{"id":44,"date":"2003-05-20T13:40:00","date_gmt":"2003-05-20T17:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/?p=44"},"modified":"2003-05-20T13:40:00","modified_gmt":"2003-05-20T17:40:00","slug":"44","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/2003\/05\/20\/44\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m trying to decide if my thumb is green enough to handle a small trellis with some Jasmine entwined on it.  I think it would be really lovely to have some on my balcony. I was actually thinking of buying some trellis slats and fixing them to the sides of the balcony to give us a bit more privacy. Not sure if the landlord will allow that though. What I really want to do is paint. I *really* don&#8217;t think the landlord would allow that though. In fact after a quick call to her I&#8217;ve discovered I&#8217;m not allowed to paint, put border up or put a trellis on the balcony \ud83d\ude41 I hate that. Why could I not paint at the least? Especially if I said I would paint it back to the blah white it is now when I leave. How depressing.<\/p>\n<p>I hate apartment life. It&#8217;s fine if you&#8217;re young and footloose and fancy-free, but man, I&#8217;m sick of hearing neighbours fighting, neighbours screwing, neighbours screaming across the courtyard, neighbours smoking weed while I try to explain to my child what that funky smell is. I&#8217;m also tired of hauling groceries up three flights of stairs, and climbing four flights to do laundry. I want a garage. I never want to scrape ice off of my car again. I want a lawn that I can pay someone to mow. I want to run around the house without fear of disturbing the neighbours. I want a little garden. I want a place where I can DIY to my heart&#8217;s content.<\/p>\n<p>Well why don&#8217;t I go find a house to live in? Hmmm.. There are two major &#8216;pros&#8217; to where I&#8217;m living now: 1. Rent is cheap, but place is nice enough and 2. My landlord is incredibly cool about working with me when I&#8217;m struggling to get rent paid on time. Which *knock on wood* I haven&#8217;t had trouble with so far this year, but then it&#8217;s only May. <\/p>\n<p>I need to come up with some sort of plan. I think the key to me getting away from here with little fuss from the family is if I was offered a job somewhere that paid incredibly well &#8211; well enough that I just couldn&#8217;t turn it down. I often have people ask me why I stay here in Nebraska if I hate it so much and the answer is not easy to make them understand. Here&#8217;s the short version: When I left my ex-husband, I had nowhere to go, no money, no clothes, nothing. I moved back in with my family in California and began a struggle to get back on my feet. Six months later they decide they can&#8217;t afford California anymore and I have no choice but to come back to Nebraska with them. If they couldn&#8217;t afford it, how could I, a single parent with a baby? So Nebby beckoned. My father died right after we arrived here, moved a few times and ended up where I am now, got my act together and put myself through college and still hated the lack of anything to do here so I upped sticks and moved to England for a year and loved every minute of it. Unfortunately, I had a tyrant boss, and I was working illegally. After coming back, my mother died. Followed soon after by my Aunt and aside from my grandparents, that&#8217;s pretty much my entire family. My sister lived 3 hours away while she was at university, then she moved back to Cali, and now she&#8217;s living in London. <\/p>\n<p>Did I say short version? Hehe. You should see the long version \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, my grandparents are wonderful people, but they are also what ties me down here and I know that&#8217;s awful to say. I love them dearly. I want my daughter to be around what little family she has left as much as she can, so the sacrifice on my part is that I work in a great job for shit pay, live in an OK apartment with shitty neighbours and continue to struggle with no opportunity to improve the situation short of winning the lottery. So I need a plan of attack. And I need time to think up a good one. I need to stop waiting for opportunity to come to me and go out and make it happen. *cheesy slogan alert*<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;ll write if I come up with a good one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m trying to decide if my thumb is green enough to handle a small trellis with some Jasmine entwined on it. I think it would be really lovely to have&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}