Well well well. Been a long time since I updated this blog with my crazy life, almost 2 years if you don’t count the post I just did about getting organized.

In September 2019 I left my job at Market of Choice to go to Consumer Cellular. Let’s just say Consumer Cellular was a bad fit to the point I had the choice of quitting or being fired. I quit….

October 2019 I went to work in the electronics department at WalMart here in Bend. I got fired (over the phone no less) on January 2, 2020 for excessive absenteeism (I had one sinus infection after another and was actually out sick when they fired me).

Was eventually found to be eligible for unemployment and was surprised when I started receiving the extra pandemic unemployment benefits.

In April 2020 I was hired by USPS but I didn’t actually start working until May 13 2020. I’m making more money than I’ve ever made in my life, putting money into savings, and fixing up my house. On the downside we are so short-staffed that I’m working 6 days a week. Oh well…..LOL

The last week or so I’ve been spending a lot of time getting my kitchen organized in preparation for eating at home (eating out of the pantry, freezer, and refrigerator) for at least the month of February if not longer.

This has involved cleaning out 14 shelves and one long narrow cupboard (pantry) and defrosting the freezer for only the 2nd time in the 5 years I’ve owned it.

A lot of food that had gone past its best by date — especially a can of kidney beans that had a best by date in 1998!! — has gone into the garbage. Most of this food was from the pantry as I’ve just been stuffing stuff in there for literally years.

Ten of the pantry shelves now have a labeled dishpan inside (the labels match the contents of said dishpan). One shelf has cold cereal on it because the boxes won’t fit in the dishpan. The three remaining shelves are empty for the moment.

The long narrow cupboard has become the new home for a massive amount of tea (Lipton, Tazo, Safeway Select, Pukka, etcetera) and a huge amount of K-cups (not to mention a few boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts cold brew, some whole coffee beans from Sister’s Coffee, and some ground coffee from Starbucks). This cupboard also holds the Sweet Drops (stevia based sweeteners) and plastic stir sticks.

I moved all of the non-food items out of the pantry (including the cat food, treats, etcetera).

The cat supplies have a new home in the cupboard to the right of my double sink. I found 87 cans of Fancy Feast which my cat no longer likes so 24 cans went to Facebook Marketplace and 63 cans were donated to the local animal shelter.

Sandwich bags, freezer bags and the like have been moved to the storage area that is built into my kitchen table/island.

Blenders, mixers, and other small kitchen appliances plus pots, pans, dishes have all found new homes as well.

All the disposables (paper plates/bowls, plastic utensils, and a huge amount of plastic cups) have been moved to a large dishpan which sits on the office area countertop. I plan to use these up and not purchase again as they are not good for the environment.

It took about 16 hours altogether to get the pantry cleaned out and reorganized.

After I finished the pantry it was time to move on to the freezer. This freezer builds up a lot of ice and probably should be defrosted at least once a month. However, I’m very good at stuffing things in there and ignoring them for years (see pantry above LOL). I’m ashamed to say that I’ve had this freezer since late 2015/early 2016 and this was only the SECOND defrosting that’s been done.

It is hard to eat from your freezer, pantry, and refrigerator if you don’t know what you have in any or all of the aforementioned. In addition, I want to make my own cold brew coffee and iced tea, which is hard to do if you don’t have any ice.

The freezer defrosting and reorganizing was a piece of (frozen) cake compared to the pantry. 1) Unplug the freezer. 2) Get all the food out. 3) Discard out of date or badly freezer burned food. 4) Put the food that made the cut in a cooler or insulated bag. 5) Leave freezer door open, line floor in front of freezer with towels.

“Let the (bodies) hit the floor LOL *song by Drowning Pool* actually it was “let the ice hit the floor”, huge chunks of it. From beginning to end it took about about 8 hours to defrost the refrigerator and probably 5 of those hours were just waiting for “the ice to hit the floor.”

