It's Really a Lot, Part I

 Hi everyone.

I'm breaking the posting hiatus here because there's so much that's happened recently and I do feel the need to actually write it down -- and present commentary on it -- for the, like, five of you who still actually give a shit and read this site. So, this is a short list of things that have been going on in our lives, to gather my thoughts all in one place.

I have not written anything new, of substance, in approximately two weeks. I have not been in the right headspace for it, my anxiety and stress levels have been very high, and it's been very hard for me to focus and to try to get into the right mindset to keep working, keep writing, keep compiling as of late. I've been in the cycle of one thing after another, after another, after another for almost the entire month of June, and it's killed almost all of the creative energy I would normally have. The past ten days or so have been particularly bad, and I do not think I'm going to be able to get any real breathing space for the immediately foreseeable future. 

So, to start our story, I guess we'll have to start around mid-month. Work this month has been terrible. Yes, I did just get a raise, and it was a long-coming, well-deserved raise for the shit I put up with, but the summer months are when the idiots all come out of the woodwork and my team begins getting engaged on things that we don't have the capacity or skillset to handle, or are completely outside the scope of what my team does, or a combination of all of the above. And because of the nature of my job, we're forced to try to solve the unsolvable, or fix the unfixable, all because of the "customer first" doctrine we have to follow. This means I've been on long bridge calls, short bridge calls, have owned escalations that are far above my paygrade (or far below it) to own, have had to rabble-rouse and browbeat lazy agents and technicians who don't care about the work and are just there for the paycheck, etc. Now yes, I do all of these things normally every night anyhow, but on normal nights I can usually step away to use the bathroom, get a bite to eat, take an actual lunch hour to nap or play a game, etc. In the summer months all of that goes out the window; a night can go from being calm and easy to horrifyingly bad in the span of an hour or so. Overnights is a skeleton crew; we don't have fifty people working for us. Most of the time it's less than fifteen. Some nights that number dips below ten. What I'm saying is that the worse the night is, the harder it is on all of us as a whole, not just on individual employees or just those of us in leadership. Most mornings I get off work now completely drained and mentally exhausted, and I'm in bed around 8:30 simply because I can't release that stress any other way.

But it's not just that, it's everything.

Father's Day was a rather muted affair. Daisy's parents were out of town (more on this below) and my own father hasn't spoken more than a few sentences to me in over twenty years. My dad, the man who I refer to here on this site as my dad, is not married to my mother and never has been -- but the man did have quite the hand in raising me as they've been together for almost thirty years at this point. I made sure he knew he was loved, and as he is a comic book nerd like I am, sent him a few subscriptions for a Father's Day gift. He is more of a father to me than anyone else in my life ever has been, and I always make sure he knows that and knows he is loved and appreciated. Father's Day is always a strange, bittersweet day for me because of my non-relationship with my actual father and because even at age 39, I am not a father myself and the chances for that to ever happen diminish a little more with every passing year. It used to be all I wanted out of life, but over the years that desire began to wane more and more. I now don't know if I would have ever been cut out for it, or if I would have ended up making a lot of the same mistakes that my own father did. Conversely, my dad and Daisy's dad are both wonderful people, and I have very special relationships with both of them. They are relationships I cherish deeply.

I mentioned here in a previous post around this time last month that the heating element in our oven blew out. And I mean blew out -- as in, Daisy turned on the oven and sparks shot out of it, and it briefly caught fire. Yeah, that happened. It took over a week to get a repairman scheduled and to have him come out to fix it -- what Daisy told me later was the repairman looking at it, saying "yep, that's blown out" and then performing a ten-minute fix; as it happened during the day, I was asleep, so I didn't know what was done. He still has to come back next week at some point to make repairs to our fridge (the ice dispenser door will not seal properly, and the dispenser motor has burned out) because our fridge is ancient and a strangely obscure model that he had to special-order parts for. 

I've written here before that Daisy's grandfather is about to die. I'm not really going to air much family business here on this site, but it's likely going to happen sooner rather than later and it is not a good or pleasant situation for anyone involved. As such, Daisy's parents flew up to Nova Scotia (where Mama is from; where all of Mama's side of the family is from) so that, essentially, Mama could see him and spend time with him one last time before he dies -- and to try to help out her own mother and help sort out a care plan for him, for lack of any real better terms. She and Dad were successful in this endeavor but not much else can be done at this point. His other (living) children are much closer and can offer better care and can help keep an eye on things better than Mama can.

