The past couple of days I've been oddly positive about the situation with Charlie. Today I had to get up early and drive him to work because he lost his license yesterday. (In Missouri, refusing a breathalyzer means you lose your license for a year--but not until 15 days after your arrest.) He was in an unusually dark mood, certain he's going to prison, and was making a to-do list with that in mind: find somewhere to store the boat, dig up the garden, give the landlord notice he's breaking his lease, quit his job, and so on. I was brave and positive until I let him out of my car. Then I cried the whole way home.
Somehow when I turned my Little Giant ladder into scaffolding, I managed to ever so slightly bend the top part of one of its legs, so now the outer ladder won't fit over the inner ladder and, until that's fixed, I can't use the Little Giant for anything but scaffolding. That wouldn't be so much of a huge problem, given that I have a ginormous amount of paint to scrape and it's easier to do on scaffolding, except that the ground's so uneven in my yard that I can't get the scaffolding positioned in such a way that it's not tippy without having it so far away from the wall that I can't reach it to scrape. Seriously considering digging up my yard. But not today.
I was making really good progress on the house today until I ran the scraper over a nailhead and took a big chunk out of the carbide blade. I'd done the same thing a couple of days ago, so I couldn't just turn the blade around. I went to get Charlie's carbide scraper and then remembered that his blade was in the same shape. The local hardware store doesn't carry carbide blades (we have some on order, though) and the closest store that does is 26 miles away. Once you chip up the carbide blade badly enough, you can't use it to scrape without gouging into the clapboards and trim on the house. Argh.
While I was trying to figure out what to do about that, the mail lady stopped by and said that she and her husband had looked at this house several years ago. "It has the cutest little bathroom with a clawfoot tub in it," she said. Not anymore. The Sucky Previous Owners just got a whole lot suckier. I launched my scraper into the grass and went for a drive to scream and cry.
Then I thought, hey, I'm already having a bad day so why not call the funeral home and find out why they haven't put a headstone on my brother's grave yet. The answer? Because they're waiting for his funeral bill to be paid. (I am not responsible for that; his estate is.) And how much is the funeral bill? Eleven thousand dollars. Holy schidt. Now it looks like Rodger might not have a headstone until sometime after the estate's closed in December. And then I'll have to pay for it because I'm guessing after the medical bills, there won't be any money left.
Tonight I have mandatory training at work. Charlie has to check in with electronic monitoring by 10 pm at his Aunt Tiny's house. I won't be home by then, Charlie doesn't have a driver's license, and Tiny doesn't drive after dark. Still not sure how we're going to figure that one out.
So I had a good cry, and I screamed, and on a gravel road east of town I pulled the car over so I could kick the tires and throw rocks into a field. That didn't really make me feel any better.
But this did:
I found Thom shortly after Sean died, and the shred of sanity I still have left after Sean's car wreck and all the other junk in my life since then is almost completely due to the wise and gentle Thom Rutledge.
Everything is a phase.
Everything.
Repeat as necessary.