This will be April, May, and June (if you missed January-March, you can read that here). As I said at the beginning of that post, WARNING: I’m going to get pretty raw, here, and say some things that I’d kept private for a while. I’m not interested in advice, I’m not interested in judgement, and I’m not interested in “well what you should have done was”.
But first, holy hell, I can’t believe I forgot to mention that in January (I know, everything that ever happened to anyone happened in my January), I paid off the mortgage for my property. You’d think this would be a good thing, right? It was frustrating as fuck, the culmination of a four-year battle with Wells Fargo that I am in fact the widow of Timothy Conyers and I am in fact on the County rolls as the sole person on the deed, what with my husband having died and unlike Wells Fargo, Clay County actually filed the first death certificate I sent them.
Basically, I was on the phone with WF yet again, finally got a guy who almost knew what to do, and when he suggested that I might have to reapply for a new mortgage to get it in my name, I was like, fine, whatever, let’s do that right this second, and how soon after I get approved, can I pay it off? And he says, oh, you just want to pay it off? You can do that any time, you’re the guaranteed successor. To which I was like, FOR FOUR YEARS I’VE BEEN GETTING INVOICES TO PAY MONTHLY AND EACH ONE OF THEM SAYS THAT THEY ARE REVIEWING MY APPLICATION TO BECOME GUARANTEED SUCCESSOR AND THEY WILL CONTACT ME WHEN THAT’S OFFICIAL. So, basically, any time in the last four years I could have paid it off, and honestly I still hope they all choke on that extra interest I paid, I could really fucking use that money right now for things like gas and groceries.
You’d think that would be the end of the story, right? It’s not. Stay tuned. It ends some time later.
But now! On to the next quarter.
April
Another thing tangentially related to Jeff (in that he moved in here in order to finish fixing the stuff Tim hadn’t finished before his death) that happened in January is that I found a woman-owned home repair company that was willing to come to Keystone Heights to fix stuff at my house. One of the things I did to set things up with them was to make a list – including pictures – of things that needed to be done. Which filled me with weeks of “why did Jeff not finish these things, he was here for THREE YEARS” and also “why did Tim not finish these things in the first place”. I mean, I know why *I* haven’t done them. I’m one person with not a lot of handy-woman experience and most of my time is divided between pet care and work… you know, WHY I WAS PAYING SOMEONE FOR THREE YEARS TO DO THOSE THINGS TO START WITH. Anyway, that gave me a lot of sad feels for a few weeks, thinking about my poor house and the care it needed and how do I not be mad at myself for someone taking advantage of me when I was at the lowest point of my life.
It’s really easy, in hindsight, to look back and see how easily someone took advantage of you, and really hard to not judge yourself harshly for letting it happen. Even though you know that (a) you didn’t see it then and (b) people who do that are master manipulators and are pros at making you NOT see it. And I still don’t really know what happened. It was like… everything was great, Jeff was doing a great job, and then suddenly he wasn’t. I don’t know what flip switched in him, but I wish I’d cut him off sooner.
In April, because I was able to start moving furniture around in the house in March, I was able to start moving things around in my bedroom and painting and wallpapering. I also got a headboard (FINALLY) for my bed, and got two more nightstands so that I could put the ones I had on top of the new ones, making them taller and thus mor functional for the adjustable bed I’d bought late last year.
Also in April, the Rat Wars geared up. I realized that (a) I had more rats than I thought and (b) the repellent I was using, wasn’t working so that (c) if I wanted to get rid of them I was going to have to start using traps. I hadn’t wanted to use traps, I really wanted to be humane… but I also didn’t want my studio to be infested, and that’s what it seemed it was heading towards. I bought a few snap traps, and a few electric zapper traps, and in April I murdered nine rats. Did I feel bad about it? Yes. But not for long… more on that soon.
