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.
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