Anne N. Mouse: Blog

At least not any more, I can't. If I go to the house where my youngest sister is there is liable to be a death, Mine, Hers, or her LIL (Live in Lover)... Why? Dude donates his pay to Adolph Coors and company, Or to R J Renolds and company. Then when the end of the month comes around he starts demanding money from anyone who comes through his door...
Last month, due to Christmas he started in early and walked up on me when I had intended to take a shower and demanded money. I thought for a minute he was going to lay hands on me and I had every intention of doing my best to put him in a grave if he did. I won't have that sort of insanity in my life! So I need to find some place to bathe (shower preferably) I have a lot of work to do on my mother's bath before I trust it... Probably in the neighborhood of $2000 worth of work if I do it mostly myself... Mostly 'cause I'll end up making several hundred extra drives of 80 miles round trips, 'cause I'll forget what I need, or discover some major problem that I didn't expect when I started. But really the issue is deeper than that... I need to do the whole roof of the hole house and I think that is going to require new sheathing (if I said that wrong let me explain... I need to replace the boards under the shingles. Not part of them, but all of them...} And my truck won't hold a full sheet of plywood... So even with the tailgate down it will be a challenge to get the materials, and that doesn't count finding rafters that need to be replaced I'm betting on at least half a dozen... And even if I make them into 'trusses' I'll be challenged to get long enough lumber to do the job... Plus the money. I'm surviving (barely) but I suspect that I don't want to start the job with less than $10,000 on hand even to do composite roof....
Well that ought to make everyone but my audience here pleased. Obviously with all of this on my mind my creative juices are a bit overwhelmed.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and all of that, May your next year be prosperous and otherwise good!

I've been working in the icy fog. Well not usually out in the fog but the building I work in most of the time isn't much better than an open barn. Probably a bit more than 40,000 square feet of concrete to absorb the ambient temp so at this time of the year it never gets terribly warm after all the Longe Woode Lumber Company is a very small mill, with only six moulders and not much else... and they only work one shift a day so the place has approximately 15 hours to cool between shifts.
I'm writing a bit, but not terribly quickly as I am sharing space with my elderly mother and just have too much else on my plate to get going very much on a story of any kind.

Okay the weather is pretty ugly here... Not raining or snowing but I've been going to work when the temp was in the teens (degrees F) which means it is cold to start. At the end of the day before the sun sets it can get into the low 50's (again degrees F) which is actually fairly warm for winter.

The good news? On a personal front (except that I'm still so exhausted that the little man fails to stand most days) I'm doing fairly well at work (even though today I looked like I'd bathed in sawdust) and the shop foreman (not the floor supervisor but the manager for the whole shop) stopped by as I was waiting for work to start and said that as soon as orders stabilize he wanted me on the payroll rather than working through a temporary agency.

But that brings me to the bad news, my hours have been cut to the point that I have none next week! That means that I'm in desperate trouble unless I can find other work elsewhere. They said we return to a regular schedule on the 2nd of Dec, which is hopeful but if I have a month of Dec with as few hours as this month has had it is going to be a very spare Christmas. It is already a very spare Thanksgiving day coming up, even if the most important thing about it is that you are with family.

For those interested in my writing, the little man does not absolutely have to stand for me to forward some of my stories, and Helluva is moving, if a bit glacially... At least it isn't as frozen as before where I wasn't even sure I'd make glacial progress on it.

I reread what I have of It's a Helluva Job and did a bit of proofreading/editing it to amend what I do have down in bits stored somewhere in my computer... I found very little that I absolutely thought should be changed, which is, I suppose a good thing. Hopefully I shall soon have another chapter ready to post, though I'm holding out for completing the story before I do post more. The good thing about that is that I actually have an ending written that I'm finding quite satisfactory. The problem is that I need to write at least a couple more chapters in between where I left off posting and the ending I wrote.
On a personal front, I HATE!! HATE!!! HATE!!! WALMART!!!!! No service, a lot of times they don't have what I want in stock, and you can't order in the store (did I say NO SERVICE?!!??!) I hate ordering off the web, for some reason I just don't trust websites to keep my info private... I wonder why (EXPERIAN anyone???) that might be?
Anyway I was at another store looking at Carhartt jeans. I had bad experiences with ripstop fabric in the army so hadn't been too impressed with the idea of buying such, but... I looked at the cargo pocket jeans by Carhartt and may try a pair. Handling them convinced me that whatever else they were they were heavier weight than most jeans that I've looked at except the double front carpenter jeans that Carhartt sells. However I have a love for cargo pockets... After all I have my cell phone, a folding knife and my ring knife all in my pocket(s) on the side of my Dickies cargo pocket jeans right now... and don't have to worry too much about reaching for a set of keys and cutting my fingers up on the ring knife... After all I can put my keys in my front pocket when I have cargo pockets and keep them segregated from sharp objects! With regular jeans the ring knife ends up in the same pocket as my keys... Carpenter jeans? The side pocket is too narrow for anything except my folding knife, so again my ring knife ends up in my pocket with my keys... So I'm always shopping for cargo pocket jeans that are tough enough (Dickies qualify) to stand up to the places I work...