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...
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