It's Really a Lot, Part III

 So, picking up from where we left off...

I did not want to waste the Covid tests. We had a finite number of them and only had one order left of the free ones from the government that I could request. Ordering the exact same tests (and I mean the exact same tests) from Amazon is close to $50. No, seriously. I checked. 

So because of that, I wasn't about to waste tests when Daisy was testing negative and when I was feeling fine. On Sunday, because I was awake and had some energy, and because it wasn't 100 degrees, I went out and mowed both the front and back yards. Daisy's mother, in the interim, had called in a prescription for Paxlovid, which Daisy masked up and went to pick up for her, leaving it at the house for them while I did the mowing. 

It would be the last time Daisy left the house for the entire week.

Well, most of the week.

By the time Sunday night rolled around, I was beginning to feel achy and really tired, and had a bit of chest congestion that was actually noticeable. I did not feel sick, though. I figured that my lack of quality sleep plus the yard work and allergies from being outdoors was the likely culprit. By the time I got off work on Monday morning, I was really exhausted and was feeling a bit out of it, and I felt like I had a mild chest rattle. Again, possibly/probably allergy related, I didn't think much of it.

Daisy, however, felt like hell. She'd gotten a sore throat (which was the primary symptom her mother had) and a slight fever, both of which were not good signs. She tried to shy away from much physical contact with me when she could.

"[Daisy]," I said, "we're in the same house, the same enclosed spaces. We're breathing the same air, sleeping in the same bed. If you have it, I will have it. There's no need to be all separate or standoffish. I don't care at this point, I've been as exposed as you have. If it happens, it happens."

Some may see that as a sort of defeatist viewpoint but at that point we didn't really have any other options -- if I was going to get it there was no way out of it after the exposure I'd already had. Might as well just hunker down and deal with it.

I probably felt the worst on Monday; just tired and achy, and sort of foggy. Meanwhile, Daisy had acquired a low grade fever that was sticking around. Generally, her temperature runs a degree or two lower than the regular 98.6 -- she tends to be in the high 96s or low 97s. I actually do too, for the most part. This in itself is weird. But, y'know, whatever -- I don't think everyone has the baseline 98.6 widely looked on as the standard. Anyway, Daisy's temperature began hovering around 99.7, 99.8 almost every time she took it. I never bothered to take mine. I wasn't exactly sick, just felt a little off. 

On Tuesday morning before bed, I received a text message from the eye doctor's office -- my re-lensed glasses had arrived and were available for pickup. Well, I thought, that's nice, but we ain't gonna be able to pick them up for a while. This troubled me on some level because my prescription changed by a bit and I wanted to make sure it was going to be, well, correct and comfortable before I took the time, and money, to order a few spare pairs from the websites I normally get my glasses from. After all, it takes a few weeks to get those glasses in the mail, and the last thing I wanted was to not know how the prescription would be, order a bunch of spares anyway, and then find out when i got my new ones that oh, the prescription was way off and/or would need to be redone -- leaving me with multiple new pairs of glasses that were useless.

In the afternoon, I was awakened by banging and yelling. 

Now, it's not uncommon for me to be awakened, at least a few times and always lightly at worst, by Daisy cooking something, shutting a door, using the bathroom or talking on a work call while she's working from home. Most of the time my brain shuts it out and I either mostly sleep through it or fall asleep again quickly thereafter. However, there are times when I'm awakened and cannot get back to sleep, at all, no matter how I try. 

Well, Tuesday, with the banging and yelling, was one of those days.

Apparently, while I'd been sleeping, the refrigerator repairman had come (since that was happening whether Daisy had Covid or not) and he was having a hell of a time with our fridge. Daisy had masked up and taken her laptop downstairs to continue her work as well as supervise while he worked on our fridge, but he had been taking forever to get it fixed and in the interim, Daisy desperately needed to take her machine back upstairs to use both of her giant monitors and actually do the work she needed to get done -- she couldn't just sit downstairs on her laptop all day; it was like working with one arm tied behind your back. She asked me if I'd go downstairs to replace her on watch. 

I'd like to step back for a minute to note that no matter who is working in our home or on what -- and we've had a large number of repairmen here for everything from the washing machine (three times) to the oven, garbage disposal, plumbing/toilets (also three times, probably more), overhead microwave, wiring/electrical (at least four times) -- etc. Every time we're always there, in the room, monitoring the situation. It's not that I don't trust these people inside our home, it's that if they fuck something up, you bet your ass they're going to own that fuck-up and make it right, because I'm going to be there to witness it. 

