(This is a ranting post. Expect me to spew. Sensitive viewers need not view. If you’re viewing, you implicitly agree to indulge my freedom of expression and my need for release.)

I’m off to a pretty crappy week. Yesterday morning, I found that my bedroom ceiling was leaking again at both prior spots, and pretty severely, too. A punchbowl was almost completely full, and the continuous drops bounced off the collected water in the bowl, splashing water all around the bowl so that the carpet’s wet all surrounding the bowl. While soaking up the carpet water with paper towels, I had to keep pushing Dodo away from the bowl where he wants to take a taste. That cat’ll drink water from anywhere. I switched the bowl with a deep plastic bucket that shouldn’t splash as much, dumped the bowl’s yellow water into the toilet, locked Dodo out of my bedroom, and took my morning shower. Apparently, during my shower, Dodo decided it’d be really cute if he vomited all over my purse. This I found as I was rushing out the door to work, and had to clean up the purse and carpet before leaving, which made me even later than usual to work. The rain (9 days in a row in LA, news reports said — CA is now out of its drought and has received enough rain to supply the rest of 2008) made a slow drive, and each additional wet day delays repair of my roof/ceiling more. Oh, and there’s now a weird smell in my bedroom. Not the dank wet smell that came when the leak first started weeks ago, this one reminds me of the awful stench in the air for weeks during a summer of consecutive wildfires about 10 years ago, when ashes floated in the air like snowflakes. Maybe I have a partially incinerated dead body hidden in the crawlspace between my ceiling and roof, and now that my ceiling is falling apart, I can smell him.

Today, I was able to get to work without much of a hitch, but then I fell into my emotional dark place. I got into a quibble with Mr. W about his position on his ex situation (by “ex situation” I mean about his ex-wife with her hand so far in his pocket that her hand is actually deeply embedded in his ass, and by “his position” I mean about his willingness to leave her hand in there because he fears the potential financial burden and pain of a forced removal). And then I hated myself because this shouldn’t even be my problem and yet it’s invading my life through him, his anger about his situation, and his financial restrictions because of it. I worked through lunch for the 2nd day in a row (not having hit the gym in a long time) due to some drama involving an Orange County criminal case that was transferred to us, and got an email reminder to pay my upcoming credit card bill. After paying online and seeing how broke I have become very recently, now I’m even more angry.

I keep coming back to picking up a second job as a solution. Remember that bartending fancy? Playing with liquids is something I’ve always enjoyed, and it’ll distract me from my mental stress. The extra money will help out a lot, which will hopefully ease some of my current bitterness. Mr. W, however, is still against my doing it.