I’m letting the freezer dry overnight, and since it’s supposed to be 22 degrees (Fahrenheit) here tonight I moved the insulated bags onto the back porch. The coolers have enough ice and frozen food in them that they should be fine inside the house.

Last summer I got rid of most of the contents of my storage area because I was never going to use the glassware in particular. I made $60.00 which always helps a bit but it was a lot of work for not a lot of money. I took everything that didn’t sell over to the park clubhouse.

After my mother passed away in late November 2018, I started making a lot of changes in my life. One of these changes has been to clean, declutter, and organize my house.

Over the last 6 months I have removed all the carpet and padding from the master bedroom while also removing my 20-year-old (at a minimum) box springs and mattress. I’ve started the process of vacuuming the master bedroom floor and will be keeping my eye out for

I’ve assembled a dining room table that came from my mother’s house and set it up in my dining room complete with a lace runner that also belonged to her. In the middle of the lace runner is a pitcher and bowl that I inherited from my grandmother (my mother’s mother).

I used my Amazon gift certificates I ordered 2 American Standard toilets from Amazon for slightly under $300.00 (free shipping because I have Amazon Prime) and paid a friend $70.00 to install them. She also cleaned up the floors in both bedroom

I’ve also (for the first time in my life) had enough money to hire a cleaning lady. She comes every couple of weeks for 3 hours or so, and my dining room and living room have NEVER looked so good.

January was okay. No major bumps in the road, healthwise everything seemed to be okay after the A1C scare and a couple of really high blood pressure readings.

February on the other hand sucked the big one.

1) Sick almost the entire month between stomach flu and viral bronchitis. I missed about 3 weeks of work.

2) Because I missed so much work I didn’t have enough money to make either of the February space rent payments–park manager is being understanding because DUH I was sick for 3 weeks and my last February paycheck was well under $400.00 when my paychecks are normally twice that much or more)

3) because I missed so much work I didn’t work enough hours to keep my health insurance for the month of March (there’s nothing like still recovering from bronchitis and praying that you don’t get sick again/injure yourself/any other need to see a doctor).

4) There will be two bills from a) Family Urgent Care and b) St Charles Immediate Care which will not be covered by my insurance because even before I lost coverage for March (this month) I hadn’t reached my $1000.00 deductible for 2018.

For most people these would be minor things but when you are living paycheck to paycheck, paying off back space rent (with the threat of eviction hanging over your head), and have less than $50.00 in savings these are pretty major bumps in the road.

Here’s hoping March (and the rest of the year) is better.

And on the bright side, I did make $8000.00 more in 2017 than I did in 2016. Working full time for $12.00 per hour (instead of part time for $11.75 per hour), getting quite a bit of overtime, and not having to pay union dues helped a lot. I’m on track to make about the same this year (a little over 24K) so things should continue to improve even with the added medical bills and paying off the last of the space rent.

Another bright spot in my life is that I managed to talk my doctors’ office/medical clinic into allowing me to stop taking Eliquis (blood thinner).

I now take one 325 mg regular aspirin every day. This helps financially because the co-pay on my Eliqius (with the new–not nearly as good as Safeway/UFCW insurance) insurance would have been $50.00 per month.

I discovered a sale on 325 mg aspirin at Safeway for $1.00 per bottle–100 tablets per bottle.

Each bottle will last 3 months so that is 18 months of blood thinning for SIX dollars total versus NINE HUNDRED DOLLARS for the Eliquis for the same time period (in addition, I take several other prescriptions for high blood pressure, diabetes, low thyroid, and depression so the $50.00 per month would have been just ONE of several co-pays).

ALSO A MAJOR BRIGHT SIDE: NO MORE ROOMMATES!! On May 1, 2018 it will be a year since I kicked out the last one, and I have to say I do not miss her one little bit. With the better paying job, I don’t even miss her money!!

Let’s just get the bad news out of the way upfront…anal cyst, 9.2 A1C, and 180/I don’t remember the bottom number blood pressure.

My doctor pretty much just flipped out on me at least about the A1C and blood pressure (they took my blood pressure three times just to make sure it wasn’t ‘white-coat hypertension’).