Anyway, Daisy said he'd been down there for at least an hour, as had she, and in that time the electrician who fixed our wiring over the weekend had come back, opened the door and just walked into our home without calling or knocking first (while the other repairman was there in the kitchen, so the front door was already open) and put the cover on the wall over the new box/hole he'd cut to rewire the line, then thanked her and left. When Daisy told me that I was stunned; she said she'd just been sitting on the couch working on her laptop when the dude just walked into the room. Like, holy shit. That bothers me on multiple levels. I can't imagine what that dude was thinking. 

So, I went downstairs to replace Daisy, and took my phone with me. The refrigerator repairman had to be in his late forties, was tall and lanky, and swore like a trooper at our fridge. He apparently hates our model of fridge, hates working on that run/model line of them, does not understand how they have to be so difficult to repair, and generally was yelling at the refrigerator the entire time he was there -- except for when he fielded a personal cell phone call from one of his buddies and they had a full fifteen-minute-long conversation about elk hunting in Nebraska and how the restrictions are too tight because "the animals belong to all of us" and how the landowners of hunting areas shouldn't charge so much money to access them...

I wish I were making that up. It took all of my self-control not to tell him that the animals don't belong to him, the human population of Nebraska, or to anyone/anything else -- they are free and wild and have lives and families, and don't deserve to be shot by meat-eating barbarians like him and his friends just because humans think they taste good.

I didn't, though. I showed some class. I do have some class when it's called for. But man, was it difficult.

Anyway.

The fridge got fixed. That was the last thing on the list of pending repairs for the house. It needed a new ice-maker motor and door flapper assembly. It works fine now. Well, fine for a twenty-plus-year-old refrigerator, anyway. It does the job.

I returned upstairs after the repairman left to find that, finally, our lab results from our physicals had been uploaded online so that we could see them.

I have...experienced zero changes to my A1C. It remains steady at 6.7. In the past year it has remained at about the same and hasn't really changed. In July 2021 it was 6.8. In January 2022 it was 6.7. In June 2022 it was 6.7. So, the diabetes is being controlled, and it's not getting worse...but I am not yet making leaps and bounds of improvements either. so it is what it is, I guess.

My other test results and labs are normal. They're slowly seeing my cholesterol rise, and when they called to discuss my test results with me, they recommended that I start on Lipitor. I told them to go ahead and call it in, sure -- I may or may not use it. I may not even pick it up from the pharmacy.

Daisy found this to be ridiculous. "I could see them wanting to put you on Lipitor if you had like, 800 cholesterol or something like that," she said. "But not for your numbers, not at all, not yet. it may be an eventuality at some point, but not yet."

She's right. My bad cholesterol is simply a little higher than they'd like to see. It's not high and it's nowhere near off the charts. It's like 20 points higher than the "standard range." 

What's worse, two of the main side effects of Lipitor are raising your blood sugar and making you gain weight, which...again, I thought those two things were goals we were actively working against doing? 

So I dunno. I had the pharmacy fill it, but I don't know if we'll actually pick it up. The doctors want me to come in for another fasting blood draw in six weeks to check the cholesterol levels again, and at that juncture we'll see where I am and if it's changed. In the interim I'm going to be more active and take high levels of inositol every day, which helps to lower cholesterol. If they tell me that there's no way out of it and I need to start the Lipitor at that point...okay, fine, I guess. I'd really rather not do it but if it keeps me alive and healthier than I am now, then I'd probably be stupid not to take my doctor's advice. I don't know yet. I do not want to be on any more medications than absolutely necessary. My overall goal is to get healthy enough to get off the ones I'm currently on, and that's going to be the focus of my next doctor's visit -- what do I have to do to my body to get off the allopurinol and the metformin? Because I am really sick of taking pills every day. I want a pill-free existence. 

Meanwhile, Daisy was getting more sick -- or at least feeling more "off" as the week went on. For me, I felt normal. Daisy took a test every other day or so, always coming up negative. 

