Twelve years ago, I lost my sister to stage IV ovarian cancer. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her and I’ve never stopped missing her. As I write this, tears are flowing from my eyes and the pain of losing her is just as sharp as it was on the day she died.

How can I describe her? There are really no words that can do her justice, but I will try anyway.

Vickey was a wonderful person and she touched the lives of everyone who knew her.  She was a contrast of flighty creativity and earthy thinking. As an example, she would give the best and most thoughtful advice, and at the same time get rafts of parking tickets because she was “only going to be parked for a minute” while she ran into some shop.  She famously would also get paint all over my favorite stretch denims because she wore them while she worked on her art and she once broke my portable stereo because she had it precariously balanced on a stack of books. I can remember being so mad at her for her carelessness back then!

Little things like un-paint smudged jeans, portable stereos, and parking meters didn’t matter to Vickey.  She was more concerned with embracing life and living it to its fullest. Her friends have stories about all sorts of mischief that she had engaged in over the years. I know without a doubt that all of the tales are true because I can picture Vickey doing the things her friends describe.

Vickey was also extremely giving, often to a fault. She would quite literally give up her last dollar if it meant helping friends and family out of a jam.  She gave of her time and money freely and without thought to how or whether any of it would be paid back. That was just her nature; she had a heart of gold.

The way she dealt with her cancer was no different from the way she had lived her life. She met it head on and faced it with all of her strength. She loved life and she would not relinquish hers without a fight.

She had two surgeries and all of the chemo treatments her doctors prescribed. She turned to holistic methods as well, drinking this icky looking green mixture of grasses and herbs every day. But this disease is ugly, evil and ultimately, powerful, and it was the one thing she could not overcome.

In typical Vickey style, she described her chemo treatments and the after-effects as being on the river Orinoco, floating on a barge draped in gauzy fabrics, sweating in the humid heat of the South-American jungle. Lying on our sofa in the den, a scarf concealing her thinning hair, she would smile, her big bright smile. It would light up her eyes, and for that moment, you would forget that she had cancer.

I will never forget her words to her oncologist on the last day he saw her before she passed. It was exactly one month to the day before her death: January 19, 2000.  When she asked him how much longer she had, he told her it wouldn’t be more than a month. Heartbreakingly, she cried out “but, doctor, I’m still strong.”

At this point, she had been suffering terribly for more than six months. Her intestines were completely blocked from the tumors so she could not eat or go to the bathroom. She had good pain relief from the medications she was taking but nothing could touch the constant nausea caused by the obstruction. She would vomit many times a day, and yet, she would still smile and be willing to fight on.

She was so strong that I thought she would beat the cancer. I knew the statistics as well as anyone: less than one quarter of women with late stage ovarian cancer survive five years post diagnosis. I could not imagine losing her and I wouldn’t let myself or anyone around me think that she might die.

Even on the day she died, I thought she would rally. That day, she woke lucid, for the first time in a week.  I remember her smile and her clearly asking my mother for some soup. I thought, great, she’ll gain back her strength and we would get her on some new clinical trial. All was not lost.

How deluded I was. Not two hours after that moment, she started bringing up what looked like black gunk. It was like nothing I have ever seen before and something I hope to never see again. I ran to the phone and called the hospice nurse.

As she took her last breath, I held her hand. I whispered to her that I would see her soon, and outside, it began to rain.

Other than that, I like the snowy winter. I know for sure that I will be having a white Christmas and it is visually stunning. The streets lined with bare trees, some laden with hanging icicles and the snow covered roofs indeed seem to be straight out of the Christmas cards I remember sighing over as a youngster, wishing for snow in Southern California.

Ares is a little phased by the snow, just as he was last year, and sometimes, he refuses to go poo because he can’t see the grass and the snow is cold on his paws. He will get used to it over time, but for now, it is taking some coaxing and patience to get him to poop. He is also a little under the weather right now, having a bad reaction to some antibiotics he was taking to combat a truculent anal sac infection.  Smelly anal sac problems are smelly.

Which brings me to the subject of unions. My husband says the has a love-hate relationship with them. He says that he realizes they are necessary and that on the whole, they do good things. However, he says, that sometimes the union negotatiors’ egos sometimes get in the way of finding a workable agreement. There are some cases where the union ends up signing an agreement that is worse than what the company started offering the employees in the first place.

I like unions. I think they are a balancing force in the economy and are necessary so that workers get a fair shake from their employers. It is telling that union jobs have higher wages and better benefits than non-union jobs.

