Added short version:
I never intended to have this place go dark, and after it did, I always intended to come back to it. I was actually planning on putting it off a bit longer, though, because I didn't want it to seem like I only remember this place when I'm in dire financial straights and need money. And I'm in dire financial straights and need money.
Then TRiG reached out to me, and - honestly - if I put it off I might never get around to coming back, so I decided to post now. This is long because I'm long winded, because I'm tired, and because I don't actually remember what relevant context I've shared here before.
/addded
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I never meant to disappear, but that's never stopped be before, so it's probably not a surprise it didn't stop me this time.
I always meant to come back and regularly post here again, but . . . same sort of thing in the other direction.
The only place I've stayed active, if disappearing for months at a time and mostly only posting to say why I haven't been posting can be said to be "active", is my patreon, and that's only because if I lose that income I lose my ability to stay in my house, full stop.
Originally the plan was for everything posted over there to eventually be available here for free, and that's still mostly the plan, which means I've got a fair bit of pre-made content to share, but there will be exceptions because of how things developed.
So, there's some stuff that's happened that makes keeping some stuff off the open web desirable.
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One, probably the most minor one but also the longest running one, is that for a long time, since back when I was actually active here in fact, I've occasionally done sort of live reacts to bad stuff. Bad in various ways, sometimes stuff of terrible quality, sometimes immoral. Originally this was mostly extremely low quality fanfic, and the thing is . . . I give people the benefit of the doubt there. If someone is writing like they're a twelve year old, I assume they're a twelve year old. I don't want to make some kid cry (or even worse, put them off writing entirely) by publicly savaging their work.
That's why I never shared such stuff here. I haven't actually done this, but patreon provides a way for me to share that stuff without risking making children cry. I put it up behind a paywall, and even if they search the internet for their work, they'll never see me tearing it apart.
A much bigger deal is that when I made this blog* various people who know me in real life promised that they wouldn't read it so I could feel free to say whatever without looking over my figurative shoulder. That promise has not been kept. So if I want to freely talk about things related to people around me, it can't be here. And ideally it can't be on the open web. Thus the usefulness of pay-walling stuff at patreon. It is, again, not really about money, it's about privacy.
Somewhere between the two is that something I wrote on here has literally been brought up in court. It was no big deal, just a poem, and nothing came of it, but it's kind of . . . daunting, maybe? Not really a thing I expected to happen when I started this place.
So that's also made me realize that having a barrier between things I say about, say, personal disputes involving my sister and her (now-ex) neighbors might be better off stored in a place where a lawyer with a grudge and an internet connection couldn't find them.
Some sort of members only space, like my patreon.
(The lawyer didn't actually have a grudge against me, and indeed I wasn't in the courtroom, and know of the poem showing up in court only second-hand.)
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One can note that the fiction this blog was originally created to share doesn't fall into any of these categories, nor do the decons I started but then ran out of steam on pretty fast. So basically the topics that will be hidden, safely ensconced in members only access on my patreon, are the live reacts I never really did here (if I ever get around to sharing them at all) and life updates that I'm not comfortable having the people involved in those updates read.
Assuming I actually manage to stick with updating here and don't disappear again.
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Ok, all of that stuff about my patreon vs here and the place where content will differ out of the way, here's an update on me.
I have not been doing well. At all.
Enough bad shit has happened that there's no way I could keep track of it all, but the big thing was 17 months ago. (I think, as near as I can tell I first mentioned it seventeen months ago.)
I get SSI for reasons of disability. In a just world everyone would get enough to live on regardless, and in a somewhat less decent world disabled people would all get the same assistance regardless, because being financially well off doesn't make you less disabled, and we shouldn't punish people for being able to work in spite of their disability.
In this world, if you have more than $2,000 in assets (the house you live in, if you own it, and a single car, if you use it, don't count; everything else does) in a given month, you don't get paid.
We're gonna come back to that, but first some context.
[link to skip the context]
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In 2021 the world was on fire and I felt helpless, there was an attempted coup no one was being held accountable, a disease we could have dealt with in a matter of weeks had been allowed to run rampant for a year and every new strain of note was even more contagious than the last (this could kind of go without saying, since for it to be of note it needs to out compete what's already out there, but it's become apparent that a lot of things that should go without saying don't) and we were discovering that instead of infection giving you antibodies with which to fight it off, people could and did get reinfected and every new infection increased the odds of increasingly serious complications.