On Wednesday at work, I made sure to gather all the data necessary for who would be working the July 4th holiday weekend. I had volunteered for it many months ago, as...well, they needed someone who could actually be reliable to be management on shift for it. I plotted my days carefully long ago -- as I usually work New Year's Day, and did this year, July 4th was another day I could pick and say look, I not only worked one holiday this year, but two and start getting off the pattern of working on New Year's Day. New Year's Day 2023 is a Sunday, a night I'd normally work. My goal is to be able to (hopefully) leave work on the morning of December 23rd and be off until January 2, and only need to use 32 hours of time for it (four eight-hour shifts). I don't know if this will be possible given the trip this summer and any time I use around Thanksgiving, but I'm readying for it as much as I can now. 

So, whether I'm in the office or not, as I have the bulk of the overnight team reporting to me, the duties fall mostly on me to make sure that holidays, especially holiday weekends, are well-staffed. I put a call out for volunteers at least a month out, and generally get at least five or six volunteers to work on the holiday. Because most holidays are dead in my job (except for Christmas 2020, when a bomber took out most of Tennessee and some surrounding states on Christmas morning -- thanks, dick), the workloads are usually very light, the help is plentiful, and it's a night there I can just supervise in the foreground and read the news or play a phone game in the background. But, because I was working the holiday this year, I would get a "comp day" for it -- meaning, an extra day off for volunteering for the coverage. 

I was planning to take that day on the 7th, but our director is OOO next week, and will need the rest of us in management to be ever-vigilant for escalations and/or other issues. So I gave the team a choice -- I could either take it on the 7th and maybe have the team be a bit short on coverage, or I could take it June 30, the Thursday prior, and work straight through next week on normal shifts. I eventually decided, after discussion with the team, that I'd just do it on June 30. However, this wasn't decided until the very late overnight hours of June 29, when Daisy was already in bed.

The next morning, when she awoke and began her work day, I asked her if there was anything off the top of her head that I could do to immediately make her happy and put her in a good mood. When she couldn't think of anything, I asked her if me having the night off would be something along those lines, and she agreed. It was very cute.

Daisy was still running a slight fever and was feeling very out of it. Meanwhile, her mother (who had taken the Paxlovid) was much improved. Dad had gone to the doctor to get an official test for him, and he also tested negative. Both parents are fully vaccinated and fully boosted, and were in good spirits (well, good spirits for them, anyway). Daisy, however, was getting worse.

When I finally woke up in the afternoon and evening hours, Daisy asked me if I'd be willing to run into the local urgent care with her to get an actual, bona-fide Covid lab test, as she was hot and dizzy and seemed as if she was fading fast, and her fever really wasn't subsiding -- it was either remaining steady in the high 99 range or would fluctuate by a tenth of a degree. I didn't really want to go, but she needed me there -- and while I was there, I also wanted to see if I could get a test done just to rule everything out. After all, I could have it too, and could just be mostly (or completely) asymptomatic. 

Our two urgent care visits cost us $70 total to get looked at quickly and a test for each of us. It was a really painless procedure and relatively fast, too -- we were in and out in about half an hour. The new, more accurate tests don't require you to stick the swab all the way in anymore to tickle your brain -- instead, the doctor (nurses in this case) just swabs the tip and insides of the nostrils, and doesn't even go in that deeply. I've done more vigorous cleaning of my nose with a tissue than with the test. We were told the results would take 24 hours or so, but to check online (in the system where we get all of our other test results) in the morning or early afternoon. 

I'd taken the night off for my comp day; it didn't matter to me how long it took to get the results -- I had the entire weekend ahead of me for doing whatever needed to be done, and Friday for me was payday. I was perfectly fine sitting around at home and getting some true decompression time -- time with which I could finally get a little breathing space and not have to go anywhere or be obligated to do anything. Daisy, who wouldn't be going anywhere or doing anything outside the house for any reason until she got the doctor's test results confirmed, was working from home on Friday as well. So, I got some decent sleep, decent rest, and devoted all of Friday to laundry and light chores. I washed load after load of towels, bed sheets and blankets, stripped the bathroom of its mats and shower curtains and washed them, washed my own laundry, paid a bill or two, balanced the bank account and placed an Amazon order for household items, and (at Daisy's insistence) did some light exercise. Meanwhile, Daisy worked as per the usual on Friday, from her office across the hall from my own.

By the early afternoon hours, we both got emails that our Covid results were in. We both checked, and thankfully, both of us were negative. 

So, whatever was making Daisy feel ill, or making her run a slight fever for several days on end...well, per the doctors, and per our home tests, was not Covid-19.

"I still think I had it earlier in the week," Daisy said.

