2010 Hay Holiday Letter of Truth (R-Rated):
That’s right, the annual Christmas letter where you get nothing but the unvarnished truth about how life totally blows. No boastful seasonal BS, colors, lights, and feel good crap here. In hindsight, 2010 was a year of karmic retribution. Come with me for a tour of the past year…
I seem to be piling them up like cordwood lately, so I will just number the exes for clarity. This first story involves #1. Sorry for the length of this, and the detail, but I intend to send this to my lawyer, disguised as Christmas wishes, because he is less likely to charge me to $275 an hour to read an update that way. Merry Christmas Eric, ya big schmuck! Merry F-ing Christmas to the rest of you too!
2010 began with the ongoing saga of the Child Support Issue From Hell. From June 2009, continuing into 2010, I was paying child support for my oldest, who is 20, due to court and lawyer errors from 2006. The way things were going I expected to be paying child support until my daughter died of old age, since the normal stop-paying-when-kid-turns-18-and-graduates-from-high-school rules did not apply. In case you were wondering, we had what is called an undifferentiated order…..basically an open order to pay child support with no end date specified, and the normal legislative rules thrown out the window. In other words, child support until death.
Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, Department of Child Support (DCS) didn’t have the authority to change the court order, or interpret the intent of the law, or apply their administrative rules, only enforce the order. The court refused to correct its mistake when alerted to the problem, so I appealed to #1 at the suggestion of DCS. DCS has never been married to #1. Had they been, they would have known not to give me that bullshit advice!
I corresponded with the head of DCS and everybody down the line trying to get this mess straightened out. Meanwhile I was getting letters telling me I was a deadbeat dad, threatening to trash my credit, seize bank accounts, tax refunds, take away business, professional, driver, boating, and even the coveted fishing license! The DCS brass pretty much told me that they were feeling me, that they got it, that this was total BS, and if I didn’t pay a dime more they would not pursue me for payment unless and until #1 filed a formal enforcement complaint, which I thought was a somewhat damning illustration of their view of what was happening. I guess this was their “don’t ask don’t tell” policy toward enforcement.
While the governmental agencies involved cannot comment due to confidentiality reasons, I can. Heck, I name names and case numbers. It was King County Superior Court Judge Mary Yu. She is an elected official, which I thought worth mentioning. Case #98-3-00933-4 SEA. Truth is stranger than fiction.
Of course #1 wouldn’t negotiate in good faith, she stalled, and wouldn’t sign an agreed order. She thought she was going to collect child support for our adult offspring forever, so I guess she figured why cooperate when she can do exactly nothing and collect the money? I made her several offers for an agreed order and she refused all of them. So I had to hire a lawyer, serve her, and to go to court to get out of paying child support I should not have been paying in the first place. Guilty until proven innocent. Great system. Thanks for nothing once again Judge Yu. Well guess what? The court (different judge) agreed that I should not be paying child support on a 20 year old!! This new judge retroactively refunded all support back to high school graduation more than a year prior! The new support levels on the younger children were then set at a rate lower than I had offered #1 in negotiations when she had outright refused it. Ha! How’d that taste!!! Oh, and here’s the best part---she had to pay my attorney’s fees for forcing me to bring the court action in the first place. Bahaha!!
It just keeps getting better though. She failed to pay the attorney’s fees directly as ordered, so the judgment went on her credit report. My new buddies at DCS gave me credit for it anyway. Fast forward six months----she was refinancing her house, the mortgage company pulled her credit report, saw the judgment, told her to show proof it was paid. Turns out there were some problems doing that and it took her a long time to get it straightened out. Her refinancing fell through, and I got the last laugh. She paid her lawyer, paid my lawyer, got all the money taken away, then got less in future support than I offered her. Karma is my friend!
After this ongoing legal cluster fuck was finally resolved, hold on to your hats now, #1 and I are taking the kids to Hawaii in January. Hawaii. The five of us. You simply cannot make this stuff up people! And why did that occur? Well read on…..
