LadyCygnet.com

We actually had people here at the store on Friday and Saturday, and we’ve done better than what we expected, but not as good as we hoped. I’m still looking for something at home, especially since it looks like I’ll probably not make it past this next week no matter how hard I work or how much enthusiasm I show for what I am selling.

I really need to get in to see a doctor, but I am hesitant to go to the ER. Part of it is because I don’t want to seem like the raging hypochondriac that I am, and part of it is because I am terrified that there is actually something wrong. I have no idea what is “normal” at this stage of pregnancy, and I am under a ton of stress. I am so tired, and I sometimes get dizzy and have headaches when I work, but I attribute that to the crappy equipment that we have at my workplace.

In that vein, I can understand people being pissed off at being called by a telemarketer, but people need to understand that telemarketers have no choice about who they call. If you really want to hate someone for calling you at home, hate the client company that forces telemarketers to call you. If the client company has you on their list of people that they can call, then they will call you with offers. If you would just listen, you might hear that some of these offers are actually pretty decent. In addition, the client typically has telemarketers call so that they can test out new products on the customer base that they already have. Most of these products are released to the general public after their telemarketing runs, if the client determines that there’s a sufficient interest in the product or service.

Sure, it’s annoying to some people, but at the same time, you get to hear about something new that is usually pretty cool or free for a set amount of time so that you can check it out for yourself at no risk and no money out of your pocket, and then you call to let the client know what you think and decide whether or not you’d like to keep the product or service. Sometimes it’s a great value, and sometimes it’s not, but either way, the client gets to find out what appeals to the public and what doesn’t.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens next. I kind of want to get a phone line at the house so that I have something for inbound calling opportunities, but I don’t know how much they’ll charge. For now, I’m working on my applications for writing jobs at home. I think that those would work out best for me and the baby.

Today really sucked. Not only did I fail at work, but I twisted my ankle on my way home from the store.

The only highlights of today were the promise of Yu Gi Oh! kids in tomorrow and Sunday and the fact that I sold about $30 in merchandise today, including some stock we’d just gotten in this afternoon.

In addition, I had no idea that Braxton-Hicks contractions were supposed to hurt. Since I have IC and IBS, I guess it’s par for the course.

Either way, I’m going to lay down and pretend that tomorrow will be better than any other day.

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