She'd talked to her parents during the day -- her mother was feeling better but was still not 100%. Mama said we could come over to hang out and eat foods with them. As much as we love the parents, that was a hard no from both me and Daisy until the Covid is completely out of that house. I went online to the USPS website and ordered the very last set of free tests that were available to send to our household. They'll arrive sometime within the next week. Better to have them and not use them than need them and not have them.

That evening, after she got off work, Daisy said that she thought our upstairs bathroom was disgusting and couldn't stand it any more, and wanted to clean it before I put the newly-washed shower curtains, towels, and mats back in there. I told her to go for it, if she felt like it; it was up to her how and when she wanted to do that. So, she did -- after she got a little decompression time, she went to work on the bathroom, bleaching it down, scrubbing the tub, scrubbing the sink, etc.

Some of you may be asking why I let her do this when she'd been sick and/or why I didn't do it myself if it was bothering her so much...and that would show me how little you know about our relationship. First of all, I don't "let" Daisy do anything -- she doesn't need permission from me for general life tasks and let me tell you, try telling that woman what to do or what not to do and you'll get a rude awakening really quickly. Secondly, when Daisy says she's going to do something, she will do it -- but she will do it her way to her standards. I don't have any say in how it gets done. If I were to go in there and clean the bathroom my way after she said she was going to do it, she would likely have been furious with me and I would not have done it the way she wanted it to be done, or in the same timeframe.

Also, I'd been awake since 6am, had done a ton of other things around the house, and I was tired; the last thing I wanted to do was clean a bathroom at 9pm -- I wanted to eat something and watch Stranger Things, which had premiered that day. My day was winding down and I wanted it to be over. 

So, Daisy cleaned the bathroom, we ate, and we watched Stranger Things. The first of the two finale episodes, at least.

As we wound down for the night, Daisy said that if she was feeling good enough and everything else was okay, we could go pick up my glasses from the optometrist on Saturday. She said this was fine because she wouldn't have to interact with anyone (even if she still felt sick) and that she knew I would want them to check my prescription/make sure it was correct for the July 4th sales on the glasses websites we use (Payne Glasses and Zenni Optical) to get some new pairs. 

My prescription apparently gets updated a little here and there every time I get my eyes checked. The eye doctors say this is normal. I mentioned this before. My major concern was that the prescription would be accurate in the new lenses I paid a lot of money to have inserted into my older frames. Mind you, I could've gotten at least one brand new pair, if not two brand new pairs, of glasses directly from the optometrist for the amount of money I paid to re-lens the old ones. But I really, really liked and missed my old glasses and I absolutely wanted to give them at least another year of life, if not more. 

In the afternoon hours on Saturday -- after it had rained violently out of nowhere for a good hour in the morning, we went to pick them up. Daisy dropped me at the door and grabbed a parking spot, and I'd gotten there in the last hour they were open for the day, meaning I was the only person there other than the nice lady who was working there who I'd originally handed off the glasses to in the first place. She presented me with my new old frames, which had been immaculately cleaned and had the new lenses installed into them, and I very apprehensively put them on.

Hoo boy, HD vision, gooooooo.

The prescription was, fortunately, perfect. I could see everything very clearly and crisply again. It was a noticeable difference, but not too noticeable -- meaning, the prescription I'd just gotten was very good, but the older one I'd had for over a year was also just fine too and still is.

I debated on getting any new glasses at all from the websites I order them from; after all, I have the two new sets of lenses now, and my older prescription is still fine...but I did want to see in HD vision all the time; my vision is so important to me. I decided that I would relent and get a few pairs of new ones, and that they'd be generally higher-quality pairs than the simple plastic square frames I wore a lot -- I'd get a few different styles, and wouldn't let overall price be a deciding factor. Having worn glasses for a large chunk of my life now, I know what styles I like versus the ones I really don't. I know which ones will irritate my nose or temples and which ones don't, and began planning accordingly.

Because of Payne Glasses' 4th of July sale, I was able to get eight pairs of new glasses for about $125, and with shipping, it came to $140 or so. I also found that both Walmart and Goodwill take glasses donations of older, outdated pairs, and I already have a giant Goodwill donation bag in my closet. So I'll swap out most of the pairs that I've acquired this past year (the ones that aren't absolute favorites, anyway) and will replace them with the new ones -- donating the lesser-favored old ones.