And then there was the rats.
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2020 was the year I had people living with me. I don't regret giving housemate a place to stay with me rent free, given she was literally planning to be homeless to get out of a mutually terrible situation with my sister, and am kinda proud that because of that she was able to get on her feet and get a job at Pizza Hut instead of being forced to make money the way she had in the past (prostitution) which she positively hated (beyond all of the reasons one might hate that job in general, she's a lesbian and the Johns were male.)
I do regret everything else that resulted from be letting her stay here. When we ran out of toilet paper she used paper towels. You can't flush those. Toilet paper is made to dissolve, paper towels are made to hold together. Sewage backed up into the house, notably including the place where I was sleeping at the time. The place plumbers needed to get to to fix things was the absolute least accessible corner of the basement. Furniture that had been stored there for years (maybe decades) had to be moved. It was a lot of work.
That was when houseguest came. In theory to help clear out a space for the plumber to work, but not everyone was on the same page. Some people thought he was staying long term. Then he was trapped by travel restrictions for the pandemic and the question became kind of moot.
He was there to help clear out one spot in the basement. First day he arrived my depression was so bad I couldn't function. All I could do was sit on the couch, staring forward, listening to the very, very loud sounds of him "cleaning" the kitchen, overstimulation sucks and housemate and houseguest both excelled at causing auditory overstimulation.
They couldn't do anything quietly. Even something as simple as cleaning dishes, which is a naturally quiet act given that a sponge or (if stuff is really stuck on) scouring pad rubbing against a dish or cookware is generally quiet as all fuck, sounded like they'd put a bunch of glass, metal, and ceramics in a tumble dryer and turned it onto the fastest possible spin setting.
When I finally did make it into the kitchen I found that a lot of stuff had indeed been cleaned . . . so the kitchen was clean . . . and it was empty. My blender? Gone. My popcorn popper? Gone. my countertop oven? Gone. My bread machine? Gone. My pizza pans? Gone. My silverware? Gone. My cookware? Gone.
Basically the only things not-gone were my microwave, my refrigerator, my normal (full size) stove, and my dishwasher. Oh, and my kitchen table and kitchen cabinets.
They threw out everything else.
Good news, trash hadn't been collected yet. Bad news: they made no distinction between food waste, non-waste, and clean waste. So to find my fucking cookware, I had to dig through unsanitary shit, but more than that I couldn't just throw out the food waste because it was mixed in with stuff I couldn't afford to replace.
They did the same thing in multiple other rooms. There was so much I had to go through, it was impossible to get the job done quickly regardless, but my mental health was also shit.
So the food waste ended up sitting outside waiting for me to go through it. In 2020. When all of the city rats suddenly needed to find new food sources because the restaurant dumpsters they usually used for food were no longer being stocked up. At the same time a long abandoned building not far from me was demolished without being cleared of rodents first. We don't know for sure if it had rats, but if it did, they suddenly needed to find a new home.
Definitely city rats, and possibly rats from the abandoned building, found my home. Because of the food waste mixed with the "I am actively suffering because I don't have access to this useful thing, and I don't have the money to buy a new one" stuff. Usually I spent months suffering for the lack of something before I managed to find it, there was just so much to go through. Sometimes I'm pretty sure it was a year.
But it wasn't just the stuff outside. Housemate and Houseguest both left uneaten food all over the fucking place. So when the rats eventually found their way inside, they found a buffet.
They chew through your walls. You could hear them gnawing some nights.
This was Hell. But that wasn't the problem come 2021.
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Rats are a health hazard. The city takes notice when a large number of rats decide to take up residence on your property. The public health guy from the city was an intimidating liar. It took me a long time to realize this, so a cycle started.
The first time he showed up was very cordial and not at all terrible, to his credit. Every time after that he would make threats and ultimatums so, so extremely stressful and scary that I'd lock up and be unable to do anything. With the passage of time I'd become more functional and get work done, but it'd become clear I couldn't do what he demanded before the time the threat/ultimatum came to pass, still I'd work to the bone trying. Then the deadline would come and nothing happened. I'd email him. No response.
