Hi, folks.
I haven't written here in a long time, but that's okay -- I've been waiting for something good, something new to happen that I could share with all of you. Well, several of those things have happened, and since I'm a total procrastinator (and also very busy during any given week) I've been putting off writing about them here.
Oh, believe me, I've thought about it multiple times:
hm, I should really document that in the blog, or
ooh, this will be fun to write about, but I kept putting it off as there was always something more important or something more pressing to do.
Now, here I sit with an hour or so to kill before I have to go to work, freshly showered and shaved with clean clothing on and a cat at my feet, and I began thinking to myself
well, now's as good a time as any. So let's begin.
This past week, I celebrated my first anniversary with my wife, who I have always referred to in this blog as Daisy, and Daisy has changed my life in many ways during the almost three years we've now been together (with, of course, more than a year of being married under our belts now), but I've seen the most changes -- most of them upgrades, actually -- in that past year. No marriage is perfect, of course -- everyone fights and bickers at times, everyone has little things about their partner that drives them up the wall (I'm sure Daisy has a long and detailed list of those things for me), but the good far, far outweighs the bumpy spots by about a 95% / 5% ratio, and there's not many ways I could be happier in my marriage. I'm also pretty sure I speak for both of us when I say this, as well.
We celebrated our wedding anniversary in a rather low-key fashion -- we went out to eat at
Uncle Maddio's, and then played games at the Dave & Buster's next door for a few hours. Daisy got a stuffed monkey, and I got two new nerdy coffee mugs and a t-shirt from all of our ticket winnings. Then we came home and went to bed.
This is the smallest, however, of things that have been going on as of late.
Daisy has, throughout the course of our relationship, done everything she can to keep me healthy. That's not just the vegan foods, of course, but in general. Over the course of the past three months or so, I have been to three different types of doctors/specialists for various things, when previously I hadn't been to the doctor for
anything since before she and I were a couple.
I'm not a fan of doctors or medical environments, generally speaking -- I don't like being around sick people, I don't like leaving the house and taking some of my downtime to go off and do something I don't see as absolutely essential, and until I got my current job, I had
terrible health insurance (or none at all), so visiting any sort of doctors for any ailment would have cleaned out my bank account.
Anyway, in the past three months I have been to the doctor's office once (when I had a nasty case of Influenza-B in March), the dentist twice, and the eye doctor twice -- and I am much better for all of those visits, even if they were/are still expensive even with our insurance.
I got my teeth cleaned at the dentist for the first time since the late '90s. Two weeks later I had two small fillings done, and was told that aside from my broken wisdom teeth (which aren't causing me any pain), my mouth is healthy and in good shape -- especially for someone who hasn't gone to the dentist in close to twenty years. I will have to go back in and get the wisdom teeth taken care of this fall at some point, once I have more PTO at work -- the aforementioned flu wiped me out of about 80% of it.
Two weeks or so after the fillings were done, I was eating a piece of pizza at work and one of those aforementioned wisdom teeth
fell out of my goddamned head. It came out in two or three pieces, the largest of which I still keep in my desk at work (as it's interesting to look at). The root of the tooth is still in there, below my gumline, and there was no pain involved -- still no pain involved even now. As the dentist said there was no need for concern unless it abscessed or started causing me pain, and that getting said teeth taken out would be on my own time, as with the way they're situated in my mouth and how they came in (i.e., straight, not causing any other issues) is good, I'll get around to it.
I have still not been billed for my dentist visits, however, even though I got my insurance statement for it. I will have to call the office on Monday to see if they just didn't send me one, or if it got lost in the mail, or what. I meant to do that yesterday, but, y'know,
always busy with something.
[Edit: I just sent them an email this afternoon, and will call Monday if I hear nothing back from them by then. Their office is closed now.]
[Further edit: No bill, everything's paid off -- they got back to me quickly.]
After the dentist visits, our next task was to schedule eye appointments.
If you know me, you may already know that my eyes have been bad for years, and have been slowly getting worse. I've worn reading glasses off and on since I was in college, and last summer when I registered the Monte Carlo in Nebraska and switched my Kansas license to a Nebraska license, I
barely passed the eye exam in the DMV office -- I was told that I should get to an eye doctor soon.
So, in classic Brandon fashion, I waited a year until my wife dragged me there.
To be fair, I'm not the only one with eye issues -- Daisy's eyesight was getting progressively worse as well, worse to the point where she couldn't read the episode descriptions for series on Netflix when she was sitting 3-5 feet closer to the TV than I was. Daisy has never had eye issues until the past year or two, and as she told me, it was getting to the point where she really couldn't see much of anything clearly. As she drives a lot more than I do (since, y'know,
destroyed and junked Monte Carlo and all that), we made it a priority to go get eye appointments/exams together on the day after Memorial Day, as both of us had the day off work.
