Three contractors came out after the hailstorm in August, and I have had all three estimates sitting in a folder on my kitchen counter for eleven days now. One is cheapest and uses a crew I have never heard of. One is the company my neighbor used and liked, but it is the most expensive by almost two thousand dollars. One is somewhere in the middle, run by a man who went to my church for a few years before his family moved away, and I keep wanting that to be the deciding factor even though I know it should not be. I have read all three line by line more times than I can count, made a spreadsheet comparing warranty terms, called my insurance adjuster twice with questions I already knew the answers to, and I am no closer to signing anything than I was on day one. Meanwhile there is a blue tarp stapled over part of my roof, and every time it rains I lie awake listening for the sound of water finding a new way in. I am six years sober, and for most of those six years I believed my old p...

The Job Application Tab I've Had Open for Six Weeks and Still Haven't Submitted I found the posting on a Tuesday night in September, a warehouse supervisor job twenty minutes from my house, paying more than what I make now, and I filled out the first three pages without much trouble. Name, address, work history, the easy parts. Then I got to the question I always get to, the one asking me to explain any gaps in employment, and I have sat on that same page for six weeks now, the cursor blinking in a text box I cannot make myself finish. I have opened that tab probably forty times since. I read over what little I had typed, delete a sentence, retype a shorter one, and close the laptop again without hitting submit. Three other applications from that same week got finished and sent and came back with the kind of polite rejection that stops stinging after the second one. This one I have not even let them see enough of me to reject. I am three years sober, and I used to think d...