July: Gus, Gretchen, Pile it On, and Daddy Spaghetti

 Weeks start and end incessantly, and three-day-weekends disappear in a blink, and before you know it you are more than halfway through July and, as such, in the midst of summer with not much to show for it. 

I realize that my story of our Canada trip probably left a bad taste in your proverbial mouths (it certainly did in mine) so I'm going to try to turn this around somewhat and move into more positive territory. It has been a month since we returned from Canada, and I must say that I do really miss it. However, I may miss the idea of it more than actually being there. I sort of miss the independence that traveling up there seems to provide. I miss the sea air, the fresh coffee, the giant gulls in every parking lot. I miss seeing the seals sunning themselves on the rocks only to whip themselves quickly back into the ocean when they see you're watching them. 

They're tracking several great white sharks (read: sharks that scientists have tagged) around Nova Scotia this month, some of them around the mainland and some of them up around the island. What a thrill it would be to see one. As I've mentioned before, I'm pretty sure I've seen sharks up there, fins moving through the water and not dolphin fins, and there was a little twinge of excitement there. 

A lot of things, little and big, have happened in the past month. A lot of them have come and gone with little fanfare, while others have been big events that have lingered for days or weeks at a time. I'm going to try to cover a lot of it as I can, in a go-with-the-flow manner from subject to subject. 

I should probably start with the bigger things the first of which is that both of Daisy's parents have had relatively important, major-ish surgeries since we've returned home. Yes, they're both fine now and have recovered normally, but it's a continual reminder that we are all but mortal and pretty soon (well, relatively speaking) neither her parents nor mine will be around at some point. And I have a feeling it's going to be a blink of the eye in relative time before that happens. We cherish time with Daisy's parents, and we make a special effort to visit mine in North Carolina every year as well. I'm getting to the point where it's so relatively inexpensive to go visit my parents in North Carolina that I am floating the idea of doing it more than once a year -- like once in the spring, once in the fall sort of planning. Daisy and I would, of course, need to work out the logistics of that a bit better, but as my parents have said that the best time to visit is October, and we had a good time and it was warm enough when we were there in March, it's not exactly out of the question to try to plan two trips a year for about 4-5 days each time. 

However, there's a bit of a wrench that has been thrown into any planning for that at this juncture, because starting next week, Daisy has a six-month promotion at her job. I call it a promotion because it's not a lateral move, really, but it is temporary. She's entering a program that is the stepping stone to higher-level leadership and/or other segments of her company. Once that program ends in six months, she'll either return to her old position with a higher-level skillset, or she will move to a higher tier (for lack of a better term) within the company. There's not really much, if any, real difference in pay (there's a slight difference in her bonuses) for this time period, but there is a change in schedule -- she is back to a Monday-Friday schedule, which means we won't have Fridays off together anymore. Friday has always been our day to take care of errands, shopping, doctor's appointments, etc. So, at least for the next six months, that's going to suck. She did, however, point out that on Fridays I'll have more me-time to decompress since she'll be working. However, I'd much rather have the time with her. I got so used to spending Fridays with her that it's going to be sad. It also means that she'll be able to watch football with me on Sundays once again though, which I'm sure she's thrilled about. Sarcasm intended.

My own job has been brutal. July has not been kind to us, and I have -- psychologically and motivationally -- been having a very hard time. It is very difficult for me to get up every day and boot up that laptop every night knowing it's going to drive me a little closer to having a mental breakdown, because of the abuse I'm about to face for ten hours straight. I am not exaggerating here, nor do I want to. Next month I cross twelve years at my job (relatively speaking; it's been doing the same job as a contractor for the same corporate overlords through three different companies, but it's the same job) and I've now finally gotten to the point where any care, drive, ambition, or aspirations I once had are just gone, and I am really just going through the barest minimum of motions every single day for the hours I'm there until I can logout and close my laptop. And at this point I am sure people are noticing, but I also...don't really care, to be honest with you. Fuck you, pay me. 