The new ones are in a variety of styles. I got a few square, plastic frames like I generally favor for everyday use, but I also got a different pair of aviators, some lower-rimless squared browlines, a round browline, and a few other stylistic odds-and-ends that I may or may not end up liking but was worth the few bucks just to try out. Half of the frames I've loved over the years have been discontinued by one manufacturer or another, and it's not worth spending $100 or more to put new lenses in a $15 frame. Those, sadly, are the ones that get donated and eventually replaced with something different. 

So, no pun intended, we shall see.

Daisy has not yet ordered new glasses in her new prescription; it may be a bit before she does. She is far more particular about colors and styles than I am -- I am old school and don't deviate much from my own likes and patterns. She is avant-garde and tends to gravitate more towards odd shapes and colors, with the drawback of that being she may not end up liking the fit or quality of them once they arrive in the mail. I've only been disappointed by the fit and/or quality of glasses I've ordered over the years about two or three times, total, and that's generally just been because of the style or fit isn't what I thought it would be, or it hurts my nose/temples to wear them because the size ended up being smaller than expected. Etc. It is what it is, I guess. I've learned the sizes that I need now and have adjusted my likes and dislikes accordingly to match, and haven't had an issue in years.

Anyway.

As soon as I got home I swapped out my frames for the new lenses in the oldest frames I have -- my $400 Chesterfield pure titanium frames from 2015, and have been wearing them ever since. There's  just something about a simple, elegant pair of wire-rim glasses that feels so spartan, so utilitarian. I also barely feel them when I wear them because they're so light. I made the right choice in getting new lenses in them. 

And, really, so ended our week. We finished Stranger Things, work seems to be dead (at least by looking at my email, anyway) and Daisy is off until Tuesday -- she will finally return to the office on Wednesday. I return to work tonight to work a normal, full week. But it's been a very long, very stressful and hectic last ten days or so, and as we enter the high days of summer I really hope that everything remains quiet and even keel. There are a lot of things coming up over the later summer and fall, but for the moment, I want -- and need -- the peace to continue. 

It's Really a Lot, Part II

 So, let's pick up where we left off. Cool? Cool.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade on Friday morning infuriated both me and Daisy. Millions of words have been said and written on it in the four days since, and as I am a white CIS male without children, I am the last person anyone should ever be coming to in order to hear an opinion on the subject...but, as this is my website, y'all are going to hear my thoughts on it anyway. 

Suffice it to say that I vehemently disagree and am very pro-choice, always have been. I am very pro-body autonomy in all people, in all genders, in all social classes and walks of life. It's also probably not a stretch for you to believe and understand that my wife is as well. 

I believe, even though at times my faith in society is tested, that society is mostly good. I believe that given right and wrong options, most people would pick the right option and would choose to be a good person over being a bad one. I am not religious, but I do understand the religious right's viewpoint on their moral grounds that it's essentially premeditated murder. I do not agree with that, of course -- nor do I have to, and nor should that belief be forced on anyone via law or otherwise. From a purely practical and pragmatic viewpoint, this country has far too many unwanted, neglected, or otherwise uncared-for children already. Our population is already close to being larger than can be sustained. Inflation is sky-high and child care costs will be affected too, and they still think it's a great idea to bring every pregnancy to term and birth? I think that's a bullshit argument that falls flat when they won't answer the question of, if every child will now be forced to be carried to term and delivered, how those children will be paid for, cared for, raised, fed, clothed, and given healthcare. Don't even get me started on pregnancies that aren't medically viable, or the concept of being able to arrest and prosecute someone for having a miscarraige. Get the fuck out of here with that nonsense.

That's not their concern, of course. Not their job to raise the kids or see that they're healthy and taken care of, just to see that they're born. The Christian Right's goal in this country is to create more Christians. Their mindset is don't want a baby? don't have sex then, and that is (quite obviously) extremely toxic. Many others have pointed out that none of these people who are "pro life" seem to be lining up to adopt any of the thousands of children currently in the foster care system as wards of the state. It's not about the babies and really, it's not about life in general at all. It's about control. It's about religious white men wanting to control every aspect of a woman's sexuality by taking all sexual autonomy away from women. It's about religious white men wanting to say when, how, and who a woman can have sex with, and why. It's about turning women into objects for men to fuck, and if they get pregnant from it, oh well, that's her problem, she had the sex.

