Bad to worse

Well, this has been a crappy year so far, hasn't it? OK, no one's died and we're not homeless (yet?), but in a minor, desperately middle-class kind of way, so far 2009 has sucked, big time.

After a money-worry-ridden January (with a pretty good February, I must admit) and the horrors of our houseguest (we went to see C's teacher - who called my sweet girl "a treasure" - and she said she would try and help C make other, more suitable, friends), we've now hit a long series of craptasticness:

The monster kid may have been responsible for making D's Mac stop working (she might not have been, but it helps me to blame her rather than just random bad luck ;-)) and it took him 5 days to get it back to standard. Then his laptop died (can't blame the kid for that, unfortunately) and it took him another 3 days to get that working again. So even if he had had work, he wouldn't have been able to do it. But of course he hasn't had any real work to do in weeks (months?), so it hardly matters.

Now my printer's more or less stopped working - the paper won't feed in, despite us twiddling with every bit of plastic in sight. So I can't print out my invoices, or at least, not easily.

The car almost blew up on Thursday night - D couldn't get it to turn off, there was smoke coming out of it, bla, bla, bla. A mechanic friend is coming to have a look at it on Monday and has said it could either be a minor problem or a really major problem (no, I'm not taking any bets). If it's the latter, it probably won't be worth getting it fixed given the fact that the car's 10 years old. So, we have no car. And are supposed to be going away for 6 days mid-April with my father. Crap, crap, crap. And a summer without a car here - 12 km from the beach but no public transport going that far - would be horrendous. Not to mention our planned (booked, but not of course fully paid for) holiday 600 km from here in July...

And then there's money. We have had to take out a huge loan (11,500 €) from the bank to pay off one of my debts, plus 6,000 € for roof repairs, plus my VAT bill and to put my private account back in the black. Obviously taking out another loan to pay for a new (second-hand) car seems improbable. My professional account is at death's door, even though I've been working like a fucking slave since God knows when. Lots of people owe me money, but none are paying, so I'll be overdrawn there too by next week. I can't work any more than I am already, and D doesn't seem to be making ANY progress on the "finding a way to earn some money" stakes. He's hopelessly overdrawn just about everywhere, has no work in view and doesn't seem to act on any of the advice he gets for finding any. I despair, I really do. And I loathe being the sole breadwinner in this house - the responsibility is eating me up inside.

Health - D's got some kind of stomach flu and me, I've got a weird nose problem - inside my right nostril really hurts and the whole tip of my nose has swollen and turned red, making me look like Bozo the Clown. And I still keep on sneezing, day and night, night and day.

Stuff to do - my accounts haven't been done for almost a year (gulp) so I have to do all that - which means finding bank statements, invoices, receipts, etc. from the various mountainous heaps of crap piled up everywhere - and fill in all my tax forms etc. by 20 April. Less than a month away. And I'm absolutely overwhelmed with work and have no time whatsoever to do it. And I'm really, really starting to freak out.

And finally, there' s money. Oh, did I already mention that? Oops. Must be kind of obsessing about it, I guess.

Holy guacamole. I sure hope this year gets better soon...