I do believe we have had a breakthrough.
Dad was up when I got up this morning, despite my best efforts to wait him out. I was expecting some weird kind of shitstorm. He was actually in a good mood, though. Said he had chatted with Aunt Matilda yesterday, apparently about me, and I have no idea what about or why but apparently they were discussing ways I could get assistance, which is a conversation she’s been involved in before. (I have seen what passes for assistance around here and, with the possible exception of housing if I could even get it, all it will do is make my life worse so, unless I’m about to literally starve to death because Dad’s dead and I can’t drive anymore, that’s not bloody likely.)
Dad asked me where I was yesterday and I said I was delivery-driving, so we got into that and long story short, he now thinks I’m employed. I have said all along that this is something like a job, except obviously I’m a contractor and not an employee, but him thinking his daughter Has A Real Job is not a bad thing. It means he now officially gets off my ass.
Best part? He has volunteered to cover my fuel costs.
That is a HUGE load off my mind.
It’s not just about me. Him keeping my tank topped up means we have a means of escape during hurricane season, which is getting to being a bigger and bigger deal thanks to all you yoyos not doing anything about climate change, and I don’t fucking mean electric cars. I won’t get into that here, just wanted to throw in that dig. You now think I’m a moron, so let’s move on. Point is there are multiple reasons for him to do it and in the final tally it will be a huge help to me. I can dig it. Let’s go.
So we ran to Jennings to do a couple errands for him and he filled up my gas tank and then I took him home and then I went to Lafayette. It was not as good a day as yesterday. I got a little over $50 yesterday and then I got a little over $40 today. I have maintained for a while that Fridays are weird; the evenings are usually pretty good but lunchtime is unpredictable. If you’re lucky you get the “holy shit this week has been hell LET’S GET LUNCH” orders, but often you don’t. I may have had some late tips coming in that I won’t know about until tomorrow, but the good news is I did hit today’s goal even if not, so I’m glad. If I get at least $41 tomorrow, I’m in the clear for the auto insurance. I will try really hard to go farther than that without staying in Lafe until nightfall, because that city is crazy and I’m not comfortable enough to drive it in the dark yet. I’m hoping for $60ish so I can have the roughly $20 to go ahead and get Rory’s fan domain out of the way. That’s coming up due on the 23rd. (I had bought it the day before his fiftieth birthday.) But if I don’t get Rory’s bit all the way done tomorrow, I still have Monday.
I still think it’s a good idea to do this every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday but instead of hustling for $40 or $60, aim for $20 every time, at least after I get this month’s bills in the bag. Hang on, this will make sense in a minute. If I get the $20 all three days, that’s $60 a week. That makes $240 in a month. I wanted $200 to cover my have-to-pay bills. Phone is a little over $43 a month so let’s say $45. Hosting is $35 (and I’m thinking more and more that I might want to change hosting services… if I can trust a cheaper one. I moved to this one because the previous one allowed hackers to change my shit). Insurance is $112. That’s $192 total. Close enough. That other $48 can be random other shit that comes up once in a while. I just opened a PayPal savings account where the interest rate is between 4 and 5 percent(!) and no fees, so I’ll just chuck it in there until I need something.
That’s my stopgap to keep things going. I can do other things to try to increase income when I’m not driving in Lafe.
Enough of this feast-or-famine panic bullshit.
I wish we had figured this out last time I was here. Honestly Dad should have backed the fuck off knowing I was still getting $600 a month from Matt, and then I could have conserved my car. I am so tired of people not respecting me where I am and always wanting me somewhere else NOW whether I am ready for it or not. This isn’t their fucking life, it’s MY fucking life, and I AM THE ONE WHO SUFFERS IF SHIT GOES WRONG. I’m still pissed off at Elizabeth telling me my actions “affect other people” as she was kicking me out to live in my car again. I will never deny she had the right to ask me to leave, but that remark was hypocritical as hell. YOU ALL AFFECT OTHER PEOPLE. I am a people too. You also affect ME, so how about recognizing that finally? But I can’t have a say in my own damn life unless it’s a say YOU agree with. Fuck off.
(Speaking of which. I still don’t wholly regret going back to Ohio two years ago. One, I love Ohio. It’s home unless I get to visit Scotland and find I love Scotland too, and that’s never going to happen because Poor, so there you go. Two, if I hadn’t gone back, Matt would have dicked me around instead of keeping the paperwork current on the car and then signing it over properly. I like to think he lived in terror of me coming by the house and screaming at him if he didn’t stop dicking me around, because I hate that motherfucker and I wish he were scared of me. The past 21.5 years would have gone one fuck of a lot differently if he had been. For one, when I got fed up with his and his people’s bullshit and dumped him the first time, he’d have fucking stayed gone and I’d have been better off.)
(I was not in the habit of going to the house and screaming at him. We had a few arguments over twenty years where I did anything close to screaming at him, and I was already in the house with him, and I literally mean I could count those specific arguments on one hand, but somewhere down in between his three brain cells he decided it would work in his favor if he pretended I was this habitually screaming harpy, and clearly it worked because everyone we had as mutual friends has shitcanned me, because clearly me swearing on a blog is exactly the same as me throwing a brick through his front window, and I’ve never done the latter either. I don’t know who the fuck everyone thinks I am, but you’re way off the fucking beam. That’s okay. You get to find out what it’s like to believe him on no evidence when he gets bored with you. Do not come crying to me when, not if, he makes that happen to you. You will not like my reaction.)
I know. I still live too much in the past. It’s hard to let go of it when I’m still mired in the immediate consequences of it. This stage of my life is about building a new Present for which I get to have different consequences in the Future. I just haven’t figured out what the fuck that looks like yet when I’m still living in the blast zone of my past fuckups. Bear with me.
