Do you remember the good ol' days when you used to post your blogs on Myspace and pretty much everyone you'd ever met in your entire existence was on there and would read them and comment? Sadly the days of such instant gratification have ended. I am almost saddened each time I move my blog from one place to another. It feels like throwing away a journal.
Be that as it may, I feel like Livejournal has been only okay for the past few years and friends posts have all but stopped on there. Are they writing stuff somewhere else? Surely no one is posting "notes" on Facebook. I don't know. But for now I guess this will have to suffice.
So, how about some good news? In the very least it will keep my mind off my aura of anxiety I've got going on tonight. Bleh. Fuckin' anxiety.
Milene's husband, Dean, got this awesome job working for a union doing asbestos removal about a month back. All he had to do was pay five hundred bucks for a week-long class to get his certification and he was in like Flynn. Dean told Mikey that he should do it, too, so Mike did. Mike's parents even paid for the class for him. And while Mike was bitching to me about how he felt bad that his parents paid for him to take the class, all I could think was "I should smack you in the face for not realizing what awesome parents you have." Merely because my parents would never do any such thing for me. Ever. My Dad was supposed to help me out with my wedding, paying only for my wedding dress on my request. Needless to say it's been over a year and he only gave me $200 for the thing. So yeah, Mike. Shut yer trap and be thankful that your parents care enough to help you out when you need it.
/end rant
So, Mike takes the class and the teacher says that they need like 5 or 10 guys to help tear down a dam in Port Angeles or some other farthefuckaway place like that. He tells Mike that once he gets his certification card in the mail to call his company and he'll hire him straight away. Even call the Union Hall and request him. So, a mother fuckin' union job. It's funny to me because unions always remind me of Irish gangs, for some reason. Wearing striped sweaters and corduroy pants and suspenders and a half-gnawed cigar in one side of their mouths while they hold their picket sign and scream "STRIKE!" I realize that this a long-ago picture of union workers, as nowadays they wear their all white shoes and denim button down shirts with bad perms and aviator glasses and pace back and forth on little islands in the middle of the road. Some aren't even that creative. Some just sit on lawn chairs and hold their signs looking bored.
Whoa. Strayed a little there, didn't I? Shit.
Anyhoozlebees, Mikey is getting a union job in just a few short days to weeks. Whenever his card comes in the mail. And he's going to be making BANK. And not only that, but the entire family has paid medical and dental, without any out of pocket costs for Mike. AND since I'm kind of thinking that asbestos removal is somewhat seasonal like construction, since he's going to be union he mandatorily gets 50% unemployment benefits, which equal to $750 a week. Shitdamn. If only he weren't on his way to getting mesothelioma, I'd feel a lot better.
Actually, I studied his booklet that he brought home with him and tested him on everything. He knows his stuff. He knows how to stay safe. (Btw, here's a little tidbit of info for you. Asbestos is safe as long as it's "locked in" to a material, be it concrete, tile, or drywall. The crazy motherfucking thing is when the twin towers fell and you saw all that dust? Um, yeah, those two buildings were made with asbestos enhanced building shits. Allllllll those people inhaling that dust with asbestos in it. Kinda scary, right?) Not only that but the union will pay for him to get certified in other classes, should he choose not to do asbestos removal anymore. Which I'm hoping for. Because, shit. The bills need to get paid but I don't want my husband to eventually get lung cancer. I'm not a greedy twit.
So if he works on that dam job or a few other places the instructor of the class mentioned to him, he'll be about 2 hours away from the house. So that's four hours driving time total, each day. I am going to be here for 14 hours by myself with the kids. Holy. Shitballs.
Also, I may have failed to mention that Scotty is not living here anymore. I found a dining room table-sized haul of my shit in his room and I've just had it. The things he stole weren't even that expensive or "valuable", but they all added up to so much mistrust and disappointment that it was just time for him to go. I knew as I was telling him to leave that life was going to get a whole helluva lot harder around here for me and Mike, but still...it needed to be done. I'm not going to have someone I don't trust in my house, even if it is my brother. I've given him an ample amount of chances and if he's never going to learn to stop taking things that don't belong to him, there are going to be worse things for him out there than just getting kicked out.
