Let's Hope This Don't Kill Me.

Mulch.

Louis Shalako

My landlord was insisting that I get tenant’s insurance. It’s in the lease and to be honest with you, I’m pretty good about insisting on the terms of the contract myself. You know—stuff like peace and quiet between the hours of eleven p.m. and six a.m. No parties, no harassment, don’t take other people’s parking spots. Don’t make a big stink in the hallways…

Shit like that.

So I guess maybe I earned that one.

This is my home, and they’ve got some kind of investment in the place, and would prefer not to suffer any liabilities.

I sympathize with their position, I really do.

My insurance company was happy enough to hear from me. It’s just another twenty bucks a month for them, right? They don’t care where it comes from. Unfortunately, I’m on ODSP and in the company’s infinite wisdom they decided to take the first two month’s payments out of my bank account about the third week of June. The ODSP insists that while they might cover some other client’s insurance, somehow I don’t qualify for the same assistance.

I’m already getting the maximum shelter allowance of $479.00 a month, right?

By the end of the second week of any month, there is never anything in my bank account…not much, anyways. My Google payment of about six bucks and not much else.

Natural, wood-chip mulch.

Well, that ain’t ever gonna work for you, ergo the payments bounced and this is the big chance to nail you from both ends. The bank has a charge and the insurance company has a charge for NSF payments. And I fucked up two payments according to them, the one for June, which I actually specified in the application, (like a fool), and one for May 1 even though I only called them on the 25^th, (the date of initial coverage according to them.)

The nasty-gram arrived, a registered letter and some postie pounding on my door.

Those fuckers can go on strike anytime they like in my humble opinion…maybe you guys should stay out for a while this time around rather than settling in thirty hours or whatever.

Anyways, I’m fortunate to be building a website for a client, and I’m extremely fortunate to get a little work landscaping, which is an area where I have some experience if not expertise.

(I’ve built a few free websites, but Go Daddy is a new learning curve and of course someone’s paying the bill, which puts a bit of pressure on me.)

So I’ve got a certified cheque for the insurance company, and that will go out Monday morning if I have some kind of envelope to put it in. Also, they’re saying in their letter that as soon as that goes through, they’ll be taking the July payment out of my bank account…in other words, about the third week of July.

So it would be incumbent upon me to make bloody damned sure that I have the money in there, eh, boys and girls?

‘Cause I know how much that one hurts.

The other thing is the credit card. A year and a half ago, my computer blew up and I put a really good one on the credit card. That was about seven hundred bucks and my new, larger monitor wasn’t completely paid off at the time.

In the year and couple of months that I’ve had this present vehicle, it has let me down a few times and nothing’s cheap. I’ve replaced the crankshaft sensor, the camshaft sensor, the multi-function switch, (lights, turn signals, high-beams, fog lamps) and a tire, and then there were the front brake rotors, front brake pads, etc. Coil packs and spark plugs last time around. 

Much (or all) of that went on the credit card. I make some kind of payment every month, but some of these items seem to hang on there for a very long time and it is one hell of an interest rate.

When I need a professional cover image for a new book or story, my favourite stock photo site requires a credit card. They don’t do Paypal, and even if they took debit, there’s never a shit-load of money in my account anyways. The images themselves are less than eight bucks CDN. Lately I can’t even afford one, so I’ve been using my imagination and certain research skills and finding free, public domain images.

So it would be nice to do something about that.

Killing weeds.

If I want to do all that and still eat, then I’m going to have to use my head and maybe even work at it a little bit.

This morning I dug out weeds with a hoe. The dirt, hard packed and very dense, fluffs up and then I have to dig or scrape two or three inches of topsoil and put it somewhere else. Then I shovel black woodchip mulch out of the back of a trailer and spread it around, roughly three or four inches deep. We’re leaving a few blank spots for plants to go in later. Also, the stuff settles and packs, and a bit of raking would smooth that out anyways.

I’m grateful for the work, assuming I can remember to keep gas receipts for the tax people and most likely mileage for the ODSP.

And I’m tired. It’s hard on the back, but I’m being extremely careful not to blow the thing up. 

If I need a pop, or water, then I get one. If I need a smoke, I get one. I sit a few minutes and think about what I need to do next.

I think I’m very fortunate to be able to do this.