We are so horribly overworked and understaffed that the people who work there have been quitting left and right, and that includes one of the girls on my team...my team of four people, which means our staffing was cut down by a full 25% in one fell swoop. Now, mind you, she was my least important employee and I could have been justified in firing her a long time ago for being lazy. However, I didn't want to fire her. I couldn't fire her; she was a warm body I could assign tasks to. I just wanted her to do her fucking job. She did not want to do that, and when it was clear that she didn't have a say in the matter, she was like "okay, well, here's my two weeks" and was gone. Her replacement was a guy I am only passingly familiar with from the day shift teams, who -- in his first two weeks on 3rd shift -- had his laptop spectacularly self-destruct on him and then, once he got a new one, three days into the week had his cat die mid-shift. So, it's been...shaky, to say the least. I have some confidence in him, but full judgment is reserved until bad shit stops happening to him and he can work a normal week without a crisis. 

But, I will tell you, my job is not my life -- and, especially that one, it never will be. When I am off shift, I do not give a single flying shit about what happens when I'm not there. Not my monkeys, not my circus. We're not a big happy family. We're people there doing a task that we get paid for. 

Still, I get older every day, and each day is a cold reminder that I have never done and likely never will do what I would like to do with my life.

But, apparently, my cousin can.

In a development that came shockingly out of left field, about a month ago I received a text from my mother asking me if I knew my cousin had written a book. 

I did not, of course.

The cousin in question is one of the youngest cousins of my generation in the family from West Virginia, born in 1986 -- so, I guess, he is 40 this year. I remember seeing him in the hospital when he was born, so, I mean, I am a few years older than him. Only two of my other cousins are younger than he is. 

Now, this cousin...he is absolutely the last person in the family I would have ever expected to write a book. I have always known him to be more on the redneck side of the family (and I say this with no real offense intended, but keep in mind I was a professor and now work in a highly skilled tech job, and the two cousins younger than him are also schoolteachers -- having gone into education as a personal choice).

So my first question was, of course, a book about what? This is the cousin who invited me to join a Facebook group promoting his self-run business, which is killing coyotes for fun and profit in rural Pennsylvania (they are quite the nuisance there to pets and livestock). He invited me to this group, the vegetarian married to a vegan, who loves animals and owns six cats...to a business page devoted to killing animals. I'm guessing he either invited his entire friends list, or he really doesn't know me as a person these days. 

Of course, I also have not spoken to this cousin, personally, in well over twenty years. I've been living here in the midwest for twenty years this fall, and I think the last time I saw him was a few years before that at a holiday family dinner, so... maybe he's a different person now than the goofy kid I knew growing up. Regardless, I was curious about his book. Was it a book about hunting? Being republican? (I'm only guessing here, going with the odds) A humor book?  A travel narrative? I know this guy married young and has a wife who adores him, the sister of family friends, and I know his side of the family is religious, so maybe it was a faith-based narrative about love and Jesus or something. 

It...was not.

I found the post on Facebook about it -- written by his wife -- and then I clicked through to the book itself on Amazon to see what it was all about.

It's a sci-fi supernatural thriller about a ghost/monster hunting detective.

What. The fuck. 

Not only that, he has another book that is about -- by the way it sounds -- a werewolf hunting two men in a forest. 

What in the everliving fucking fuck.

I was speechless and needed to take a few minutes for myself. 

Not only is my cousin doing the exact thing I got two different college degrees to do, but he is doing it on his own, with what appears to be some help in the art department (I must admit, the art for the covers looks great) and has not one but two books written in a similar vein/genre as the style of fiction I write and have been working on for years -- well, in a roundabout way -- and not only has them available on Kindle but has his own full author page and has hardcover/softcover versions too. 

I was, and still am to some extent, stunned.

So, I have Kindle credits. I save them -- you can earn $3 towards digital purchases if you choose no-rush shipping on a lot of stuff on Amazon, and if I order something I don't need immediately, I just set it for that no-rush shipping and rake in $3 for each qualifying item. Over the course of any given 2-3 month period, I'll rack up enough digital dollars to where I can buy an album by an artist I like, or will be able to get, say, the next volume of Absolute Batman or Absolute Superman digitally once it's available. It is very rare that I ever spend actual dollars on Kindle content or music, is what I'm saying.

I figured, okay, what the hell, like if he's doing it, I may as well support his endeavors. I purchased his new book, the one he just put out about the ghost/monster hunting detective -- which is the first in a series, apparently.

And then I summarily forgot about it for a couple of days.

