It’s, like, faith

On Sunday, the ‘net got disconnected, and the cable TV too, which I didn’t actually know until the company called me. I led off with a joke and spun a story about (actually true, but unsure nonetheless) how I was expecting a check in the mail, and how I had a new job – "you know how that is – the first month you are so poor" and I got my service restored right then.

I guess it helps to have a "nice voice", eh?

So, yesterday was indeed Friday, and by golly, there was indeed money in the mail. Some, anyway, because my friend in Japan who sent me the money has had her teaching hours cut 40%.

Yesterday, there was also a direct deposit into my bank account – I guess I really do have a position with Mentor Oregon. Apparently, my background investigation was not complete. They emailed me about it, but it took me a couple of days to get to that email account – password problems and it seems the Windows Live email doesn’t work any more. Or, mine doesn’t, but I got Outlook up and running and it turns out that the investigation needed only my digital signature.

I feel I’m not so bright sometimes, and have been operating with my mom’s voice in mind – "if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all". I have been stressing over money – I didn’t have any, and I still really don’t, and I’ve been mindlessly looking at other stuff on the net and not written much of anything this month.

I haven’t actually turned on the TV much at all lately. I could stand to lose cable TV – I have a converter box for my "old" analogue TV, and really, I spend far more time on the Internet, and if I give up the cable TV and get faster net service – well, TV is on the net too, right? and it’s kind of a waste of my time anyway….

Another 90 degree day yesterday, one in a run of hot weather. This is the best time of year here. It usually doesn’t get TOO hot, not TOO cold here, but now – now is the best time of the year for the Northwest.

(these are also the times when I wonder just WHY I had to have a BLACK car….)

4 and a quarter years I’ve had my Brilliant Black beauty, and I’ve managed to hold onto it. This means, in a sense, that I have had a Dodge Caliber to drive every summer since 2007, when I rented that first one and drove it three thousand mile in a week, and LIKED the car so much, that when I could (in better days) I bought one of my own, in "Surf Blue Pearl", a color I miss a lot. (B5 Blue, in the Mopar paint catalogue, a "heritage color" from the 70’s)

I drove the blue one happily for about a year and a half and then traded it for the black Caliber I have now, loaded with about every option I could get on that model, an SXT Sport. I really like these Dodge Calibers – they are good cars. I’ve had one to drive every summer for six years.

That’s pretty good, for me. Almost 59,000 miles on my black beauty, which I bought new in 09, and the average for me owning a car runs about 66,000 miles. 7 years is the longest I ever owned a car, but that one sat in the lot downstairs for those seven years and never did run, really. The V6 engine had become a V4 and it ran very badly, which is why I replaced it in April of 1998, with the car that I wrecked ten days later on the Morrison Bridge. I had kept the brown station wagon, my "cockroach cab" that whole time, here, after I moved here from the Foster Home I had been recovering in, after that car wreck.

15 years ago, now, Wow.

This whole time, I have taken it on faith that "things will work out".

And, they always have. I don’t like to count on that, because, you know, one day things WON’T "work out", and I have to always be prepared for that, for things not to work out.

I already KNOW what I can live without; I would like the chance to earn my own way in this life and to apply what I think I have learned in a Real Life situation.

We get this Mentor thing straightened out, it could all work out.

***

A nice note to end with:

26 years ago, I taught English in Japan. The last group of students who I taught in 96, whom by then I had known since 1985, still meet with my former wife, an English teacher herself in colleges and universities. They met this weekend (Japan is 17 hours ahead of Oregon) and heard the glad news, that I have a job, one they all agree on suits me well. They all wished me well and success.

It’s kinda nice to have students think of me, even so many years later. Two of them did come to Portland to visit me in 2011, for a weekend! From Japan, 5000 miles, to see me, for a weekend.

If I can try to remember things like that –

Well.

Onwards.

 

*****