On the subject of money and how I got here...

I think I'm starting to figure out how this thing works. At least I have the illusion of understanding.
So back to me.
One of my central preoccupations, probably due in part to the fact that I'm a Cancerian and love my stuff, is with money and cash flow.
I was plugging along in my newspaper career, doing my best to keep a good attitude in the face of management changes that had pretty much sucked the fun out of my job, when my mother died in October, 2000. She had lived independently since my dad died in 1997, but was becoming increasingly forgetful and more and more dangerous to herself. Finally, in the spring of 2000, she injured herself in a fall, which gave me the motivation and emotional leverage to intervene and install her in a retirement home about 10 minutes from where I lived at the time. She hated being away from the house where she had lived since 1953 and constantly begged to go home. I guess she got her wish that night in early October when she died in her sleep.
Anyhow, two days after the funeral I was driving to work for the first time since her death and I called my wife (then my girlfriend) on my cell phone and announced, "I think I'm going to quit today."
Bailing out had been on my mind a lot that year, especially after a major newspaper chain bought the paper and set about making all of the old-timers like me utterly miserable. The aim, of course, was to get the expensive people the hell out of there.
"You don't have the nerve," she taunted.
Oh, yeah?
When I got to the office, I picked up my phone, called Human Resources and said, "Cash me in. I'm quitting today."
It turned out that, since I had turned 55 a few months earlier, I was eligible for early retirement with a reduced pension.
Ok, so I'm retiring.
To the amazement - and envy - of my editor and coworkers, I cleaned out my desk, said goodbye and walked away.
The managing editor, who was one of the reasons I had come to hate working there, was furious. That made me very pleased. As it turned out, the new owners didn't have much use for him either, and he was gone in a matter of months.
So my girlfriend and I bought a big old (100 years old) Queen Anne Victorian house in the small town where she lived, threw a ton of money at it, got married and moved in.
The problem is, it's become increasingly obvious that she/we aren't making enough money to support us in the fashion to which we've become accustomed.
We've been drawing down my resources - she had practically none - at an alarming rate and I'm starting to get very nervous about how to maintain our standard of living without going broke.