Somehow, on a day when I could have used a little sunshine, I survived the soul-deadening combination of heavy daylong overcast and a stack of mindless, tedious forms to fill out. Nothing makes my eyes glaze over more than being forced to pander to bureaucracy, unless it’s pandering in the semidarkness.

There wasn’t much I could do to avoid either of these unfortunate circumstances. I think I’m finally learning that nothing, not even the power of wishing-hoping-thinking-praying, can fix the deficiencies in the weather. Now I still have to convince myself that the dark clouds are neither a personal attack on me nor a commentary on my life. I’m working on that.

As for the forms, I knew what I was getting into when I opened the mail from the last three days. There were no less than eight envelopes from the workers comp carrier, and I had to deal with them. Tim hurt his back a month ago. He’s been working, but it’s been getting worse and he needs treatment. So the insurance company bombards me with forms to fill out. I did the ones that asked about his payroll records; there were five of those.

Another form had questions about his job duties. How much he lifts, and how high. Whether any bending or twisting is required. How much of his time is spent squatting, crawling, kneeling and climbing. Simple grasping, power grasping, fine manipulation (how much with each hand). Instead of sending the form to Tim so that he could lose it in the back of his truck, I’m mailing it to the Boss and asking him to help Tim fill it out. I think that’s my best bet.

But that wasn’t even all of the form-filling I had to do. I got yet another support order from yet another county for our deadbeat dad employee. This now gets more complicated, because there’s a limit to how much I can take out of his paycheck, and I have to pro-rate it so that each county gets a share. And current payments take precedence over delinquent payments.

This will make the next payday more painful for me, but for today all I had to do was fill out form after form, and make sure the employee gets a copy. We don’t want him to be surprised when his next check suddenly shrinks even more than before. On the other hand, this guy has had at least two children, each with a different mother in a different county, so I don’t feel bad about helping see that they’re cared for. Besides, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know where I live.