All Things Profane and Sacred

Ah, another lovely morning at work. Why, oh why is the eviction docket at 8:15? Snow again in the mountains, which is pretty, but cold and wet and slippery. The weather keeps fucking with my head-all morning long it was, "11 inches by 10 pm!" "No! 2 inches above 1000 feet by 3 pm!" "It'll all melt by noon!" "4 inches at 500 feet by 10 am!"

C'mon guys. I just need to know that I'll make it over the hump to work by 8:15, and will be able to make it back home at some point in the afternoon. I shouldn't have to peer outside and calculate what's happening on the mountain by how much snow is on the cars going by, or call home mid-day and ask, "So, what's going on up there?"

My plan to blog more had a monkey wrench thrown into it with this new gmail requirement for Blogger. I didn't have the time to dink around, so I put it off, but today, with the grey clouds rolling overhead and the office quiet as a church, I'm breaking the long blog-fast. Besides, I just can't look at public housing regs all morning long.

Another month of ups and downs. After a month of going through the application process, J was finally hired at this place. They hired him for $2/hour less than the job was advertised for. For 2 weeks, while he was supposed to be training for his job, they kept him working these low level shit jobs. During the second week, J's car died, so I was driving him in to work in the morning (40 minutes), and then driving to my work (80 minutes in the other direction) and picking him up at night. It sucked quite badly, and was pretty stressful. That weekend, we celebrated his car being once more operational, and we looked forward to an easier schedule.

When he came in on Monday, hoping to be moved to doing what he was supposed to do, they fired him because there was 'not enough work.' When he went into the employment office to look for more work, he saw they had posted his job the day before they fired him. Assholes. At least he has unemployment now, but he's still pretty down about the whole thing.

The day he was fired, I was having my own problems. On my way home, my car started losing power pretty badly. I willed the car to drive just a little further, and just managed to coast into a small, mountainside store that was not much more than a phone booth before it died. J was not home, so I hitched a ride with someone heading back my way. When he got home and we swapped news, all I could say was "at least I won't have to drive you to work tommorrow." He hated working there anyway, so at least now he has a chance to find something better.

So, I've been driving the old green machine-the 30 year old mercedes with the 400,000 miles on it and the awesome sun roof, and the wee electrical problems for which we carry a fire extinguisher behind the drivers seat. Ah, the glamourous life of a legal aid attorney. It's a fun car to drive, so I'm really not bitching so much, but we really do need two actual working reliable cars. How we're going to finance another car is a worry for another day.

And we finally have the heat back on, after a week of shivering cold. It seems our furnace was FUCKED UP BIG TIME (FUBT) and needed cleaning and special parts and a new chiminy and 30 technicians to put 'er right. Luckily it wasn't tooo cold, but February in the mountains is still no time to be without heat.

That all is not to say that things aren't going swell as hell out here. I still like my job. I had some triumphs, settled a bastard of a case in an extremely agreeable way, and managed to be the sole attorney in the office during my boss' vacation. Not so bad, all in all.