Friday, September 6

[gottawonder]

Today I am grateful for:

Nice weather. Not too hot, not too cold.

The basement is more or less dug now. There's some work to do with packing the bottom and corners of the pit, but the concrete can begin very soon, now.

I got our giant bag of returnables (we get money here for returning milk jugs, soda cans, etc.) in to the bottle depot.

The woman from our local gas station is in a rough state. She has worked there for 6 years, and was living in the apartment above the business for 5 years as an incentive to keep working there (because the job is minimum wage, the owner offered her the apartment rent free, because it's tough to keep employees in the middle of nowhere). The owner decided out of nowhere that he wanted the apartment for his adult son, and gave her notice to move out. He didn't fire her, but he might as well have, because she can't afford to live anywhere in town on the wage he's paying. She gave her notice, and is moving out (she has a friend who offered her a place to live).

She's stressed out, and really upset that the owner treated her like this after being a loyal employee for 6 years. I couldn't do much to help her (family was helping her move), but I was able to give her a hug and share a little cry, and I told her how much I appreciated her at the gas station, because it's always nice to see a friendly face and someone who you know by name. She was always nice to us, and I enjoyed seeing her when I got fuel. To me, this is what community is.

The owner of the gas station was telling me that a lot of people were angry with him for doing this, and I'm not surprised. This woman is probably around 60 years old, was working for minimum wage but doing a good job and was a solid, honest employee. She was likely hoping to keep working there, and living inexpensively until she was able to collect her old age pension. I wonder if the owner realizes how tough it will be now to find good help, and maybe no one will want to work for him after this. This woman also did things like would cover the owner's shifts when there was bad weather, because she lived above the business, so he wouldn't have to drive. He's going to find out how much it sucks not to have this kind of arrangement.

I'm just grateful I was able to talk to her before she left, so that we can maybe keep in touch, and so that she knows that people care about this, and that I could tell her I appreciated her work.

That even though our lawn mower died today, it did last through 10 years of hard use, and some of the parts might be useful to our friend who has been helping us with the house project.

For good books. I just finished "The Other Boleyn Girl", and it was really good! Sure, we all know the story about Henry the eighth and Anne, but the way this was written you feel like you know what was in everyone's thoughts, and instead of a dry book about history, it was a book about the fears, what was at stake, the personalities, the political climate. Really well written.