Author: LadyCygnet

Illinois/Indiana/Chicago Metro Area doctors piss me off.

Condescending clerks piss me off.

Winter can go fuck itself. No really, it can.

“Pro” Magic players piss me off, as do Yu Gi Oh! players.

Do you want to know why?

Really?

Well, here you go:

The doctor I was supposed to see on Saturday won’t see me because I am too far along for her to take on as a new patient. I am now tearing my hair out because I have spent the last few weeks trying to get in to see some doctor, any fucking doctor, and I only have time to call and look after 4pm because I cannot use my phone between 7:50-3pm on weekdays, and until I get home or to the store, I can’t comfortably call people to find out whether they can see me, much less WHEN they can see me.

Yeah, I should have anticipated being unemployed and chosen a doctor that DID accept Medicaid. My former OBGYN won’t, and I can’t afford to pay him. I hate the idea of using the ER as my PCP, but since I can do it for free as a medicaid patient and I can’t get in to see a regular doctor, I don’t see how I really have a choice.

When I called to let the clerk at medicaid know what was going on, she kept on admonishing me for not seeing a doctor sooner. I saw a doctor in November, then got fired right before Christmas. I’m not fucking stupid; I just had no time to get to a doctor, between holidays and jobs. Yes, I am VERY aware that I need to see a doctor. No, I have no idea how women gave birth without having a doctor hold their hands through the entire pregnancy. I know, I know, I KNOW! I am not some fucking ignorant cunt who opened her legs for some random guy and found herself smuggling a watermelon eight months later.

It continues to fucking snow and be ice fucking cold. Even with layers on, I was completely numb by the time I got to the store. I am so sick of winter that I could just spit. It has been a hard, cold winter, and it doesn’t look like there’s any relief in sight.

The winter may explain why we’ve had a hard time getting people to come to the store, but I think it’s more than that. I think Bob is driving people away from the store, and he only shows up every once in a while to mock us. Thanks to the poor turnout, we will most likely be closing the store soon. I am not happy about this at all, but there’s not a whole hell of a lot that I can do. I can’t even take out another loan.

Anyway, it feels like everything has been the opposite of help. I’m getting better at my job, but I’m so fucking discouraged that I could just scream. I’m going to have to hope that WAH comes through, so that I can make better money. If people would actually WORK with me here, it would make life much easier. My coach is cheering me on, but if I don’t don’t graduate, she’ll have no choice but to let me go.

I am so scared right now. My baby will be here in a matter of weeks, and I’ve got to find a way to make enough money to support all of us. I really don’t want to shell out for daycare, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to find a space where I can work at home without lots of outside noise. It’s annoying, but it’s a fact of life. I’ve also got to somehow pull the money for a headset out of my butt, but I may have help with that.

And no, I don’t mean help with pulling money out of my butt. I’m looking at grants to keep the store running, but I’ve never applied for a grant before, so I don’t know how I’m going to pull it off. It’s not enough for me to be a female businessowner–I have to be able to prove to people that I’m smart enough and competent enough to use this money to make the store into something remarkable.

Anyway, I cry every time I think about putting my little one into daycare, and then I cry when I think about us not having enough money to survive, much less keep the gaming store open. While I have no objection to moving to Missouri so that my family could at least give us a home while we get back on our feet, I do object to the idea of failing anyone.

Hell, maybe the stress will kill me, and then it won’t be my problem anymore.

Speaking of stress, I’m trying very hard to get into the doctor, and a lot of people are bitching at me because I haven’t been there since November. Well, excuse the fuck out of me for not having insurance and not being able to afford it until I got on Medicaid. Also, excuse the fuck out of me for working at a place where I cannot USE a phone from 7:50am-3pm. For some reason, the people to whom I need to speak to even get a fucking appointment aren’t available after 3pm. In that time, I only get ONE fifteen minute break (more like ten minutes), and I have to take that time to eat and use the bathroom. I also CANNOT miss work for any reason for another few weeks, or else I will be fired. That’s why they call it probation. Unless and until the doctor puts me on bedrest, I CANNOT afford to lose this job. At least if I have to part ways with the job for health reasons, people will look at it more kindly than they would if I committed some sort of workplace violation that got me fired. Yes, the one and only time I was fired, it was completely unjustified and unfair, but there wasn’t a whole fucking lot I could do about it. My family needs to eat, and until my blogs, freelance writing, store, freelance editing/proofreading and artwork take off, I have very little choice but to bust my ass each day, even if it kills me.