The upshot was my Metformin was increased from one tablet per day to two tablets per day. My Lisinopril was increased from 2.5 mg per day to 10 mg per day.

She agreed with me that perhaps I shouldn’t be eating two pints of Open Nature ice cream in a sitting two or three times a week (big surprise there NOT since that’s a minimum of 2000 calories right there not including anything else I was eating during the day).

I gave up the ice cream that day (July 12, 2017); I’ve seen too many friends and family members lose limbs to unchecked diabetes and that is NOT the way I want to go!

I’m supposed to be checking my blood sugar every day too but as usual I am very resistant on that. I have checked it twice since July 12, 2017.

I was frustrated about the high blood pressure since it had been normal (well, slightly high at 123/77) on June 22, 2017 and in stroke danger range less than three weeks later. Yes, I had been taking my low dose of Lisinopril faithfully for that 3 weeks. It had been slightly high (143/80) on June 8 2017 but that was because I hadn’t been taking ANY of my medications for ANY of my conditions since appromixately June 3, 2017.

I bought a home blood pressure monitor and so far my blood pressure has gone down but still isn’t as low as it should be.

As for that anal cyst, that whole mess has been a comedy of errors.

I’ve been waiting to see a surgeon since June 22, 2017–there have been three referrals sent by my doctors’ office to two different organizations.

The first one (Bend Surgical Associates) said they never received the first referral, and when I called them to set up the appointment myself (as recommmended by my doctors’ office) they 1) wouldn’t let me do so and 2) never called back about the status of the referral.

I asked my doctors’ office to resend the referral and they did so on July 6. Another two weeks went by and I still never heard a word from Bend Surgical Associates (almost tempted to shorten that word to ASS since they have been so unhelpful!!)

At that point, I requested that the referral be sent to another organization and my doctors office sent it to St. Charles Surgical Specialists.

St Charles Surgical Specialist called me the same day that they received the referral which would have been wonderful except for one little thing–they do not have any offices in Bend where I live.

Their closest office is in Redmond (16 miles away one way) and their other offices are in Madras (42 miles away one way) and Prineville (32 miles away one way).

My transportation is shanks mare (walking), Bend’s city bus system (yes they offer a bus to Redmond at $6.00 each way), my bicycle (oh yeah that’s going to happen–not in THIS lifetime or the NEXT!), or a cab that would probably cost $40.00 each way.

So we are back to the drawing board, waiting for yet another referral to another surgical team that 1) will respond to the referral and 2) is located in Bend.

Again I didn’t realize that I hadn’t updated this blog in over a year. Back when I started blogging I was updating the blog daily, sometimes more than once per day. Then again, I didn’t have a job and I also had a lot of blog material due to my various and sundry roommates (and my mother, my life in general, adventures with cops, etc).

A lot of the changes are referenced in the post directly below this one, but I did want to detail a few others mostly because the aforementioned post would have been 10 pages long (no joke) if I had included everything that has happened in the last year or so.

In July 2016 I posted that I had an impossible roommate and that was all I was choosing to say about that at the time (mostly because part of her impossible behavior was to stalk my social media accounts, Twitter, Facebook page, etc and make comments such as “Why do you call yourself a domestic goddess? You don’t do ANYTHING around the house”–said the woman who didn’t clean her bedroom even once in the 13 months she lived here–I only wish I was joking.)

I’m not going to spend time here rehashing everything she did or said in those 13 months, but I will say this much about her: she was an alcoholic with THREE convictions for drunk driving (breathalyzer in the car, lost her drivers’ license, the last DUI also included 2 charges of possession of a controlled substance without a prescription, on probation, supposed to be completing community service, etc) CAN I PICK ROOMMATES OR WHAT? LOL.

She was also pushy, bossy, snoopy, rude, demanding, asked inappropriate and highly personal questions, lied more often than most people breathe, totally untrustworthy, and only understood boundaries as they applied to HER.

