You Got What You Get Until It’s Taken Again

Just as I was fretting how I’d be able to make my mortgage payment and deal with all the other due dates, I received an e-mail from ODJFS notifying me I’d receive four weeks of back pay.  And from the amount in the “Pay Remaining” box, it seems I’ll have a few more months worth of funds available.

Literally, minutes ago I was like millions of others facing uncertainty.

Waiting for  assistance.

Worrying about bills.

Hoping for a Tier 5.

Wanting to know if it will ever get better.

Or just remain okay.  At least for a little while longer.

On second thought, I guess I still am one of those millions.

Sure, I have money now.  But that and the checks coming in the following weeks will go toward paying bills.  Heck, I have a property tax bill due next month that equals three unemployment checks.

Despite what the Republicans in the Senate believe, unemployment isn’t one long summer vacation.  I’m not spending my money (which is the equivalent of $8 an hour) on ice cream and rollercoasters.

Jerks.

My Urban Garden 6-18-10: Repairing My Hummingbird Feeder

Yesterday I made some hummingbird nectar on the stove, poured it into the hummingbird feeder and placed it in the freezer to cool.

Then I forgot about it until this morning.

And then I learned that when frozen sugar water thaws the glass bottle it’s in will crack and break apart.

One thing I knew for certain though:  I don’t have the money to buy a new hummingbird feeder.

The perch/feeder part was fine, but finding a replacement bottle with the right size neck to screw it onto was difficult.   Living near a convenience store in a shabby neighborhood, I have the literal pick of the litter when it comes to bottles.  On the sidewalks and in parking lots and alleys are plastic soda bottles, tall 40-ouncers, and other bottles of assorted sizes and shapes.

But they were all either too big or too small.

However, the strout 1980’s Sprite bottle I salvaged from the cistern last month?  That did the trick.

I added a hose clamp, some wire.   And soon my hummingbirds were thirsty no more.

Well, It Could Be 1930′s Kentucky Worse

Finished K87′s garden.  Another $72.  Another free lunch.  This time homemade egg salad.  She gave me a jar of homemade quince jelly to take home.

We discussed her life in Depression Era Kentucky.  The self-sufficiency many Americans have been rediscovering like canning and sewing was just a way of life for her back then.  People starved if they didn’t find ways to preserve food, and by the end of the winter her family practically was.

So now I need to get about $480 in 14 days.   That’s what will keep my head above water.  I’m gambling that Congress will pass a Tier 5, but I know the odds are lousy.

Could be worse.   But it could be better.

About $480 better.

Tears of Loss, Tears of Borrow

I worked all day on an 87 year old woman’s garden.  I’ll call her K87.  Another person that my lady barber has recommended me to for garden work.  K87 is a sweet woman, but kept insisting I take a break and drink the ice water she provided.  She even fixed me lunch.

I listened to her talk about her late husband, who she misses very much and suffered such pain the last few months of his life.  He tried his best to hide it from her when she’d visit him in the hospital, but she knew.  She’d sometimes arrive earlier than usual and hear his cries from the hallway.

She got up from the table with tears brimming in her eyes and said she wanted to show me something.  From a nearby shelf, in a tidy little stack, were a few items she had gathered after his death: a handwritten shopping list found in the car as well as little notes discovered tucked in pants and shirt pockets.  She explained he was always jotting something down.  These and a couple other items—everyday but tangible—seemed to be as cherished as love letters or handwritten  poetry.

Just what can you say to an old woman who has lost her true love?

Came home and planted zinnias, sunflower, and basil.  A woman on the sidewalk started talking to me.  She was surprised I lived alone in such a big house and questioned me about why I didn’t have a girlfriend.  Then she wrote down her phone number, saying maybe we should go out and have a beer and shoot some pool.  I’m not exactly a beer and shoot some pool type of guy, though I didn’t say that.  Her eagerness was odd.  I’m used to women being hesitant.

She told me, “I’m not some prostitute.  I’m just a sista that likes white guys, that’s all.”

 And more power to you, I thought.  But you offered me your phone number before you even asked what my first name is.

Later there was a really obese woman sitting on my retaining wall and wearing clothes that were much too short.  She was bawling her eyes out, thick blobby tears dripping down her red cheeks.  She said she had absolutely no money and needed some cash to get by.  Boy, did she ever choose the wrong person to ask.  I decided to just leave her be and let her cry it out.

Tonight, I added all the bills due in the next few weeks.  I’ve got to earn $550 between now and July 4^th just to meet the bills.

Hanging by a Penny

Five weeks of ODJFS questionnaires and still no payment.  I pray a Tier 5 comes.  It seems a horrible gamble, but unless I earn $600, I have no way of paying my mortgage, health insurance or credit card.

Wrote checks for gas, HCTC and electricity and there was only a penny left in my checking account.

I responded to Friday’s answering machine message about a $190 research study.  But that one had been filled up.  However, I applied for another one, involving $150 for mouthwash testing.  But during the question and answer portion my name was given a red light.  Guess they already had enough fortysomething test subjects.