You probably realize that I'm painting this story not just with broad strokes, but a roller -- there's a lot of details here I am purposely leaving out for privacy's sake, but suffice it to say that Daisy's grandfather is not going to be alive much longer and it is very much a toss-up as to whether he'll live long enough to see all of us for the "family reunion" scheduled for about two months from now after the wedding of Daisy's cousin (which I think has already taken place at this point, but I'm not even sure of that at this juncture). It's likely that said reunion will have a bumped up timeframe, as all of us who can -- very much including Daisy and myself -- will be immediately booking flights and taking off for the Great White North the moment he dies. 

Throughout all of this going on in the background, Daisy and I had stuff to take care of while they were gone. Aside from Daisy taking care of the parents' cats and keeping an eye on the house, there were four other major events all happening during the same week:

1. Eye appointments for both of us

2. Yearly physicals for both of us, including my latest A1C blood draw

3. Daisy's birthday

4. The installation of our new gas line. 

I've touched on most, if not all of these events, here on this site, but never really went into any detail with any of them -- mainly because they hadn't happened yet. Well, they've all happened now, so let's dive in and discuss.

I am not a big fan of eye appointments except for when I have to do them -- as in, when I know my eyes are getting worse and I know I will need an updated prescription. From roughly my senior year of high school (so, 21 years ago now) to today, my eyes have been getting a little bit worse every year. I have slight astigmatism, and I am nearsighted -- and over the years I know my eyes, like the rest of my body, are getting worse and are slowly degrading. I went roughly 15 years between eye appointments when I was younger, and in college I used to buy +1.00 reading glasses from dollar stores or grocery stores to keep the words from blurring on the page or on the screen. I had a few pairs of these even into grad school, though I didn't wear them all the time -- only for reading/writing work. My vision at the time was good enough to get by without them, and if I wore them when I wasn't trying to read something, my vision would really blur and I couldn't use them. 

About a year after we were married, Daisy and I got on new insurance and, by this time, my eyes were very much getting worse -- noticeably so. We both had eye exams and both of us needed glasses. Daisy's prescription was, and still is, far stronger than mine (and almost the polar opposite of mine). I got a single pair of wire-rimmed titanium glasses from the optometrist -- $400, insurance covered everything but $35 of that, and ordered a spare pair of large, brown horn-rimmed glasses as a spare pair. 

That was in 2015. My vision with the new glasses was the best vision I've ever had. As I told Daisy at the time, everything looked like it was in ultra high-definition. Daisy had never had a prescription for glasses before and felt the same way about hers. We both got our prescriptions written down, we both ordered an array of glasses from places like Zenni Optical, and 

I didn't go back in for another optometrist visit until 2021, and by that point my vision had slowly deteriorated to where my current prescription at the time was no longer cutting it. It helped, yes, to wear my glasses -- but only marginally. There were days where my vision would feel so fuzzy (mainly due to allergies) that it didn't feel like my glasses were really helping at all, and I'd asked Daisy for a long time to just set up the eye appointments and get them done when bam, Covid happened and delayed us being able to do that by about a year. When we finally got the appointment set up and done last summer, I'd just been diagnosed with diabetes a week or so prior, so I had to get the full treatment done -- retinal scans, dilation, etc -- all the checks they'd perform on a diabetic to help stave off diabetic eye disease taking hold (it, thankfully, has not taken hold). I was also informed that I'd have to now make yearly appointments on a tight schedule and do all of these things every year, because of the diabetes. I got a new, much stronger prescription then, got a set of glasses from the optometrist, and then ordered a lot of spare pairs -- some sunglasses, some normal, some transitions lenses -- from online stores. 

So, flash forward to last weekend. I'd set my eye appointment up a few weeks in advance and had confirmed it, as did Daisy. I didn't think my vision had changed that much in the span of this past year -- the 2021 prescription was still very good and was/is what I'm currently using now (more on this shortly) and I expected minor updates only, if any. Daisy knew hers would change (one of her eyes actually changed quite a bit). When we went in last weekend, I took two things with me -- the original two pairs of glasses from 2015, and a bag of donation glasses from old prescriptions that were no longer current, as they used to have a glasses donation bin where you could donate old glasses and they'd be redistributed/represcriptioned (I'm sure) for the less fortunate. We got in there and here I am holding a legit 13-gallon trash bag full of donation glasses and...no bin. No hint of a bin anywhere. I asked the front desk staff where the donation bin was and they looked at me like I was an idiot, or as if I had come from some parallel universe where this sort of thing was done. I finally asked the eye doctor himself, who had sort of the same response, but also took the bag of glasses from me and said he'd find out where and how the donations were now done, and would take care of it. When we left the exam room, I noticed the bag of glasses sitting on the desk in his office as we walked by, and found it sort of amusing.

