It ain't good.

Ok, so I picked up a case which should have more than made up on my hours. The problem? Someone won't return my phone calls in order for me to set up the visits that were requested by the case manager. This is a BIG problem. Because I can't take other cases on in order to make up for the lost hours on the off chance that this person decides all of a sudden that they want to see their kids. This hits me in the wallet HARD. This is in addition to the fact that my hours have been down for the last three weeks anyway due to case closures and short coverage coming in.

Add to that the fact that I have to go to the dentist tomorrow and well, my week is just looking LOVELY.

I got a new supervisor at work, and he sympathizes with my plight noting that my current case load "kinda sucks" and "is full of nothing but doozies" at the moment. I like that I've got a supervisor who has only met with me once and can already see how bad my work life sucks at the moment. It reaffirms my belief that things on my caseload can't get a whole lot worse. (There is alllllllways room for deterioration, but I figure that at this particular moment in time, the margin is slim.)

As for the family, my mom is supposed to take my grandfather to see some relatives down south, but we don't know what's going to happen there because in the reaches of my southern roots, my uncle's sister choked the other day and is currently laying in a coma with very little visible brain activity. This woman had only one daughter with her first husband, a gentleman who is currently in another hospital dying of terminal cancer. I don't envy that young lady at all. I mean it's the holidays and both of her parents are at death's door, and she is split between two hospitals with no sibling-support system. So that puts things into perspective.

My aunt put things into perspective by noting that the first Christmas was spent by a woman who left town nine months pregnant, amidst rumors about her virtues, with only lil ol' Joseph (a carpenter, not a doctor or midwife) to assist with her delivery. She ended up in a barn with some smelly animals because there was no place to stay. There is some mad king killing all the other babies around, and wouldn't you know it, but some random-ass traveling kings and shepherds start showing up all unwashed wanting to hang out with her newborn. So who are we to want or expect things to go smoothly during the holidays when it starts on a note like that?