Shortly before the new year, we experienced a minor flooding event on the lower level of the house. First, I had to write a ten thousand dollar check to the emergency plumbers to dig a small hole and replace a segment of pipe which feels like a business model built on extorting exhausted people who are weary of having to buy a six dollar coffee from Starbucks in order to use a toilet that they can flush, considering that it only took a few hours of work to accomplish this. 

(Stop freakin’? More like start freakin’ because the tornado in their logo represents them sucking all the money out of your bank account)

I said “minor flooding event” but let me be clear that the consequences were not minor, involving the removal of the floors (including a sublayer of asbestos floor that we didn’t know we had in two places), the entire bathroom, and 18″ of drywall. I had to pack up everything for my business and move it into the garage. 

Priest played another show in Southern California, at the Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles, which I fully intended to attend, but I couldn’t because bright and early in the morning on the day I flew to California, I received a phone call from the fraud department and my credit card number had been compromised so they had to cancel it. And I suppose I should have a second card for cases like this but I didn’t at the time which meant there was no way for me to get a rental car to drive to LA. Good thing I was staying with my dad, because one also cannot check into a hotel without a credit card, so in the latter case I would’ve had to cancel the trip entirely. They turned the show I couldn’t see into a live album which was released this December and I still feel very salty about the “woooo!”s in the background that could’ve been mine. SHOULD’VE BEEN MINE.

In February, Navani’s gravel paddock area turned into a solid sheet of ice and nothing was being done about it, despite her having to step down onto it in order to access water. I was very worried about her slipping and hurting herself (again) so I salted it and chipped at it with a pickaxe until both hands were covered in bloody blisters in order to make it safe for her.

In March, I tried putting Navi into a herd with other horses and she bullied them all so badly that she is once again living by herself. She scared one of the other horses so much that this mare scaled a metal gate to escape her. I’m grateful no one suffered permanent injuries but I’m so terribly disappointed that it didn’t work out. Every ethical horseperson’s account I follow on social media hammers on the idea that closeness and contact with other horses is a basic need, essential for their well-being, and so I feel like I’m failing at providing even the basics for her happiness, the bad kind of horseperson. But I can’t make it happen for her if the only contact she’s interested in is her hooves to another horse. I badly jammed my middle three fingers on both hands while pounding in fence posts to rebuild the fence between the horses.

Jason lost his job in March, a major blow because he was the breadwinner and his was the job that provided our insurance. COBRA costs more than our mortgage; it’s not an option.

Around the same time, my farm job security came under threat. My boss had a health circumstance that prompted her decision to end her riding career, and grief touched every shift thereafter. Saying goodbye to her horses when they left to a sale barn. Saying goodbye to her little son when the family moved out, whom I held for the first time as a baby while she injected a colicking horse and who had grown into a bashful but eager tiny helper, always willing to hold a bucket. Individual boarders’ horses disappearing overnight as their owners couldn’t bear the uncertainty of whether or not they would be able to remain when the farm sold.

The winter woes palate cleanser: Navani’s Bad Bitch Birthday Party, which she celebrated with a buffet of all her favorite foods and no one else was invited but they did get/have to watch. She thought the table itself was scary.

On the next to last day of our North Carolina trip, I felt a weird bump on my lower back which turned out to be a lone star tick, which meant a trip to urgent care for testing and a prescription for antibiotics. “Oh no, Melissa” say readers of the previous woes section, “didn’t you lose insurance coverage at the end of March?” I did, observant reader. Did you know that the tests for Lyme Disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever are five hundred dollars? Seems like by now we could’ve come up with a less expensive test but I’m just a farmhand and therefore not someone used to pocketing fistfuls of money at a time and that’s probably the sort of thing to which one becomes accustomed. And while antibiotics help with tick-borne disease, I can’t find any source that can tell me definitively if I’m at risk for alpha-gal syndrome so a sudden allergy to meat gets to maybe be a surprise for future Melissa. Whee!

And where did the tick even come from? We did some hiking but we weren’t brushing through foliage, and those outings were earlier in the trip and I definitely would’ve noticed the tick before multiple days had passed. The only outdoor thing we did the day before I found the tick was go to Old Salem and that involved mostly also being indoors. Did I get it from laying down in that straw tick bed for a second? Is that where the word “ticking” comes from, because it gives you ticks? Goddamnit why can’t I pass up an opportunity to lay down?