My prescription did get slightly updated -- at a glance it wasn't any different, but when I looked at the numbers between my old prescription and my new one, there were some decent changes. It was at this point when they asked me if I wanted to get glasses that day while we were there, to pick out new frames, etc etc -- I said no, and had Daisy pull out my two original pairs of glasses from 2015, and said "put new lenses in these with the new prescription."

As mentioned, one of those pairs, the solid titanium pair, was a four hundred dollar pair of glasses. The other horn-rimmed pair was about $100 or so and has long been out of production by the manufacturer (believe me, I checked, I even sent letters of inquiry). 

"Sure," the lady said. "$248."

What the fuck. Whatever. Those are my two most expensive, best fitting, and overall favorite glasses I've ever owned. Sure. We have a FSA card for our insurance. Sure. Just do it. 

"And you?" she said, turning to Daisy. "Will you be getting new glasses today?" 

"I'll just get mine from Zenni," Daisy said, with a wry smile.

So I left the old glasses there with the request, paid the required amount, we got our prescriptions printed out and handed to us, and off we went. It took probably four hours, and a nap, for my eyes to fully un-dilate again. 

My re-lensed glasses have not yet been completed. It could take two weeks or so, but I'm betting Daisy gets a call on Monday to come pick them up. Until I can test them out and until I can see if the new prescription looks/feels accurate, I'm not ordering spares from any of the websites I'd normally get new glasses from. If the prescription isn't right, I'll have to redo them, and the exam, anyhow. And I'm not just going to waste money.

Daisy has not yet, to my knowledge, ordered new glasses from anywhere and is still using her older ones.

Our physicals would be up next -- on Daisy's birthday. Which, also purely coincidentally, was also the day we would be picking the parents up from the airport. So, three major things happening all at once, all on the same day.

I'd like to think that most of the time I am a calm person, I am a rational person. And truthfully, most of the time, I am. I am very even keel and go with the flow in public situations or in mixed company, and nearly nobody would ever think otherwise. But privately, by myself or with Daisy and/or her parents, they see the real me -- a ball of stress and anxiety who has really terrible stress reactions that are mostly out of my control (when they're not and/or when I get angry, it's generally because of the situation, yes...but a large contributor to it is that people around me don't have the same reactions to things that I do and I get split-second outraged that they don't). 

I'm also the person who, if I have to be awake and active, wants to be out the door taking care of business at like 7am, get done whatever needs to get done, and return home as quickly as possible. My goal, when accomplishing tasks, is always to GTFBH -- get the fuck back home, as soon as possible. Daisy is very much the opposite -- on Saturdays, for example, when we have things to do, she is very much the "I'll get up when I get up, you're not going to rush me, and we'll say we'll leave the house by 1 but probably won't actually leave until 3 or 4" when, if I'm awake and we have a to-do list, that laissez-faire attitude does not mix with me. I want to have been home and done with tasks for the day by 3 or 4, not leaving the house to start them. I have finite energy, and when I have it -- especially on a day off and especially when my sleep schedule is turned around in order to do said things anyway -- that time and energy is very much use-it-or-lose-it.

So with that being said, I made sure to get some good sleep the night beforehand -- I should add at this juncture that I took two extra days off this week, one for Daisy's birthday anyway but a second because I had flex time that I'll lose if I don't use it. I got up, I showered, took my pill, drank close to eighty ounces of water and had nothing else (bloodwork/physicals mean you have to fast beforehand, it's not optional). You all know that I've had trouble in the past with getting blood taken, and I've been told that trouble is sometimes partially due to dehydration before coming in. Well, that wasn't going to be a problem this time around. 

I also knew that because of the diabeetus they were likely going to ask me to do another urinalysis too, so I needed to be able to, well, basically pee on command. I guess that's basically a requirement now when you're diabetic. Not the peeing on command, but the urinalysis at every physical thing. Since I once had blood in my pee like two years ago, likely from a kidney or urinary tract infection at the time, I guess they want to check for that, too. It is what it is. I don't mind peeing in a cup. 

