It's Thursday Morning at 6:00 am

I'm ready for work. I've been sleeping real heavy and waking up with a headache for the past 3 mornings. I think it's sinuses. Still, it's aggravating to wake up with a headache. I'm going to try turning off the fan tonight.

Image inspection this morning. I have to be to work at 6:30. I'm ready, got the truck organized and washed and I'm wearing khaki pants and company shirt (two sizes too big).

Speaking of two sizes too big: I've lost a lot of weight in the past couple of months. All my pants are falling off and when I put the belt on to hold them up, they pucker all around. I look like I'm wearing a circus tent. I need new jeans soon. It's uncomfortable wearing baggy (I mean really really baggy) pants.

There is an ongoing joke. A friend told me I have an "onion butt". I said "What?" He said "Onion Butt. Because every time I see it, it brings a tear to my eyes." I laughed about that. Then I told the boss about it and we had a good laugh. He told me yesterday that I need to eat more, that I'm losing my onion butt.
Okay, so it's a corny joke. I thought it was one of the most unique complements I have ever gotten.
Miss Penny came out to the shop and announced that she had to leave early that day and asked the guys if they all had their "big girl panties on" today.
I guess my little euphemisms are contagious. It's funny to hear that coming from somebody else's mouth.

Well, I gotta go get inspected.
Have a great day!
MsAmber

My new attempt to keep fish

The little fishbowl had started growing algae along the walls, and the water-lily is growing fine, so I thought I should try again at fish-keeping. I bought a Betta and named him Alpha, and I bought a rubber-lipped baby plecostomus named Angelina. Alpha and Angelina have been here for 4 days and appear to be doing just fine. So far....

I have to clean out and organize my company truck today. Image inspection again tomorrow. I have to attend a 9:00 meeting this morning and gather any materials I'm missing, then I'm going to come home and organize and wash the truck. I've already made lists of what I'm needing, so I should be fairly efficient:
Ground wire
fast connect kits
HD cables
2-way splitters
purple tags
expanded filters
RG11 strippers
compression tool
and put my 4 cones back on the truck.

I took the boys for a walk when I got home yesterday. They've both lost their minds: they don't remember how to walk together. Good grief. I need to practice with them more. This is a busy road with no shoulder and 6' deep ditches. No place to dive out of the way if a car was going to hit you and the dogs have forgotten how to heel. I guess it's my fault - I haven't taken them both for a walk in about a month. I'm supposed to get a little fence built around soon so that we have a perimeter and a yard. I'm daydreaming of a little 4' picket fence, but I'll probably end up with t-posts and some wire fencing. It'll look good though, I'm planning on decorating up my little plot of land and making it look real homey. All the kitsch I can stand.

Well, I need to take a shower and get ready for the meeting.
You have a great day.
MsAmber

Had a gully washer last night

and I slept like a baby through it.
It's still raining now, and I hope it doesn't do it all day while I'm working. It's a bear to set up the ladder in mushy mud and keep my feet clean when I go in and out of people's houses.

I have a tad-bit of a headache this morning. I woke up early, but I think I want to go lay down for another hour. That will only make me rush to get ready, so I'm debating it.

Yep, I'm going to lay back down.

Have a great day.
MsAmber

What's happening to my app?

Just a couple of months ago I celebrated my 14,000th day of life. I see today that it says I have been alive for 14,362 days. What????
It has not been 362 days since I rolled over 14k.
Now I have to go find the darned app site and see what went wrong. Did something change my birthdate?
Oh fuss and bother.

I got the electricity on today. Yayy! Then I turned and tilled up a little cold garden patch by the fence. That little garden is for lettuce, radishes, chives, and green beans on the fence. I got four rows about 10 feet long and two feet apart. It may be a little crowded, but it'll be good and shady for my cool-weather plants. I started the banana peppers and cantaloupe in a little greenhouse. 72 plants. I still have cucumber and squash to plant also. I need to make mounds for them. Yeah,a gazillion of them, one foot high by three feet across. It's going to look like an alien landing pad around here until the plants cover the mounds and it looks like a garden... (chuckle).
Mounds!

Boy, the wind is something else today. Really glad I'm not working on that ladder today. It gives me the willies when the wind is blowing.
I'm also thrilled to be back on my blog. I missed it.

You have a great day.
MsAmber

Good Morning.

It's Monday.
Hopefully today I can get the electricity turned on. I'm not driving up to the shop unless I'm needed by the buyer of the truck to go and get the campershell. I have gardening to do on my day off.

I've been looking through the Auto Trader and I don't see any hopefuls yet. Since my routes take me around to all the different towns and neighborhoods, I'll just keep my eyes peeled for a good deal. I'm not ready to jump into another vehicle yet anyway. I need to take my time and find the best truck I can for the little money I have.

