One more night before I can start over again. It's been not quite a weeks since I got home from Reno. Things aren't particularly bleak per se, but it ain't exactly beer and skittles here on the ranch. Joy has been holding up as well as can be expected for someone who's basically been forced to couch-surf for the last two months between our friends at the Evergreen Terrace apartments - where we're on the waiting list, by the way - and trying to maintain sanity as best she can. We're both stressed and angry at everything. But we do our best to apologize to each other before we go to bed, wherever that bed may be.
But tomorrow is a new day, and a new and more permanent residence will be waiting for us. Even before I got home from Reno, we'd been scouting out RV parks for the fifth-wheel trailer that Dad bought for us on the cheap only to wind up spending almost double what he paid for it to fix it up - much to his chagrin. We'd pretty much settled on setting up shop at Monroe Estates just east of town, but their insistence that my father co-sign for us pretty much scuppered the deal and sent us scrambling for a new location. On a lark we tried the Peabody Creek RV Park downtown happened to have spaces available and was willing to overlook my temporary lack of employment - more on that later - because of my comparative abundance of cash. In the morning we get the electricity turned on and change our address for quite possibly only a few months.
Why do I say that? Turns out that Joy's attorney has wrangled a new hearing for her Disability case in late September. Given that we're looking at seven years of back SS/D pay handed to us should the judge finally rule in our favor, even the revelation that Joy's medical bills have us $27,000 in the hole is suddenly kinda trivial.
And I doubt that I'll be unemployed all that long. A day or two before I left for Elko, I took a flyer and threw up an application onto Wal-Mart's website for any position that didn't require a lot of customer interaction - mostly graveyard-shift jobs. The day after I pulled into Elko, I got a phone call from the Port Angeles store's personnel office asking if I could come in today for an interview! After explaining the situation to their personnel manager most carefully, he agreed to keep me informed should an opening come up after I got home. The very next morning I got a similar call from the Sequim store's personnel manager, with a similar result. Then the personnel manager from the PA store called me again the following morning, only to remember the conversation we'd had forty-eight hours before and apologize profusely for waking me up from a deep slumber. And then he called me a third time two weeks later as I sat patiently between gigs in my old pop-up trailer - I guess he likes me.
By the way, the trailer is no longer mine/ours. I sold the thing to a nice young Hispanic couple, only for them to wreck the thing on the drive home. And then they had the audacity to demand their money back, claiming that I knowingly sold them a defective vehicle! I offered them my sympathy and nothing else before leaving the scene - we'd towed it down from Washington without incident, after all. I don't think they were being entirely truthful to me. Welcome to Craigslist, kids - everything is sold 'as is', and the moment they handed me the money and I handed them the title, they were on their own. I sold them a functional unit, and they knew what was wrong with it going in. Sucks that they wrecked it, but that's not my problem.
And I'm trying to get a new band started here in town. But it seems that everyone is in survival mode right now - myself included. Nothing is sacrosanct right now, anything and everything can potentially be sacrificed should I need the money. The Wal-Mart job is only minimum-wage, but the hours should be sufficient to keep us in the RV park for the time being. And at my father's suggestion I put in an app at Clallam Transit for a paratransit driver. I think I could do that. And there's always fast-food work or some other sort of temp or part-time job should Wal-Mart not be enough. I just have to bear down for the time being and get us across the finish line - which with any luck should be sometime this fall. I just have to do what I have to do, and hold on for the time being.
By the way, the trailer is no longer mine/ours. I sold the thing to a nice young Hispanic couple, only for them to wreck the thing on the drive home. And then they had the audacity to demand their money back, claiming that I knowingly sold them a defective vehicle! I offered them my sympathy and nothing else before leaving the scene - we'd towed it down from Washington without incident, after all. I don't think they were being entirely truthful to me. Welcome to Craigslist, kids - everything is sold 'as is', and the moment they handed me the money and I handed them the title, they were on their own. I sold them a functional unit, and they knew what was wrong with it going in. Sucks that they wrecked it, but that's not my problem.
And I'm trying to get a new band started here in town. But it seems that everyone is in survival mode right now - myself included. Nothing is sacrosanct right now, anything and everything can potentially be sacrificed should I need the money. The Wal-Mart job is only minimum-wage, but the hours should be sufficient to keep us in the RV park for the time being. And at my father's suggestion I put in an app at Clallam Transit for a paratransit driver. I think I could do that. And there's always fast-food work or some other sort of temp or part-time job should Wal-Mart not be enough. I just have to bear down for the time being and get us across the finish line - which with any luck should be sometime this fall. I just have to do what I have to do, and hold on for the time being.
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