Our appointments were for 9am, the parents were set to land at sometime around 2-3, so we had a little breathing space. When we got to the doctor's office, I had already checked in online the day prior. Daisy had not. We found that yes, my appointment was at 9am, but Daisy's was at 8:30. Which she didn't know. We got there at approximately 9:05. The nursing staff was...ahem, not exactly happy with Daisy.

Aside from some appointment confusion and the fact that, as we were seeing a different doctor than usual and they tried to split us up for our appointments (we corrected them there, of course), the physicals were pretty unremarkable. The nurses were easily able to get blood from me. I didn't faint. I peed in the cup. We wore masks the entire time. What I'm saying is that it was fine. We picked up some vegan donuts and some chips and guacamole for the parents afterwards, and stopped to get a little Chinese food takeout before we returned home and ate. 

I'd been in contact with Mama all day as they made their way back to Omaha via a few different flights and layover times. They touched down in Omaha when we were about halfway to the airport to pick them up, and by the time we got to the terminal, we only had to wait on them for a few minutes before they came out. We took them home and spent a few hours of downtime with them, making sure they were okay, before finally coming home and getting some rest time ourselves. It had been a very long day.

Our first test results from our bloodwork had already come back by the evening, and both Daisy and I were completely normal. Nothing flagged, 100% in all normal ranges for both of us. But this was also not exactly everything -- as I write this, it is Sunday evening, and none of the other test results are available yet, four days later. That includes my A1C as well as my urinalysis and whatever else they decided to run on me because of the diabeetus. So those are all still unknowns. It's likely I'll know them by tomorrow, but still. Still. 

Anyway.

Daisy's birthday ended quietly. For her presents, I got her some crystals (a set of four, each of them with a different healing purpose) -- while I am not one of those hocus-pocus-crystal-people, Daisy loves all of the different stones and gems and rocks and collects them. I also got her a set of generic super-soaker-style water guns, a case of Cocomels, and a few bottles of the Crystal Light with Caffeine she likes, as it's gotten hard for us to find as of late.

As an aside, when I told Mama about the presents I'd gotten her daughter, she looked at me like I was nuts. I explained that for Daisy I always get three types of gifts -- mind and soul (the crystals), body (the foods) and something purely for fun (the water guns). This does not change for any holiday or gift-giving function, really. There's always variations of similar themes. 

Daisy went out for dinner with her best friend to the Indian place we like, but as I was very tired and hot and just needed downtime, I elected to take a nap and to let them have girl time together. Her best friend (also the maid of honor in our wedding) has her own birthday on the day before Daisy's, so it was sort of a birthday dinner just for the both of them. As much as I like the Indian food, I was tired and absolutely didn't want to eat it that night, or be a third wheel for their girl time, despite the fact that it was assumed I was going to go previously. Nah fam, you have fun. 

I woke up in my chair, dazed and confused, just as Daisy was going to bed for the night -- and rather early at that. She wasn't feeling well and was afraid she was coming down with Covid. She'd been exposed to a coworker last week, and said coworker had developed and at the time was still very sick with Covid. Daisy had tested negative (because we do have those free tests from the government) but was worried with the way she was feeling that night that it might have been late-onset for her. She slept, and I stayed up for a few hours before passing out again myself for a few more hours of sleep.

When I awoke the next morning, Daisy had already been up and was moving about a bit, and my immediate concern was to begin getting ready for the utility people to arrive to install our new gas line, because that was the day they'd picked that worked the best for us. Daisy had also taken the day off work prior to the scheduling of the gas line installation because she wanted to stretch out her weekend, so this worked well. I do need to backpedal a bit, though, because there's some explanation here that all of you will likely need.

I have written previously about how strangely our house is set up. Our house was built in (I believe) 1973, and then very quickly destroyed in the Omaha Tornado of 1975. At that point it was rebuilt to what it is now, and aside from some minor modifications here and there by previous owners, it has remained what it is today. And the house has had at least three sets of previous owners. Well, at some point, possibly when it was rebuilt, because we don't have a basement our gas meter was indoors on the bottom level of our house, in the center of the bottom level of our house, in a closet under the stairs. Once a year or so the utility people would call us and make an appointment to come inside to read it.

I've since learned that this is not that uncommon for houses built in the 1940s through the early 1980s, especially houses without basements. Even for some houses with basements they'd build the gas meter inside -- it's just how it was done depending on the type of construction.

Well, probably in March at some point (if memory serves) I was getting ready to go to sleep one morning when an entire crew of utility workers knocked on my door. Daisy was at work, so I had to deal with it. During this visit, they explained that they were replacing all of the residential gas lines in the city and with that came the need to replace meters. Our meter, as it was inside, would need to be moved to the outside. 

