Evening pages

I had to go to court for a ticket I got months ago for driving with expired tags. It got dismissed cause I got them taken care of, so I only have to pay court fees instead of anything more serious. Going to court was a bit stressful. I actually put on slacks and a sport coat for the first time in weeks. This also happened to be the first day that the courts were open since the lock down began. Most everyone was wearing mask, except for one young black woman, the attorneys that I saw, and the cop that pulled me over. There was probably three people there out of the two dozen cases that I heard called. Everything else got extended due to the shutdown orders.

It rained all day, so the girls stayed all day except for ten minutes before dinner when they were unable to follow instructions. Today was really rough; they were especially bad. Missus and I just can’t figure out how to deal with their ingratitude and entitlement. The thing that triggers me the most is when Elder tells me something like “we only watched four shows today,” or some complains that she has to do everything. I’d finally had it after dinner, and tried to give her a reality check about her behavior. Younger wasn’t much better, and wound up crying herself to sleep in the bed by herself. She never falls asleep by herself.

Missus and I had more money talk today about getting our bills consolidated and some other subjects. She’s more comfortable keeping large amounts of cash in the bank; I can’t, and am trying to figure out the best way to earn interest on it. We need to have a fair amount saved in case Zombie, LLC goes under, but what do we do with everything beyond that? We’ve had conversations lately about holding cash instead of paying down debts right now, but I feel like I need to figure out way to leverage that cash, safely, otherwise I feel like I’m losing opportunity cost.

I keep looking at the numbers that I wrote on our fridge last week with my debts on it, and the maturation date on the mortgate: 2042. It seems crazy to think that it’s going to take another two decades to get out of this trap. And the chances of this house getting flooded by a hurricane or other storm is non-trivial as well. Looking back, I think we were stupid to consider this house as a long term home. Part of me worries that we’ll never be able to get rid of it. My next door neighbor was about to close on his house before COVID struck and the sale fell through. He’s had a couple of Boomers come out to look at it recently. That’s probably our only hope for getting out of here; I don’t anticipate demand being too high among the younger generations. Things will just get harder.

We discussed selling my car again. I guess I’m stuck paying off the loan for now, it’s a buyers market. I suppose I could put it up on all the local marketplaces as a minimum. We’re not sure if I can just cancel insurance on it and let people test drive it. That’s a whole project for another day.

Work was productive today. I had several trouble tickets that got taken care of, and did an hour pro-bono for a Zombie partner in Iowa that needed help with a firewall issue. Only did it to build clout and hopefully get some projects hours. We shall see.

Anyway, the day is almost over, and I have not applied for a new job today, so I better get to it.