Life rolls on without Yasha. But now Sergei is sick, eating his ass, I mean literally. He's managed to get every bit of hair off and has a sometimes bloody, often raw spot back there. I went to the pet store and got him one of those funnel collars, and omg, you'd have thought I cut off his balls. He hardly moves anywhere in the house. Mark wraps up his rear(around the tail) with neosporin laced pad and an ace bandage. He hates it, and usually before morning, has chewed the damn thing in half, and thusly, gotten it off his backside. The funnel collar isn't helping much. The only positive is, he's still eating and drinking so we know he's not at death's door yet. The huge negative is, we can't afford the vet.

Which brings me to my next issue, money. Things have gone down hill rapidly. It's tough being the working poor. You make too much money for assistance, yet not enough to live. Honestly, we would have downgraded to a smaller place by now had we not taken Ibriham in after the fire. While he throws us some money when he can, it's not enough to help ease our plight. Of course, we didn't take him in for money, and we really care less about it, it's just hard, that's all.

And then on top of that, we think he's fixing to bail on us, get his own place on the other side of town. This of course, means we lose the use of his car. Hadi is not happy, because it means she'll be spending a lot of time by herself while he's on the road. She's not confident enough in her english, has no family or friends here(besides us)and she doesn't like to be left alone. I've been running her all over the city, finding english as a second language classes for her. She's taken two so far and is excited to throw herself into them.

Unfortunately, the area we live in is the bastard step-child of the city. It's only about 15 years old and there is no public transportation over here. Meaning, Mark will now have to walk quite a ways to work and back(and I mean, quite a ways).

When it rains it pours and my life is as full as those houses in New Orleans. It's so exhausting worrying about everything(damn you grandmother for passing along the worry gene to me). However, it's nice to have my sweetie and to know I don't have to go through this alone.

On the plus side, damn, Mark and I are smart. My last trivia entry revealed that after winning one, we lost the next week, horribly. Well, we're losers no more. We're on a winning streak and won three more. One week we went in and noticed a really nice professional dart board as one of the prizes. It was unclear whether it would be the first or second place prize, but both of us were willing to come in second if we could win the dart board. Darts is one of my son's hidden talents and he loves to play the game. We didn't try to do it, but we did come in second. When Mark went up to see what we'd won, the "quizmaster"(this is funny if you know this guy)offered the dart board to the first place winners. However, they had five people at their table and had run up quite a tab and said they'd prefer the $50 gift certificate so they could pay their bill. OMG, we were so excited(and the quizmaster was soooooo pissed---Mark used to work there and the two never really got along) We now have a sweet ass dart board hanging in our living room.

This trivia thing has become quite the part-time job. We figure with the dart board(which is easily worth between $75-$100) we've made at least $225 in the last month. While it's only gift certificates to that place, it at least affords our broke asses a nice night out of the house.

Now just so you know, it's not really that Mark and I are all that smart. We just have a system. Sometimes they're lucky guesses, sometimes we can reason the answer out, we know some of "the quizmasters" favorites(he seems to like Norman Mailer who has been the answer to at least three different trivia questions), often, if the answers have two or three familiar names and one obscure one, the answer is the obscure one, and we keep track of every right answer during the game, so if answer A hasn't shown up in a while, we'll pick it and usually end up right. And then, if worse comes to worse, and we simply don't know, Mark relies on the old "if in doubt, Charlie out"

The morale of this entry is: Everyone has problems, rich, poor, old, young. Living "the life" is never easy(and if it is, you're in denial), but we should appreciate the things we can, find the positives amoung the negatives, take pleasure in those little distractions, and have faith that things usually work out in the end.