And I guess I ate too many biscuits and cookies and pulled porcines because the week after we got home, I had to have my wedding rings cut off in the emergency room. Do you know what’s more humiliating than having to tell a doctor who popped in to observe the slow and painful sawing through of the rings I was supposed to wear for the rest of my life that there was no inciting incident other than getting fatter? Receiving a bill for eight hundred dollars for this doctor’s “services”.

When we got home, I applied and we qualified for Medicaid, which was thankfully retroactive to the beginning of the month, covering the tick bite, and this was such a relief it belongs in the highlights but it doesn’t make sense without all the bullshitty context.

Also that week a carpenter ant bit me on the chest IN MY BED and how very dare!? Should I now expect that a bed is now a place where random bugs attack me? Am I in hell?

At the end of spring, the time came to clean every inch of the farm until it was sparkling in order to appeal to a buyer who may or may not continue my employment when they take over. Shortly thereafter, I learned on the grapevine that the purchaser (who wanted to remain secret for the time being) was a different kind of horse operation that would not be offering boarding and uses volunteer labor. So I had to sit with the knowledge that all the horses and people I loved would have to leave/be out of work but unable to tell them because the person who confided this to me trusted me to not spread it around.

And my downstairs is not fixed. The insurance company did pay for the remediation work, but they have been an absolute nightmare in terms of offering adequate funding to restore the home. The amount they’ve offered to replace the floors, fixtures, and trim as well as fix the drywall is delusional given what materials and labor cost in 2025 (and projected costs keep rising because of Dear Leader’s tariffs, including a recent one of 50% on bathroom vanities). Even accounting for having to pay some out of pocket because any new floor would be considered an “upgrade” from our fully depreciated floors, the amount they’ve offered might cover labor and not materials. Our claims adjuster works part time, does not answer the phone during their office hours, and takes multiple weeks to return messages, which are often “I need to run this up the ladder which will take up to two weeks”. I found our intended flooring supplier listed on a right wing shopping site so I had to find somewhere else. Our contractor of choice complains to me about the time it takes to send emails to the insurance company. I filed a complaint with the state insurance commissioner.

The spring woes palate cleanser: a pink mosaic french bulldog reminding us to be kind or he’ll find you on a sunny day and blast out your retinas.

I picked up more horse farm work and it was the hardest physical labor I’ve ever done in my life. Six, seven hour shifts hauling wheelbarrows with hundreds of pounds in them for miles over uneven terrain. This job is so hard the person hired before me quit after one week. My shifts began during a sudden heat wave which is pretty brutal when paired with a new, higher level of physical activity.  I was so exhausted after my first solo shift I cried in the hayloft for an hour, and then drove home and cried for another hour. I’d go home completely physically wrecked, too tired to do anything but rot. I don’t know where I found the reserves of energy on those occasions I needed to teach water fitness after a farm shift but I made it happen and then I extra rotted. On my days off, I would also conserve energy and prep for the upcoming week. It’s a good thing I did get that canter on Navi because I did almost nothing else with her outside basic care for a while. I had nothing in the tank to try.

Ostensibly my fitness should’ve improved over time as my body adapted to the level of work I was asking from it, and I think it was as I was getting faster, but it was not doing so on a short enough timeline for my employer.  The fury that I felt when asked if I could work faster for the sake of their budget was self-protection kicking in. I was already dedicating the whole of my energy and my time either working, recovering from work, or preparing to work again, dedicating my personal unpaid time plotting and replotting the most efficient route to compensate for the ways I had to be less efficient because of my anatomy (One example: given my height and arm length, I can’t remove feed pans from the horse shelters by reaching in through the window like everyone else but must go into the paddock to retrieve them which means going through a gate and sometimes an additional electric fence. One second to do versus one minute to do. Multiply times fifteen horses and that’s already a full quarter of an hour for which I have to compensate! I sometimes found I could reach pans on the floor if I did weird gymnastics pivoting my body on the window but that time gain came at the cost of increased risk and guaranteed bruising.) but any time gains I made were subsequently rendered invisible by added tasks; there was not any additional time allocated to the shift when there was additional work to do, I was just expected to do everything faster: five hours or less. The previous worker could get it done in four and a half hours so I’m sure I did seem very slow by comparison.