I'd stop working because I didn't know if there was even any point. My life was pure and utter dread and I was desperate to know what was happening. All effort was in getting information on what the fuck the situation was. Had I been given an extension I hadn't been notified about? Was it already too late? Was I gonna be kicked out of my house because it was declared a health hazard? (One of the the threats.) Was my house in the process of being condemned because of the incredibly persistent rats (another of the threats) was [insert terrible thing here] already in motion?
The uncertainly was Hellish and it consumed everything. Working was impossible.
Then, over time, I'd become acclimated to the uncertainty, and start working on fixing things again.
And that's when he'd come back. That's when he'd do everything in his power (including telling egregious lies) to kick my generalized anxiety disorder from, "Hey, I almost forgot I had that," to, "I cannot function because my anxiety is well past the point that renders me incapable of doing anything."
And repeat.
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Inasmuch as there was good news, I was no longer suffering from Housemate and Houseguest|.
Housemate and Houseguest had tried dating. It worked out about as well as you'd expect given that this involved a (non-bisexual) lesbian attempting to be in sexual and romantic relationship with a straight dude. After the inevitable breakup, they both started being horrible to each other. Houseguest demanded I kick out Housemate, I refused to take a side, so he left.
After an unpleasant experience away from home where someone tried to strangle me (yes, I'm pretty sure it was attempted strangulation, and the goal was not merely the actual choking that took place, though the choking sucked too) I returned home to discover my cat had disappeared. More than that, Houseguest hadn't thought to contact me to tell me the cat had disappeared, nor to mention it when I got back, and was apparently never planning on telling me she hadn't seen the cat the whole time I was gone.
The cat was old, frail, and only allowed outside because being outside (and probably destroying the ecosystem) was the only thing that seemed to bring her joy anymore. I knew there was a risk of her not coming back every time time I let her out. I did my best to emotionally prepare for that. I was not emotionally prepared for her to have disappeared to the point she hadn't been seen in days when I got back from being attacked.
It was my birthday.
I ended up in a bad place, said some things I shouldn't have, and other things I should have said much, much sooner, and told her to find a new place to stay.
There wasn't a deadline, I didn't know how long it would take and the whole point of taking her in was keeping her from being homeless, but by September first she'd found another place to live. Public health guy came later in September.
So at that point, I didn't have to deal with either of them, and my mom started coming down regularly to help me deal with the rat problem. For a while it was great. Punctuated with the public health guy fucking up my mental health, but seeing her and working with her was great. Good for my mental health, a welcome change from what being around housemate and houseguest had been like. Consistent positive human contact.
The garage was packed with stuff to go through to separate the stuff I needed from the actual trash, and we did almost all of it in about a month. The one thing left to do was to move an old couch that had turned into a nesting area. My mom was on her way to rent a truck so we could take the old couch to the dump, and after that we planned on working on all of the stuff lost due to "cleaning" that had been stored inside the house.
She was on the road, on her way, when she got a call from the police. My sister had been involuntarily admitted to a psyche ward and my mother was being told to come pick up my sister's three kids.
After that, my mom didn't have time to come down. And it's harder to work alone. Not just harder in that you need to do all the work instead of part of the work, harder in that it's harder to motivate yourself on your own than when you have someone working with you.
And her not being able to come down and help was the end of (almost all of) my in-person human contact. The bottom dropped out. My mental health collapsed. Even now, over three years later and coming up on four, the majority of that "inside the house" we were about to start on remains undone.
But the public health guy kept on coming and fucking with my mental health into early 2021.
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So the world was on fire, there was a coup attempt no one was being held accountable for, I was being told my house would be condemned and possibly demolished if I couldn't deal with shit that my mental health wouldn't allow me to deal with, said mental health was absolute shit, and then GameStop.
Volatility creates the potential for people involved in stocks to make or lose a lot of money fast. The difference between, "TO THE MOON!" and, "It's worth like five dollars," is hella volatile, and no one's retirement money was invested in GameStop. The only people engaging with that shitshow were people who were willing to engage in a high risk marketplace that was set to completely collapse any second. No moral qualms about making money off GameStop stock, because everyone losing money had self-selected into this incredibly punishing game in hopes of getting rich quick.
In the past, it was impossible for people like me to engage in the stock market, it cost too much. Then fractional trading. You didn't have to buy full stocks, you could just say, "I want five bucks of [whatever]," and if [whatever] was trading at $500 dollars a share, you'd get 1% ownership of one share.