More than anything, I think that the stress is affecting me. Every symptom I’m having seems a thousand times worse when I am stressed. I have trouble eating on days when I have to work (more often than not, I start having dry heaves, if not outright puking). After work, I can eat just fine, when I am not too tired to eat.

Besides the job, I have people who insist that my partner is abusive, which isn’t really true. Sure, sometimes he flies off the handle and says things that he doesn’t mean, but I do the same damned thing when I am under stress. When I get angry enough, I can be quite cruel. I just happen to have a longer fuse than most people, and I usually cry when I’m angry or frustrated.

Why do I cry instead of raging? It’s quite simple: as long as I care about you, what you have to say, and what you think, the things that you say to make me angry will make me cry, because I refuse to direct my anger at you. When I do finally get to a point where I don’t cry, and instead I vent my anger, beware: it means that I’ve stopped giving a damn about what you think. In extremely rare cases, it may even mean that I’ve stopped giving a damn about YOU. I’ve been to that point before, but it rarely lasts…I’m just not cut out to not care about people.

Anyway, if anything should happen with the job, I’ll see about getting assistance for food and whatnot while I attempt to find a better job and try to get work I can do at home while raising the baby.

Meanwhile, some of my designs are on CafePress at www.cafepress.com/lichslair. The interface is frustrating, but if it helps me sell products online, I’ll do whatever it takes.

And so, time to work on other stuff. I’m too depressed to keep on thinking about this.

Please stop kicking me in the bladder, especially when I am at work and cannot get up to use the bathroom. I am glad that you are kicking, but I do have other internal organs which aren’t quite as sensitive, so please kick them instead.

Love Always,

Mom

If you are making a right turn, use your damned turn signals! Pedestrians and other drivers aren’t mind-readers.

Thank you and have a nice day.

I finally got the spam filter to work on yahoo. I wish they had other filters where I could direct other emails, such as scholarship and grant applications, but meh. What I have is good enough for now.

It is EXTREMELY cold. It was already -2 when we left the store last night, and it was -5 this morning. I hate winter. Steve loves it, but I hate it.

We also did very well yesterday. A lot of people showed up at our store, and we made a good amount of money. If we can keep that up until the end of January, we’ll be able to stay open until February. It’s all very touch and go right now. For those who don’t know, our store is The Lich’s Lair Games, Inc., and we are the place to go in Lansing for tabletop gaming and tournaments. We actually sold out of chocolate yesterday, and that made me happy. A lot of people enjoy our lower prices, and we got our first preorder for Heroclix: Infinite Crisis. Today is supposed to be the Yu Gi Oh! Junior Leagues and V:TES play day, but I don’t know if enough people know that we are here and open yet.

Anyway, Naruto, Magic (the Gathering, not the Johnson), Yu Gi Oh!, and Heroclix all have new stuff coming out at the end of the year. I hope and pray that it all sells well, because we need to be able to keep this going so that people have a place to play and get their stuff.

Blah. I’m hoping for the best, but I’m scared…I’m especially scared about tomorrow, because if I can’t sell stuff, I’m dead meat. I need to watch, learn, and convince people that what we have is what they need.

After posting my resumes online publicly and joining a couple of GTP sites, my email is getting FLOODED with spam. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was a variety of spam, but it’s the same damned message over and over and over again! It’s really annoying when my only email access is through my cell phone, and I have to go through page after page after page of the same damned message over and over again.

To make matters worse, my email’s spam filter doesn’t want to work. Every single time I mark the messages as spam, I figure they’ll get filtered, right? WRONG! I seem to have gotten the one yahoo email account that refuses to recognize spam as spam.

In good news, The Lich’s Lair Games, Inc, is officially and legally open per the business inspector. We have a few minor things to straighten up in two weeks, but the guy was super nice about us and even gave us resources to help get it done. I take back SOME of the bad things I’ve said about the village…

In bad news, it seems that being closed for two weeks while Bob was moving out and we were getting legal has killed our business. We’ve only had a few people show interest in our store, and we already had our first group of ignorant hecklers pester Steve. They may have driven people away from the store; if so, I will not hesitate to call the police on their intolerant asses should they show up again.

