TROUBLES

I believe my current property manager is a con artist. I had a discussion with him on Wednesday about the lack of funds in my shrinking bank account. He said he would put in 2 months payment and figure the rest out after he got back from Thanksgiving holiday. He said he had no idea why his bank was sucking everything back out of my account, like it was a mindless machine. After that discussion, I put a payment block on his company on my account Wednesday after he put money into it. Today, he sucked the last payment out by changing his company name to access my bank account. Now, I’ve had to completely freeze my bank account and I will have to close it to protect my money and open a new account. I need to find a new property manager for the condo. Meanwhile, the contract he has is for 12 months so I may be stuck with him and without any income for a year. I don’t think this affects the current tenant. They are still paying this realtor, who is keeping all of their money, every month but I am getting none the rent money. I need some referrence/financial advice/help with the condo I own in Atlanta. I might need an Atlanta attorney. I might need a new property manager in Atlanta if I can get out of my contract with my current realtor. Rental on the property has been my main source on income since we moved to North Carolina, until recently. I had to change realtor for managing the condo when the previous Real Estate company, stopped handling small individual properties like mine. She recommended the current manager of my condo. The condo has not made any money for me since this guy took control of it on June 1, 2023. It has only cost me money - $250 each month in Condo Association fees + payments to contractors for improvements + special assessments on the building + property taxes. I get monthly distribution emails saying that I’ve been paid and but when I look at my bank statement, every payment is sucked back out of my account in full a couple of days later and not replaced. The nice little emails made me feel like money was going in. It wasn’t. Wednesday was a frustrating day that all started with me trying to get health insurance and going to Healthcare.gov to see if I qualify for anything. Then I checked my bank account to calculate incomes to apply for healthcare and see that my bank account is shrinking every month. I have to cancel my doctors appointments next week because I can’t get insurance and a lot of medical services seem to insist on it. They don’t want to see me if I’m self-paying. I can’t apply for healthcare if I don’t honestly know what my monthly income is when I fill out online forms. I can’t count on the condo rent and I can’t discount it either. I need to cancel all of my subscriptions to everything and try to stop bleeding so much money from my savings. The most frustrating part of that is that Adobe software will charge me $109.98 to end my monthly subscription to all of my work apps. I thought when I had to update my Adobe software it would be a simple pay-by-the-month fee that I could easily drop or pick up again if I wasn’t working with a particular software package. Leaving them effectively ends all of my work possibilities in graphics or photography. So, since I’m not actively working, I suppose I am going to have to go out of graphics and photography altogether now. I can’t keep paying for my own tools. I am almost certain he will file a W9 claiming I made money on the condo this year when the condo has only been costing me a lot of money in HOA fees, property taxes, and maintenance fees. I don’t know what to do or what I can do about any of this. I have no words.

cold & wet

Today,  everything is dark, wet, and (finally) cold outside.  I would not be taking a single step outdoors if I didn't have to work tonight.  MonsterMustDie is working today until 5pm.I start work in the dress shop at 5pm, so we will not see each other today. 

We started watching Devil's Hour on Amazon last night, based on the recommendation of friends, and it's quite good with attention to detail in dialog and art direction. 

Going to the Potluck

Just finished making a pot of Thai green curry, based loosely on the recipe I got from a friend. It is a recipe with little or no specific amounts but a list of general guidelines on how she makes her curry, which everyone loves. She makes curry the same way I make gazpacho or guacamole. You just figure out what the base is and eyeball or taste until it seems right. No two batches are alike. This is a day when I walk a couple of blocks down and up to the next neighborhood near us, which is a lot more multi-generational (younger) and hipper (still working) than the neighborhood we live in. I always have a great time at the annual potluck, whether I go there alone or with my husband joining me. I always walk, crockpot in arms, because it's so close. I wish I knew more of our neighbors. People in High Point keep to themselves and mind their own business. This one street is different because it has a lot of multigenerational households including the children and grandchildren of original residents. It has in tiny community of people who have known each other since childhood and that sense of community spreads to some of the newer families on their block as well. With a lot of younger people who have children, the parents will inevitably know each other through their children. A few blocks over in our neighborhood, the only people who know each other are the dog-walkers, and they don't get too personal or care to do anything outside their home. It's amazing how different things can be, so near each other.

sound

I wonder why it's so quiet here; not our house but the neigborhood itself - so much that I think if voices are raised indoors that someone outside could possibly hear them. Inside the house there are sounds of air vents, fans, electrical hums, creaks. It's not the cacophony of nocturnal noises that my grandparents, the Hardy's, house was but there is quite a symphony of sound in this old house.