So I thought, given everything was fucked anyway, why not give it a try? For once in my life I wasn't in the red, I had to figure out what to do with what was left over of my stimulus funds, and I thought, "Why should rich people be the only ones to make money by doing nothing of value?"
The answer, by the way, is because the rules are set up such that only rich people are able to make money by doing nothing of value. For a little bit, I was actually doing well, until I ran up against those rules. I should have stopped when I realized just how rigged the game was (I'd known it was rigged, but vastly underestimated the degree), but the stock market is the world's largest casino, and it turns out I'm a gambling addict.
Never had an opportunity to discover that before, and I don't have a formal diagnosis, but "addiction" is the only way I can describe what was happening to me. I. Could. Not. Stop.
Notes I was taking were full of asides saying, "This is unhealthy, and I need to stop," sometimes in those exact words, other times in other words that meant the same thing.
I couldn't stop.
Then my computer broke.
Good news: I'd used some of the stimulus money for a down payment on a desktop. Possibly the first desktop I'd owned in decades. I was in the process of setting it up when my laptop died. As I transferred files, passwords, logins, and so forth from my laptop's hard drives to the new computer I made sure not to transfer the information needed to log into the brokerage account.
Because I was afraid. I was afraid that if it were possible to get into that account, I'd go back to how I was, allow it to consume my entire life again, and be unable to stop.
I knew that the money I had in there, about a thousand dollars I think, would lose its value because it was all in stuff that could only possibly go up in the short term, and would drop way the fuck down once a degree of sanity returned.
Even as much as a thousand dollars could help me (five months of food, for example) I thought it was an acceptable loss if it meant I wouldn't lose myself to the stock market and a gambling addiction again.
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And then we come to seventeen months ago. Somebody (some non-governmental agency contracted by the SSA) told the SSA I had over thirty fucking thousand dollars in that account.
Again, any month your countable assets are $2,000 or more, you get nothing.
They were cutting my SSI payments to zero and demanding repayment. This would make survival impossible.
So I transferred the login information to the desktop. Couldn't log in. Jumped through a ton of hoops, including walking to the next town over to get an up to date state ID on a day that was way too hot for walking, and doing some online thing to indicate that I had the same face as the one on the State ID.
No dice.
Eventually I got in by hotwiring my desktop to run off of the laptop's hard drive, which the site interpreted as being the same computer. As I recall, there was one hundred and sixty something dollars.
Even though I'd never seriously believed I had anything like $30,000 in that account, I still somehow managed to feel the gut punch and loss as if I'd had $30,000 taken away from me.
That wasn't the problem seventeen months ago.
The problem was that in the midst of all of this the SSA did a full blown review where they discovered they'd been handling my case wrong for years. They'd made bad assumptions in phone interviews, whereas if they'd asked for clarification instead of making assumptions I'd have told them what they needed to get things right.
Also, if certain rules had been explained to me more clearly, I would have known to point out that some stuff wasn't adding up.
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The thing is, they'd been mishandling my case in my favor.
When I said people would help me pay bills sometimes, referring to when I'd ask for donations because I couldn't cover a bill, they assumed the people were paying the bills directly, and this is completely different from how things are treated if people give me money with which I pay the bill (which is what was happening.)
Short version: donations are unearned income, and I am allowed to have fucking mountains of unearned income with no penalties whatsoever provided the income is not in the form of money, rent, or food. (I think the food thing has recently changed though.)
I am allowed to have $20 of unearned income with no penalties if it's in the form of money.
They already think I'm getting more than $20 of unearned income, because I don't own the house, and they think no one would ever let anyone live in a house at just the cost of expenses, because they think everyone on earth is a rent seeking motherfucker. (If I owned the house, they'd say I was getting no-house related unearned income, but because my mom owns it they invented a rent they claim I should be paying, and the difference between that and the expenses is the unearned income they're punishing me for re:housing.)
What this means is that if I, say, need $800 for oil and someone gives me $800 dollars to buy oil and I buy $800 dollars of oil with that money, I get penalized $800. If the person with $800 dollars pays the oil company directly, I'm not penalized at all.
The practical upshot of this is that I can't fucking fundraise when I fall short. I have to instead pay for the shortfall with debt. Credit card debt, which racks up interest like fucking whoa. And it's been that way for 17 months.
