Bit Stressed But a New Couch

My mom's still in the nursing home and I'm way broke thanks to the draconian uncollected funds policy of Asheville Savings Bank but other than that things are okay, I guess. The money thing is not so good. Public Service Announcement: Do not ever, ever, ever deposit money to your checking account via the ATM over the weekend. Because they will not acknowledge that it is there for at least 24 hours and possibly longer. If it's the beginning of the month and you have automatic withdrawals you have kind of forgotten about, your financial status, never healthy, is about to fall shatteringly in ruins. They took $29 out for each transaction. There were 7 transactions. I am in the deep doo doo now. I went over there and begged and pleaded and was told that they would call me today, which they haven't done yet, to let me know if they will take any of those fees off. The lady said, "I see there was some problem back in November." Yes. Yes there was. Does the term working poor mean anything to you, bank lady? Does the cost of living in our fair city, where housing is the highest in the state and salaries are the lowest, mean anything to you? I am bitter. I am broke and bitter and stressed.

And I'm tired of getting dressed in acceptable-to-mom clothes every day and going over to Deerfield and running errands. She goes up and down: one day she'll sound good and then the next she won't remember our conversation from the day before and she'll be cranky and peevish. I know this isn't a big deal in the scale of aging parents and actually I'm very lucky and I need to stop bitching but somehow it's very hard. I don't know whether it's because she has always been so independent that this sudden change has made it difficult or whether I am just a wimp, or a little of both, but somehow going back and forth over there every day and worrying about her and etc. has sent me into kind of a tailspin. A lot of it is anticipation: I keep thinking, well, this is the beginning. Things are going to get better for her than they are now, but she's never going to go back to where she was before. It's just going to get harder, day in, day out, for the next few years. That scares me. It's why I'm here and all, why I moved here, and a lot of why I stay here, but on the other hand if I had any aptitude at all for health care I'd have a lucrative career by now. Unfortunately I am squeamish and panic easily at the sight of blood and would much, much rather not discuss or even acknowledge the presence of other bodily fluids. So all this does not bode well for the future.

On the cheery front, however, I got a new couch, thanks to my friend D who moved and gave me his couch, and it's very wonderful. It's like real furniture and it's comfortable and deep green plaid. It's all fancy like and the living room has been reinvigorated by the removal of the ancient dog chewed futon couch from a long defunct Timonium Maryland Caldor. It would be more wonderful yet if we could keep Jackson off it, but Jackson feels that he cannot sleep on the floor: he must get up on a bed or on the couch to sleep. When he is tired and the beds and couches are blocked to him, he howls. Continuously. I went to Toys R Us and bought a motion activated recordable alarm for $8. Yay for toy stores. They don't have staggeringly useful things like that for adults. I recorded myself snarling "Get off the couch, god damn it!" into it and put it on the couch. It works. It works so well that it makes Jackson and Theo howl continuously as soon as it goes off. My head hurts.