I finally grew a spine and evicted her May 1, 2017. I had another roommate lined up but she couldn’t move in until June 1, 2017, and it turned out that she was allergic to my cats so that fell through. At that point I decided NO MORE ROOMMATES (if I ever have a significant other, I would consider a roommate situation but that would be based on LOVE not my financial need.

I am currently one very happy lady nearly 90% of the time because I have my house to myself and because I have a job that I love!!

Again, I really had no clue that it had been over a year since I posted ANYTHING on this blog. Back when I first started blogging I was posting daily (sometimes more than once a day). In my defense, back then I had no job as well as a very ‘interesting’ life (crazy roommates, problems with my mother, so on and so forth–if you are really interested, read all about most of it here on this very blog).

In December 2015 I went to work for Safeway as a checker, and in December 2016 I moved into the file maintenance department at the same store. Reasons for the move included learning new things and I was also promised 40 hours a week by my supervisor (sadly I found out later that she didn’t have the authority to promise me anything and that at most I should have gotten 20-25 hours per week)

Approximately a month after my move into file maintenance my boss (the one who promised me 40 hours a week as an incentive to get me to move into the department) had a stroke. Things hadn’t gone smoothly before that mostly because she wasn’t willing to train me on hardly anything, presumably because she thought I would then take her job. A secondary problem was that the lady had very poor communication skills to the point of fighting with vendors as well as other employees.

The person who took over my boss’s position had also not been trained on all aspects of her job so it was like the blind leading the confused LOL!!

After several months of feeling unhappy and incompetent (solely because I hadn’t been trained) I started looking for another job. On Monday June 12 2017 I was offered a job at Market of Choice (a small regional chain with 12 stores located in Oregon). I accepted the job, attended orientation on June 21, 2017, and went to work as a Kitchen Clerk on July 2 2017.

I am extremely happy with my decision to leave Safeway for several reasons.

1) I am getting 40 hours per week and have been getting that many hours (plus overtime nearly every day) since I started.

2) I am making $12.00 per hour (I was making $11.75 per hour at Safeway but was NOT getting 40 hours per week)

3) There is little to no micromanagement at Market of Choice. If you know what you are doing they leave you alone and let you do it.

4) My job is very physically demanding and there is no waiting around for anything. In an average day at Market of Choice, I walk over 10,000 steps. I sweep, bend, walk, squat, stoop, etc for the entire shift. I go home exhausted every night and that’s a good feeling.

5) I couldn’t find the soda aisle at Market of Choice so I gave up soda–not one drop of soda, diet or otherwise, has passed these lips since July 2, 2017. I drink water, green tea, iced black tea. I get my caffeine that way and don’t have all the sugar going into my body (I was NOT drinking diet soda!!). I feel much better and my energy level is unbelievably high

6) The physical activity has helped with the arthritis pain in my knees and feet to the point that I can now walk up and down stairs with little to no pain. In fact, I now choose to take the stairs nine times out of ten.

7) Because I earn nearly $500.00 a week before taxes, I can afford to pay my own space rent (that means no more roommates, I haven’t had a roommate since May 1, 2017–and I am happy as a clam about that. They have all been insane in one way or another, and their craziness made me crazy and unhappy).

8) I like nearly ALL of my coworkers *this was true at Safeway too* and they seem to like me, which makes stressful days less stressful.

I didn’t realize that it had been nearly a YEAR since my last post.

Time freaking flies when you have a REAL job. Yes, boys and gerbils, Suellen has been working as a checker at Safeway for slightly over 6 months now.

I just got a HUGE raise too, from $9.35 per hour (just 10 cents over Oregon’s minimum wage) to $10.75 per hour.

I’ve also decided to go with the medical and prescription coverage provided by Safeway, since Oregon Health Plan –in its infinite wisdom — decided to terminate my coverage with no notice to me effective May 31, 2016.

Safeway insurance will cost me $7.00 per week, and while there may be a deductible, it is still better than trying to get through to Oregon Health Plan on the phone (don’t even think about their website because it is a JOKE).

