26 May 2026

I really need to quit putting off posting for almost a month.

I see I have an influx of new subscribers. Always glad to see you, but this was in the wake of several Notes about gender identity politics, and I have to say that if that’s what you’re after here, you may find yourselves bored. I do have a ‘stack for that at Clownfish Don't Need Gender Clinics if I would ever write in the damned thing. Up to you. You can even subscribe to both. I won’t be mad. 🤡

(I sort of poked around a bit trying to figure out if I could rearrange my account so Clownfish would pop up as my default Substack link, which would solve this whole problem, but so far I can’t see a setting to change. I haven’t tried very hard and I might still find it, but in case I don’t, I really should edit my About page here. If any of you even read About pages. You read About pages, right?)

Anyway. So. Stuff going on.

Blondie is still here doing various handywoman things. The latest fun is she showed up at 6pm, while L was out of town for a week, to paint the front porch. First thing you gotta do when painting the walking surface of a front porch is sweep off the dirt and debris. Fair enough. Though first off, I have no reason to believe she chose one of my days off on purpose, so why the fuck did she wait til 6pm when normally the dogs are winding down for bed, I have to let them out for their final pee of the night (except Parker, who sometimes needs a 1am pee), and I have no idea when the porch is even going to be safe for them to go outside. “I’ll put up a barrier,” she said. Yeah, with what? Her “barrier” involved propping up the dog ramp on a chair. Parker routinely jumps on and off the porch, ramp be damned. So anyway, I was already irate about that. I was not irate about the broom, except later on I needed it to sweep inside the house — I don’t do that daily when L is out of town because fuck it, that’s my vacation time too, but it does get out of hand if I don’t do it at least sometimes — and Blondie had not returned the broom. Went outside to look for it. Nada.

At that point, because Parker steals tools and Parker loves sticks, the bigger the better, I simply assumed Parker had stolen the broom and then hidden it somewhere in the underbrush, which Parker has been known to do. It is a mystery where she actually hides things. I don’t know how she does it. So I said “oh well,” grumbled about Blondie, and simply bought a new broom the next day because Parker had done me a backhanded favor because the old broom was kind of shit anyway.

Well. I thought Parker had done me a favor. Come to find out Blondie had simply put the old broom inside the barn at the front end of the driveway and not bothered informing me.

I have made no secret here that I do not like the woman, but I have pretty much made up my mind she doesn’t like me either, and I’m kind of tired of it. And this can’t be a recent development — see my previous (in recent posts) tirades about her damaging my tools or making them disappear, which goes back something like a year and a half by now. You don’t act like that toward a person you like, no matter what anyone has to say about it. I don’t know how she thinks sabotaging my ability to do my chores is in any way helpful to the woman who is actually paying her, either. She’s not hurting me. I have a job and I can replace whatever she loses or breaks that I’m using. She’s hurting L. Remains to be seen whether L will ever fucking figure it out. My bet’s on “no,” or else this nonsense would have been nipped in the bud by now.

It’s all good, in the case of the broom. Joke’s on her because it turns out she’s the one who did me the backhanded favor, not Parker. Haha on you, Blondie. And for the record, I don’t know who invented screw-on broomsticks, but I’d love to find him (got to be a him) and beat him with one. Screw-on broomsticks come unscrewed as you’re sweeping and you spend almost as much time stopping to fix them as actually sweeping. New Broom has a normal broomstick and is much easier to use. And it’s not half worn out, so it actually gets things cleaner.

I write about the most mundane shit.

Work has gotten interesting, as in “may you live in interesting times.” Other Coworker put in her two weeks’ notice. Ordinarily I’d be thrilled because she’s nice enough if it’s not about work but always made my Thursdays suck (first day back from days off) because she’d neglect her closing duties and I’d have to do some of those as well as my opening job in the same hour allotted, which was a huge stressfest. Problem is, her replacement’s worse. I can put some of that down to New Coworker, who I’ll call K, being nineteen and still figuring things out. I find that if I explicitly ask her to do things she ought to be doing anyway, she’ll do them. So hopefully we’ll work through this and she’ll get better, though busy season was not a good time to have to go through this at all. But she’s also pregnant, at least second trimester and possibly early third (I haven’t asked her due date), which means she’ll be disappearing while we are still having busy season. That will not be good. I CAN do a full-capacity day, but I don’t like it much.

I no longer have a short day at work. Five days in a row opening. M (Favorite Coworker, and I nicknamed her that because she and Other Coworker both have names starting with M, which is now no longer an issue) is opening the other two days. It means a bit more time working because K leaves promptly at 11, which she was supposed to do anyway being the 7am person (I start my shift at 5am), but she isn’t yet doing as much during closing as would be maximally helpful to me, so I end up working until 1pm, especially on a busy day which leaves much more of a mess. I guess I’ll get used to it, and I certainly do not mind the additional pay. I’m also doing both inventory days now, which hopefully will improve our supply situation because Other Coworker used to inventory during open hours which means the count was not accurate, as she was counting right as the guests were making it all disappear. That will not be an issue going forward; I consider inventory a closing duty, and GM agrees with me. Now if middle management would just get on the same fucking page. GM routinely orders well under budget and they STILL bitch about her “overspending.” You wonder if “must comply with the franchise contract on breakfast provisioning” means any fucking thing to them whatsoever.

I’m kind of mostly letting it roll off because I finally enrolled in a training program for sterile processing tech certification. I have zero experience in this field and I am hoping that having the certification training and having taken a practice exam will position me well to get hired anyway. It’s through Purdue Global too, not some diploma mill, so that will probably also help. Pay for uncertified is probably in the $25 to $30 range per hour and will be full-time; when I get certified we’re talking anywhere from $35 to $50 an hour. It’s not untold riches, but it would at least get me to functional instead of scrounging. And that’s what I want. Just to stop the bleeding, so to speak.

I will also need BLS (Basic Life Support) and CPR because hospitals want all their employees to have those now, so somewhere along the way I’ll get online courses for those — yes, that’s a thing — and if I also need in-person training for some specific hospital, even though this occupation specifically does not have patient contact as a routine feature, at least I will already have something under my belt and they will probably give me time to get the other done. Typically I see “within six months of hire” in job descriptions for hospital jobs in general. Either way, the training is cheap. I saw under $20 for the online combo BLS and CPR. Not bad at all.

So having some hope for my near future is nice. I need to save more money for moving (I have four grand in savings right now that isn’t earmarked for something specific), but this is a good start. Unless something really fucked up happens, I don’t see myself leaving here suddenly so, as long as things stay relatively not fucked up, I can afford to wait until I have an actual job offer letter before relocating. It’ll be nice to run to instead of running from.

The only question now is where it’ll be. My initial idea was to inquire over several different states. What I might do is start with Sutter here in town and also southern Oregon within half an hour of my brother, and if those don’t bite timely then I can branch out from there to Louisiana and Ohio. I would prefer Ohio, but for some fucking reason I still want to consider being there for other people. I doubt I will ever be fully cured of that. I suppose that’s not a bad thing.

If my daughter and I are ever in touch again, and if she wants to stay in Colorado, that would be an option. But I can’t see that happening. I feel I’ve been written off.

That and a conversation I had with a friend today have got me thinking about the relative merits of having children with men who have obvious personality and ethics issues. But this post is too long already. I think I know where to put that one, if you also follow Born With Ovaries.

I’ll try not to make it so long before I update here again. It might actually be interesting next time. Hey, you never know.