I...I can't believe this is what we've become as a country. I am a 39-year-old atheist, liberal, anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-religion, anti-Republican with a brain who uses said brain, and I am just stunned and disheartened. So many are angry, violently angry. And I have anger, too, but it's mostly just sadness. Twenty years ago we were at the precipice of becoming the society that we were always meant to be -- kind, progressive, always moving forward and upward. Now we're a short few steps away from losing the last of our freedoms and democracy as a whole. How long will it truly be before all of the violent uprisings start? Before we truly do have a second Civil War?

So, all of this was running through our heads on Friday morning as we supervised the work of the utility teams installing our new gas line. As mentioned before, this was an arduous task, as it involved drilling holes through two walls and through the side of our house. It also involved turning our house into a goddamn mess, because we store a lot of things in that closet where the gas meter was. 

So, after drilling through the side of the house, the inside wall above our couch (a two-inch wide hole that you could see light through, the tech on the inside of the house drilled through the opposite wall behind our TV, and hit the house wiring. Suddenly our rooms downstairs were without power as the breaker got kicked. 

"Huh," he said. "I didn't nick it that hard, but I still nicked it."

The tech, with his boring drill (the one drilling the two-inch wide holes through our walls) had hit one of the bigger/thicker wires inside the walls...the wire that apparently distributed power to a good chunk of the house. He had barely nicked it, but it was enough to blow the breaker. 

The crew quickly assessed and told us they'd reported it to the claims department so that an electrician could come out and fix it free of charge. They said they'd be out in an hour or so. Okay. In the interim, they were on a schedule and had to finish the gas line installation and move on. 

I got a call from the claims department confirming the report, and confirming callback with appointment details by noon or so. At that point it was a little before 11, so I was fine with it. The wire nick appeared to take out the downstairs bathroom light and the light in the living room (as well as the single bulb in the closet where they were working) but the other electronics and lighting in the living room -- my work computer, the router, my large lamp, the TV/game systems, etc -- were all fine; they run on a different breaker, I guess. The kitchen was fine too, as was all of the upstairs.

Daisy and I watched them snake the big, ugly black gas line along our support beam, drill brackets around the line to hold it in place, and then caulk up the holes in the wall around it on all sides once it was fully hooked up. It is very ugly. It is very noticeable. It is obtrusive. It sucks.

"We recommend you just paint it," they said, "to make it blend in with the rest of the room. It's fully paintable, and we used paintable caulk too."

I am not sure whether we have the same shade of paint for that room anymore. We've not changed the paint since we moved in -- we left it what the last homeowners had it. While there are multiple cans of paint they left us for rooms and touchups, I don't know for certain we have the living room wall paint. Oh well. Daisy wants to repaint the downstairs eventually anyway. 

They finished up their work and finally left, but not before getting up on our roof to run a scope down through our entire water/sewer system to make sure they hadn't done any damage to our lines when digging and laying the new gas line -- apparently for a lot of homes and a lot of neighborhoods, there's been some significant damage done when they were doing that. We were incredibly lucky -- no damage to ours. Additionally, our water/sewer lines are clean, no blockages, no problems seen -- all drainage is good. Always good to get confirmation of that, I guess. 

So they left, and I waited on the call from the electrician. As they were leaving, I also noted that the breaker ran the front dining room as well, our front window security camera, and the outside porch light -- all were out/offline. So, that was at least half of the downstairs that ran off that breaker. 

By 1pm, I'd received no call from the electrician. I called the claims folks back and told them this. They said they'd get the electrician to call me, and he did -- he said he had his tech out on a job at the moment, but he would have him call shortly.

3pm rolled around. Still no call. I called the electrician back again to tell him this. Said electrician told me to be patient (definitely not the right thing to say to me). I responded that half of our downstairs was without power and that I would need this to be taken care of. I was polite, but I was also firm. He said if I hadn't received a call by 5, to call him back again.

In the interim of all this, a large protest against the overturn of Roe v. Wade had materialized and was set to take place at Memorial Park (on the outskirts of the college campus a few miles away from the house). Daisy said she wanted to go and be part of it no matter what. 

Now, mind you, at this point my anxiety and anger levels were running very high. I was angry at the Supreme Court, I was angry that I had a giant, ugly black gas line running through my living room, I was angry that most of the lower half of the house had no power, and I was angry that it was late afternoon and I was still waiting on a call from an electrician that the claims department had told me five hours previously that I would only have to wait an hour for. Add to this that Daisy knew I was stressed and angry and needed her support and she was telling me she wanted to potentially put herself into harm's way for a pop-up protest when a LOT of people had emotions running high and were likely to riot -- Omaha protests can very quickly turn into riots, after all, as we saw in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests. 