This I was fine with; this made sense. However, what he said afterward did not.

Because our meter was in the center of the house, that's also how the inlet line was built. The inlet line goes through all of the lower walls of the house and the house was, essentially, built around it. When the old gas meter would be removed, and new one installed on the side of the house, the old inlet line couldn't be removed and instead the gas would have to be piped to the original inlet. This entailed drilling a hole through two walls and the side of the house, as well as running a nasty, snake-looking pipe across the ceiling of our living room. That was all there was to it -- there was no way around it, no other way to do it, it just was what it was. It was either that or we just don't have a gas water heater and furnace anymore. 

Well, our home warranty will cover repair or replacement of larger systems like the water heater or like the furnace, but they have to be broken -- they won't replace them just as an "upgrade" or anything like that. If we didn't want a gas line running through our living room, the only other option would have been for us to go completely out of pocket in replacing the gas water heater and gas furnace with electric -- a lot of money just for the actual appliances and even more for installation and making them actually work off the house wiring/breaker system we have, which they likely wouldn't, so we'd probably have to get a new breaker box installed. That in itself is several thousands of dollars, and one of the things our realtor told us to avoid when looking at older houses. If they had an old fuse box, either the seller or the buyer would have to replace it to get the house up to code/pass inspection, etc.

Or we could just let them run a gas pipe across our ceiling. Our choice. 

So, what I'm saying is that we really didn't have a choice at all.

The utility guy left me his card and gave me his number, told me to program it into my phone so that I would have it and know it was him when he called to schedule the installation appointment. When I asked what the timeframes were, he replied with "Months, several months."

Well, he was right for that, but they've also been doing a lot of work outside the house on the street for the entirety of that wait time as well. They've dug giant holes in the yards, they've torn out and replaced sidewalks, and they've dug complete, long trenches under the yards to run the new gas lines/pipes up to the side of everyone's houses. The hardware and piping for the new meter on the side of our house was installed well over a month ago and I never heard or saw them do it -- even though our bedroom, where I sleep all day every day during the work week, is right above that new meter area and shares a wall with it.

Finally, about two weeks ago I got a call from the guy. He floated a few different days, we rescheduled once, and finally set Friday the 24th as the date it would happen. Okay. Cool, we were gonna be home that day, we had no outstanding plans, and nothing should stop the smooth installation. He let us know that we'd be the second stop of the day, roughly between 9am and noon for the arrival time, and the installation would take 2-3 hours max. It wouldn't be pretty, but it would be only minimally invasive and they knew the game plan already as there were seventeen other houses they had to do that were set up just like ours. 

They said between 9am and noon? Yeah, they were here right at 9 on the dot. We let them in, and as Daisy had already moved the furniture and everything out of the way, they had a clear path in and out to get the work done. She even closed the cats upstairs in her office (well, two of the three, anyway) to keep them out of the way.

Five minutes after the work had started, when the utility techs were beginning to drill, our phones lit up -- the Supreme Court had just overturned Roe v. Wade. 

What happened next? Well, that is a story for part II. 

Progression, Part V

 

On a good night, when I'm not too distracted or too tired, I can generally write five or six pages of good, solid work. This tends to take several hours, and on the next readthrough I'll catch an error here or there, or slightly rework a section of the piece I've been working on. 

The above is the current story I'm working on. I'm guessing it will take another 2-3 pages to complete, then another hour or three to edit, before I can call it done or "locked."

It feels like I'm not accomplishing that much in my writing work, but the truth is, I am. I just can't be turned on and creative at all times. The vast majority of my weekends, when I do the most writing, are spent doing non-writing activities -- house work, social obligations, shopping, etc. Sometimes I just want some downtime too, where I do nothing but play a video game or watch YouTube for a few hours. Sometimes I want to spend some time with my wife joined at the hip with her, going on adventures. Sometimes I just want to be me, not the writer me.

I find myself preoccupied with everything that has to go right for this book to get published, get off the ground, get on store shelves before I can actually feel accomplished or justified in all the work I'm doing on it. It's not a small amount of work, and it's not a work that most people would actually classify as work. It's difficult to, shall we say, keep a story straight in one's head when coming back to write it in multiple sessions, editing through it to make sure there aren't any inconsistencies, and then actually getting it to not only where you want it to go, but where the story needs to go in a narrative fashion.

