This is the third or fourth day I haven’t worked out, thanks to allergies and the cramps I should’ve gotten yesterday and not today. Tom probably had a case of bad allergies as opposed to a cold since I haven’t had anything other than allergies. I had to take a Benadryl for it, and at 8:30 when it was just about ready to knock me out for a nap, the dogs went off. When Jesse didn’t come out and shut them up, I figured he ran out somewhere. But when I woke up at nearly 11pm, they were still going crazy so no getting any peace tonight. Fucking bastard won’t be back till the wee hours of the morning knowing him. But why tonight? He rarely goes out on a Thursday night. I hope the little cock doesn’t go out on both Friday and Saturday nights as well!

And so I found myself asking the same question I’ve been asking for 20 years now – am I ever going to live where I don’t have to listen to other people’s dogs???

I still worry something up there is going to undo all we’ve worked so hard to build up by having him laid off. This will be a good test, I guess, as to just how much Dad may be looking out for us cuz nothing else usually does. I don’t want to think negatively but I don’t want to get my hopes up either. Even Tom says he doesn’t want to get overconfident and he’s usually a pretty optimistic person. He also swears getting laid off won’t be a big setback for us since we’re getting things paid off now. Instead of paying every few months, he paid the entire year of car insurance off. The weather will be warming up soon enough so we won’t need to run the heat. Plus, he says it shouldn’t be more than a few weeks till he got something new now that the economy is better.

I disagree. If God lets him get laid off it’s for a reason and that can only be to set us back. I think it would take more than just a few weeks to get another job and that God would make sure unexpected things came up to set us back.

I still wonder if we’re gonna be stuck here forever unless we practically drop everything, take only the bare necessities and what we can fit in the car, and then run. Just not sure where we would run to and what we would do to get by till he got a job. I just know I don’t want to keep going through this cycle of bullshit till he retires. No, we wouldn’t be even remotely close to desperate if he got laid off cuz we could collect unemployment. But we don’t want to “collect.” I didn’t come here to be a bum and neither did he. I’m tired of God, fate, society and other things beyond our control deciding what we can be and what’s meant for us. We want to be in the driver’s seat of our own life for once!

But a permanent position, as rare as they are these days, doesn’t necessarily grant you any more security. Not if that job has the threat of not being around indefinitely. If they’re shutting down the area he’s working in now they could shut down any other area as well. Yet there are no guarantees in life no matter what you do. If you have your own business, your customers aren’t guaranteed. If you work for someone else, their customers aren’t guaranteed either. Everyone’s always at risk.

It seems just about everyone has been affected by the economy somehow, including my folks. Their biggest mistake was overspending. No doubt about it. My mom is a very materialistic woman who loves to shop and I think they blew the bulk of their inheritance living too high off the hog. But as Dad said when the economy was at its worst, they couldn’t even save and what they could save had to go to medical expenses not covered by Medicare. I doubt she’s living paycheck to paycheck now that Dad’s expenses are gone and the economy’s picking up, but who knows how much they owe on things and what medical costs she could be looking at? I doubt she’ll sell the store till she absolutely has to. By then she’ll probably sell the condo too, and either go live with someone else or in some kind of assisted living program for seniors.