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| 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.
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