I purchased a new keyboard a few weeks ago -- the $5 keyboard that came with this PC was beginning to have keys stick or become non-functional, so I splurged and spent nine dollars on a replacement. It'll do just fine until I have the money or the wherewithal to purchase another good, mechanical keyboard that won't break down or deteriorate on me over the course of a few months. I am looking forward to that, honestly. I am apparently too rough on my keys and they get a lot of use, probably more than the keyboard for my work computer (which, arguably, could stand to be replaced eventually as well). 

I'm still on track (hopefully) to have the book completed and ready to lock by the end of the year, and if I'm lucky, have it on shelves by first quarter 2023. There are a lot of steps to that process, as I alluded to above, and there will likely be major delays here and there. I just want to get the book done and out there, and let the work speak for itself. I have so many good stories still in me, stories waiting to be put on the page and read -- but I psychologically need the confidence a book release will give me before I can feel like yes, I can devote the time and energy to putting them on the page. It's all a fantasy until I see that paperback on the shelf and can feel it in my hands. 

Intermissions: A Numbered List

 Hi everybody.

So in the background, there's been a lot going on. As mentioned, this site is mostly on hiatus while I get my book put together, but here's a list of things that have been happening while I do that -- just so that you folks don't think I've forgotten about you.

1. I got a bonus and a raise.

Yeah, this happened. I got a 9% raise this month (it takes effect starting tomorrow's paycheck) and I got about a $100 bonus for helping out during the Friday the 13th weekend outage -- the repercussions of which echoed throughout the rest of the month, give or take. I am mostly satisfied with the raise, though I still think it's far less than what I'm worth. It is what it is. It's a good start, so to speak.

2. Our oven died.

On Saturday night, the oven shot sparks out of its sides and internally caught fire. Don't worry, it didn't last long. It likely blew out its electric heating element, as now it will sort of get warm, but won't get hot. It stressed us out at the time, but we have two air fryers, a toaster oven, and a microwave -- we'll be fine. And the burners up top still work. Once Daisy figures out what days she's working from home next week, we're going to open a ticket with our home warranty people to have it fixed or replaced -- as that's what we have the home warranty for.

3. Daisy's grandfather is bad off.

It's likely that Daisy's grandfather (maternal grandfather) will be entering the hospital sometime this week, and sadly will likely not return home from it. I should mention that he is part of Daisy's Canadian family, so when he dies we will be dropping everything to fly up to Canada to pay our respects. We're scheduled to head up there later this summer for a family reunion anyhow, but I personally will only have enough money and PTO for one single round trip before I'm tapped out. Daisy is determined to make both trips if necessary and possible, and if she can, more power to her -- but I don't know if that will be possible for her, given the same reasons of money and time. 

4. Plans made and broken

As mentioned in my last post, Daisy and I were off on vacation for the past six days, both for our anniversary and for an extended holiday weekend (Memorial Day); well, I was off for six, she was off for four. We both return to work today as per the usual. There are many things we wanted to do during our time off that we either didn't get to do, or didn't end up wanting to do -- or we changed some plans on the fly. Daisy was sick for most of last week with a cold or light flu (who knows, but it wasn't Covid -- we're both fully vaccinated and she took a test, negative, and I never felt ill). We were going to book a room at a spa/resort in Missouri, but with Daisy being sick and with bad weather supposed to hit -- it never did -- we didn't spend the money. We had planned to go see a movie, and there was nothing playing that she wanted to see, so we stayed in and watched Stranger Things. We were going to do an anniversary dinner at our favorite local vegan place, Modern Love, but instead ordered pizza and stayed home. I wanted us to go get new tattoos (I wanted to continue the flower motifs on my other arm), but decided against it. The money we would've spent on the resort trip and big dinner, along with the tattoo(s), we spent on the pizza, getting some groceries, and -- at least on my part -- TeePublic's 35% off Memorial Day Weekend sale. We did, however, plan a day trip to hike through the Iowa wilderness, and we took that trip on our actual anniversary (there is a picture from said trip attached to my last post here).

5. Yard work and gardening

Well, it's June now, so because of the warmer weather we've actually been able to get out into the yard and clean it up, mow a few times, and Daisy has gotten most of her garden planted for the year already. This was pretty much to be expected, though we (mainly her) got it done a lot more quickly this year than in previous years. Allergies this year have been terrible -- like far worse than the past few years -- which has slowed us down quite a bit as there are some days we'll just feel miserable, but overall, stuff is planted and it's growing, and I'm doing what I can to get into a routine of mowing once a week or so, and will never let the weeding (string-trimming) get as bad as it was when I did it a few days ago.