I see a bad wreck on Talladega Racetrack is on the news. Apparently an airborne racecar hit the fence and shrapnel hit the crowd and injured quite a few people.

I need to put an ad on Craigslist to rent out the other RV spots near me. I told the landlady we would get this place filled so she can afford to live here and not need to sell the place.
Speaking of my landlady: Ms Doris is such a cool old gal. She used to be quite the looker in her day, and we seem to have a lot of sensibilities in common. I threw down a little extra for getting the lawn (field) mowed and I think she and I will be great partners in keeping this place looking great and keeping the new tenants from trashing out the place. I'm going to hate having neighbors, but I'll deal with it.
I'm getting used to seeing a green field with clover flowers out my window.

It appears as though I've picked up a new reader. Welcome.

You have a great day.
MsAmber

Okay, I kicked butt this week.

I sat down with my calculator and set some numbers in stone. I decided my bank account needed a blood-transfusion, so I got a piece of posterboard and I wrote:
FOR SALE
DARN GOOD TRUCK
'84 SILVERADO C-20
BIG BLOCK 454

And I went and stood on the side of the road off Johnston St with the truck parked behind me picturesquely.
Day 1:
First place I parked at and stood for a while I had three inquiries, then the manager of the lot told me I had to move on (nicely, though). The second place was an old gas station that now hosts a computer repair business. That guy didn't mind. I had a lot of hopeful inquiries, but no serious bites.

Day 2:
I got up early and had my coffee so I went to the Home Depot parking lot off of Ambassador Caffery and held up my sign for a few hours, got a lot of inquiries and people took my number. Then Nate called and asked what I was doing, I told him I was selling my truck. He asked if I wanted lunch, I said yes, and he told me to meet him at the Golden Corral buffet at 12:30. I got there at 11:30 and went out to the street with my sign. I sold the truck AND had a good meal.

So, I'm making April's RV payment, May's RV payment, cellphone/internet payment, electricity deposit, loan repayment, May's rent, and RV insurance for the year. I set X amount aside for buying another old "project" truck. I would really like to find an old Chevy Suburban with air-conditioning. Now that I'm caught up, I can live off my income. Getting caught up was a bear, I was in emergency mode! But I pulled it off in just 2 days. I celebrated with an Arby's roast beef sandwich, curly fries, and a Dr. Pepper.

A friend just gave me a bicycle, so I'm going to spend a little bit of money to fix the tires and make it road-worthy. I have the company-truck as my transportation, but hey, like my friend says: "If you've got the time, isn't everywhere walking distance?"

Then my work-week started and I worked some big ugly jobs, so I know my paychecks are going to start looking better. Thursday was big, Friday was hell, Saturday went good.

I slept 9 whole hours last night without even trying. I went to bed at 9:30 and woke up at 6:30. I went to Wal-Mart and got dogfood, shower gel, garden seeds, dish rags, soy milk, lotion, bratwurst, hot-dog buns, and a two-liter of Welch's Grape Soda.
The two days that I was standing by the side of the road, I got such a sunburn on my face, neck and a really obvious farmer's tan stripe on my arm. The burn on my neck/shoulder curve is really blistery, brown, leathery and hideous: thus, the lotion.

All in all, it's been a good week since last I blogged. I'm minus one truck, but it's ok. I'll build me another one. The important thing is: I have my internet back on.

Have a great week.
MsAmber

I know it's been a while...

Yeah, it's been over a week since last I blogged.

Money is still real tight. I had to replace the starter in the truck yesterday, that pretty much ate up my gas money for the coming week. Getting the electricity turned on may just have to wait another couple of weeks. I'm racing to see which happens first: that my cellphone gets shut off or that I can make a payment on the trailer. If the money comes up for the trailer first, then I'll pay it and my cellphone (and internet) will get shut off for a little while. Ya'll just bear with me. More bills than money, but I'll get caught up eventually. I sure could use a winning lottery ticket right about now, but I understand you have to play to win and I can't even afford that.

Food or gas? The neverending dilemma.

Freakin' truck!

Have a great week.

MsAmber

Yesterday was rough.

I had two jobs to start out: a 10-12 and a 1-3 (that's the service window, the time I must show up). So I waited around the office for a while, then I went and put some gas in the truck. Since my jobs were in Kaplan and Abbeville, I decided to start driving toward those towns. Nate called me back to the shop. He put two 8-10's on me at a quarter to nine, and they were 37 miles away in Jeanerette. I raced down there and started my first job. It required a wall-fish. Really, I should have replaced the whole aerial drop because it had two barrel-connectors on it. Then the phone calls started: "Are you done yet?", "Are you going to make your next appointment?", "When are you going to be done?". I'm in a hot 3-foot tall attic, drilling and fishing, and my phone just kept on ringing. So I got a little snippy with Penny. I was late to every single appointment yesterday. My whole schedule was off and there was no room to breathe. I got a lot of points yesterday. I had new aerial install, a wall fish, a transfer of service with data/phone, and a data/phone install. One of my customers had a bad computer and wasn't home to instruct on his new connectivity so I opened a browser and put it on google.com and just left it. I'm sure he'll call for service because he won't know how it works.

