I would like to state as I begin this post that I'm not exactly in a good mood today -- I was awakened shortly before noon by my house shaking, and its shaking accompanied by an incredibly loud, grating noise of sorts that sounded like something upstairs was in the slow process of exploding or breaking down. I leaped from bed and ran upstairs to find...everything okay. I looked outside and there was some sort of crew with big machines parked at the end of my driveway. I thought it was the street-cleaning/repairing crew, as occasionally they'll come down the streets and clean them off, patching up holes and/or broken concrete, applying road sealant, etc. I went into my room and realized that was not what it was...this crew was fucking jackhammering my neighbors' back patio area and hosing it off for something.
I live in a duplex, which -- if you are not aware -- are two separate houses connected in the center by a common stairwell. My house is my house; it's completely separate from my neighbors' place except for this stairwell, which is outside, not inside. Both houses are owned by my landlord (who owns every house/duplex on my street except for two of them) and when work needs to be done to them for whatever reason, usually preventative maintenance and the like, there is often little warning (if any) and all of it is done on all of these houses at the same time. For example, when one of the central air AC units in one of these houses needs a recharge of freon, all of them get recharged at the same time in order to save time, multiple trips, and money.
I don't know what these guys were doing; I could hear them talking behind my windows in my room saying stuff like "I don't see why he needs us to do this, but I'll do it anyway," etc. I'm not making this up. It appeared that they were doing cement sealant or something of that ilk on the area where the big back patio meets up with the bottom of the house; they had "mud" and trowels and were applying it all along this area. They left by 1PM and didn't come back, and I went outside on the back deck to see what they'd done....and didn't really notice anything different. There are a few tiny patches on the patio, but really? I don't know what the point of those guys being here was either -- unless it was the cosmos' way of telling me to get the fuck out of bed, or something.
Anyway. On with the story.
Daisy had set the alarm on her phone on Sunday morning for 9AM; her sister and family were supposed to arrive around 10-ish, so this would give us both enough time to get up and for her to get ready while I had some coffee, the only cigarettes I'd be able to smoke the entire day (again, Daisy's nephew is highly allergic to a great many things, including smoke), and get a Silkwood-style shower in order to scrub off as many allergen-inducing particles on me as possible. I never heard the alarm go off; when I awoke, it was 9:15, and I got up and went downstairs for said aforementioned cigarettes and coffee, leaving Daisy to sleep. She soon followed me, and the house received a call from said sister that told us they were running a bit late and would arrive closer to 10:30 or 11. Mama had made coffee and was preparing the kitchen for a late breakfast/brunch with everyone, and Daisy's father had gone out to get fresh bagels for the family.
Mind you, I'd never met this sister yet; Daisy has two sisters, both of whom are married with children. Daisy is the youngest of the three, yet I am older than her two sisters (and, presumably, their husbands as well, though I don't know said husbands' ages). I turn 31 this year; Daisy turns 25 next month. I'd met Daisy's oldest sister and her child when I was there over New Year's, though I have not seen her since, and she recently had her second child in the past two months or so (don't worry, I talked to her on the phone on Wednesday). Daisy's middle sister, the one who was coming in to visit and meet me, is married with three kids and has a fourth on the way. Aside from being friends on Facebook, I'd never even talked to her, and had met her husband very briefly on Skype only once when Daisy was talking to me and they were in town.
As an aside, all of them are in Omaha again this weekend for Memorial Day, a big gathering that I am not there for because, well, Daisy works all weekend and we just got back from Omaha three days ago. Because she works tonight, I'm pretty sure Daisy is sleeping through everything going on with everyone there right now.
Anyway, I had my coffee and two cigarettes before I ran upstairs to shower. It's difficult for me to shower in Daisy's bathroom; her showerhead is detachable and unable to be angled, which means if I want to wash myself it basically entails moving the showerhead all up and down over me in order to rinse off, and to wash my face I either have to curtsy under it or hold it in front of my face. Let's not get started on how difficult it is for me to wash my hair with that thing, too. Ahem. But, I showered quickly, brushed my teeth and got dressed, and went back downstairs shortly before everyone arrived.
