So, I was going to be posting the below to Facebook, but things have been so damn UGLY over there that I've decided that nothing personal should start out there (yeah, I'll be linking back to this), so you all get to hear my whining first ... aren't you the lucky ones?
(sigh) My elder daughter is turning 17 tomorrow. These events really bring home how broke we are. Much like the "dollar store xmases" we've been having the past few years, this is an almost all "used item" birthday for her.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. I used to be a well-paid PR executive ... if things had continued on that track, I'd be making a solid income and be able to get my kids cool stuff, and take them on vacations. It kills me that I'm not able to even take my kids to a CHEAP vacation, let alone show them Paris, London, Rome, etc.
I can almost not express the level of anguish I feel over this ... the sense of failure is overbearing.
Of course, that disaster this summer (where I'd been "hired" into a supposedly great-paying job, only to have it fall apart as a scam 10 weeks later) just makes it more bitter ... I thought I'd finally moved out of the darkness, where it ended up being just a deepening of the downward spiral.
Sucks to be me, eh?
Happy-happy-joy-joy, NOT.
Oh, and here's a picture of worms ... deemed too gross to be the cover shot over on the NLR FB page:

(click for bigger-than-life-size nightmare image!)
Yeah, as in:
Nobody likes me, everybody hates me
I'm goin' down the garden to eat worms