6. Health and wellness things

Daisy and I both have our physicals on the 23rd, during which we'll likely get another set of Covid boosters and I'll have my bloodwork/A1C done again to see if I've made any actual progress in staving off my diabetes. I also have my next eye appointment on the 18th, to see if I need an updated prescription (I likely don't, as with my current glasses I have pretty excellent vision) and to see if I can get the lenses replaced in my two favorite older pairs of glasses with my current -- or, if necessary, new -- prescription. We're also resuming our gym regimen starting now, too, as we've both been very lax about that. I've been eating like an asshole as of late and have gained six pounds over the past two weeks, so back on a much more restrictive diet I must go.

7. A very intrusive gas line

A few months ago, utility workers came to the house and explained that they were redoing all of the city's gas lines and gas meters, and that ours would be replaced as well over the course of the next few months. They then asked where ours was, and we showed them -- in the center of the bottom floor of our house, in the closet under our stairwell -- which is, apparently some of the most asinine construction/meter placement possible. We told them we didn't build the house, we just bought it. Well, apparently, that's where the gas main comes into the house, and that meter in our closet will have to be removed and a new one installed outside on the opposite wall -- that means they have to drill through two walls, and the side of the house, and then run a pipe across the interior of our living room ceiling to install the new meter outside...in the middle of the wife's flower bed. Neither of us are happy about this, but per the utility board, it's the only way it can be done with the new regulations they have to follow. They will not reimburse us or cover the costs to cover the cosmetic damage to the living room, but when they do do it, it's supposed to be a really fast operation, so to speak -- two hours or so. They'll be calling us in advance to schedule it, and judging from the work outside they've been doing in the neighborhood up to this point, including in our own yard and sidewalk areas, I'm sure it won't be too far off now. 

8. The beardening

My beard is at full strength once more, and I intend to keep letting it grow out for most of the summer. It is, make no mistake, a huge pain in the ass to take care of, but Daisy absolutely loves it. I do, however, plan to get my hair cut short again soon for summer, in the short crew-cut-fade style I tend to do, in order to not have to go through a bottle of conditioner every two weeks or so and to keep cool when it's hot. I wanted to get this haircut over our vacation, but Daisy pleaded with me not to so that I could still have my long hair for our anniversary photoshoot. I wrestle with my appearance a lot; if I have my long hair and am clean shaven, I look like a woman. If I have my super-short crew cut hair and have my long beard, I look like a biker (or a hipster, depending on what I'm wearing that day). If I have my super-short crew cut hair and no beard, I look like a penis. Or I look like I'm twelve, either way. So, generally, I'll have more beard and hair than not. 

9. The cleaning

Our house is a wreck. It's rekt, it's Tyrannosaurus Rekt™. When I've had the time and the energy, I've been doing all I can to make it look not so much like a pigsty, with varying levels of success. Time and energy are indeed the biggest factors, and sometimes I'll run out of one or the other halfway through my list of tasks for the day or the week. It's the same with Daisy too, who tries as she might, but as she's also getting older, her previously boundless energy is starting to wane a bit. There's just so much to be done, and even on my days off I couldn't get it all taken care of. I could take a month off work just working on things around this house and probably still wouldn't be finished with all of it. It's frustrating. 

10. Finally, the writing.

I'm going to spend a bit longer on this section because I believe it deserves more attention. Yes, I have been hard at work on my collection. One story, as you know, is finished -- save for a few edits for some basic content and continuity here and there. I'm currently letting the wife and a few friends read through it. 

The second story (which will be third overall in the collection) is about 70-80% complete, and with luck I should be able to finish it sometime this weekend.

The third story (which will be the fourth overall in the collection) is about 15% finished, and is thus far one of the darkest, most hopelessly depressing things I've ever written. 

The fourth story (the second overall in the collection -- the title piece) and the final fifth story have not yet been started. I have notes for both of them but am finishing the others first. 

The acknowledgments section at the end of the book is about 90% finished. 

A final essay explaining the inspirations behind each piece, as well as discussing the creation of new worlds and universes, is about 80% finished as well. It will be the last thing I finish as I'll continually be adding to it and editing it throughout the entire process. 

Daisy has not yet started the cover art and likely won't until the manuscript is fully locked. 

