Anne N. Mouse: Blog

Well I have a job, but if I continue at it in a year or so I probably won't be able to even do any typing. I apparently have some sort of nerve pinching going on in my shoulders or neck due to this job. Whenever I relax enough to go to sleep two things occur. First my hands feel like they have pins and needles going on. They also feel very swollen. They feel hot to my forehead (I can't trust touching one hand with the other to tell what might be going on...) so I'm not too worried about lost circulation, though I may be not having adequate return of blood from my hands given the 'swelling' that is going on. Anyway to even type this now hurts a little. I can't imagine what even a few more years of the sort of work I'm doing will do.
Besides the job just doesn't support me in the fashion I'd like to live... I.E. having an escape (even for a few hours) from living with my mother. Such is fine most of the time, but some how I'm expected (because I work) to cover any emergencies that happen around the house... This means that I have no funds for even normal other things like say a 'bolt hole'... or practically even fuel for my vehicle...
I'd start a patreon or other page, but the govt makes me use both my real name and real address on it, which means that even if I use a pseudonym to front it someone who wished to stalk me due to my perverse work (it hasn't happened yet but some of the comments on my work make me think it might!!) could very easily find me and harass me.

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.