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| 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.
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| 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 25th, (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.
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| 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
