DISCLAIMER: This will ramble.
OK. Plans are interesting. Because so much can change between making them and the execution. A boss once had a 4 sided chess board. It looked a bit like a Swiss cross; regular board, but with an additional 2 rows extending out from each side. So instead of you making a move and then your opponent making a move and you getting the next move, you moved. Then the guy to your left moved. Then the guy across from you moved. Then the guy to your right moved before you got another move. Pieces obeyed regular chess moves. Pawns could only move forward across the board. But they could be attacked by the pawns on the left and right, that were moving forward, relative to their position. It was...complex. Trash talking was valuable, because if you could convince 2 of the other players that the 3rd player was the biggest threat and everyone went after him for a round, a lot could happen.
Anyway, the point is, a lot can happen in Life too. The Plan, circa July 1, was to buy another house to fix up and rent out. I could, conceivably, live on the rent from 2 houses (although that wouldn't be ideal). Unfortunately the housing market went bananas at that time and I couldn't have bought the kind of rental property I wanted even if I'd been willing to pay what people were asking for them.
So I decided to get a short-term job and park my money in the stock market until winter, when prices would likely taper off. For this reason, working for the census seemed ideal. Pay was pretty good. Hours were flexible. It would wrap up right around the time I wanted to start looking for another house. And The Dog could ride along in the car when I drove to different locations. Never heard back from them. So I applied for part time M & F backup work for 2nd shift at a local factory. People get sick or take vacations or find other jobs. And if you don't have a person to be at every place on the assembly line, you can't run the factory. So, since people are most likely to miss Mondays and Fridays, they have people like me that can get plugged in wherever they're needed to augment the regular workforce--it's a bit like the National Guard, supplementing the Army. They moved very quickly and I think I was working in under 2 weeks.
Well after my first week, the Census Bureau finally got around to offering me a job. Since it had been billed as less than full time with variable and flexible hours, I took it. Of course with the 'rona and everything, they were playing catch-up and flying by the seat of their pants, so they actually wanted people to work as much overtime as they could (which was a bit of a change from the training that, if you worked overtime you would almost certainly be fired).
IN THE MEAN TIME... A house came on the market. Not really a great rental. It was a long narrow huge lot with outbuildings enough for, say, 6 cars. Although it had a sketchy gravel driveway and dirt floors in said outbuildings. The house looked good in pictures but the roof needed work and the pictures hid a lot of things like damage to a corner of the kitchen cabinets, a mismatched and badly installed tub and surround (shower curtains are a great thing), laminate flooring installed directly on top of 1960s/70s era loop carpeting. The "tile" floor in the kitchen and bath was actually linoleum sheet. But everything worked and the furnace and water heater were relatively new. Plus, the place was part of an estate so the executor wanted to get rid of it so she could get back to her life. Made an offer and got it for a fair price. The new Plan was to move there, rent out my place, and fix this place up while I was in it. Since the census was legally scheduled to end before October--possibly earlier if the work got done--it seemed like a viable plan.
Of course 2 things have happened: Because of the 'rona and shutdowns during all the recent protests, the court system is backed up and the probate judge hasn't approved the deal yet, so I again find myself in limbo regarding a house during October--the time you really want to be getting tenants into any empty rentals. Meanwhile, the NAACP has successfully sued the Census Bureau to force them to keep working through October because not counting all the black people would be Racist. Anyone care to guess who doesn't fill out the online form when told about it, doesn't fill out the mailed form when they receive it, doesn't answer the door when someone being paid a pretty good amount of money drives to their home to interview them personally (and we won't even go into the managers, IT, and office staff supporting this), and refuses to do an interview even if they do answer the door? So yeah, shame on the Racist Federal Government for deliberately undercounting minorities. :/