This evening, on my way to the meeting with DeVry’s financial services department, I took a detour to avoid a traffic jam.  As I waited for the exit ramp line to move forward, I spotted two fifties and a twenty dollar bill lying in the grass.

$120 just lying there?  The paper felt like real money paper.  No ink was coming off on my fingers.  But could this be a little too good to be true?

After the meeting, I took the bills to the bank to be verified, and it turned out all three were counterfeit.  I should have known.  The teller took my name and phone number down.  Just what I need: to be suspected of counterfeiting.  I should have waited for the bills to be verified before filling out a deposit slip.  But when you’re hanging by a penny and three bill due dates are hanging over you like storm clouds, you get a little anxious.

Pulling Cats and Chasing Dogs

Returned to Dr.L’s garden for what was supposed to take four hours.  Just weed the thick carpet of seedlings and prune the dogwood tree in back.  Just four hours.  But even with rain delays, I ended up working seven.  That darn sapling carpet is so time consuming, like pulling cats off a screen door. Like thousands of little stitches that have to be removed individually, roots and all.

The unsprayed ones are easier to pull out whole than the dead ones that she’d sprayed earlier.  Of course, she sprayed most of the bed.  Grabbing and ripping them out in clumps won’t work.  Mostly just the leaves come off, leaving dozens of needle-thin stems standing.  The wiring and tree roots crisscrossing just underneath the ground make it a sort of no-hoe zone.

The baby bunny returned.  He was there in the thicket of seedlings.  Stayed there beside me while I weeded.  He even allowed me to hold him and carry him over to the dianthuses.

Dr.L suggested I should let her dog Toby out of the garage if her friends who usually stopped by couldn’t make it.  No need to worry….Toby is a good dog…he’ll stay close by….if not then call him back.

Yeah, well, once Toby learned his owner was nowhere around he started roaming farther away from the house and was reluctant to come back the first time I called.  The next time I looked up from my weed pulling he had  disappeared.  I went down the length of the driveway.  No Toby.  He came running back nearly a half hour later after doing who knows what on someone else’s property.  Will not letting Toby out tomorrow, that’s for sure.

When I wasn’t imagining how I could tactfully explain to someone that their dog had run away from home, I tried figuring out what sort of garden care income I could earn over the next couple of months.  There must be more people out there who love flowers but don’t want to get their hands dirty.  $450—about 57 hours—and I could pay the rest of the bills for the month.

But you can’t count your chickens before they hatch.  Especially if I’m not even sure I have the hen to lay the eggs.

Afternoons in the McMansion-ized Country

For the last couple days I’ve been working on a garden in a very posh area outside of Bellbrooke.  Huge homes with long driveways the length of city blocks and acres of green grass.  Ms.NC’s recommended me to the owner, a dentist.  She had once done her window treatments.

It’s a lovely yard at the top of a high hill, overlooking several miles of woodland countryside.  My first day, I saw a deer at the base of the hill.  We watched one another for awhile before he started scratching himself behind the ear with his rear leg and then jumped back into the forest, probably off to find a hosta snack elsewhere.  Dragonflies the size of toy planes hover about and the air is loud with bird songs while I work. A baby brown bunny leapt out of a hyacinth I was trimming.

Compared to my urban lot, this was like gardening in a Disney movie.

She has extra work for me to do, replanting her hostas and pruning her dogwood and hollies.  But my main task is to weed out tens of thousands of little tree seedlings.  She had sprayed them, but seemed surprised they died and remained there gray and petrified instead of slowly evaporating away.

It’s odd how many people spray weed killer and think it works like a phaser.

I’ve pulled maple saplings and, of course, walnut seedlings thanks to many a mischievous squirrel.  Yet I haven’t faced anything like these things, which covered the ground like carpeting.  I’ll finish up tomorrow.

Afford school? Riiiight.

Seems I’ll be using my credit card bill to pay the water bill.  Still no word from the state about my jobless benefits.

Cleaned up the pruned branches and limbs from Ms.NC’s yard.  Took me half a dozen trips to get it all hauled away though.  That’s what happens when you don’t have a truck and have to use an Elantra.

Maybe it’s because I was driving in the fancier part of town; but I noticed a lot of pickups with hauling trailers piled high with pruned debris headed for the dump.  I guess you don’t notice this landscaping commerce until you’re transporting tree branches yourself.

I felt like such a newbie, a landscaping rookie.  My car probably looked like some sort of Rose Parade float turned inside out.  I swear I made a cop do double take.

The first few hauls, I cut the limbs down into manageable pieces and arranged as much as possible in the car.

But I had this appointment to speak to someone at DeVry about their courses.  It seems I qualified for some sort of scholarship because of my grades at the other school I just graduated from; and they wanted to talk.

So as the time for the appointment drew closer, I started cutting less and just crammed as much as I could in the trunk and on the seats for the last two hauls.

Why did I even agree to meet with a DeVry rep?  Maybe because she was so persistent.  Maybe because I was curious about the scholarship.  And I’ll admit, the multimedia courses interested me.

