I Need Some Cheese To Go With My Whine

Today has not been a good day. I think I have the flu; I don’t know if it’s swine, bird, or al dente flu. Yesterday, I had the sniffles. Today, my runny nose has been joined by aches, pains, chills, and fatigue. I have a busy week coming up at work and I need to start training for the Donna Hicken half marathon. Neither one of those things is helped by being sick. I’m also approaching a “fish or cut bait” moment with my job. LMJ is getting older. It’s less than a year until she needs to go to pre-school, and I can’t send her to a bad one. The bad economy is killing me. Strangely enough, it never occurred to me that 15 million people being out of work would affect my practice so drastically. I’m not getting paid because the works have been gummed up by the work those laid off people used to do. I’m still waiting on several fairly large sums that I should have received as much as six months ago. Unfortunately, things don’t get processed when no one is there to process them. I’m even noticing it with weird stuff on the edges in my office. Ricoh laid people off so the copiers aren’t being serviced the way they had been, and at least one of them is down for extended periods, it seems like, every week. All of this was fun and games when it was abstract classroom stuff, but it’s not just MJ and me anymore. I will get paid at some point, but there’s always a balance between potential and cash on the barrelhead. I’m not the only one in this boat. The sad part is that I’m doing better than the vast majority of people in my industry, but that doesn’t pay the bills. Actually, the situation will sort itself out because while I may get to the point where I want to stop fishing, there isn’t any bait in Jacksonville. All I can do is throw myself into my job a little bit more and weather the storm.