Well, this sucks.

The elderly shut-in that I've been helping to care for took a turn for the worse today. She was fine when I left today at 1pm. By 3pm, she had trouble breathing and called her nurse on the phone. By 6pm, she was completely unresponsive. She's not expected to make it through the night.

Nobody's sure what happened. Perhaps a blood clot. Perhaps her one good lung collapsed. Can't even really call it a "good" lung since that's the one with cancer.

Not to sound like a callous asshole, but this throws my finances into the toilet. This job provided more than half of my income. Even with this job I was living well below the poverty line, but I was starting to get a grip on my finances. Not only were my bills all current for the first time in a while, I had just picked up another house cleaning gig that throws me an additional $40 every three weeks.

Another monkey wrench in the works is the fact that the old woman's son and his wife are the neighbor-cousins I'm supposed to be riding with to Michigan this coming weekend to attend my parents' 50th wedding anniversary party. So now that whole trip is up in the air at the moment.

If the neighbor-cousins can't go, my parents would surely offer to pay for the gas for me to drive myself. Can't say I'd look forward to a 36-hour round-trip solo drive in a truck with shitty brakes. But it's not like I can miss this family occasion.


Sigh...there's a white-tailed deer in my front yard right now, raiding my garden. I've been seeing quite a few deer lately. This is the third one I've seen in the last 24 hours. Could be the same deer for all I know.

There's only a few wild citizens of Spenardo del Sur that I can recognize on sight. There's one turkey vulture with a distinctive mark on its wing. Of the dozens of vultures that circle above, that's the only one I can pick out of the crowd.

There's also a family of crows that live in my woods. Last year, I would see two crows wandering around my yard almost every morning. Eventually, I realized it was the same two crows. This spring, they had three babies. Hardly a day goes by that I don't see them on a family outing.