An Anniversary Not Worth Remembering

We're almost at the end of the first month of 2013. Hopefully, the wintry weather that has kept the midwestern U.S. in the icebox from hell this past week will start to cease and that damn groundhog known as Punxutawney Phil will wake up next weekend, see his shadow, and just say, "the hell with this!"  This laptop is the only thing that I use to speak my piece and not get myself chewed out by my common-law roommate. Speaking of "hell", Mariah and I have been going through a never-ending battle of this, which  rings in its second anniversary as of next weekend.  You can only guess how much longer we'll be stuck in this predicament. I have done quite a bit of sacrificing since 2011.  There's nothing like the embarrassing feeling of being evicted from your home that can make you put your whole life in perspective, is there? 

One day after watching my beloved Green Bay Packers win a spot in Super Bowl XLV against the Pittsburgh Steelers, I received some news that no tenant wants to get: an eviction notice. Our idiotic landlord, who at the time moonlighted as a suburban Chicago narc, sent this via a representative of the Winnebago County Sheriff's department. This basically came down to a common issue for folks like us: failure to pay off the outstanding amount of past-due rent. We did owe him a bit of money (between $1400-$2000 over six years), but in the last months we did have a reason not to cough up the dough. Since he became our landlord in 2006, we have had constant problems with our plumbing, from a stopped-up bathtub to nearly replacing the entire bathroom floor. There was also the hole on the bathroom wall that kept growing and the refrigerator, which we found out the hard way that the bottom part didn't keep anything cool. We were forced to put everything, including milk, in the freezer. Despite repeated attempts to contact him to have someone over and get this fixed, nothing happened. (Never mind the fact that out old apartment was a former drug house. It caught on fire a year prior to moving there back in 2002.) We had a hearing later that week, and yes, the landlord actually showed up. We didn't speak to him, which shouldn't have been a surprise. The judge we faced gave us a week to gather our stuff and find a new home. 

Getting that eviction launched a cascade I knew was going to cause me and Mariah some grief for the rest of 2011. She had been off her psych medicine since 2004, and her behavior was definitely showing signs of it. She had nightmares in her head about...nonsense. She banged her fist into the bedrest when she didn't get her way. Screaming obscentites (including one very unpopular "n-word" repeatedly) to the top of her lungs didn't help.  Meanwhile, I heard the engine in my minivan make a loud "pop" while driving with some friends. Turns out the head gasket was blown, due to me not taking care of it. I eventually had to part ways with my ride, depending on friends or unreliable public transportation ever since. Being unemployed definitely hurts more than it ever helps. I made a decision that seemed reasonable at the time that I later regretted. What do I know about being a medical biller/coder? Since when have I ever wanted to get into the long, complicated world of medical health care? My mother and some aunts may have been nurses in the past, but that's not what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was still at a crossroad. That turmoil of a life of mine had to wait. I had to scramble to find a new place for us to crash within a week or face getting the boot. Then came February 2nd, 2011. Let's just say God gave me something else to worry about: snow, and lots of it.