I was so tired, all the time. My body ached. Rising and moving around after even a short period of resting was so painful. My feet felt crabbed and tight. I would hunch walk between the recliner and the fridge. Climbing a flight of stairs took notable effort, effort it shouldn’t take given how much muscle I’m packing. 

My fingers felt like they never healed from pounding in the fence. They ached every day, stiff to flex. My arms were going numb for longer and longer portions. I’d wake up in the morning and they’d often be dead to the point that reintroducing blood flow was painful. I was losing feeling in my fingertips. I couldn’t play the guitar anymore because practicing made the numbness worse.

I stopped working that job and thought I’d have a surplus of energy when I wasn’t toiling as often, but I still had nothing to give. I went to the doctor and they ordered labs and despite all that time laboring out in the sun, I was severely vitamin D deficient which accounted for a good portion of my symptoms.  The doctor also laughed when I told him I expected to have extra energy at this point, as without adequate rest to repair, the body isn’t building, it’s breaking down more and more, so that’s cool. Extremely cool and good and a fine toll for a part time job to take.

This is around the time that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins suggested that in order for able bodied people to receive Medicaid, they should have to work twenty hours a week at a farm, that they can replace the immigrant workforce. I can tell you from experience that the average person would not be able to handle that level of activity. I am not movie-aesthetic fit but I am a genuinely fit and strong person, accustomed to working outside in all weather conditions, and I crumbled at twenty hours a week of this labor; it is my understanding that agricultural farm work is even harder.  If this is implemented, people will be hurt trying to meet this qualification in order to keep themselves or their families covered by insurance. And, I’m sure not coincidentally, twenty hours a week is often just enough wage to push people over the threshold where they make too much money to qualify for medical assistance anymore but not enough to be able to afford to purchase medical insurance. Riddle me this: if someone has to work to qualify for a medical care program but performing that work disqualifies them from the program, is the result not the same as blanket ending the medical care program? Except this way extracts labor and exhausts people while leaving them fundamentally worse off. Still living precariously but now with no medical care and unprotected against medical calamity and extreme medical debt. Anything could happen at any time and suddenly wipe out the family financially.

I know this because when I moved to Washington in 2004 and not long after I started blogging, in the gap between coverage from my parents and from employment, I had to have an emergency surgery that led to a situation where I had to work three jobs for a while and people crowdfunded for me on the internet and that’s how I stayed housed. When the Affordable Care Act passed, my situation had changed but I was so grateful to know its protections would help prevent other people from being in situations like mine or worse. It is devastating to see some of these protections stripped away because I know in my body, feel in my body, the toll of living on a knife’s edge and reliance on others’ sympathy and generosity.  

And of course disqualifying people from medical coverage will ultimately increase load on emergency rooms (because preventative care is expensive when uninsured, people will adopt a wait-and-see approach about illness and injury) which increases care costs because emergency room visits are even more expensive, unpaid expensive bills strain hospital resources, blah blah blah all these things are interconnected and the cruelty is the point. Precarity forces compliance. Over the past twenty years internet crowdfunding has become a lot more normalized, and as it has become the de-facto medical social safety net in America, I think it’s worth thinking on how its system is set to more likely meet the needs of those who are attractive, better-connected, and most importantly, who can tell a compelling story. It’s social safety net Shark Tank, where people have to pitch themselves as deserving of survival. “Hey Sharks, is my life challenging and expensive in a way that activates your sympathetic feelings enough to feel good donating to me?” When the government has positioned a lot of people to eventually rely on crowdfunding for medical expenses, we have to recognize that distributing funds based on vibes will increase inequality in the United States, and that private charity should not be a replacement for a robust civic safety net. And because I have direct experience, I believe it’s important to speak up about it. 