Both of us needed glasses. Daisy needed them
badly. While I can see just fine without mine, reading things across the room and whatnot, Daisy's eyesight was bad enough to the point where I can't imagine what she was actually seeing (or not seeing, as the case may be). The eye doctor told me I'm farsighted with slight astigmatism, and told Daisy that she's nearsighted and that her astigmatism is worse. So, with our new prescriptions for glasses in hand, we picked out frames. The result? Well, here's mine (I'm not sure if she'd want me to post a picture of her in hers, so I'm just showing mine):
Not bad, right?
I opted for light, rounded metal frames instead of the big, bulky plastic ones I had before for my reading glasses, mainly because I wanted something comfortable that wouldn't easily break and wouldn't fuck up my peripheral vision or give me headaches (as the plastic frames sometimes did). These glasses are comfortable, and I wear them about 80% of the time now -- especially at work. I don't
need them all the time (I rarely wear them when I'm just here at home bumming around the house), but there is a night-and-day difference in clarity when I'm wearing them versus when I'm not. Daisy, on the other hand, does need hers all the time and she does wear them all the time, since she can actually see now when she has hers on.
So there's that.
However, I've saved the most significant -- well, to me, anyway -- news until last.
About two months ago (give or take), we were informed that our brother-in-law (not the one who performed the ceremony at our wedding, but the other one) had gotten into seminary school. This is his life's calling, and therefore it's important to him and the family, so more power to him, we're happy for him. However, with this came the not-so-great news -- for the family, anyway -- that said seminary school is in Vancouver.
No, not some little town named Vancouver out here in the midwest somewhere, the
actual Vancouver. The one in British Columbia. As in, way west and into the great white north of Canada.
O, Canadaaaaa....my home and native laaaaand.....
Ahem.
I know I've written about Daisy's sister's family here a long time ago, and touched on them briefly at best then. Of the three daughters in the family, this one was the middle daughter -- Daisy is the youngest. She also married first, married young, and became deeply religious after marriage. I don't know if she was deeply religious before marriage or not, as I didn't know her then, but suffice to say, she (as well as the rest of the family) is now. She had four children over the span of nine years, all of whom are wonderful little kids -- if a bit rowdy -- and she homeschools them, while her husband (the aforementioned seminary schooler) works in an IT job, I think for hospitals or something. Actually, it's never occurred to me to ask him exactly where he works. It won't matter soon enough anyway, as he'll be the
proverbial
preacher man.
Because this is a rather sudden development, and because they have four kids, own their house, and own (up until recently)
four vehicles, one of which is a huge Suburban, they've had to make some tough decisions on what needs to be kept and gotten rid of, but basically it boils down to "whatever doesn't fit in the truck and the trailer either needs to be put into storage, sold, or otherwise gotten rid of."
This includes the house, of course -- a huge, spacious house with a massive garage and downstairs apartment in a nice neighborhood out in the country about two hours north of here. Believe me, if I wanted to drive back and forth four hours every day for work, I would've already made an offer on it.
So, a few weeks ago, I got a call from my brother-in-law. Actually, all of us did -- me, Daisy, and even Rae -- trying to reach me. I was at work at the time (and he'd had Rae's number from the organization of my bachelor party before the wedding), so I didn't know what was going on. He messaged me on Facebook the next day asking me to call him, so I did.
One of the four vehicles they have/had is a 2002 Chevy Silverado. It's white, banged up, with a lot of miles on it -- it used to be a city works truck before my brother-in-law's father purchased it as a daily driver. Since then, my brother-in-law has been using it as his own daily driver, using it to get him to/from work every day. With the Suburban, they can't take it with them. They wanted to know if I wanted it.
"Yeah, of course I do," I said, jumping at the opportunity. "What sort of work does it need done to it?"
"Not a lot," my brother-in-law said. "It had some engine valve gunk in it a while back, but I think we got that mostly cleared up. Still runs a little rough, though. It has some dents, some rust, the driver-side mirror is broken and bent in -- but it runs and drives, doesn't leak or burn oil, and it's a good little truck. Doesn't have many bells and whistles on it since it was a city truck, but the radio does get AM
and FM. I'll get it worked on and tuned up for the little stuff before I turn it over to you."
Truth be told, a truck that's thirteen years old is going to have a lot of little cosmetic things like that wrong with it anyway. Am I concerned about dents, rust, and a broken mirror?
Hell no. My Monte Carlo had rust and dents, as well as a host of other things wrong with it. Does the truck start up and run? And it'll get me back and forth to/from work every day somewhat reliably?
Sold. No questions, just sold.
"How much do you want for it?" I asked.
"Eh, it's between family," he said. "I'm not going to charge you anything for it. It's not reliable enough for that."
He drives this truck to/from work every day, I thought.
That's all I'll be using it for, too.