The only exception was when I got someone else to do a GoFundMe to pay for oil for me, but that person had to bow out of the "I'll fundraise for you," position due to mental health reasons and no one replaced them.
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And what happened 17 months ago is worse than just that, but for this bit I think it's all on me.
As of 17 months ago, my patreon income is classed as unearned and thus cut out of the base amount I get paid monthly, meaning that I fall short a lot more often than I used to.
I spent a long time trying to convince them my earned income is earned income, and it never worked. Recently, I think I figured out why. The SSA and IRS share information to determine the benefits a person should have. So if I say I'm self-employed and the IRS says, "She's not paying self-employment taxes," the SSA trusts the IRS.
Now my self employment income is around 4.5 thousand dollars a year. If you look up who needs to file taxes you'll find that a single person under 65 only needs to file taxes if their gross countable income is $12,950 or more. (Well, that's what the IRS website says right now, but I think it's for last year.) So it looks like I don't need to.
On less than perfect websites it really looks like I don't need to, because there's nothing about exceptions.
When I found out the $12,950 figure didn't apply to me I went to check places I'd checked before. Depending on the exact page in question one of two things was happening with respect to exceptions. On some, there was an asterisk I'd consistently failed to notice for years. On others, it was a "but first" thing.
That refers to an episode of M*A*S*H my mother has told me about. Hawkeye and Trapper are sent to defuse a bomb, and these are the instructions:
First, you need a wrench. Now place it gently on the nut just above the locking ring, and loosen.
Now, rotate the locking ring counterclockwise.
Now, remove the tail assembly.
And carefully cut the wires leading to the clockwork fuse at the head.
But first, remove the fuse.
The result is that the wires get cut before the, "But first, remove the fuse," is read. The bomb detonates.
On tax sites without an asterisk it tells you that the threshold for someone in my demographic is $12,950, then it lists nine other demographics and the thresholds for them.
Then, completely outside of the chart that shows the thresholds for filing, it says that self-employed individuals are required to file if their income is at or over $400.
Which is a very different value than $12,950.
So the fact I don't file taxes clearly means I can't be making more than $4,000 dollars in self employment income a year.
Based on what I know of how the SSA handles things, I'll have a windfall consisting of all of the money withheld because my earned income was classified as unearned the moment the tax situation is fixed and I can use the tax documents as proof it's earned income. Though who knows what the back taxes will be.
The thing is, that does jack shit to address the high interest on the debt I used to pay for things that money was supposed to go to. And I've reached the point where the interest on the debt is piling up so fast there's seriously not enough left over to pay utilities (which is why I'm behind on them and at risk of having them switched off.)
But it gets worse.
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Six months ago, I was in a bad place mentally. I think I remember why, but it falls into the "stuff I don't want to put on the open web because of who might be reading" category.
I started having suicide-adjacent thoughts. They weren't suicidal any more than someone saying "Just kill me now," is asking to be euthanized (credit to my therapist for that comparison) and indeed it was just an intrusive thought in the form of a phrase that kept entering my head. Whenever I thought about the future and the problems I'd have to face in it, the words, "Well, I'll just kill myself," appeared unbidden in my head. No related thoughts or feelings or desires or plans or whatnot related to suicide, just the words.
Now this is an easily identified maladaptive coping mechanism. You can't worry about, or otherwise stress out about, the future if there is no future. Thus it releases the pressure the future is putting on your mental health.
There's two problems, one is that I've been terrified my depression might become suicidal for most of my life, and thoughts like that don't help.
The other, the one that's having a big impact right here right now, it was successful in producing that "no tomorrow" thinking, but said thinking wasn't limited to stress about the future.
And six months interest free financing is a thing.
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You can probably see where this is going, but there's another wrinkle.
I never self-harm physically, unless you count not eating, drinking, and/or sleeping (which some people do, but I really don't) but there are other things I do to hurt myself.
A friend who has a history of physical self-harm once shared other ways she hurt herself, and that came with some, "That's me!" realizations.
She'd do things she knew were stupid and irresponsible so that a) they'd come back to bite her, and b) she could tell herself she was stupid and irresponsible. She could "prove" to herself that she was a bad person, no matter what other people said, because only a bad person would do things that stupid and irresponsible while fully aware that it was stupid and irresponsible to do them.