In Rufus Hardy's house, there were constantly bangs and groans from things turning on or shutting down, compressors, motors, electrical hums, loud clocks, etc. The mechanics of older buildings are simple yet mysterious.

In Horace Crowe's house, the only sounds were TV or radio broadcasts. Even the old "baby-burner" furnace in the floor was silent because it relied on hot air rising to conduct the heat. Ceilings were high with open transoms above the doorways to help keep the building cooler at ground level in th summer. All of the noise in their dodgy, poor neighborhood came from outside the house, where there was always some sort of drama going on.

The washing machine is down again

Against all odds, a tech came by this morning to service the washing machine that has been stuck, locked shut, nonworking for over a week. Today's visit from Whirlpool was free but they can't get it running again until they get new parts, which they will have to order. $576.65 is the total for parts to keep our washing machine working because we need a new board and pressure switch. The board keeps going out on it - the one in it now was installed free last year when the original board was recalled. The most recent service call we had when it stopped working was last July. This is a machine I purchased when we got married in 2016. Makes me wonder about buying a new washer. Looking it up, it's a lot more expensive now for a new washer. Now, just the washer alone is $938. I can get a one with less features in steel that won't match for $698. However, most of them can be delivered by October 18 at the earliest, which is might be sooner than we can expect the new parts to come in. The next time it stops working, I believe the answer is to replace it entirely, possibly from a completely different manufacturer.

behold our gourds

MonsterMustDie has fallen in love with the variety of gourds and pumpkins this autumn. 

October plans

I'm trying to figure out if I can visit Atlanta at the end of October. I won't know absolutely if my requested time off at the dress shop will be granted until 1 or 2 weeks before.  That limits my ability to make hard plans on where I can stay or what I can do if I make the trip. I can't buy tickets to any events in advance. Friends can't plan for me as a house guest.  Reservations anywhere are completely out of the question.  

flat tire - it just blew

Out riding with K when she had a flat tire. As it turns out, there had been a low pressure warning for a while that both she and B had been ignoring.  Oops. 

Fortunately,  B came up quickly and saved us. He put on the spare and switched cars with K. He later got a good deal on two new tires - the one that blew and the one that had been about to go for a while. 

disturbed sleep

I woke up at about 4:00 AM this morning. Tried to be quiet walking into the kitchen to give Ellie Cat a snack and then heard MonsterMustDie walking around in the house. He immediately started making coffee. I suggested it was too early for coffee and he assured me he was not going to be able to go back to sleep, anyway. We both gave up on going back to bed and just stayed up. I was able to go back to bed at 6:00AM and I slept for a couple more hours before getting up at 8:20-ish and staying up for the day. Tonight's dinner was just kinda put together impromptu with what I had in the fridge. I cooked angel hair pasta, pan-roasted chicken, and a salad of bitter greens purchased at the Farmers Market on Saturday topped with leftover dressing from dinner at a Greek restaurant last week. MonsterMustDie took a sleep aid and went to bed around 8:00PM tonight.

Ellie had oral surgery yesterday

Ellie Cat had six teeth removed yesterday. Her mouth was a mess. She was out of it all day yesterday. She woke up long enough to throw up twice. Her only desire was to be on the hot back porch but we kept her indoors near us and her food & water. She seems to be back to her senses this morning. We haven't gotten her to eat or drink anything much today. I suspect she probably visited her water fountain last night but food is not interesting or too painful for her. She got two types of pain meds this morning, per the vet's instructions. The first one, Meloxicam, went down easy. The second med, Gabapentin, made her foam at the mouth.

sweet things in the malstrom

 I dreamed I was at some sort of geeky meeting. Chris was hosting it at his home, which was large, so it might have been SciFi of some sort. We were heading out and a huge storm was brewing on an otherwise sunny clear day. I could see patches of dark, round clouds in the sky of deep blue. I was in a van with some younger women driving, reminding them to pull over preferably down hill if it got too bad to drive.  The clouds opened up with tornado warning wind and rain by the time we were driving through a downtown section and I looked out the side window and thought “that flower looks like icing” which, in fact, it was. There were long white tables and fantastic baked items set up for some sort of party. There were cakes in the 3D form of cartoon characters with perfectly spherical heads. There were beautiful elaborately iced flower cookies. There were pastries in the shape of animals... and it was all about to be blown away... all of that bakery artistry wasted, so we paused in the street, opened the doors and I saved a bunch of things that were about to be ruined, pulling them into the vehicle and placing them into any any bags we had to stabilize them for the ride. Then, we kept going through the storm. 