Today I worked two and three-quarter hours. There’s a bit of driving, roughly forty-five or fifty kilometres round trip.

Hopefully I will get a chance to work on the website, it’s a long holiday weekend after all and they’re calling for thundershowers tomorrow.

I have a few day’s work there and that’s good.

The gardens are starting to show some promise and I’m looking forward to putting some new and interesting plants in there.

The thing to do is just to keep going back.

Life is like that sometimes, or maybe it’s just me.

I will be back.

End

Back to Work.

Photo by KDS444, (Wiki.)

Louis Shalako





Years ago, I had a house and a mortgage. ODSP was paying $930.00 a month at the time.

What with house payments, taxes, heat, hydro, water and insurance, it was a tough go each and every month. I rode a bicycle and lined up at food banks, which sounds familiar to many Canadians. Going back to work was tough too. My first day was two hours--two hours, at ten bucks an hour, picking up shingles and stuffing them into a bin. I drove up to Port Franks to work with my brother.

I went back a few days later, and stripped shingles off of a roof for about four hours including clean-up. Forty bucks and maybe five bucks worth of gas if I was lucky. I can’t really recall now, but Steve might have bought me a coffee and a doughnut.

Sometimes it’s good just to get out of the house.

The thing is to keep going back, I guess. No matter how fucking painful it is. I’m fifty-seven years old this time around, too.

Going back to work, with back problems, and totally out of shape from a fairly sedentary lifestyle, is always going to be hard.

So. I’ve been shoveling a bit of mulch and it’s the same thing: two or three hours a day, max. 

That shoveling and wheeling things around in wheelbarrows is very hard on the back. When you’re all out of shape, it’s pretty exhausting, working in the hot sun. That’s why I go out there early in the morning…I always did prefer to get things done. I don’t mind coming home a bit early and at least I have something to show for it.

Yeah, and I need the money, too. Quite frankly, I seem to be falling behind, with not a hope in hell of paying off my credit card, for example. I would very much like to find another place to live before I strangle somebody…

As far as the book sales go, they’re nothing to write home about.

I had my own company back then, and I reported my income and all of that. You need to stay out of trouble with the ODSP, and don’t forget, there’s a rat born every minute anyways.

That was back in 2002, 2003, and 2004, when I finally wound it up. In addition to roofing with my brother, I also did the commercial interior renovations for four Curves for Women. 

Those were in Petrolia, Glencoe, Blenheim and Tilbury. At some point I had bought an old GMC S-15 from my brother, and when I finally scrapped her, she had 362,000 kilometres on the odometer. Considering that I was going back and forth to London and all these other little towns; that must have been one pretty good little truck.

After a while, I had saved up something like $12,000 and the ODSP was all over me like a dirty shirt because I wasn’t allowed to have that much in my business bank account.

That’s when I bought a Ford Windstar minivan, which was good because the tools were all indoors. You don't want to leave them in the truck overnight, not in this or any other neighbourhood. It had nice captain’s seats and a good view down the road, being a couple of feet higher off the ground as compared to the pickup.

The way things are right now, I need to find some sort of part-time work, and the truth is that the two or three-hour a day thing is only going to take a person so far. The only employers willing to put up with that are essentially relatives, maybe one hell of a good friend somewhere if I had one.

Otherwise I’m not making it, and the rent here goes up each and every year. That’s sort of what happened to my house, essentially. There it was the taxes, which went up from twelve hundred a year to over eighteen hundred in about four years. I was only going to be able to keep the place for so long and I would have had to sell anyways.

The funny thing was, after cleaning the place up, when I sold it, I made around $23,000.00.

That was the equity, the reward supposedly for my risk and my efforts, and in the end I was unable (maybe even afraid) to buy another house. The ODSP was all over it, of course, and so I had to ‘spend it down’, which is their polite way of saying piss the money away as quickly as possible and go back to abject poverty again. That’s just the way things are, sometimes.

The thing with the ODSP, is that I can earn a couple of hundred bucks a month, after that it’s fifty cents on the dollar in what they call overpayments. Basically, they do their best to keep you in abject poverty, otherwise someone a lot better off than you would be bitching and whining about cheaters.

Let's just say I'm doing okay and we'll leave it at that.


End