Now, Daisy shares my Kindle account because we share a Prime account. This is also because I bought both Kindles at the same time and they auto-registered to me as the primary on the account. So, anything I've bought or downloaded for Kindle she automatically has access to on her own Kindle. I've bought some Supergirl collections on there (for me, of course) that I've also encouraged her to read, for example, as I think she'd really enjoy them.

So a few days later, I tell Daisy this story from the beginning, and I add that I had not read it yet or even opened the book file, but my off-the-cuff suspicion was that my cousin had gotten AI to write this book, or had written a really rough version and had put it through AI chapter by chapter to punch it up and make it sound professionally written -- solely because he was absolutely not the person I would ever expect to write anything like this, let alone in this genre. 

"Let's see," Daisy said, opening the Kindle app on her phone. She navigated to the book, opened it, and read a page or two of it silently.

"Well?" I asked.

"...I don't think it's AI at all," she said. "It really feels like a person wrote this."

I opened it a day or three later and read the first pages. Daisy is right. It does not sound like an AI wrote this book, or even really punched it up -- at least not from the scant few pages I'd read. I'm not sure it's a writing style I like or mesh with, but it doesn't seem to be written by a robot, at least.

Somehow that made me feel even worse. 

Like, make no mistake, good on him. He put up a post on Facebook about how he has wanted to do this for so many years and now his dream is a reality, and he thanks everyone who has supported him and bought the books and cheered him on throughout the process of getting them done, and honestly I am happy for him. I am still stunned, but, you know, good for him. He gets to live his dream. I don't even care if it's all or half AI or all genuine. At this point it doesn't matter to me. 

I think I've come to the conclusion of, essentially, I am not in competition with him. And I'm absolutely not, because I have never done anything commercial with my writing and have never had the opportunity to do so. But even if I had, or even if I do, eventually, get to publish the short story collection(s) I've been working on for years, I am not in competition with him. I wouldn't be doing it to be like "oh look at me, I can do this too" but I'd be doing it because, again, I've spent my entire life trying to be a writer only to have that dream be derailed, over and over, by needing to have an actual job to survive and pay bills. Over the years it's come down to well Brandon, what do you want more? would you rather have six cats and a lot of food in the house and a giant t-shirt collection, or do you want to barely survive and be miserably broke? And sadly the former has won every time. 

That's not to say that my writing hasn't gone anywhere. Daisy encouraged me tonight to start on that short story collection I'd been talking about.

"Start?" I said. "I've got four or five stories anywhere between 60-80% finished, but what happens is I'll get that far and run out of steam, and then I won't have the energy to come back to them and finish them for weeks or months, and then the spark is gone and I have to fight to try to get it back...which sometimes, most of the time, does not happen."

This is the most accurate description of this process I can really explain, honestly. When I have the spark for it, the drive for it, the energy for it....there is no stopping me, and I can write for eight, twelve, sixteen hours at a time, barely stopping. When I don't have that creative spark or energy? It can't be forced. And nothing I can do will make that spark happen.

I will be struck by inspiration sometimes, and I do have good ideas that I scramble to write down before I forget them, and then come back to refine them later. Grand plans, however, don't always translate into actions -- we all know that.

Anyway.

While we were in Canada, the catsitter had told us that she'd heard strange noises from our porch, under our back porch, against the house, etc.

"It's the groundhog," we told her, matter of factly.

Gus, as we have named him, has either lived under our porch or has made our backyard his stomping grounds for a few years now, off and on. Sometimes we'll see him every day for weeks on end, and other times we won't see him for many months and then suddenly he'll pop back up again. He's very cute, he's about the size of one of our smaller cats (I'd venture to say he's larger than Dolly, for example) and we've coexisted peacefully for, again, multiple years.

"It sounds like he's tearing up your deck from the underneath," the catsitter told us. "Like gnawing at it, biting at it."

Now, mind you, I have never heard that. I have heard him moving around under the deck -- it sounds very similar to someone walking across the deck -- but I haven't seen or heard anything I would classify as destructive. And the deck itself does not appear to have any damage to it.

Still, this made us a little apprehensive. You wanna live here and eat the weeds in the yard, sure, fine, but if you start destroying our house? You gotta go, son. 

We looked up some groundhog deterrents -- apparently cayenne pepper is a big one. Put it around their living areas in abundance, and they'll get the fuck out.

