I haven't posted for a while. The combination of work and cleaning up at home after seven people becomes discouraging and all-consuming. Sometimes I write a post entitled something like, "Take This Job and Shove It," only to delete it without posting.
I clean kennels and bathe dogs (and cats). Sometimes, when the two full-time groomers have too many animals on the books, I groom. I make more money per hour grooming than the $9/hour I get for doing the other stuff. I'd rather just groom a couple of days a week, and forget the kennel work altogether. Working two full days a week sounds great. (Yes, I know lots of people work forty hours a week and then come home to feed kids and clean up their houses. I am grumpy and don't wish to discuss them.)
My present schedule: Go in for four hours every weekday morning and every other Saturday morning, and do kennels for the whole weekend once a month. But I know my employer, a dour and intimidating man, doesn't want to find someone else to do the morning kennel work. I am an old mom and I CLEAN. Usually, the people who apply for my type of job are 20-year-old twinkies. They don't clean. Not very well, anyway. The place smells better since I started working there. The boss doesn't want me to quit doing kennels and to just groom. I don't have the guts to insist on it.
The thing is, I could easily spend four hours a day cleaning and doing laundry and yardwork at home. But by the time I've done it at work all morning, I'm not perky enough to come home and jump right into more frenzied activity. Therefore, the house is a freakin' mess most of the time. (I once told the kids, "The house is my brain. When the house looks like this, my brain is a wreck, and I'm cranky."
When you spend four hours cleaning kennels, putting dogs out, and bathing animals, you spend those four hours on your feet and moving. I lift dogs into the bathtub that weigh up to about eighty to ninety pounds (beyond that, I have to get help).
There's a limit to how much activity my poor old mom body can take in one day, any more. I'm old. I'm ancient, I'm wearing out, I'm depressed. My knees make slight crunching sounds when I go down stairs. In twenty years, I'll probably need knee replacement surgery, like my mother did two years ago.
On the other hand, I'm a year younger than I thought I was. I discovered this when I had to fill out some paperwork or other for the kids, and I had to figure out how old my husband Fred is. Once I did that, it didn't add up--I know he's three-and-a-half years older than I am, but aren't I . . . ?
Nope. All last year I thought I was XX years old, but it turns out that it's THIS year that I'm XX years old. Hey, those numbers sort of run together during the middle years of each decade, I've found.
So, some good news. I have an extra year of life to do something wonderful, something grand. If I could just figure out what it is. I'm about the same age as the president. He's president. I'm cleaning kennels. I must have screwed up somewhere . . .