In ugly news, I am working a day job at a telemarketing firm. I hope and pray that I can actually convince people to buy what I’m selling. If I don’t sell well, I only make a quarter more than minimum wage, then I get fired after 60 days. If I do sell well, I’ll become a better seller in the store, and I’ll make something like $16.50 an hour, with commission bonuses. Steve’s worried that I won’t be able to deal with people cursing and screaming at me on the phone, but I do know that as long as the opinions of the people that I talk to mean nothing to me, and as long as I don’t have to deal with them face-to-face, I’ll be just fine.

No, I didn’t sell my soul to the devil…I am just doing whatever it takes to keep my family fed and sheltered. Mommy, Daddy, Baby, Kitty, and Birdy all need to eat…and we are NOT going to eat Kitty or Birdy under ANY circumstances.

Anyway, I’ll be glad when we get Internet in the store. It should render me capable of writing more and writing more articles. My ultimate goal is to be a work-at-home mom who edits and proofreads books and/or articles for a living…at least until the baby is in school. After that, I want to head back to school, get my MLS, and start working as a librarian…if I’m not too busy running the store, anyway.

Hey, I began and ended the paragraph with “anyway!”

I think that that means that either my writing is getting rusty, or I need a thesaurus.

Oy vey.

I’m still applying for jobs, but the only places that have called so far are “insurance” companies that want me to to be a sales agent. I haven’t applied to these places; they just use bots to get my resume off of careerbuilder and monster.com. When they call, they have no bloody clue who I am or what work I am looking for.

Anyway, I’m still trying to get WAH or local jobs. I’m even considering babysitting at this point–whatever it takes to pay the bills and keep the store going.

Speaking of which, I have also started setting up a shop on Cafe Press for gaming-related merchandise to tie into our bricks-and-mortar store. I need to whip up a few designs to share and sell, and I need to get that going right away. If Steve would go ahead and send me a copy of the official logo, I could get started on that right away. It’s fun to be indie…sort of, anyway.

It’s time to head storeward. Although we don’t open until 5, I am walking there, and I need to get over there before it gets dark and the unsavory types decide that a lone pregnant woman carrying a bunch of stuff is a good target.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this before, but you would probably do a better job of convincing me that I have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning if you didn’t number 90% of your “contests” as “giveaway no. 1170.”

I was born in the morning, gentlemen…but it wasn’t yesterday morning.

Still, because I am an eternal optimist, I will continue to reply to your emails, enter your contests, and search with your search engine because the part of me that still believes in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and miracles still persists in believing that one day the Prize Patrol will knock on my door and give me money. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be $10 million or $5000 a week for life. Give me a bit of money, and I’ll do what I can with it.

Signed,

LC the dreamer

Well, I signed the lease to get the store today, and it was in HORRID shape. The carpet and tile floors are CAKED in dirt from seven years of neglect, and the whole place reeks of urine, especially the storage area. I don’t know if they cleaned it when they moved out, but it sure as heck didn’t look like they even tried. Fortunately, my partner and I aren’t afraid of a little (okay A LOT OF) hard work. We tried using pine-sol on the tile floors, but that just made them smell better. Surprisingly enough, what worked the best was scrubbing bubbles! I brought a can from home on impulse (I brought a lot of cleaning products with me when we went over there, from febreeze to rubbing alcohol), and when the pine-sol was failing and Steve was getting discouraged, I had a wild hair and sprayed the nastiest tile I could find with scrubbing bubbles. In less than a minute, it was a LOT cleaner, and we got a ton of dirt up off of it. That tile took a couple of treatments, but it looked 1000% better when we were done. As a result, we decided to go to Sam’s and buy some more scrubbing bubbles. We also wanted a sponge mop, but Sam’s didn’t have any, so we went to Target and got a Mr. Clean mop there. It looks like it’ll do a good job, but we’ll see.

Anyway, Tom’s volunteered to help us get the new store set up. He got fired from his job today because he was holiday help, and we’re all pretty pissed about that state of affairs. I know that the economy is bad and all of that jazz, but Tom is a fantastic worker, and he really knows his shit. He’s also a master of tactics, and he’s a great go-to guy from strategy advice. If I had the money to pay him, I’d hire him in a heartbeat…but I don’t, so it’ll be a little while before we could even offer him a spot. Hell, it’ll be awhile before I can even afford to pay myself for working there full-time!

