Things That Have Been Happening

The carrot that was keeping me going for awhile in this job was the promise of September - come September I had put in my 6 months as a full-time employee and could finally use my vacation time.

I had planned to drag my husband back to his hometown to celebrate the Defeat of Jesse James Days, watch a rodeo, drink a lot of beer, and generally forget my life and get away from my job for some much needed stress relief.

As life would have it, that same weekend his grandfather got ill, had to be hospitalized, and passed away. So my planned vacation of debauchery and forgetfulness turned into trip to visit the family, feel depressed, and attend to the required and un-fun family business like funeral planning.

A week after that, we had to go back to his hometown for the actual funeral, also not fun or stress-free.

So now I am back to the ghetto, having missed a significant amount of work but not any more relaxed, feeling any better about my life, or with any more of a plan of what to do with it other than "Oh shit, now I have even more work to do because I missed week and I am even less motivated."

Before any of this happened, I had 3 new people move in (1 Hispanic family, 1 single woman with 2 kids, and 1 single woman). This week I have another Hispanic family moving in, a relative of the first Spanish-speakers I moved in when I started the job. I love them. They are quiet. They pay their rent on time and in full. I have every reason to believe their relatives will do the same.

The single lady with 2 kids is already a shitty tenant (literally - she let one of her kids shit outside on the steps of her building and didn't clean it up). She also has someone not on the lease living with her, and she has been here 2 weeks. I hope I can get her out before her Section 8 payments start.

The single girl is 20 years old, has a full time job, and I was hesitant to rent an apartment to her only because she is a prime target for the drug-dealing vultures in the neighborhood. They like nothing more than to set up shop in the apartment of an employed single woman who is going to pay the rent, let them store drugs and/or guns in the apartment, and protect them from police searches, etc. The dealer might also live there illegally, but has about 4 or 5 other places they hang out, which usually include the apartment or house of a mother or other older female relative, and several girlfriends' apartments.

I am still up to my ears in my own work plus the work for the Section 8 program, but at least we finally started interviewing people for the on-site social work position. I am very excited about that, mostly because I have been going to meetings that person should be attending, and I hate meetings. Especially meetings with clueless social workers who sit and whine uninterrupted for 2 hours in a conversation I can boil down to 1 sentence, "Someone should do something about all the problems!" I am beginning to seriously despise social workers.