Mind you, Daisy had to work on Sunday night -- it was the one night during my trip up there that she was forced to work; there's no way she can get out of work on Sunday nights, as she's frequently the only one on the entire side of her building. This meant that even though her sister and family was there, she did have to sleep a good chunk of the day. So, after a big breakfast of bagels of all different sorts and some family time, she went back to bed for a few hours, and I got to know the kids and her sister/brother-in-law during that time. They're adorable, very sweet and precious little kids, if a bit rambunctious (and they're basically little angels, really) so I didn't mind too much. I played hide-and-seek with the oldest kid for a long time, a little girl, and helped Daisy's dad and brother-in-law put together a swing set for Mama -- Mama had gotten a new porch swing set to replace the old one, so we disassembled the old one and built the new one on the porch (which was a bit more difficult than one might think for something that looked so deceivingly simple). In the process, I pinched my finger really hard with a pair of needlenose pliers, which gave me two big blood blisters, one of which later popped and I couldn't get it to stop bleeding. Eh, no biggie. Battle scars. Builds character. We planned a trip to the big Cabela's store in Omaha for that evening, and before dinner, after Daisy awoke, I went upstairs and took about an hour's nap or so myself -- something that rather annoyed Daisy herself.
Granted, I was also really tired from the night before, still, and coffee wasn't working to keep me awake. I was also incredibly twitchy and moody because I'd not smoked since that morning, and Daisy didn't appreciate this either. I also didn't let any of this show to the family, and I didn't smoke while everyone was there, obviously, because of the one kid's allergies to everything (he would've had an allergy attack even from any lingering smoke on my clothing, even if I'd walked up and down the block while smoking to keep it far away from them and the house). I awoke and came downstairs while everyone was eating, and they asked if I wanted to eat.
I don't eat much, as you know; generally I only eat one meal a day. Eating more than that makes me feel overly tired, bloated, or otherwise ill. Almost everyone but me finds this odd, but it's just how I've always been. When I'm in Omaha, it's a three-meal-a-day house, so I feel disrespectful or standoffish if I don't sit down and eat, even if I'm not hungry at all. This time around I'd just awakened from a nap, I was still full and not hungry from the big breakfast that morning, and Daisy was already irritated with me because I had taken a nap and because I'd been twitchy and moody a bit with her because I desperately needed to smoke. Again, that's totally on me. I put on my brave/happy face and politely declined to eat, and as everyone finished and prepared to go to Cabela's, Daisy and I went back upstairs and proceeded to launch off into a squabble about a lot of little things, though as quietly as possible.
Look, I love Daisy. I really do, more than anything or anyone. And overall, I don't even really remember what we were bickering about (again, I'd just awakened from a very short nap, I'd only had two cups of coffee all day instead of my normal full pot, and I hadn't smoked, so I was not myself and wasn't in my normal headspace). Daisy and I don't "fight." We have disagreements and/or squabbles very rarely, and I will fully admit that when we do, it's usually my fault. We did get past it quickly, as we always do (because there's no point in bickering about anything when you're going to spend the rest of your lives together anyhow) and as the rest of them left for Cabela's, we followed in Daisy's car about fifteen minutes later.
We arrived at Cabela's -- a massive, very expensive-looking store -- and met up with everyone, only to find that they closed at 6PM on Sundays, and we'd gotten there at 5:55 or so. Daisy and I approached her father from behind, without him seeing us, and she ran up and smacked his ass. He turned around and looked at me standing next to him.
"Wasn't me," I said, laughing.
It wasn't until we'd been in the store for several minutes that we found out they were closing, and that Daisy's brother-in-law had gotten a shirt, which meant he was waiting in line for checkout as all of the security guards were trying to shuffle everyone out so that they could go home. Daisy's sister asked if we were okay, as it was apparently evident that we were having a tiff before everyone left the house. I thought it was sweet of her to ask, and we responded that yes, everything was fine. The next thing I noticed, however, wasn't an item in the store, but the large television mounted in the corner...a television that was showing some live radar coverage of very nasty weather hitting my area of Kansas back home.
"Um, honey?" I said, pointing. "Look."