"I'll at least give you a few hundred bucks for it, if nothing else," I said.
"If you were to pay us for it and then have some major part blow on it in a month or two, I'd feel really guilty. Don't worry about it. Again, it's between family."
"Fair enough," I said, stunned. "I get that."
I really couldn't come up with any other real response. It's not every day I'm offered a free truck.
"Good," he replied. "I'd rather someone get some use out of it, or get
something out of it for as long as they can instead of selling it, and I know what happened to your car, so I thought I'd check with you."
"Well I'm glad you did," I said. "I'm very grateful. Thank you."
This entire exchange was at least a month ago now, probably longer. I talked to Daisy about it that night as well:
"I don't feel right not giving him anything for the truck," I said. "I mean, I absolutely understand his logic here, but he's going to take it in for servicing before he turns it over to me. I'm going to at least offer to pay for that, since that'll be a few hundred bucks, more than likely.
"That's fair," Daisy said.
It's a full half-ton Silverado; it's not like it's a little truck like an S-10 or Ranger. Servicing said truck probably won't be cheap. On the plus side, there are
a million of those trucks on the roads, some of them much older than this one -- so if anything does blow up on it, parts should be readily available.
The next week, I not only got to see it, but I got to drive it:
(license plate covered for privacy's sake, duh.)
Our brother-in-law made it sound like it was falling apart, and/or wasn't reliable. It's actually in
really good shape for a work truck that was a
city work truck before it fell into private ownership. You can, however, see the broken driver-side mirror and the dented front quarterpanel right below that. That
does look worse in person, but as Daisy replaced the mirror on her Sonata all by herself a few years ago, it shouldn't be that difficult to replace one on a truck.
We'd gone up to their house on Memorial Day weekend in order to help them clean up and pack, help them put stuff in storage, and repaint/tear up the carpet in their master bedroom. During the day of work, myself and the brother-in-law took the truck over to the storage area where they were putting some of their larger stuff that wasn't coming with them. The storage area was maybe three miles away, so it was the perfect opportunity for me to test-drive the truck.
There's just one thing:
I'd never driven a truck before.
Cars, yes. Speedy cars, yes. Vans, yes. Never a truck.
Well, no, let me correct myself on that -- the only time I've ever driven a truck, I crashed it into my house in Newton. Backwards.
Yeah.
So, needless to say, I was fairly nervous....
And it drove like a car. No, seriously, a car. The shifter is on the column, which I'll have to get used to, but it handles really easily and mostly smoothly, and it seems just fine (at least when I drove it that day, anyway).
Now for the troubling things I noticed...
The "service engine soon" light was occasionally flashing even in the three miles to the storage unit and the three back. That means there's a misfire, usually caused by at least one bad spark plug or wire. As long as the engine in that truck isn't dumbassedly backward as the one in my Monte Carlo was, that's more than likely a pretty easy/inexpensive fix.
I noticed the battery light was on too -- I don't know if it power-cycles through all of the lights when it fires up or if there's a genuine battery problem, but even if there is one, that's maybe $150 at the most to fix.
The brakes are a little loose -- loose as in, they're not touchy and you have to put the pedal down pretty hard. I don't know if that's a truck thing or if I was just spoiled by the Monte Carlo and Daisy's Sonata. Or if the brakes/pads will need replaced soon. Take your pick, right?
Acceleration from a slow speed to a fast speed, quickly, is really slow and jumpy -- I noticed this when I was trying to make it through the yellow light before it turned red, so I put the hammer down...and there was at least a one-second delay before it recognized it and revved up. That could be attributed to the spark plug problem as well, or the gunked engine valves (also something I can clean out fairly easily).
Aside from that? It's all good. Shit, that's nothing.
Free truck. I put up with a lot more from the Monte Carlo over all the years I drove her.
"It's definitely an upgrade," I told the brother-in-law. "Keep in mind I am coming from a car whose radio didn't work, I couldn't lock the doors, I had to push and pull the windows up and down, only had a 25% or so chance of firing up on the first try, no air conditioning, a heater that wouldn't get warm until I drove 20 or so miles, bad defroster, transmission slips, no anti-lock brakes, tires that couldn't keep air, and burned oil and coolant as quickly as if I were pouring said fluids directly into a fire."
The last part is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
"I thought you said you never wanted a white vehicle," Daisy said coolly.
"[Daisy]," I said, "
Free. FREE. It could be hot pink and I'd drive it if it were still free."
And this is true. I can be sure nobody would steal it or break into it to steal it, that's for damn sure.
All of this being said, I do not have the truck yet. I won't get it for at least another three weeks or so, as that's around the time they're leaving for the great white north. We'll get to see them and spend some time with them first, obviously, but the clock is ticking.
So, that's about all for now. I've been working on this post off and on for many days, so I'm putting it up. I do, however, have more to share, so I'll get on that soon as well...
