I'm Getting Creamed Today

Hoo boy! I'm getting creamed today. I mean murdalized, slaughtered, squashed like road kill. Woke up this morning at 4:45. Head too full of buying plane tickets and arranging hotel rooms and making sure it all goes right for my upcoming Amazon/Lima/Machu Picchu guests that I decided to stay up. Read the NY Times, the NY Post, the NY Daily News and the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram and there was very little worth reading. Was done in an hour. Got a laundry going, woke Madeleina--who wanted to wake up early--and she screamed at me. No big deal. Finished that load, did another, started the actual writing on a story that's due in a few days. I've been doing homework forever, so getting down to the writing and thinking I've got a good lede led me to believe I was in for a good day. HA!
On the way to Madeleina's school she reminded me that we had to buy 50lb bags of goat food and corn for the pig. No big deal, just $20 bucks.
Came back to find Italo awake and explaining that the mechanic said his alternator was shot--despite the light not being on--and that he'd need $400 to have them fix it or $320 and he could do it himself. He's currently out of work, so it falls on me--unless I want him using my little truck forever. I went for the $400 and the guarantee.
Then Marco came home and announced he couldn't possibly pay his car insurance this month. "You know how it is, dad...I took Carly to Six Flags."
"I know. I gave you $20 towards your food, remember...?"
"Yeah. So keep it going with that generous thing, old man. Give your kid a break. I'm really broke after buying that new phone."
Then I took a look at my four tiny stocks. Having made good dough on the first two, these seem like no brainers to me. Heck, one of them cost under half-a-penny a share so I bought 50,000 shares for a couple of hundred bucks. Every penny it goes up will get me $500. Problem was today it's down to about $0.10 a share.
And my others are bleeding too. I'm still even or ahead on all of them but last week I was up $700 and today I'm up like $30.
And then I went to send a Western Union to pay a hotel in Lima for my next group and the woman who made the reservations turned out to have given me the one day cost, not the two day cost...there goes another $400.
That's a lot of karmic body shots for someone who's barely hanging on.
But you know what? I got to talk to Sierra on the phone a few minutes ago, and then I get to take a drive to fix the Western Union with Madeleina in half an hour, and then Marco will at some point wrestle with me and Italo will do something really cool, so I'm gonna keep thinking it's a pretty good day, despite some bumps, if that's alright with everybody.