I’ve had several roommates come and go since the last post as well. In September of 2015, my longest term roommate moved to California to help take care of her father.

I didn’t find another roommate until January of 2016, and he was a DISASTER. Worse than ‘Andrew’ “The Queen B’ and the Commoner put together. He or his friends stole almost $300.00 cash from me, and if I can’t trust his friends (who were all up in my house nearly every day) I certainly can’t trust him. Also, he or his friends let my cat Mick out…..was gone for 10 days and I was convinced he had passed away.

Two months after the theft, a friend of a friend moved in. She lasted 6 days. She let my cat Mick out at least 2 times in 6 days, stole toilet paper from my bathroom while I was at work, stole towels from the laundry room (she used them to wipe her ass with after the rest of MY toilet paper mysteriously HA HA disappeared), stole a plate and used it as an ashtray, hid the towels and plate in the garbage, broke an antique plate, and hid that in the garbage as well. She was smoking in my house, totally disregarding the “No Smoking, Oxygen in Use” sign posted prominently on the front door.

Her final act as she left (not having the courage to tell me face to face) was to leave a cigarette butt and a turd floating in the toilet. TACKY!

In March of 2016 (March 31st to be picky about it) I found my current roommate. Living with her is extremely challenging, and that is all I am going to say about that situation.

First volley in the latest bullpucky round re Craigs List:

saw your advert few minutes ago. you should reach me at jphillip856@gmail.com.. .I have a concert tonight and am setting up after work today, 6:00 to 10:30. I would come to your venue to view
it,if you’d like me to come check it out… Or, I will be home after that from 8:40-11:50 tonight. Would either of these times work for you? Please let me know; if you won’t be around

My reply:

We can set up a time for you to look at the quilt. Please be aware that I am requiring cash for all purchases, no checks accepted.

Philip Angel
7:33 PM (15 hours ago)

to me
Thanks for your response, I’m ok with the asking price and the
description stated so I would like to send payment asap to you via
UPS Next Day Air from my bank.
Please let me know if a certified check is ok.. After my check clears
my Mover will come and pick it up at your location… I would have
come and take a look of
it but I can’t… My business trip come earlier than I plan(on a
business trip ). If you can get back to me with your info below…
I’ll mail the check out asap. Need your FULL NAME to write on the
check and FULL ADDRESS with Apt #/suite # ,Your Cell Number and your
FINAL asking price…. to mail the check out asap. Thanks

Sent from my HTC One on the Verizon Wireless 4G LTE network

Another scammer, different email address (again, I received this exact same BS on 4 different items).

computer wasn’t working this morning ,can we set up a time for me to look at it. Just give me directions then i can locate the place . I’m going to work out,but if I hear before I leave, I could be there this evening or tomorrow morning. If not, would tomorrow night work. I teach piano so am flexible mornings and evenings. Will wait to hear. If gone, please leave message bettiecoach9zv@yahoo.com . Thanks

Considering the fact that I have nothing else to do other than play games with Craigs List scammers, I again decided to play along!

We can set up a time for you to look at the stereo and the other items you are interested in. Be aware, I am requiring cash for all purchases, no checks.

Tara Carr
1:12 PM (0 minutes ago)

to me
Hello! let’s do like this, actually now I’m not in town for now, I
came to visit my mother so I wont be able to meet with you but am ok
with the condition as seen on the advert, I’ll proceed in issuing a
Check out to you and when you received the check, I will make
arrangement for pick-up. So get back to me with below details asap.

Name:
Address:
City:
State:
Postal Code:
Phone Number:
Last Asking Price:

And as soon as this is provided, the payment will be overnight to you
and I will let you know when its mailed out. I need you to be honest
with the sale as I am a God fearing person.

Sincerely,

“The Will of God will never take you where the Grace of God will not
protect you.”

Ummm, again email addresses not the same and the email from “tara” has a male avatar. Last time I checked Tara was a female name.