And so that brings us back to my own job-hunting woes. The temp agency keeps on jerking me around about assignments. The only thing that they offered me that would be a sure temp spot is in an area where there’s a 99% chance that I’ll get stabbed while I’m on the bus. While I have no issue with tempting fate as far as riding a bus is concerned, Steve would rather have me and the baby in one piece, and he doesn’t think the pay is worth the risk. In addition, they never called me back to tell me what hours I would be working, so I’m sure that they gave the assignment to someone who is willing to risk her life for minor change. If so, more power to them. I want the job that pays better and is in a safe area of town near a bus line where I won’t risk stabbity death for being a pale-skinned, pregnant female.

Fortunately, a friend of mine turned me onto WAHM.com. It seems that they’ve got real WAHMs who earn enough money to pay their bills and stay home. I’m still fudging on cover letters and nervous about phone interviews, but I have the voice and manner for telephone work, and I have the skills to do a damn fine job at data entry. I’ve applied for a few open positions so far, and I have hope that I’ll do well working at home.

Anyway, I got my first paying assignment for Kasamba.

Unfortunately, they won’t send me my money until I get a minimum of $50. For some reason, they also took almost $4 of my $13.14 charge for my services as a copy editor. I’m only going to be getting $9.20 of that, and it really pisses me off. Still, it’s better than all of the work I did for that lady who contacted me through facebook. I edited her article, communicated with her back and forth about the changes she wanted to make, and then, when I finished working on it for her, I never heard from her again. I even emailed her and asked if she was dissatisfied with my work, but she never wrote me back…and that’s REALLY annoying.

Speaking of consultations, here are a couple of the widgets for my Kasamba virtual office (assuming the HTML works right):

Blah. I’m tired from all of the cleaning and BS today. I don’t feel like I accomplished much, but I did get some networking and word-of-mouth advertising going on. I also feel like I’ve got some ideas to help get the store off the ground…

But now, it is time for bed. I had more to say, but my brain died…

My blogger is now a decent shade of green…you can all be jealous of me now.

I’m also going to do the bulk of my rambly writings here, because I can actually get PAID when people click on my little Google ads. Sure, it’s only a few centavos a click, but it’s better than writing for nothing.

Today marked the first day that I actually did some copy editing under contract on Kasamba. I’m supposed to get paid for it, but I haven’t seen any notice to that effect, so I don’t really know. I was actually shocked that someone used the service and didn’t want me to right a paper for her, but I was glad for that. When I was in college, paying someone else to write your paper for you was called “plagiarism.”

I may be ugly, I may be poor, but at least I’ve got some personal integrity.

The job hunt continues, somewhat successfully, somewhat not. It would help if I would stop pissing and moaning over the damned cover letters and just send them out. Sure, I may only have a job for a couple of months, but any job is better than going under while trying to make a business work.

The really bad thing is, though, there are a few jobs out there that I would like to keep on a permanent basis. I know I’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of getting one, thanks to how I got screwed over at the clinic, but it still bothers me that if I were hired, they’d probably look for someone else when the baby is born, and it would make it look like I’m a fucking job-hopper.

Anyway, I did the best I could each day, and it just didn’t satisfy the people in power. Would it have helped if I were someone else? Maybe. Would it have helped if I weren’t pregnant? Maybe, but I’m sure as hell not going to blame the kid for my job loss when it wasn’t the kid’s fault. I tried to do the right thing, I tried to solve a problem through the “proper” channels, and it blew up in my face and got me fired six days before Christmas.

Now I understand how Mary must have felt when every inn in town was full. “Hey, we’ve got no room here, and we realize you’re in labor, but why don’t you snuggle up in the barn with the rest of the livestock?”

Bah.

Sisko threw up all over the living room tonight. He must have thought that I needed some practice at cleaning up vomit, because he sure left a mess. He also didn’t cover his poo when he went to the litterbox, so I guess he’s just expressing himself, feline style. Oh, well. He’s cute, I love him, and I’m sure the baby will be playing with him a lot, so he needs to get his mischief in before he’s too busy hiding from the kid to get into trouble.

Thank God for Woolite Pet Stain & Odor Eliminator. This beigey-gray carpet would have been stained many times over were it not for the geniuses who created a product that can successfully clean up even the messiest cake puke without leaving a spot or odor behind. I have a feeling that I’m going to be buying it by the case after the baby starts trying to eat solid food…

For some reason, I’ve had the urge to watch Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. I guess I kind of identify with Auntie Entity’s desire to make something better for herself after the disaster…but I’m not sure if I want to be “up to my elbows in blood and pigshit.”

Anyway, I think I’ll watch Colbert and head to bed. I’ve got some other letters to write, and I could use a few laughs.