Understanding that these levers are being pushed and pulled intentionally to disempower the population, exhaust us into torpor or calloused inaction doesn’t make their effects easier to bear. Every single day, Donald Trump or someone else in the Republican party has said or done something to assault my sense of decency, of justice, of safety, stolen some of my energy and well being. For myself, I thought America was greater when I didn’t have to constantly hear about the goddamn president sucking all the air out of every room while his cadre of sociopathic ghouls whispers in his unblemished ear. Hand in hand with the (wildly irresponsible? evil? both?) tech oligarchy they do their best, every day, to isolate Americans from one another, inflame our nervous systems, extract money from us with no sense of responsibility to us, the planet, or the future of either. Of course I’m exhausted! Everyone is exhausted right now! It’s intentional!

After the announcement of the sale of the other farm, the day arrived that half the horses left to go to another facility, including one of my favorites, the horse who gives hugs. I subsequently lost half my hours there because with fewer horses there was less work and less income to pay employees. Then I discovered that the owners of the new property that the remaining horses and my workplace were shifting to are the kind of people who put stickers on their car threatening others with gun violence. My last shift was heavy with grief, saying goodbye to a patch of land I’d grown to love and which I’d felt great pride in being part of its caretaking.

My floors are still not fixed. By this point in time, Progressive’s “millennials are turning into their parents” advertisements rile me up every single time they air within earshot. You know what’s turning me into my parents? Making me become the sort of person who has specific, lengthy complaints about insurance! The insurance commissioner has reviewed my complaint and while my complaint may be useful in the long run to demonstrate a pattern of behavior by this insurance company, they seem toothless to help me as an individual at this time. And we can’t start work until we have a financial agreement with the insurance company because if we do “it might impact your ability to claim further funds” which translates to “we absolutely won’t give you another dime because profits for our shareholders are more important than honoring our financial agreement with people we’ve collected money from for years”. It seems like the only way to move the needle closer to fair would be to take them to court, but that feels impossible because that takes Lawyer Money and if we had Lawyer Money we’d just pay for the damn floors.  The insurance company now wants us to have the work done by one of their preferred contractors, a company we rejected at the remediation stage because of their carelessness in generating a quote (missing multiple areas, more than once). So their repair quote might be competitive but I don’t doubt it’s missing or short somewhere and I just feel like if I can’t trust them with paperwork right off the bat I would be a fool to trust them with my house.

The summer woes palate cleanser: A hug from a giant horse, a very sweet boy.

 

“Gee, Melissa, it seems like you didn’t have a lot of highlights in autumn, surely your woes did not increase?” -the anxious reader

My woes did in fact increase and I didn’t do much at all this autumn because Navani bucked me off in late September and I broke my collarbone on my right hand side, my dominant hand. Thank you, dream horse! (There was a scary noise from the tractor which was there to transport her manure, you see.)

The Information Society show was a week after this happened, so I was loaded up on nsaids, arm in a sling, and wearing a dress in case I had to use the bathroom at the venue because at that point I couldn’t fasten a pair of pants. 

Other things I cannot currently do: lift a hay bale, teach water fitness, exercise my horse, any leatherwork hammering, lift more than ten pounds with the affected arm. (“But Melissa! All the kinds of work you do involve those things!” Yes. Yes they do.)  I still can’t fasten a pair of pants because my body has gotten larger given the sharp decrease in activity and the fact that my clothes don’t fit anymore factors into my depression.

I am very tired in the same ways and now also a new and different way. My vitamin D levels have improved. I no longer feel shooting pains in my legs. My arms stopped going numb, I regained feeling in my fingers. But it doesn’t take much effort at all before I’m tired and have to rest. I know, I know, my body is regrowing a bone and that takes energy but it feels like it’s taking a lot of energy and really dragging its boney ass on the healing part. The orthopedic doctor initially forecast fourteen weeks until I was healed enough to resume my regular heavy-lifting activities, which has been extended to eighteen weeks.

These weeks have felt very long and I have felt varying degrees of helpless. The end on this is in sight, the doctor is impressed with my range of motion, and I just need to remember that easing back in and building back up will also feel like it’s taking a long time but it’s faster than hurting myself again. And I have been very touched by the help and support I’ve received while this has me sidelined. Better days are coming.

I still don’t have floors and I’m in torpor about it.

The autumn woes palate cleanser: a beautiful twilight walk