I've asked Nate not to give me two 8-10 jobs at freaking 9:00. It sets off my whole day. I can't catch up afterwards. He said I should have rescheduled my first job because it was a wall-fish. I'm used to just doing the job until it's done, then move on to the next. What's the point of rescheduling? I have to climb the pole on each job to put new fittings and tags, that takes me a few minutes with the extension ladder. The company thinks it should take 20 minutes to install phone. Let's see:

Drive up and make contact with the customer.
Look over the job to determine where to put it - with cable/phone/electricity nearby.
Call dispatch to put equipment serial number on account.
Climb pole and check signal level, change tags and fitting.
Open house box and change fittings, check ground and tag it.
Install MTA and backfeed dialtone to jacks.
Disconnect house from Ma-Bell at demarc.
Call Dispatch again to check signal levels and receive call-back.
Do paperwork, customer education and signature.
Pack up ladder and close out job on phone.

...And you want all that in 20 minutes? Just calling dispatch takes sometimes upwards of 5 minutes. I go through all my dispatcher's phone numbers, then I may sit in queue for 10 minutes, which doesn't leave my hands free to do the ladder work.

This is one job where I'm not going to be a Superstar. My jobs will be done to the best of my ability, but it won't be blazingly fast. There should never be the kind of pressure put on me like there was yesterday. I am a short-old-woman. That's my excuse and I'm sticking with it.

Anyway - I may be PMS'ing also. I just don't want any more repeats of yesterday's schedule. That was rude. And my back aches this morning.

Gotta go get ready for another day of fun, fun, fun!
You have a great day.
MsAmber

I didn't just hit snooze.. I turned it off.

It was cold in here this morning. So, instead of hitting snooze, I turned the alarm clock off. Now it's 6:30 and I'm late. I haven't even showered yet and I'm usually out the door at 6:45...

It rained all day yesterday. Especially while I was up the ladder. I'm getting better with the ladder. Not shaky at all. Still not fond of the derned thing though.

Stupid dog has half an acre to run around in and still he goes straight for the street. I had to run out there and kick his ass back home. Dummy.

Well, gotta get moving.
You have a great day.
MsAmber

I got moved into the country.

Yesterday I pulled out of Rinea's yard. It was a little tricky backing out of her backyard. I found a place in the country for $125.00/mo but I have to turn on the electricity. I called Swepco and there is a $165.00 meter deposit. Urgh. So I guess I'll do without for a week. They ran me an extension cord so I can have electricity at night. During the day she'll unplug me so she can do laundry. At least I'll have my coffeepot for in the mornings. Talk about timing: I ran out of propane last night. Must get it filled today.

I got a 100% on my image inspection yesterday. Nate is pissed off because everybody was given a whole day to get ready and still they weren't in compliance. So, I have to attend an ass-chewing meeting this morning. Total waste of gasoline.

Last night I went to bed when it got dark. The dogs started barking and then: knock knock knock on my door. So I answered it. My landlady's son wanted to know if I had $7.00 for a pack of cigarettes for his mother. I said no, I don't carry cash. He told me not to mention it to his mom that he'd asked. I went back to bed. My phone rang. It was my Dad. I spoke with him for a few minutes, and knock knock knock. The landlady's son wanted to know if I would roll them a few cigarettes for tonight. 4 for his mother and 1 for him. I let him in while I got out my can of tobacco. He was grinding his teeth and jabbering on and on about dogs he found, the death of his dad, going to jail, being a model in California, being an offshore worker, etc. I told him I could hear his teeth grinding and that he better cut out the "shit". He knew exactly what I meant and swore that he hasn't done any drugs in 6 years, and he's only done coke twice in the past 8 months. (Yeah, right.) He told me he usually dipped copenhagen and he's jonesing, so I gave him my spare can (I like to dip sometimes...) I ushered him out the door then called my Dad back to finish the conversation. I'm going to run into him every day that I'm here, so I will be sure and establish with the boy that it's inappropriate to knock on a lady's door after dark. He's a little on the rough side so I need to tread lightly with him until he respects me. It's a little ooky trying to stay friendly (but not too friendly) with a tweaker. I don't want to come home and find all my stuff stolen and my dogs hurt, which is a distinct possibility if I establish enmity with him, he will feel justified in stealing from me to meet his needs.
I understand now why the rent is so cheap and the lots are vacant.

Don't worry, I've handled worse. I just have to be courteous but stand-offish. I've established my safety-net and if things get too rough, I'll simply move again.

You have a great day.
MsAmber