At the end of the summer before last, my dad offered to let us live in my grandmother's old house in town. We moved out of the old place and into this one. It is a small two-bedroom house that hadn't been lived in much in this decade, and hadn't been lived in at all since 2004.
With the benefit of getting out from under paying rent for a house with a faulty septic system, we had the drawback of moving into a house without working plumbing or an up-to-date electrical system. Soon after we moved in, my dad installed line to get us a single tap of cold water to the bathroom sink. We spent the next few months flushing the toilet with a filled ice cream bucket and heating water on the stove or with my trusty hot cocoa maker. More recently, my husband has rigged a working faucet in the kitchen and even a dishwasher (Free from craigslist. Yes, it does heat the water!). My daughter and I drive across town a few times a week to get showers at my parents' house and my husband takes "whores' baths" in the sink. Every few months, he will give in and come with us to take a shower, but mostly, he just gets by with the sink bath.
We would love to put in a hot water heater, but that would involve upgrading the electrical system. The house still has a knob-and-tube system, complete with four whole fuses for the house. Instead of updating the entire system, my DIY-crazy uncles have "improved" on the original knob-and-tube system by putting subpanels (I think that's what they're called) near where the water heater and the electric dryer go. Those subpanels are still old enough to be fuse-based.
The current system allows for a certain amount of our electrical usage, but there are times when adding one too many of our modern conveniences to the circuit plunges us into partial darkness. Running the dishwasher and heater (or air conditioner in the summer) for example, pushes that poor little 30 amp fuse to its doom. Of course, it hasn't kept us from enjoying our modern entertainment. We still have our wireless broadband, our computers and our TV. The only difference is now we can only have one TV and one computer going, and we must turn something off before we use the dishwasher.
I know, I know. I'm lucky we have the dishwasher in the first place. It was a pretty good score. The guy on craigslist wanted $50 or best offer for it, but had it for a few months without any takers. When he asked my husband what his best offer was, my husband jokingly said, "Free?" and the guy accepted.
We're also lucky to have the entertainment stuff, although that comes at a price, too. If my husband wasn't so rent-to-own happy, we wouldn't have the TV we have now, but if it weren't so pawn happy, we would have had a perfectly good if slightly smaller one. We had to give up on the satellite, after failing to keep it paid, but we also have enjoyed the benefits of hulu (and now netflix, until we can't afford that any more). We keep the internet paid, but just barely. A few months ago, my husband also got the bright idea that he needed a smart phone, and signed up for a plan that he was unable to keep. He also got me one for my birthday, even though I didn't want one. Although it also has gone by the wayside, I have enjoyed the benefits of its wifi capabilities.
But putting all of this technology in a crumbling house is akin to putting a massive soundsystem in a Festiva. The benefit to being so wired is that it can distract us from our inability to fix the roof or put in new wiring or get a hot water heater installed. It also keeps us from keeping up with the basic utilities that my father still refuses to put in our names. If we can't keep him paid, how could we keep these companies paid? I do entirely see his point.
See? More bad choices, one after the other.
As for the job front, my husband got fired from his program assistant job after failing to put in the appropriate paperwork for a medical leave to manage his head issues. While that's the official reason, at one point the school administrators claimed he had been written up for performance issues. The only issue we know of is his absenteeism, as his review was stellar. In any case, he now has a job managing at a local truck stop. He likes it pretty well. For now, at least.
We still haven't seen anyone about his head. We had a specialist lined up in a nearby city, but that fell through when he got fired. He's been managing his own pain with tramadol from a local doc-in-a-box. I wish he could get by with less medicine, but it's amazing how much a less stressful job and a feeling of confidence in his work has reduced his headaches.
As for me, well, I'm still a loser. I thought I had a decent job with a local newspaper, but it was never a formal arrangement. I was doing regular stringer work for them, writing a few articles and a column. Soon after I quit my card-slinging job, they reduced their number of pages and the stringer work dried up. I've been making do with some odd jobs here and there, but I'm still without a full-time job to call my own.
My crap-splotched road of bad decisions has turned into a highway, and I haven't found the off ramp yet.
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