As for how things are going now, Fermin has been gone for two weeks as of 8:30 AM this morning and the house seems so much more quiet now. Fermin was very likable and was a decent guy and I miss his good spirit and the life he brought to the property. I wish he had not passed - I wish he had just gotten his damned shots and he'd still be alive today. And I feel really bad for his four year old daughter in Mexico who will never know her Dad now. But.....making lemonade out of lemons, Yesenia is hardly here these days and I think she will be moving out as she has female friends to stay with where she is welcome and she has been gone for days in a row - obviously she is staying somewhere else. I am thinking that she is just waiting for the free period to be over on February 4th - and if she moves out things will become easier for me in the sense that I can FINALLY move the living room into that unit and give Mom her damned living room back. That will be nice not to have to hear about her living room. It's very annoying as my life is totally screwed and she's worried about her living room? Thank God I am gay is all I can say as I this kind of thinking really sets me on edge and alienates me. And how.
Right now before we find out what Yesenia's plans are, I can be making the yard and the outside of the house better plus I can be seeking low hanging fruit through the house for recycling. If Yesenia does indeed leave, I will be able to sort through my stuff alone and in peace without a woman directly near me. That will indeed make things easier. So that much is good - I could finally get Mom off my ass and also just get rid of all my excess which is indeed a good thing! Yes indeed!
Things are just so weird now and I doubt that when this virus is endemic instead of being a pandemic, what "normal" unfolds is not going to be quite the same. I believe that everything that can possibly go online will go online and that there will be fewer human connections possible. Case in point - the CEO of Hilton is saying that service cuts will remain permanent and that the hotel industry in the future wiill be a higher margin business and part of this will be achieved via cuts to housekeeping (no more daily housekeeping!) and food and beverage and even in some hotels doing away with the front desk entirely via check in kiosks and digital room keys downloaded to your smartphone. What this tells me - fewer employees. And that that wonderful time in the late 1990's when every hotel and resort was screaming for help - this was but a point in time that no longer exists.
And I believe too that changes are coming to the restaurant biz - already tech exists to replace a server or to reduce the need for quite as many servers. At $9.80 an hour plus tips, servers will be replaced. As much as cashiers are beginning to in grocery stores everywhere - cases in point - Safeway and Sprouts. Both have expanded their self checkout recently big time. So who knows if I can even hope to ever wait tables again when you get right down to it! Do I miss it? Not hardly.
It is however amazing for me to think that this April it will be 25 YEARS(!!!!!) since my first season waiting tables in Tusayan. It will be 24 years since I arrived in Tusayan for my employment at the Squire. It will be 22 years since arriving at Bullfrog in Utah for my two months working in that hot mess. May 8th will be 9 years (!!!!!) since my interesting episode of panic attacks that forced me to bail Flaming Gorge Resort. I still remember that housekeeper who entered while I was nude and how I ended out getting a free night out of it, which was money I used in Salt Lake City as I spent a day there and found it to be an entirely nice place - I really did like it. Especially that funky public library with the incredible view of the Wasatch Mountain Range.
I can still remember how insane that situation was - I was almost tasered and arrested by law enforcement for refusing to go to a hospital in Wyoming - I did absolutely nothing wrong and I was almost tasered and arrested. That was fucking insane and I'm glad the very next day I left Flaming Gorge as after that had I stayed I would have really started to cop (no attempt at humor here) an attitude. I am so so so glad that I got out of that place when I did as I don't believe things would have went well and the short period of time I was there Mr. Collette lied to me in regards to having a private room - what more would he have lied about had it worked out so that I could stay? I remember coming down with another panic attack the following day and it was made clear then that I had to leave - as the owner's wife put it, it could not happen again. Fair enough - I am glad that I got out of that place. Hard to believe that May 19th I believe nine years will have passed since that ordeal. Though there is one bright side to all of this - I had a long wait for a Greyhound ride from Vernal to Salt Lake City and during this wait, I was able to visit the dinosaur museum in Vernal and I must say that that much was indeed cool. I am glad that I had the chance to see this much.