I don't do that a lot, but sometimes when my mental health is really bad; yeah: that's me.
So six months ago I spent a bunch of money on useless digital goods that aren't returnable or transferable. No returns means I can't get the money back. No transfers means I can't resell it to get part of the money back. It was, very much, stupid and irresponsible.
Thus allowing me to tell myself that I'm a terrible fucked up person who is a drain on society and deserves everything, every bad thing at least, that ever comes her way.
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To keep the lights, phone, internet, and water turned on, to refill my nearly empty oil tank, and to stop the stupid stuff from six months ago from exploding via retroactive compound interest I need $3,240.78 (plus or minus depending on fluctuations in the price of oil) in less than two weeks (That is, before November 1st), and I don't have a way to raise anything because I can't take direct donations and I don't have anyone willing to take them on my behalf.
But the stupid and irresponsible spending wasn't all confined to a single month, it spanned the boundary between two months, so there's another $1,249.62 "lest this explode" that needs to be paid before December starts, and as impossible as it seems to get any of this, it's not even the majority of the problem.
Because there's also all of the debt that built up to the point it's growing so fast it leaves me short on funds for utilities.
Put it all together, and add in repairs I need to do to the roof (which could cave in when the snows come if not fixed) and the basement (the windows and the door need to be fixed because right now cold air can flow right into the house through holes) and it's circa $10,000.
Circa $10,000 That I need to somehow get raised and paid to appropriate places without ever actually touching or controlling the money itself.
The exact figure, less the cost of materials for repairs (because I don't know the exact cost of those) is $9,624.63 with the usual margin of error based on the fluctuating price of oil. The materials should cost less than $375 so while what I need is circa $10,000, it's also under $10,000.
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The only part of the roof that needs to be repaired, by the way, is the beams holding it up. The actual roofing is pristine because after someone saw the damage done by a positively absurd windstorm and paid to have the outside redone. The roofers who did that work had apparently never worked on a roof like mine before, because the beams holding the roof up are in a very, very specific place phase of falling apart.
Human beings temporarily walking on the roof isn't enough to cave it in (yet) but it is enough to make the cracked supports bend. A lot. The experience of walking on it was described as "bouncy". While they were working on it, I heard them talking to each other about how in all their years they'd never felt a roof act like that before, and even if I hadn't overheard it, they made sure to report it to the person who actually paid them.
The situation is this: the beams are all in one piece, which is why it hasn't collapsed, but the beams are all severely cracked to the point they can and do bend at the cracks. Or, to put it more parsimoniously, they're buckling. That's not a sustainable state.
Enough bends, and they'll break completely. Likewise, if there's extra weight on them for a long enough period, that'll break them too. Here's the thing: roof rakes exist to stop snow from piling up too heavy on a roof, but you can never rake all the snow off. And then when rain comes and soaks into that snow things get much heavier, if it turns to ice, that extra weight sticks around.
That's why roof rakes are a preventative. Once the damage is done, and in this case it has been done, they can't fix anything, and can't guarantee a collapse won't come.
I don't actually know if the roof will cave in this winter if I don't get it fixed. I do know that if can't prove that I'm capable of dealing with the problem I'll lose the house. When we were in talks about me being given the house so my SSI stopped having a bunch deducted from it for not paying an imaginary rent in full. That, combined with getting taxes figured out and filed so my earned income is counted as earned would fix the root cause of the financial problems I've been having since forever.
Except, it may be too late for that. Because the root cause being fixed will mean fuckall if I can't deal with the $9,624.63 and change I'm currently facing down.
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Before I went back and added the stuff about the nature of the roof problem, this is how things ended:
(Stuff already said formatted as a quote)
Circa $10,000 That I need to somehow get raised and paid to appropriate places without ever actually touching or controlling the money itself.
The exact figure, less the cost of materials for repairs (because I don't know the exact cost of those) is $9,624.63 with the usual margin of error based on the fluctuating price of oil. The materials should cost less than $375 so while what I need is circa $10,000, it's also under $10,000.
Pretty sure I'm fucked.
That's why I was thinking of holding off on reviving this place until after fundraising. I don't want it to seem like I only remember Stealing Commas when I need money, and I currently need money. Somehow.
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