I didn't catch her name when I spoke to her) and tell her to throw away the sample, not ship it back to us. Ugh. What a pain in the ass. This study is SO not worth it. But that's why they pay me the big bucks (as my dad would say).

I do NOT need this stress right now. My meds have been adjusted to 75mg sertraline instead of 50 (yay, I hope). I am in the process of finding a psychiatrist (since my midwives have about the same amount of expertise as a GP, so they can't do much more for me) and waiting to hear back from my insurance about what they cover regarding mental health care,. I know it will be a $40 copay, but I don't know how many times I have to make the copay, etc. It ain't gonna happen if I have to make a $40 copay twice a month or something, we just can't afford it right now. We actually can't afford anything right now, we already overdrew our checking account with our mortgage payment and we're maxed out on one credit card. We're desperately trying not to use the other cards, since we're trying to get rid of our debt. We actually had PB &J for dinner last night. When I called the bank Tuesday to find out if they could/would lower the rate on one card, they pretty much told me that they can't do anything, and that nobody will help us until we've defaulted on our payments. Nice. So, all you people out there in our shoes, where you know you're heading toward financial trouble, just keep on truckin because no one will help til you're already totally screwed. Awesome.