It had been a very hot and muggy day; we were outside in the sun building the swing, and I was sweating. It was probably 85 or so in Omaha for the majority of the day, though as the evening rolled around, storms began to fire up. Everywhere. When I say everywhere I mean basically the middle third of the country, from Texas to north of Omaha, and they were all moving in on us. This was problematic; Daisy not only had to be at work in about two hours, but I was 300 miles from home, and while the house was shut up tightly and my car was in the garage, as mentioned before...that wouldn't help if a tornado decided to knock my house off its foundation and/or kill the cats in the process. My cats are my babies; screw the house, that can be replaced, as can my car -- the cats cannot be.
We got out of Cabela's as they closed up, took some very sweet family photos with all of us, and as the parents went home and we said our final goodbyes to Daisy's sister and her family, I was finally able to smoke in the parking lot and Daisy used her way-out-of-my-league smartphone to look up weather warnings for my area back home. There were two.
"Shit," I said, reading them. "Tornado watch, severe thunderstorm warning..."
"We're under a tornado watch here too," Daisy said. "Have been for most of the evening. Until 11 or something like that."
Daisy's phone uses a mobile version of Weather Underground, which is the primary radar map service I use here at home (clicking that link will show you exactly where Newton is located in the state of Kansas, as well as any storms around me). We couldn't get the radar to work properly, possibly because off in the distance we could see lightning strikes and could watch the clouds rolling in -- Cabela's is on top of a big hill in Omaha, next to a big hotel and convention center. It gives a good view of a large chunk of the city. Omaha is also not like New York or Los Angeles; while yes, it is big, there's also a lot of open space there, and it is not uncommon to drive down city streets past cornfields and wheat fields with lots of wide open, undeveloped property.
I began to read. "Severe thunderstorm heading for Newton...50mph wind gusts, nickel-size hail...psh. That's nothing. House'll be fine."
I've become so desensitized to bad storms since I've been living in the midwest. I've seen golf-ball-sized hail at my house before without it doing any damage to anything. If there are no tornadoes, I don't really care about it anymore; I put my car in the garage to avoid any hail damage and then go about my business. I've been living in Newton since 2009, and the tornado siren hasn't gone off once for an actual threat. The last recorded tornado to hit any part of Newton proper was about five miles from my house, and that was in 2007. There was, at one point in time, video of it on Youtube. There have been many around the area since, of course, but none of them actually have come into the city -- tornadoes tend to move around the town for some reason, and hit the smaller towns around me, if they hit anything other than, say, a cornfield or abandoned barn.
I tried to keep an eye on the storms for most of the evening -- I would later find out that an EF-2 tornado hit the outskirts of Wichita briefly, out by the airport, before dissipating. The airport is a good forty-five minutes to an hour's drive from my house. If it would have touched down and stayed down, it would've caused substantial damage to that part of the city. That was, however, the worst of anything around my area that I saw or heard about, anyhow.
We came home and Daisy's parents were getting ready to go to bed -- both of them get up really, really early in the mornings for work -- and Daisy made a bagel to eat before she had to leave for work herself. I very sincerely thanked Mama, since she was still awake, for everything she and dad had done to make my visit special, as well as for the card and gift. I know I've said it before, but I adore Daisy's parents and family. They've always made me feel included and at home whenever I'm around them. I'm not used to feeling so welcomed all the time, but this is also because I usually don't leave the house.
As an aside, as a bonus graduation/engagement gift of sorts, Mama also gave us fifteen yards of muslin and several jars of procion dyes -- Daisy is learning to quilt, and this is so we can make our own quilt and dye it however we wish to do so. I'm not sure we'll need all fifteen yards of it, nor all the dye, but as I've never quilted anything before, I wouldn't know. If there's anything left over I'd love to get a pirate shirt pattern and make that eventually. I left the fabric and dyes with Daisy so that they don't get smoke-scented, discolored, or torn up by the cats in my house.
When Daisy went to work, I sat down at the kitchen table in silence (since the parents were in bed) and read one of her father's Bathroom Reader books for a long time while I ate a bit of dinner, and went upstairs to go to sleep in Daisy's bed quite early, around 9:30. That's the last thing I remember, really. When I awoke in the morning, it was about ten hours later, Mama had already left for work, and Dad was finishing his breakfast -- shortly afterwards, Daisy arrived home, and Dad left himself.
So yes, that was day two. In writing this post, I realized that there was way too much that happened over the trip to try to cram the rest of it into one entry, so I will basically be writing post after post until I can finish the tale. I do not know how long this will take, but I will write until I am done. Until next time, folks...
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