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Well, anyway. So after I got done driving delivery (and I now sort of know where Carencro is, and it was Breaux Bridge yesterday), I stopped in Crowley to go to Walmart. I still have gift-card balance and, dig this? I had over a hundred bucks in rewards points in my Humana app. What??? I have no idea where it came from. I am not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. So, not remembering how much I had left on the most recent card (they only let you make cards worth up to $25, in $5 increments), I pulled out another $25. The reason I went to the Crowley Walmart store specifically, okay, there were two reasons. One, I didn’t plan on going to Jennings and then going home from that direction. It would have just added too much distance to the trip and I was tired. Two, I’ve been working on a crocheted twin-size blanket sporadically since I was in the shelter last year. I no longer like to leave projects unfinished, even if it takes me fucking forever to get them done. Problem was I had just about used up the Soft Navy and Black yarn colors (Red Heart Super Saver). Jennings Walmart had both colors, but in the large skeins and I only wanted the regular-size ones because I don’t know how much more yarn I need, and I didn’t want to wind up with a huge amount of leftovers. I knew Crowley had both colors in the regular skeins. So I’ve got those now, and I needed a few other things, and it ended up being just a smidgen over $18 for the whole shebang, and most of that was on the old card and only a literal few cents off the new one, so I was fairly pleased with myself.
I haven’t decided what to actually do with the blanket when it’s done. When I began it I was thinking “give this to the shelter” as a thank-you for taking me in. I might yet do that, but if Dad sees it finished and claims it, he gets first dibs. I picked the colors I did (the other one is some kind of gray… charcoal?) because I thought perhaps the shelter had an excess of so-called “feminine” blanket colors and I wanted to do something nice in blue and gray. So there you go. They’re also the sorts of colors Dad likes, so there’s that.
That reminds me. I am losing two domains this month because Poor. I MAY be able to rescue the second one but I’m pretty sure the first one is a lost cause. That’s the bistitchuality.com domain. And I have thought it over and I want to say, and this completely doesn’t matter to anyone else but I am just sharing, that I have no problem with bisexual people (except when they’re homophobic… sometimes they are) or with the LGB community — I should think fucking not, I spend half my time calling out homophobia from the genderdorks these days — but the idea of having a domain and yarny-stuff online store with a name that sounds anything like that community just doesn’t sit well with me anymore. It’s not a moral thing, it’s political anger about what far too many of them are allowing to happen in their name. But I still wanted to have a site about knitting and crochet, so the name question vexed me. Seems like all the good names were taken years ago.
But! I have now come up with a brilliant idea and I need to whois it to make sure it’s available and I will be THRILLED AS FUCK if it is. I will say no more than that in case an asshole is reading this. Let’s just say it is not likely to be something someone else has thought of, and it has heart connections for me. And that is not a clue to the name. That is very broad and vague and there are no clues in it at all. When I reveal the name — if I get this done; knowing me, I’ll fucking forget for like five years or something — any of you who knew me in my old life would understand what I meant.
Which, none of you did because you’re all fucking bots. You know it. I know it. Moving the fuck on now.
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SOOOOO… My last real period was in February. The… sixth? I think? And I think I had some spotting later that month and possibly in early March, but nothing to write home about, and it just kept getting lighter and lighter every time it happened.
I have been afraid to get my hopes up because the last time I lived here, I’m gonna say that between January and March I had no period either, and I got my hopes up then, and then it cranked right back the fuck up a couple months into my being back in Ohio and was interfering with my fucking job search, so… thanks? So I’m worried something like that will happen again. But so far, no dice, and this has gone longer than it did last time. Yay? I hope?
However. I noticed something interesting, and here’s where I get into TMI so if you are a family member, I recommend you just stop reading here. If you don’t, that’s on you and I don’t want to hear it later. Ever.
Okay. They gone? Who cares. Moving on now. So, probably about once a month, and probably while I was ovulating, I’d get frisky and then do something about it. Not WITH anyone, but if you thought that at fifty I don’t know how my bits work well enough to benefit from it, boy do you ever not know how the world works.
So normally I’d do that thing about once a month, and then, here’s the interesting bit I noticed… I would spot the next day and then start my period not long after. But there were times I would get Extra Friskies at other times in the month, not real often but now and again, and I’d still get the spotting if not the period. Probably the stupid fibroids. Fuckers. But none of that’s happening now. It’s awesome.
No wait, that was one part of the interesting bit because we haven’t gotten to the other part of the current situation. I hadn’t gotten any fun in a while, if self-serve, so I did it again recently and not only did I not have spotting the next day, I also did not have spotting the day after the next time I did it and, unusually for me, this was twice in one week.
Bonus: The rousing conclusion felt different, too. Better. More… intense. More like it used to feel back before my reproductive system went into a complete fucking tailspin.
Legend has it that fibroids shrink as a sufferer goes into menopause. Hormonal changes. Oh man, I fucking hope that’s what it is. I missed Fun Me. Looks like she’s starting to come (ahem) back.
But that’s another reason I’m hopeful that this is finally it. My poor fun park. If she doesn’t get to party anymore (is a party by yourself really a party?), at least she gets a well-deserved retirement. Respect.
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This doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be up for fun times with a buddy if I ever got the chance again with someone actually worth it. (In theory. In practice, I look like a fucking nightmare with my clothes off so honey, it’s not you, it really is me.)
It does, however, mean I don’t have to worry about certain potential consequences anymore. WOOHOO
…
Okay. Off to bed, to dream of large men. Mmmmm. Big man. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee