Dreck

From dictionary.com:

dreck 

–noun Slang 1. excrement; dung. 2. worthless trash; junk.


An apt description of my total output yesterday, literary and otherwise.  I had such plans.  I had my blog post all planned out in my head.  I was going to do not one, not two, but three loads of laundry.  I was going to make numerous telephone calls (yes, me, the one who hates telephones) to attempt to clear up issues with the North Carolina Employment Security Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and my tax accountant, Met Life insurance, and Joe my friend who is working on the computer that crashed without a backup.  As my mother always said, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."  Starting at 3:00 AM yesterday morning we had magnificent thunderstorms that lasted well into the afternoon.  My head was pounding and hurt so much I could barely see. Thinking was completely out of the question.  The last words Bud said to me as he slithered out the door on his way to work were, "Take some pain meds and go back to bed."  As his spouse, I am duty bound to ignore everything he says to me.  I was also determined I was not going to let the weather rule my life any longer.  I was going to overcome this silly little problem and learn how to function under even these adverse conditions.


I wrote the post for my blog.  I rewrote it.  Then, I rewrote it again and again and again.  Every time I read it, it got more and more boring.  It was poorly written and a total mess.  The more I attempted to make it better, the worse it got.  Finally, I decided it was so bad I would never want my name attached to it, so I just abandoned it altogether.  Some day I may tell the story of Legs and Wings and Stones, but not if it's gonna be as awkward, dull and tedious as that mess yesterday.


I did manage one load of laundry.  Then I checked Bud's underwear drawer to be sure he had at least one pair of briefs and a pair of socks for the next day.  He did, so the rest of the laundry was forsaken.


As the old adage from Morton salt goes, when it rains it pours (how appropriate considering yesterday's weather).  Lately it has been pouring situations that can only be described as fubar, primarily because they involve some bureaucracy or government agency.  The NCESC cannot decide whether they overpaid me or whether I am still eligible for benefits, or exactly what my status is though I have not attempted to deceive them in any way.  I collected unemployment benefits and I searched diligently for another job, right up until I decided to take early retirement and quit fooling myself that someone was going to offer me a position.  After I notified the NCESC that I had taken retirement and was no longer eligible for benefits, they sent me a letter telling me they had overpaid me for one of the weeks during which I was still eligible and still seeking employment.  The next day I got another letter informing me I owed another partial week repayment for some other reason.  The next day I received a letter to let me know I was eligible for continued benefits.  The next day I received another letter inquiring as to my eligibility status.  I began making attempts to reach a human at NCESC.  Every day I got the same recording and every day I left the same message with my name, social security number, telephone number and a brief description of my problem.  I have not received any return calls, so I suppose I'll just have to start calling again, and call every day, until someone returns my call.  I love home answering machines because that means I don't have to answer the phone, but I think businesses should still have humans answer the phone and direct the call to the appropriate department.  Automated operators do NOT perform acceptably.


At the same time the NCESC decided to drive me further over the edge, we received a letter from the IRS informing us we owe $10,000 in back taxes.  Needless to say I went completely into shock and broke down into tears.  How the hell could this have happened?  The IRS said we took $33,000 from my IRA and didn't report it as income.  I didn't remember doing that, but as it turned out, yes we did.  We got the money to pay the IRS for another fiasco related to one of my past places of employment in which I was a partner (there are no funny parts to that story so it will most likely never get written).  And, after some  research, it turns out our tax accountant didn't report it as income and we didn't catch the error.  So now I'm trying to reach my tax accountant to see what needs to be done to correct this mess.  Then I need to make arrangements with the IRS to pay the taxes.  Even though it is not tax season, my accountant seems to be unusually busy and it appears his voice mail isn't working either because he has not yet returned any of my calls.


Met Life is another bureaucracy.  All I want to do is cash-in a small life insurance policy so we will have money to get our roof fixed.  Our roof is leaking and since it's about 15 or 20 years old, that is not totally unexpected.  It didn't matter much until recently, because we weren't getting much rain.  Well the screw has turned and it rains at least once a week now, usually in torrents.  Since I have been without a reliable income for almost two years now (unemployment was helpful but gave us nothing extra), we don't have a lot of money just hanging around waiting for us to find ways to spend it.  A new roof is a little beyond our pocketbooks at the moment, so we decided to cash-in the insurance policy to get some quick cash.  I'm not planning to die anytime soon, and it won't cost much to handle my final arrangements when the time comes.  I plan to be cremated and I do not want a funeral or any type of memorial service.  All of that can be done for $1,000 and since I'm a veteran,  the VA will pay for part of it.  I completed all the paperwork necessary to surrender the policy and returned it immediately.  That was weeks ago.  Still no check, but plenty of rain.  If I could remember the agent's name (I tossed his business card), I'd call him to check on it.  As it is, I'm gonna have to call and again embarrass myself by admitting I don't know who my agent is (I've done this before).


And finally, there is Joe.  I am an idiot.  Though I am a computer geek and well aware of the need to backup everything regularly, I had an old desktop computer (I built it in 2000) that was the repository for all my documents, email and pictures.  I seldom used the computer because it was old and slow and I have a newer, faster laptop.  However, I knew the hard drive was probably going to crash, so I signed up for an online backup service that would allow me to backup the computer data to an offsite, easily accessible location.  I signed up for this service and initiated the backup from my laptop with every intention (there's that word again) of changing it over to the old desktop the next day.  So, of course, when I got up the next morning, the old desktop had crashed sometime during the night, and there was no backup.  My friend Joe is also a computer geek, much more so than I am.  He knows easily four times as much as I do about anything that has to do with computers.  I asked Joe to take a look at the old computer to see if he could salvage anything.  I need to call him and tell him to forget it.  It's been a few weeks and he hasn't had any success yet.  He has many more important things to do than mess with a computer that I was too stupid to backup.


I called no one yesterday.   I did only a third of the laundry and wrote many words that unfortunately were the equivalent of babble.  I was not successful in my war against the weather.  I finally gave up shortly after noon and spent the rest of the day happily pain free and in oblivion.  But as John Paul Jones said (remember, I was in the Navy), "I have not yet begun to fight."  I'm gonna try to tough out the next storm and the next.  I may not succeed, but I am damn sure gonna give it all I've got.