On the plus side my dad found him a place to live and a job. (Where the fuck was he on that like, 2 years ago when I was telling him that Scotty needed to move out and find a job? Jesus.) But Scotty is living up on Beacon Hill in Seattle now and has a job at what I've determined is kind of like a fast food Thai food chain restaurant. He is living in a basement room in a house with 6 other guys. After he apologized to me, I decided to drop all hard feelings and just let it be. I don't want to lose my brother, after all. I love him dearly, but I think 21 years of taking care of him is enough, especially since he's not even my kid.
I am happy that he's found somewhere to live and is on his way to becoming an adult. I feel like this could have happened years ago if only I would have gotten support from my dad. Anyway, I was worried about scotty for a while, not having anywhere to live. I guess he was staying over at my uncle Bud's but that was a kind of iffy situation. We helped him move all his stuff up to his place last weekend and it was a flood of relief to know that he wasn't going to be homeless or sleeping under a bridge. Aha, I am not heartless after all.
Right now I am making him a grocery shopping guide and recipe book so he'll have some kind of clue how to do these things. I have been working on him for the past year or so, trying to teach him how to cook and shop and whatnot, but I don't think it's sunken in yet. I hope that this guide/recipe book will be of help to him.
So here we are with no caregiver for Austin, Scotty moved out, and Mike is going to be gone for 14 hours a day four days a week. A few days ago I felt like there was a boulder sitting on my chest and my anxiety has been a fucking monster since then. I'm trying to acclimate myself to doing EVERYTHING around here. I mean, other people do it all the time. I should be able to adjust accordingly.
Let me tell you that I CAN do everything, but not without wanting to escape right around 5pm everysingleday. It's sooo much to handle. Even with Fawn just sweeping and doing the dishes that was help. Even with Scotty having to be reminded to do everything 15,000 times, he still at some point managed to do them and it was a big help. Mike has been awesome with taking over a lot of the care for Austin and helping me clean the house, but he's going to be gone. I'm just....ack, I'm overfuckingwhelmed.
I don't even want to think about when school starts. Oh my god, I am going to have to drive Nicky, Violette, and Steven back and forth to school, plus somehow manage to be home to put Austin on the bus and take him off. I feel like my chest is going to explode sometimes when I think about it. I just...I don't know. Now that I think back to when Nicky was born I've ALWAYS had someone there to help me, be it my brother, my dad, or Fawn when she was working for Austin. Now I have no one. And I need someone. Someone to at least help me with Austin or else I'm going to lose my shit. I will be putting an ad up on craigslist as soon as I get my monthly check. They charge for that shit now. A-holes.
Of course, it terrifies me to have someone in my home that I don't even know if I can trust with my child or my belongings. Every caregiver my mother had over the years was either a prostitute, a klepto, a druggie, or just generally psychotic. It's a scary thing to open myself and my child up to. Two words. Background check.
Enough depressing shit, though.
Mike and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary a week and a half ago. It was rather low-key, as neither of us had any money to really do anything. His boss at work gave him a coupon for Black Angus so we did that and played some bar trivia while we were there. Then we went to see Harry Potter again (for me, anyway) in 3D and then came home and shared a bottle of champagne while we played Dungeon Seige 3 on the Xbox. Not your typical anniversary, but it was nice because all the grandparents (and Milene!) took the kids for the whole weekend. We had the house to ourselves for probably the first time since we moved in over 2 years ago. The quiet was eerie, yet nice. I could definitely end up liking it. But yeah, that was it. No grand anniversary presents or anything. But even though I didn't have any money to buy him anything, since it was our first anniversary and the traditional gift is paper I decided to give him a gift of sorts. I promised him I'd read The Lord of the Rings finally. He has seriously been harassing me about it for almost four years. It's his all-time favorite books. He's read them 22 times. Yes, that many. He knows them like the back of his hand. It's one of the few things that he's super into and I figured, shit. I may as well read them so when he talks to me about that stuff I'll finally know what he's talking about. He was absolutely THRILLED OMFG when I grabbed the book nonchalantly out of the bookcase and plopped down on the couch with it. I don't think any present I've ever bought him made him that happy.
Can I just say though, now that I'm starting book two that it just fucking draaaaaaaaaaags on? Shit, I am so tired of reading songs and reading about them walking that I want to pull my hair out. Still, I'm trudging on through because I told him I would. I'm actually even retaining things. And no problems with any questions I have about it. I need only ask the grandmaster of Tolkien himself. Soon it will be over. I just have to keep that in mind.
But I'm totally going to make him read Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice, if he can ever pry his eyelids open long enough to absorb more than the title page of any book before passing abruptly out. We'll see.
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