I expect the final length of the book to be somewhere in the realm of 250-300 pages, depending heavily on typesetting and words per page for any given normal paperback book. It's not going to be short or leave the reader feeling "that's it?" when they finish. I want to create a satisfying collection, and what will hopefully be the first of many, but I'm not overdoing it. I'm not putting ten or fifteen stories in there of short lengths or varying quality, because that feels like I'd be half-assing it or not giving the writing itself room to breathe. I am meticulous about how this collection will be presented, because that's the one thing I have control of -- I don't have control of how it will be reviewed, received, read and studied, none of that. I do have control of what is in it and how it is arranged and presented. I don't even expect it to be reviewed or studied. I do expect some people I don't know to actually read it. 

So that's about all that's going on right now. I'll keep all of you updated with new things, sporadically, when I can.

Anniversary Year Eight

"I didn't get you anything for our anniversary," Daisy told me a few nights ago. 

"I didn't expect you to," I replied. "We're on vacation, we're spending time together, I got us the canvas thing, we're going to have a good dinner...all of that is enough, you don't need to do anything for me."

A few weeks ago, for Mother's Day, I found a website that would let you print any photo on a framed canvas. You know what I mean, I'm sure -- like those square canvases that wrap around a premade wood frame that you can hang on the wall. I printed up a photo of the two of us (one of the shots we took last fall but did not use for our Christmas card -- same session, though) on something like an 18x24" canvas and sent it to my mother so that she could hang a large, nice photo of us on the wall of the house. I told Daisy about this because I wanted to know whether she wanted me to do it for her parents too -- Daisy has made canvases for them before (two hi-def canvasses of their cats was a Christmas present we got them a few years ago). She declined, and we ended up doing other things for Mom for Mother's Day.

What I did not tell Daisy was that, at the same time I made the canvas for my mother I also made one for her/us -- a giant 24x36" with a photo of us kissing on our wedding day on it. It turned out really nicely. On the day it arrived, as it was wrapped on a giant wooden frame, it was too big to hide -- so I just put it across the headboard of our bed and forgot about it. 

That was like, three weeks or so ago. She came home that night from work and I'd forgotten it had arrived and that I'd put it up (when you work overnights, and don't sleep a lot, things tend to sort of slip your mind), so it wasn't until she mentioned it to me and thanked me for it that I remembered. I told her we could put it anywhere she wanted -- we have many a visible wall in the house that would benefit from a giant canvas of us -- but eventually we just decided to keep it where it was above the bed. 

I mean, it does look really good there. 

The last eight years married to Daisy have been a wild ride. And I say that with love, meaning it in the best possible way. It's not always been easy, of course. We fight, we argue over stupid shit sometimes. We don't always agree. We are individual people with thoughts, feelings, and opinions of our own that don't always mesh well together. But our fights and arguments are always rare and appropriate, and all of the good times far, far outweigh the bad by leaps and bounds.

Our relationship, and our marriage, is built on mutual trust, open and honest communication, and a very deep love for one another. I want you to read that again and really comprehend it, especially if you are married yourself: mutual trust, open and honest communication, and a very deep love for one another. There are no secrets Daisy and I keep from one another. If one of us has a problem, we talk it out. We may not see eye to eye on it, but we talk it out. There's nothing I couldn't tell her and at this point, likely not much she doesn't know about me already. I trust her completely. I know she trusts me completely. She knows she can talk about anything and everything with me and if she ever has a concern or a fear or a problem, I'm always going to be there to help. 

On that same token, I'm not going to say that our relationship is the same as it was in 2014 when we got married, nor will I say that it's the same as it was in 2012 when we fell in love. We've grown and changed together in all of those years, both as individuals and as partners. That likely sounds cliched, but it's true. Healthy relationships evolve and change, they roll with the punches (metaphorically of course). Healthy relationships are like trees -- what you see above ground in leaves and branches extends just as far below ground in the root structure. We are not the perfect couple, even though we've had several mutual friends tell us that we are their favorite couple. I do not think any couple can be perfect. True perfection will always be unobtainable. But, we can and do strive to be as good as we can for one another, and that goes a long way.

I've been on vacation for the last six days; Daisy has been off for four (Memorial Day weekend, plus our anniversary, allowed us to both take some time off, with an excuse). We've spent each of those days focused on doing things for, and with, one another -- just enjoying our time together. We did not do everything we'd originally planned or wanted to do, and that's okay. As much as I like it, not everything has to be about structure and metered time. We accomplished a great many things though, spending as much time together as possible, and spent our actual anniversary hiking through the Iowa wilderness. 

I love this woman so very deeply, with everything I have.

Here's to many more anniversaries.