My positive view on unions goes back to my childhood. When I was about seven, my mother got a nursing job at Kaiser Permanente. It had a strong union and she was paid a good wage, vacation pay, and sick pay. She was able to take time off so that we could go on vacations and if she got sick, she could take the day off to get better without worrying about losing a day’s pay. She also had health insurance that paid for everything, and she didn’t have to pay a dime for it. As her child, I was also covered, at no additional cost, until I turned twenty-five.

Today, my mother is retired and is on Medicare, but because she also has her Kaiser insurance, she still pays no co-pays, and her medications are all free. Had she not had her Kaiser insurance, she would not have been able to afford the medications necessary to keep her in good health.

So, I like unions and I am glad my husband works for a union shop.

Brad is insisting that we can’t live in certain areas. He says they are “gunshotty-stabby” areas and we can’t live there. Except that those areas have the cheapest rent, make that the areas where the rent is affordable for us. I am sure that the people living there would rather live elsewhere but they can’t live anywhere else because it isn’t affordable for them.

It is frustrating when my husband throws in another criterion that further limits the already tiny, infinitesimal pool of affordable rentals for us. At this rate, we’ll probably be in this basement for the next ten years.

Apparently, the creator of the CEP, Numenor, is unhappy that so few people have donated to him to show their gratitude for the CEP. At the bottom he says if you can’t donate, or won’t, it isn’t a problem, but apparently, it is, because he has taken the time to create a page on his site and write five paragraphs about donations, or rather, the lack of, and wouldn’t it be nice if you could please give me the moneez. It comes off as scolding people for NOT donating and it seems to me if you want to encourage people to donate, berating them into doing it is not the way to go.

Then there’s BlooM, who on his Sims 3 modding site,  says this at the very top of the index page:

My crappy 8 year old comp is dying on me and instead of making my creations donation files(wich i hate!) i hope you consider making a small donation.
Thank You.

So, this guy thinks that the people who download his mods should pay for him to get a new computer? In a recession, no less? Please! He has some nerve to suggest that he is in any way deserving of help getting a new computer when millions of people are struggling to make ends meet and probably have older computers than the one he has!  What’s worse, he threatens to make his creations donation files…in other words, he threatens to make his site a paysite! The word “paysite” has become an anathema in the Sims modding community, and with good reason. No other modding community would dream of allowing pay content. Computer games with all the expansions and downloadable content in addition to that, are already expensive as it is. Why should we pay for derivative content? It’s nonsense!

In the past, I have donated freely both to sites and to individual creators that I respect as a way of saying thank you. I haven’t been in a position to donate to anyone for a number of years now, but if I ever find myself in that position again, I will NEVER donate to any creator who whines about money. That just doesn’t impress me.

Now, I am not a fan of any sort of sales tax because sales taxes tend to be regressive. Everyone pays the same amount, regardless of income, and this tends to hit people with lower incomes harder than it does those with higher incomes. In a nutshell, sales taxes make everything more expensive and therefore, make it harder to makes ends meet when you’re barely scraping by.

Having said that, the sales tax, which everyone pays, is a loop-hole free way for the government to collect revenue. Governments do need revenue in order to operate. They need money in order to fund all of the services that most of us take for granted, like roads, bridges, the police,  the fire department and schools. In Canada, you can add health care to the list.

The effect of not collecting enough revenue is that the national debt rises and there is less money to fund important projects like repairing infrastructure or to provide disaster relief. Lack of revenue is one of the major issues that plagues the United States right now and while the majority of Americans favor revenue increases, politicians on both sides of the aisle seem to be unable to even discuss this.

Perhaps a Federal sales tax needs to be considered. As much as I loathe sales taxes, they do bring revenue in to the government because they’re unavoidable. Like Canada, the government could issue rebates to people with lower incomes to offset the burden on them somewhat. Unlike Canada, things like groceries should probably be exempt.

Reflecting back on what we have accomplished in the past year, we’ve been able to get some of the things we wanted done, while accomplishing other things has remained elusive.

On the positive side, Brad has a decent job at the MTS Call Centre. The pay is decent and he is protected by a union, which is so important these days when we have corporations running amok and treating their workers like slaves. Also on the positive side, my writing is progressing nicely and I have three regular clients with two book deals in the offing. The book deals are not finalized, so nothing is for sure, but I’d say that’s progress from next to nothing happening back in California. Another positive to note is that Ares, our Weimaraner, has lost over thirty pounds and he is much happier and healthier.