And some good news perhaps just landed in my life! It turns out that all I have left of this Pfizer Study is a phone call in June and an office visit in December! Meaning they won't see me for months and that gives me a chance to donate plasma and make some dollars doing that as plasma donation is paying more due to less supply due to covid. I have a chance to build up another Money Market account, this time at SunWest. That is something I for sure would like to pursue - it means easy money though it is time consuming. And I would not have to deal with the Pfizer people in person again until December - I could buy a comfrey salve to heal the injection site, you know? And I just looked up comfrey salves and they can indeed be bought online and are not even all that expensive! Cool! So there is some hope right there, literally out of nowhere!
I find it amazing what a strange decade this has been thus far. At the very beginning of 2020 there was a second attempted impeachment of Donald Trump. Right after that we were almost at war with Iran and right after that, Coronavirus started making inroads. I can still remember my second to last trip to Algodones in March of 2020 and how right after we returned - BOOM -the public library was closed as was the Art Museum and right after that we were on lockdown in Arizona for a short while and then our lives turned upside down in a very short period of time. Who knows what travel is going to look like going forward, and who knows how expensive travel will be going forward as there is to be much less business travel in the future as businesses have learned they can conduct much business online, thereby saving travel costs and not needed as much office space with so many white collar office types being able to work remotely from home. It really is a different world now. And who knows if and when this virus mutates into something that does not respond to the vaccines available?
Something that has amazed me is that the US Government actually GAVE me via auto debit in my checking account a grand total of USD $3200. No taxes or strings on this money, either. I chose to save every penny of this money and started a Money Market Account at Navy Federal Credit Union with this money. It's so odd that I actually have this amount of money and even under my name.....I want to save it as who knows how things will be going forward, you know? So odd to have been given this money due to the virus messing up the economy - since it's such a blessing and seemingly so unlikely just mere months before - I feel duty bound to save every penny for once. That is one of the few upsides of this virus. That and for a lot of other people, much more flexibility in where and when they work - but this has the nasty side effect of making real estate outside of main cities more expensive.
And now the US and the rest of the world in general seems to be experiencing inflation in a scary kind of way. Everything just is so expensive now that I live for my get aways to Nogales and the wonderfully cheap Goodwill where everything is dirt cheap and sold by the pound.
Funny.....I was just looking at Coolworks - and thinking of how this site is no longer relevant to me. I am unable to break free as Mom really needs someone around these days and background checks in the biz these days and the virus on top of everything else plus if I leave the state I lose Medicaid and I really don't want that to happen for a crappy seasonal job. I still can't believe I dealt with what I did at Denny's in Tusayan and at the Squire the following year.....I can't deal with the insanity of seasonal these days, I just can't. My Coolworks days seem to be over for good I'm afraid but I did get to do a bit of travel and I did for sure have some funky experiences.
So tonight I have group at five and then I go home and tomorrow I get to really work at the house as it does seem there is hope that Yesenia will move out and I can use that back studio to move the contents of the living room to for sorting and getting things out of my life. How nice it would be to have all this damned work done and off my ass! I can also be doing surveys on Drop and on the Coin App though I just noticed something that gives me pause - on Premise, the surveys are now only paying 20 cents instead of 25 cents. What this tells me is that perhaps Premise is not all that stable after all.....perhaps at $50 I should just cash out to be safe? Let's look over their cash out policies and find where I stand with that. I'd just hate to lose that money if they fold up and go out of business as so many of these apps do - remember Media Insiders? I really loved how brainless and lucrative that app was! Remember Great Bridge? That was another nice app that unfortunately did not last very long. Remember Perk Street? I am glad that I cashed out when I did as when they closed up shop, they did NOT pay out the earned monies (1 percent cash back). I am so glad I took them up on their $20 Macy's giftcard which I used to buy a chili pot, which I believe is somewhere in the wilds of the office where my desk is buried.
Anyway, this is an update of the life and times of Rob Andover.
More later, Rob
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