Yeah, Gus didn't care. He would look at Daisy all terrified from under the deck, apparently, when Daisy was spreading around the pepper, but it does not seem to have deterred him in the least. But, I will say, I also haven't heard him doing anything to the deck other than moving around beneath it since we got back from Canada, so if it deterred him from tearing it up, I'm all for it.

Cut to a couple of weeks ago when I heard Daisy exclaim, from the kitchen, "OMG there's two of them!"

I came out to look, and sure enough, next to Gus in the backyard is a smaller, slightly lighter-colored groundhog that clearly appeared to be a female (though I don't know, maybe in groundhog physiology the males are smaller and the females are larger). 

Well, there ya go. Learn something new every day.

Anyway, the smaller female, which we've named Gretchen, has a little distinctive white spot on her face that also lets us tell her apart from Gus. She also likes to waddle back and forth across the porch around 6:30 in the morning, which gives Gary fits. Rarely do we see them in the backyard together most days, but we can tell them apart when we do see them out there individually. Neither appear to have been deterred by any of the cayenne pepper or anything else Daisy has tried to put out there, but also we don't hear or see them tearing shit up, so we have a live and let live policy, I suppose. Mind you, our deck and house are built on concrete slabs, so it's not like there's a lot they could really do to cause real damage. Now that I've said that, of course....

We have been trying to keep ourselves on a budget and relatively in-shape as pertaining to our actual health and routines. This does not mean exercise necessarily, but it means we don't really spend money on food or items we don't need and we are trying to eat what's in the house and cook creatively, especially when it's 100+ degrees outside and it's too fucking hot to run the oven(s). 

The cyclospora outbreak has had us on edge too -- we have an entire five-pack of full heads of romaine in the fridge that we picked up from Costco legit the day before the news of the outbreak came out, and we're too paranoid to eat it now. Add to this that if I wanted to, and I have wanted to a lot over the course of the past few months, I could eat an entire bag of Taylor Farms chopped Caesar salad in one sitting a few times a week. I could live off that salad if I had to. And now, well, Taylor Farms means until we get some sort of all clear, or we're otherwise told that salads are no longer a threat, I have to go without. 

I told Daisy that I am happy to live off what we have in the house, but, to do so...well, I have to get more grocery staples to add to stuff we have in the house.

"That kind of defeats the purpose," said Daisy.

"No," I said, "it doesn't. We have fifteen jars of spaghetti sauce and yet we have no spaghetti. So I would need to get spaghetti in order to use those. As an example."

I did get four giant boxes of spaghetti delivered to me from Walmart yesterday. As all of the cats watched me put it away, I told them "just call me Daddy Spaghetti."

Because, of course, they understand English and will find that amusing, right?

Anyway.

I just like having all of my ducks in a row when it comes to having supplies on hand and having food in the house. At the same time, the Mounjaro has made both of us digest food so very slowly, and as such, we are generally eating a lot less than we did before. Daisy has lost something like twenty pounds, but she is also experiencing some sometimes serious gastrointestinal issues from the Mounjaro. I have lost zero pounds on the Mounjaro, but I am only experiencing mild gastrointestinal side effects at best. What I can tell you is that I have almost zero appetite compared to before. When I am hungry, my eyes are bigger than my stomach, and after about 1/3 of the amount of food I used to eat, I become full or start to feel queasy.

So, I mean, I guess that aspect of the drug really works well. I just want to actually start losing weight on it. I know it's working to control my diabetes and lower my blood sugar/A1C, but goddamn do I want the weight loss side of that coin too. Daisy says she's read studies that some people don't start dropping weight on it until they reach the higher levels (7.5mg and above; I am at 5mg now), but after seeing the side effects she's had from it at 5mg like me, I'm slightly terrified to see if the same, or worse, would hit me at higher levels too. I had to discontinue the Trulicity because, essentially, it gave me terrible IBS. While I don't seem to have any major side effects yet, I do know that I am at least somewhat prone to them. 

What I do have, however, is a hemorrhoid. 

This happens about, oh, once every year or two for me. I'll have a flare up, I'll drink a ton of Metamucil and drink as much extra fluids as possible, and within a few days it'll gradually go away. This time it is taking its time and being, well....a real pain in the ass.

Pun intended.

So that's what's happened in July. Time to move onward now, into August, into football, and into fall.

Finally.