Another UTI?

 I have UTI symptoms again this morning. I decided to take one of the leftover Nitrofurantoin capsules I had from the last UTI before they switched me to Ciprofloxacin. I hope these leftover antibiotics are enough to knock it out this early in the infection. I'm also wondering what is causing this and if this is just the last infection was not completely clear when they took me off antibiotics last time. 

twisting around in circles

I miss having a real job using the skills I spent years learning, which are useless now. It's been two years since I had my last freelance temp gig and now I'm paying too much to keep software on hand that I do not have a use for other than personal entertainment. I'm losing what I know about a dead industry.

Jump to today. Out of the blue, I got two phone calls from what I truly believe is another work scam. A woman with an accent too thick to understand phoned about a print production job in Winston-Salem. I don't think there is any company that fits the description of what she said this job is about there. After agreeing that, yes, I was interested in any work I could get at any price that used my skills, I got a couple of emails and another phone call & voice mail from a man with an equally heavy accent that went on about something about work for a temp gig at low pay doing something related to printing. Again, I could hardly make out what he was saying. I'll play along until it gets too weird.

MonsterMustDie has a cousin who wants me to make some banner ads for him in a "New York Times" style that I'll have to investigate before I get back to him on it. He's asking how much advertising work I'm doing now. Well, I'm not doing anything now but I can make something look good even if I can't guarantee I can send people to his site. This would be a free favor, anyway. I'll do it but I'm dreading it because I expect him to be over-critical of anything I do. Not what I need when my self esteem is at an all-time low.

I can't touch any of this until Wednesday anyway, since I work closing shift at the dress shop tomorrow. MonsterMustDie works in the morning so he won't be available to help me deal with any of this. All of these things will have to wait a day for me to get back to them. I'll do what I have time for before going into the shop.

Dysfunction

MonsterMustDie was out all day, hunting for dead people's stuff, with a small but very specific list of provisions to pick up. He got every last thing wrong, to extent that I think he did it on purpose. That, and he seems to have intentionally omitted the main thing we needed, which was paper towels. He is quite capable of passive aggressive behavior when he thinks I ask too much. This is not fair, considering that I alone paid $550 to a tree service last week to trim some branches hitting our roof and clean our gutters. The gutters were overflowing and causing damage to the woodwork outside the house. That still needs to be replaced as soon as I can find someone to do the work, since I am not a carpenter. 

I woke up this morning to find the thermostat set at 65 degrees. That's too cold even for me in the morning. I turned it back up to the usual Summer temp of 72 degrees (70 if I'm actively cooking) and asked about the temperature. MonsterMustDie said he had not touched the AC. Maybe it was bumped down and forgotten about last night. He was also hyper-sensitive to sound and light this morning. I turned down the volume on the TV, which is always up too high in the morning. I turned overhead lights back off - we don't really need them anyway with window light in the Summer. 

All this also makes me wonder if he sneaks in drinking when he's out of town and/or I'm at work at night. 

I've got other things to deal with. All of the Alexa devices, including the DVD player which had color settings that seemed to be RG but no B and high contrast, have been wonky this week in ways that I have only partially worked through and reset. Most of it was fixed with updates and rebooting to reset everything easily. The Alexa in the bedroom, which I often use as my alarm or reminder, is still not functioning properly - mostly not listening to me. 

Lastly, my earbuds are not functioning correctly but I think that's entirely my fault from falling asleep most nights listening to podcasts on them, which is very annoying because the earbuds are also the main way I listen to music. The left bud/speaker is not playing music. I know it's still on because now and then it plays a system sound occasionally, with no prompting. I wonder if I changed something by sleeping on it. Or maybe that battery is going kaput, which seems unlikely because they are still too new. 

The UTI I had last month finally cleared after three rounds of antibiotics. No idea what brought it on other than generally bad habits on my part, mentioned earlier. The important thing is I feel good now. I'll be working a 4-hour shift at the dress shop this morning. The rest of the day will possibly be spent pacing in circles around the house.