monkey's paw or family outing?

I'm torn between two posts.. two that will go rather long and both pretty important.

I guess I'm going to go with monkey's paw because it's just pulling at my heart and mind and maybe I'll get a few emails on what I should do.

I read over the weekend one of the Diarist.net award winning entries.. the monkey's paw. In a nut shell. this is what it means (copied from the site:) Allen Philosophy Note 1: I find that much of life is like a Monkey’s Paw story. You can have something good and wonderful, but there will be a crazy and unforeseen side effect that invariably detracts from it in some way. (You know, like rain, on your wedding day...or is that irony? Or perhaps writing a song about irony, yet continually using it incorrectly, is irony...I don’t know.)

When reading the story I took a few seconds and thought of my own monkey paw moments in life.

1994) pregnant for the first time when I was told all odds were against me, then having to risk my life or the baby's life when I had my appendix ruptured. Did you know that 1 in 4,000 women have their appendix taken out when pregnant? See? monkey's paw.. happy pregnant me has to choose my life or baby's life. Of course, both babe and I turn out ok, but it was scary there for a few hours. She's bouncing around as usual for an 8 year old.

1996) this is a reversal of the monkey's paw. I had decided to go to college and knew my father would not approve. He thought it was a waste of time and money for me to go. When I made the decision to go, a week later my father passed away. It was some of his life insurance that was left for me that paid for my schooling.

2002) this great job I'm doing contract for. For once, I'm being paid a decent salary for the work I do, the skills I have, the knowledge I know. I'm having fun, more work down the road will come my way from it. We plan on getting our bills reversed so that rent can be on time. The bad side? I just found out today that the company (who own's the company I work for) does not cut checks till 30 days later. In the next 10 days our lives will fall apart again and we risk losing everything again because I didn't work at my other job enough hours and this place won't pay till Oct. 1. Major monkey paw there. I explained to my project manager before she left for New York that we can not possibly wait till Oct 1. We will sink faster then the Titanic.

My first thoughts, on the way home is "WHY?" "why me?", "Why us?" "Have I not been punished enough with the bankruptcy?" "lay-offs?" "having to move again?" "losing everything we owned?". I thought this job was going to help our situtation. Not set us back again. I didn't expect it to be our savor, I just thought it could help us reverse the bills. I thought maybe we could reverse the bill paying in Oct. but in the meantime, I didn't come home with a decent paycheck on the 1st (none at this point in time) and that is going to hurt us by the 15th and then it will effect us again on the 1st of Oct. so we gained nothing.

I have to wait till my project manager comes back from New York on the 9th, but how long do I stall my husband of what is happening? I hate the monkey's paw.. and it's there, staring me in the face. Telling me what a great job I did on that site. When co-workers are hoping I come back. And I'm just falling back into my sink hole.

I will write later about the family outing.