But as it turned out, even with the scholarship (which seemed really more like a promotional coupon than a reward for scholastic merit), I’d still need to take out student loans totaling $4,000 a term, which means I’d be $12,000 in student debt by the time I got another degree.

She insisted there were several scholarships and grants I could qualify for, and they could help me search for them and provided me with paperwork.  I agreed to fill out some forms and meet with their financial aid rep.

Me, the guy who had to use his credit card to pay the water bill.

Hiding Her Tears

Another day, another $75 from landscaping.  Spent most of the day pruning Ms.NC’s gargantuan aspen tree, removing some gangly branches and limbs that were scraping her roof like a huge monster claw.

Ms.NC recommended me to a friend of hers.  She says that job could last a couple weeks since this woman has two acres of land.  She also said she has several friends, and I could make $100 a day during the warm season.

Ka-ching.

Any money I can get will be helpful, considering the state still isn’t paying.

I won’t charge her for the branch clean up tomorrow.  She’s paid me a total of $150 and she can’t afford cable or internet.  Also, she received notice that her house would be foreclosed on if she can’t negotiate a mortgage adjustment later this week.  She got teary-eyed talking about losing her decorating business as well as the recent deaths of family and loved ones.  Now she could lose her house, and she felt ashamed.

I tried my best to assure her she shouldn’t.  She made an excuse about going inside and finding her purse so as to pay me, but I knew she wanted time to collect herself and not start sobbing in front of me.

This is a Graduation Ceremony?

I attended my graduation the other day.  Even with the knowledge I’d receive an award, this felt more like an obligation than an important ceremony.

I’m glad Mom didn’t drive all the way from Indiana to attend this function because in some ways it reminded me of the school: rushed and disorganized, and perhaps a little embarrassing to admit that you actually attended it.

I should’ve known something was up when my supposedly surprise award was listed in the program, and two other people were also receiving the same award.  We had no class valedictorian or student council president.  Our guest speaker was a state congressman who made a few remarks about commitment and following career goals.  It wasn’t until he fell back upon conservative talking points like patriotism and honoring the flag that he seemed at ease, or maybe just a little more practiced.  I much preferred my human relations instructor’s speech, which seemed genuine and thoughtful: two things sorely lacking in this diploma giveaway.

Two days ago I’d attended my niece’s high school graduation.  A little high school where a few people in the crowd were dressed like they’d spent the day at a water park.   And yet there was much more audience decorum displayed in that ceremony than in mine.

Almost as soon as the ceremony began, several family members started coming down out of the bleachers and walking in the center and side aisles, taking pictures or filming video of grads seated or coming off the stage after receiving their diplomas, sometimes stopping the lines.

At one point, one woman’s husband or father couldn’t get his camera to work, so he had her stay on the exiting stairs as other students received their diplomas.   Finally the guy got it to work, but he then insisted on taking several pictures while a growing number of people stood behind her, waiting to leave the stage. Eventually a student in the receiving line hesitated after her name was called because there wasn’t be enough room to walk after being handed her diploma.  The guy kept snapping away though.

“Hillbilly College,” a health tech grad behind me who was observing all this interference muttered to her friend.

“Well…” she said, attempting to excuse what was going on.

“C’mon, we both know stuff like this isn’t happening across town at UD.”

“I know, but it’s not…terrible.”

Okay, I thought, how about tacky?  Ghetto?  This was the type of graduation ceremony that should’ve been held at a bar and grill.  And, honestly, I think the rowdy crowd would’ve appreciated some beer and hot wings.

When awards were being presented, the student administrator stood at the podium and gave a little rundown on what each person had accomplished at school and career wise.  Now that was the surprise part.  Because I stood there with two other students, looking out at the audience, waiting for my name to be announced, and wondering just what the student administrator planned to say about me.  No one had asked me anything, only that I promised to show up.

Well, it seems someone had heard about my Microsoft Office presentation months earlier and used the details from that to embellish some glowing talking points. I wanted to interrupt a couple of times with an “Actually, it’s more like…..” and a “That’s true, but I would also add…”  For instance, I was no longer working for Agent M, which really turned out to be a (thankfully) temporary part time job.  But the school made it sound as if I was top honcho at a busy, important insurance office.  Without a job and facing an uncertain future, I sort of felt like a fraud standing up there.

But then I realized the real reason I was accepting this little wall plaque was not because of any actual faculty appreciation.  No, this was a little dog and pony show for the state politician so the administrative office could tout a few career success stories and justify their state accreditation.  If I and a few others hadn’t been lured to this borrowed gymnasium there would’ve been even more empty chairs and greater difficulty dressing up their little marketing ploy as a celebration of academic and career achievement.

We didn’t exit in a line.  Nope.  Just got up, switched our tassels over from right to left and that was it.  It was announced that after class pictures there would be free cake in the lobby.  After sitting for a group photo with the other computer tech majors, I took a little plate of cake and made a hasty exit.