I asked her if there was anything I could say that would prevent her from going. She told me no. My anxiety was super-high because the protest was along the most heavily-traveled road in Omaha. Nebraska is a red state. For the most part, it is a very red state. It was nothing, given the propensity of mass shootings recently, for me to imagine a redneck white guy in a giant truck just sticking an AR-15 out the window as he drove by and mowing down protesters with it. 

As a further aside, I understand the irony of being pro-life and still performing a mass shooting. But mass shooters don't make sense, they don't have logic, they just want to kill large groups of people.

I couldn't have gone to the protest if I'd wanted to -- I was stuck waiting on the fucking electrician to call me back and come fix the wiring.

When Daisy had gotten dressed and tried to leave for the protest, surprise, the garage door got knocked out by the breaker/wiring too. So the car was trapped in the garage. Her/our friends who were also going to the protest came to pick her up, and she left. 

It was nearing 5pm. I was angry, I was anxious, and I was completely alone. A thunderstorm was rolling in. I went downstairs to look to see where the wire had been nicked, as if it were a "small nick" as the guy had said, I could seal it off with electrical tape myself -- that's what electrical tape is for -- and then kick the breaker back on. 

I opened the closet door and shined my flashlight up to where the damage had taken place, and....nothing. As in, there was no wiring there. The new gas line was installed/hooked up, and the gas people had completely caulked the wall closed. The wiring was completely inside the wall, between the closet and our living room, sealed in there to where it couldn't even be accessed. The electrician, whenever they would come, would likely need to cut a hole in the wall to access it.

It was somewhere around this point where I completely lost my shit. It was a Friday night, when I knew there wouldn't be an electrician coming out that night because nobody would fucking call me, Daisy was gone, I can't see in the dark -- which it was rapidly becoming because a storm was rolling in -- the house was a mess, and I was just at the end of my goddamn rope with things not going right. 

It was also around this point where Daisy texted me to let me know that while the protest was peaceful, she also very nearly got into a physical altercation with some guy who was going through the crowd filming everyone there and like, brushing up against women and generally being a creep. I told her about the wall and the wiring and that I still hadn't gotten a call (she thought, when I told her about that, that the electrician was already here) and that I was about to call the electrician back and lose my shit on him. She said no, give her his number, as she was already really angry about the incident at the protest and angry in general, and that she would do that instead.

Again, another further aside -- when Daisy gets angry, which isn't incredibly often, she goes full tilt on it and leans into it. However, if there's a way she can channel that anger into getting something done, even if it's something unrelated, she will do so. It's like aiming a cannon at a target. Daisy is the most strong-willed, bull-headed person I've ever met, and she has no real problems in unleashing (fully justified) fury on someone to get something done. I've continually been impressed with her ability to get people to do whatever she wants them to do by using anger and logic. She is not subtle about it.

I gave her the numbers. She first called the claims people, to relay that no, we had not yet heard anything from anyone and that we'd been waiting all day since they originally called. She then spoke to the electrician who I'd already spoken to twice, who told her to be patient as well, and that if we hadn't heard anything at this point we likely wouldn't before Tuesday. Tuesday! 

Yeah, that was the wrong thing to say to my wife. 

Daisy told him in no uncertain terms that 3/4 of our downstairs was without power, we couldn't get in and out of our garage, we needed someone there at the house tomorrow (which was Saturday), as we'd originally been told "an hour" at 11am, and his guy who he told us repeatedly would call us to take care of it had never done so. She said very clearly that Tuesday does not work for us. 

Remarkably, this worked -- he said he'd hire another electrician who would be at our house between 8am and noon on Saturday, and that he'd be sending over techs who would be able to show us how to get in and out of our garage manually. 

"Why do we need people to show us how to get in and out of the garage?" I asked. "Do we plan on going anywhere before the wiring is fixed anyhow?"

Daisy wanted them to show us simply because if we messed with undoing the garage door opener ourselves, or if it broke when we disengaged it, that would be on us and not on the utility company. If they broke it or otherwise fucked it up, that was on them and we'd get them to replace it for free (just like the wiring repair). 

So, Daisy got dropped off here at home and shortly thereafter, two biker-looking guys showed up to look at the garage door. They unhooked it and showed us how to do it, and found that a) it would not stay up on its own, at all, without the opener...and b) that it would not close all the way on its own without the opener making sure it was sealed, either -- there remained an inch or two of space under half of the door because the chain of the opener, and the latch on it, is what held it down in place. They could not get it to re-engage with the opener once it was disengaged, despite their trying.