In April… or maybe this started in March? I started getting letters from Wells Fargo. Well, Tim started getting letters. Apparently, in spite of triple checking that the payoff amount was really the payoff amount, they had a check for him (they sent it) because his wife had overpaid by $1500. Honestly, I didn’t really have the mental space and energy to fight Wells Fargo over that, not with everything else that was happening, so I just let it go. HAHAHAHAH. Boy, did this turn into a fucking saga.
Lastly, in April, I realized that about a third to half of what was coming out of my kiln, was coming out warped. I still didn’t chalk it up to the replacement clay, though, for some reason (imposter syndrome?) I thought that it was my latent horrible inability to make pottery finally come to the foreground. That I had fooled everyone for almost sixteen years but it was finally coming out that I couldn’t make pottery for shit, and maybe I should give up.
This year has been rough, mentally, let me tell you.
May
In May, I got a surprise visit from my friend Anne! She and I have been online friends for… what, like 20 years now? But we’ve only met one other time in person. This is where I tell the Boomers that yes, online friends are real friends. We’ve watched each other go through a lot in the time we’ve known each other, and just like I know if I needed her, she’d be here, I hope she knows if she needed me, I’d be there. We had a good day with me showing her the best that Gainesville had to offer, and she got a relaxing break from some family sadness that was happening.
But then the rest of May happened, sigh.
In May, I murdered 24 rats. I would have felt guilty about that but I found out where the fuckers had made a massive home, and I went ballistic.
A side note, first, because so many people on Facebook were asking me why I didn’t just call an Exterminator: exterminators will not clean. Wildlife removal companies will sometimes help clean. Exterminators are there to trap/kill pests, and will handle smaller pests and rodents. Wildlife removal has stricter rules about humane treatment and will encourage relocation, as well as only handling larger mammals (and sometimes snakes and birds). I already live where people relocate pest animals to, and while I had a soft heart about them at the beginning, the rats had thrown down the gauntlet and now I planned on cold-bloodedly murdering every single one of them, unto the next five generations. So…. you can see where I’d be reluctant to call either type of company, unless I was being physically overrun at all moments of the day. Which I wasn’t. I’d trap between one and three rats every four or five days. So I guess even “infestation” is too strong a word. I didn’t need help catching them, I got that part down. If I needed help at all, it would be with cleaning.
OK, back to the drama. I thought, having taken down two dozen of the fucks, that it was over, and time to start cleaning. So I moved the tortoise bin that was empty (those tortoises are now in an outside enclosure), that had been sitting in front of my yarn stash, so I could clean the floor underneath it. I’d piled stuff on top of that enclosure, so the top of everything was about even with the stack of four bins. All in all I had 25 Sterlite bins of yarn and fiber spread along that wall. And what did I discover when I cleaned off and moved the tortoise enclosure? The rats had chewed through most of them and pulled yarn and fiber out through the chew-holes in order to get nesting material.
I didn’t even let myself think about it. I got all the bins to the trailer to take to the dump. There were about three bins on the very top of the pile that had no ratty footprints, no poop, no holes in them, and because all of the yarn in those bins was also in sealed bags (and I checked those too, for poop or chewings), I felt safe keeping that. Everything else, twenty-five years of spinning fiber and yarn, yarn from small companies who aren’t even in business anymore, fiber from the sheep from the farm I lived on with my dad… it all went to the dump. And yes, that is a picture of me crying after it was all in the trailer. Make fun of me, I dare you.
I’m still not really letting myself feel anything about this other than relief that the yarn I sell was in a different place entirely, and remained unsoiled.
Have I mentioned what a fucking shitshow this year has been?
The only other thing I have to say about May was that my car was Still Doing That Thing.
(Is this video actually showing up? To me it just looks like a black box.)
June
You know what? June is going to have to wait. I’m about ten minutes away from needing to leave the house for some errands, I’m kind of wiped out from writing about May, I didn’t sleep well last night, and I want to get this published today. So I’m afraid June will have to wait until next time. Sorry/Not Sorry….? Y’all probably need a break after reading about May, anyhow!
Thanks for reading, if you’re still here!