Turning to the negative, we are still, a year later, living in Brad’s mom’s basement. While we’ve had the house to ourselves for most of the summer as my mother-in-law and her husband have been away as caretakers of a bible camp, we still do not have a place of our own.  I am unhappy with that situation and I want to remedy it as soon as possible, but my husband is not cooperating with me. He wants to wait until the middle of September to start seriously looking at apartments and I think that’s a mistake.

I’ve already mentioned in past posts about how the vacancy rate in Winnipeg is less then one percent and what that means for apartment hunters. That’s one strike against us for finding a place. The second strike against us our dog. Ares is a big dog, and almost all apartments have a “no pet policy” and those that do allow pets seem to only accept cats and small dogs. The third strike against us has to do with our income situation, which, while better than it was in Lancaster, is still on the low side. I can’t work beyond my freelance writing, and so the only stable income we have is from Brad’s job. Right now he is on part-time hours, which basically means he makes a little more than half of what he makes at full-time.

You add all that up together and you get an extremely shrunken pool of housing that is available to us. Add Brad’s aversion to the areas of town with the cheapest rent, and you get an almost impossible situation for finding a place of our own. 

Then you have the cost of living, which, surprisingly is a lot more expensive than it is in California. That’s kind of upside down, isn’t it?  A state on the West coast has got to be far more expensive than a small city in the middle of Canada, right? Wrong! Part of it comes from the fact that the minimum wage is higher here and there are more mandated government benefits. Not a bad thing, but still, it is a factor in the cost of things. The other portion of the higher costs is owed to the sales tax, which Federal and Provincial combined is about 14%. All of these things combine to create a situation where the prices of everything, from gas, to clothing, to food, are far more expensive. Paying for the necessities, therefore,  eats up a larger portion of Brad’s checks, making it harder to make ends meet, even though his wage is decent.

Well, that’s been my year. Some things are better, some not so much, but we are moving forward, and hopefully, we’ll see some real progress soon.

Since they are coming back, and since I can’t spend another winter in my husband’s mom’s basement, we need to put our apartment hunting efforts into high gear. I hope my husband cooperates. He should, now that he knows they are definitely coming back to their house for the winter.

Let me explain a few things lest this sounds like the parents are ogres or something silly like that. They’re not. My mother-in-law is the sweetest, nicest woman around and has welcomed me into the family with open arms. She and her husband have done so much for us that we could never re-pay all that help in a lifetime.

Regardless of how nice and sweet they are,  we can’t continue to stay here. It is bad for us as a couple and not right to take up residence in someone else’s house forever. My mother-in-law’s husband needs his space. It is important to him and he should have it. It is not fair to him to have us here a year later.

Finding an apartment is definitely going to be a challenge for us, since we need something affordable that will accept a big dog. I hope my husband is reasonable about this. We can’t be too choosy about the area of town and that’s just the reality of it. Once we have more money, like once he has full time hours all the time, we can find something better. Right now, we have to take what we can get and make the best of it.

That said, the vacancy rate in Winnipeg is under one percent, which means that apartment vacancies get snapped up pretty quickly and that rent tends to be on the expensive side. It’s that market thing called supply and demand at work. We also have a large dog, which further reduces the supply of apartments available to us. In other words, it is going to be very hard for us to find suitable accommodations.

All of this leaves me feeling very uncertain and uncertainty is always a bad thing with me, especially after the tumultuous couple of years we spent back in California, wondering how were going to pay the bills and feed ourselves. I am finding myself stressed again and I don’t like it.

I find myself feeling a little upset at my husband because he is too equinanimous about our situation. Sometimes, I think he is content to live in this basement. He is ok with living with other people, but I am not. I want us to have a place of our own where we can be ALONE.  I thought that is part of why we moved here. He complained all day long about having to share the house with my mother, but he is okay with us being with his mom still, a year later. It isn’t even his house. At least back in Lancaster, that house was mine. I was paying for it. Yeah, we pay rent to be here, but it isn’t anything that in any way belongs to us and I know it. I also know that we are here only under the good will and tolerance of his mom’s husband and I am pretty sure he would like his house back when he returns from Victoria Beach at the end of September.

Frustratingly, he is also unwilling to live in the parts of the city where rent is more affordable for us. He says those are bad areas where you can get killed. I think that’s an exaggeration. I think that they are probably not the best areas of town, but those are the areas where rent is affordable. We can’t be too choosy. I would rather live in a questionable area and be on our own than live in a better part of town with other people. He is unwilling to consider that.

So, if you are a real person who has something PERTINENT to say in response to one of my posts, I welcome your comments, and rest assured, I will read them and approve them. But, if you are using spambots or you are just manually attempting to spam my blog with useless comments just for the back-links, your comment will never see the light of day.