"So how are we supposed to get in and out?" Daisy asked them.

"Open the garage manually, hold it up while you back the car out so that it stays open and doesn't fall on the car, then let it close, engage the security latch, and go out the front door."

Daisy and I were stunned. That meant that exiting the fucking house just became a two-person job, because the door wouldn't stay up on its own -- someone would have to hold it. They just slid closed the security latch on the side (which still left the gap under the door), shrugged and said "it is what it is," and left. 

We were not impressed. The entire day and experience of dealing with all of these idiots had been maddening. Idiot after idiot. Person after person. On one of the most politically inflammatory days ever. Oh, and we still had no lights or power to most of the downstairs of the house. 

I don't remember much else about the night or about what we did. I know I ate something, eventually, and took a shower (finally) before I went to sleep. I was emotionally and spiritually drained, and the entire day had been wasted and stolen from us. I let the parents know via text that we had no idea when we'd be able to be over there on Saturday for Daisy's birthday celebrations, as we had no idea how long it would take the electrician to correct the issue the next morning or when he would arrive. 

The next morning, after some fitful sleep for both of us, the electrician finally arrived around 11. He was a young guy, really nice, and obviously very smart. He took one look at the situation, after we explained it to him, and was like "yeah, there's no other way to do this, I'm going to have to cut a hole in the wall."

He ended up needing to cut a hole up near the ceiling about the size of a wall outlet -- he stripped out the old damaged wiring, cut it out, replaced it with new wiring and hooked it all up, and then flipped the breaker back on. Success, everything worked again. Daisy unlatched the garage door and got it to re-engage, and we were completely back in business. There was still a hole in our wall with wiring inside a small, outlet-sized wall box, but everything worked. 

"I'll come back in a few days and put a cover on that," he said. "I don't have one with me today."

The entire process took about half an hour from start to finish. It was something that could have very easily been done during business hours the day prior, and not a complex repair that we needed to wait over 24 hours to get taken care of. 

Yes, I understand, first world problems and all that. I'm just sick of shit breaking or having wrenches thrown into plans for what was supposed to be a fairly easygoing week/weekend with a few errands involved.

With the wiring fixed and everything working, Daisy and I let the parents know and we went over there shortly thereafter so that we could celebrate her birthday with them, even though her actual birthday had been a few days prior. That was fun. That was peaceful, for the most part. We spent several hours there -- it had been some time since we really had a lot of time with the parents, since they'd been in Canada. We had spent some time with them on Thursday as well, when they got home, but Saturday was far more relaxed and we were able to just be. We discussed our upcoming travel to Nova Scotia and how that will play out when it happens, because it'll either be when Daisy's grandfather dies or it'll be at the end of August. We are not sure yet (because, well, he's still alive), but it will be one of the two. Either way it'll be a logistical headache to plot the trip, submit PTO for it for our jobs, and budget for it. We have not yet booked the flights because (no pun intended) a lot of things are still up in the air.

That night, we returned home -- and with stresses lessened a bit after the gas line had been done, the wiring had been fixed, and with most bills paid/groceries obtained...it looked like we were finally able to get some peace. I went to bed as per the usual in the dawn hours, and planned to sleep throughout most of the next day to reset my sleep schedule for the coming work week, which started Sunday night (as per the usual).

At 10am, Daisy's mother called and woke us up. She had just tested positive for Covid and felt horrible.

Now, mind you, Daisy and I are fully vaccinated. We're actually both able to get a second booster now, and will be doing so as soon as possible. However, we haven't done so yet. And Daisy already wasn't feeling great. 

Me? I felt fine. I felt normal, aside from being awakened at 10am. 

This, of course, did not matter to either of us -- exposure for hours on end, in close quarters, breathing the same air and hugs and kisses and all that -- that was all a very bad thing. And it threw, again, a very large wrench into many plans for the entire following week.

Daisy made sure her job knew ASAP, and was given permission to work from home for most, if not all, of the entire week at that time (she still planned to be in the office on Friday, based on the isolation period now being a recommended five days if you test negative). Because I'd had the foresight to order the free tests from the government, Daisy took one and tested negative. I made the decision that I would not test myself unless she had a positive test, as I had zero symptoms of anything. 

How did that go? Well...