A Horse Is a Horse Divorce Of Course
It was a fine horse trailer. Nothing was wrong with this particular trailer. But all of #2’s friends had gooseneck trailers. A gooseneck trailer has a fifth wheel that connects in the center of the bed of the truck like a semi, rather than connecting at the rear like a conventional trailer. She had to have a gooseneck trailer because she heard it was easier to back up. She had been talking about getting a gooseneck trailer for about a year, and I kept saying huh? A smaller trailer? Are you high? I would follow that up swiftly and clearly with “no, no, and hell no”. I may have even thrown in a “FUCK NO” or two for good measure.
A little background: The horse ranch was snuck in under the radar, the direct result of emotional blackmail (“I am going to buy it, with you or without you”), at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, and involved the literal pissing away of $300,000 (translated: THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS). Said flushing of money was done in her mental vacuum, with the economy in the dumpster, while simultaneously remodeling 11 apartment units that we had just acquired. After getting in a series of fights with the prime tenant in the barn and having all of the 20 boarding customers bail, while boarding rates were crashing, while still spending money on fancy fencing and paddock panels, and more mini-horses, and who knows what else, and, while struggling to pay the bills, she still wanted a gooseneck trailer. I just kept up my mantra of no, no, and hell no. No, no, and hell no doesn’t work with #2, who gets what she wants, regardless of who is standing in the way, or the actual financial facts.
She bought a gooseneck trailer. I told her simply and clearly, “take it back”. We cannot afford it I explained. She kept it. Of course this meant she now had to buy a truck to pull the gooseneck trailer. So she bought another diesel truck, this one four wheel drive (our fourth vehicle). I ignored the entire situation and kept completely quiet, hoping this would be the last hurrah of the spending and we would get beyond this, dig out, and move on. She brought the truck home. I said OK, I will support this, but for the love of God and all things sacred will you please stop spending money? Please. Just. Stop.
I then personally changed all the fluids and filters in the new truck so she would be good to go, and tried to make peace.
My truck needed to go to the shop for some work a few days later, so I asked if I could use the new truck to get to work. She said, “that’s my truck, you can’t drive it.” We got in a bit of fight over that. And I moved downstairs.
Living in the basement, paying the two mortgages on our house, paying for her gasoline, her car repairs, her land and cell phones, her mother’s cell phone, her satellite television, her internet access, her power, her propane, much of her food, her line of credit that paid for the horse ranch improvements, the mortgage shortfall on a rental house that she had to have four years prior (co-owns with her daughters--yet I paid for), I continued to watch her take the profit from the apartments and spend it on horses. All of her paycheck and the thousands of dollars in apartment profit went either into the horse ranch or “her” retirement. All of it. I became slightly bitter, as you might imagine.
She moved out two months ago. She said she moved out because I yelled at her. That’s what she tells people why we broke up; I yelled at her. Yes, I did. I think she actually needs quite a bit more yelling at, but what is the point?
The irony in all this is that after getting the truck and gooseneck trailer connected she couldn’t back it up any better than the old conventional trailer, and that is because of one thing that simply cannot be bought: She lacks the spatially superior male brain!!
Epilogue:
I have learned many things owning a horse ranch. Here are a few of those things, along with some questions:
a) Country music sucks worse than I ever could have imagined. Now I know why they used it as torture at Gitmo.
b) Women cannot back up trailers to save their lives. They simply do not get it.
c) Why do horse people get pissed when you mention that horse meat is leaner, more flavorful, and more tender than bovine? Hypocrites. It’s legal in Canada. One is your best friend in the world and the other is dinner?
d) Horses are actually exceptionally stupid neurotic animals. I really had no idea just how neurotic.
e) An animal that requires a tractor to move its shit simply produces too much shit.
f) Horse show definition: Horses showing their asses to horse's asses showing their horses.
g) There are about a thousand different words for the way horses walk/run, like Eskimos have a thousand words for snow.
h) Why is it that horses literally piss gallons into the paddocks every day (and on the walls of the stall and on the floor, roll in it, and rub it all over themselves), but if I were to whip out my tiny little pecker suddenly “that’s gross, use the bathroom”? WTF!
