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...

It's Really a Lot, Part I

 Hi everyone.

I'm breaking the posting hiatus here because there's so much that's happened recently and I do feel the need to actually write it down -- and present commentary on it -- for the, like, five of you who still actually give a shit and read this site. So, this is a short list of things that have been going on in our lives, to gather my thoughts all in one place.

I have not written anything new, of substance, in approximately two weeks. I have not been in the right headspace for it, my anxiety and stress levels have been very high, and it's been very hard for me to focus and to try to get into the right mindset to keep working, keep writing, keep compiling as of late. I've been in the cycle of one thing after another, after another, after another for almost the entire month of June, and it's killed almost all of the creative energy I would normally have. The past ten days or so have been particularly bad, and I do not think I'm going to be able to get any real breathing space for the immediately foreseeable future. 

So, to start our story, I guess we'll have to start around mid-month. Work this month has been terrible. Yes, I did just get a raise, and it was a long-coming, well-deserved raise for the shit I put up with, but the summer months are when the idiots all come out of the woodwork and my team begins getting engaged on things that we don't have the capacity or skillset to handle, or are completely outside the scope of what my team does, or a combination of all of the above. And because of the nature of my job, we're forced to try to solve the unsolvable, or fix the unfixable, all because of the "customer first" doctrine we have to follow. This means I've been on long bridge calls, short bridge calls, have owned escalations that are far above my paygrade (or far below it) to own, have had to rabble-rouse and browbeat lazy agents and technicians who don't care about the work and are just there for the paycheck, etc. Now yes, I do all of these things normally every night anyhow, but on normal nights I can usually step away to use the bathroom, get a bite to eat, take an actual lunch hour to nap or play a game, etc. In the summer months all of that goes out the window; a night can go from being calm and easy to horrifyingly bad in the span of an hour or so. Overnights is a skeleton crew; we don't have fifty people working for us. Most of the time it's less than fifteen. Some nights that number dips below ten. What I'm saying is that the worse the night is, the harder it is on all of us as a whole, not just on individual employees or just those of us in leadership. Most mornings I get off work now completely drained and mentally exhausted, and I'm in bed around 8:30 simply because I can't release that stress any other way.

But it's not just that, it's everything.

Father's Day was a rather muted affair. Daisy's parents were out of town (more on this below) and my own father hasn't spoken more than a few sentences to me in over twenty years. My dad, the man who I refer to here on this site as my dad, is not married to my mother and never has been -- but the man did have quite the hand in raising me as they've been together for almost thirty years at this point. I made sure he knew he was loved, and as he is a comic book nerd like I am, sent him a few subscriptions for a Father's Day gift. He is more of a father to me than anyone else in my life ever has been, and I always make sure he knows that and knows he is loved and appreciated. Father's Day is always a strange, bittersweet day for me because of my non-relationship with my actual father and because even at age 39, I am not a father myself and the chances for that to ever happen diminish a little more with every passing year. It used to be all I wanted out of life, but over the years that desire began to wane more and more. I now don't know if I would have ever been cut out for it, or if I would have ended up making a lot of the same mistakes that my own father did. Conversely, my dad and Daisy's dad are both wonderful people, and I have very special relationships with both of them. They are relationships I cherish deeply.

I mentioned here in a previous post around this time last month that the heating element in our oven blew out. And I mean blew out -- as in, Daisy turned on the oven and sparks shot out of it, and it briefly caught fire. Yeah, that happened. It took over a week to get a repairman scheduled and to have him come out to fix it -- what Daisy told me later was the repairman looking at it, saying "yep, that's blown out" and then performing a ten-minute fix; as it happened during the day, I was asleep, so I didn't know what was done. He still has to come back next week at some point to make repairs to our fridge (the ice dispenser door will not seal properly, and the dispenser motor has burned out) because our fridge is ancient and a strangely obscure model that he had to special-order parts for. 

I've written here before that Daisy's grandfather is about to die. I'm not really going to air much family business here on this site, but it's likely going to happen sooner rather than later and it is not a good or pleasant situation for anyone involved. As such, Daisy's parents flew up to Nova Scotia (where Mama is from; where all of Mama's side of the family is from) so that, essentially, Mama could see him and spend time with him one last time before he dies -- and to try to help out her own mother and help sort out a care plan for him, for lack of any real better terms. She and Dad were successful in this endeavor but not much else can be done at this point. His other (living) children are much closer and can offer better care and can help keep an eye on things better than Mama can.

You probably realize that I'm painting this story not just with broad strokes, but a roller -- there's a lot of details here I am purposely leaving out for privacy's sake, but suffice it to say that Daisy's grandfather is not going to be alive much longer and it is very much a toss-up as to whether he'll live long enough to see all of us for the "family reunion" scheduled for about two months from now after the wedding of Daisy's cousin (which I think has already taken place at this point, but I'm not even sure of that at this juncture). It's likely that said reunion will have a bumped up timeframe, as all of us who can -- very much including Daisy and myself -- will be immediately booking flights and taking off for the Great White North the moment he dies. 

Throughout all of this going on in the background, Daisy and I had stuff to take care of while they were gone. Aside from Daisy taking care of the parents' cats and keeping an eye on the house, there were four other major events all happening during the same week:

1. Eye appointments for both of us

2. Yearly physicals for both of us, including my latest A1C blood draw

3. Daisy's birthday

4. The installation of our new gas line. 

I've touched on most, if not all of these events, here on this site, but never really went into any detail with any of them -- mainly because they hadn't happened yet. Well, they've all happened now, so let's dive in and discuss.

I am not a big fan of eye appointments except for when I have to do them -- as in, when I know my eyes are getting worse and I know I will need an updated prescription. From roughly my senior year of high school (so, 21 years ago now) to today, my eyes have been getting a little bit worse every year. I have slight astigmatism, and I am nearsighted -- and over the years I know my eyes, like the rest of my body, are getting worse and are slowly degrading. I went roughly 15 years between eye appointments when I was younger, and in college I used to buy +1.00 reading glasses from dollar stores or grocery stores to keep the words from blurring on the page or on the screen. I had a few pairs of these even into grad school, though I didn't wear them all the time -- only for reading/writing work. My vision at the time was good enough to get by without them, and if I wore them when I wasn't trying to read something, my vision would really blur and I couldn't use them. 

About a year after we were married, Daisy and I got on new insurance and, by this time, my eyes were very much getting worse -- noticeably so. We both had eye exams and both of us needed glasses. Daisy's prescription was, and still is, far stronger than mine (and almost the polar opposite of mine). I got a single pair of wire-rimmed titanium glasses from the optometrist -- $400, insurance covered everything but $35 of that, and ordered a spare pair of large, brown horn-rimmed glasses as a spare pair. 

That was in 2015. My vision with the new glasses was the best vision I've ever had. As I told Daisy at the time, everything looked like it was in ultra high-definition. Daisy had never had a prescription for glasses before and felt the same way about hers. We both got our prescriptions written down, we both ordered an array of glasses from places like Zenni Optical, and 

I didn't go back in for another optometrist visit until 2021, and by that point my vision had slowly deteriorated to where my current prescription at the time was no longer cutting it. It helped, yes, to wear my glasses -- but only marginally. There were days where my vision would feel so fuzzy (mainly due to allergies) that it didn't feel like my glasses were really helping at all, and I'd asked Daisy for a long time to just set up the eye appointments and get them done when bam, Covid happened and delayed us being able to do that by about a year. When we finally got the appointment set up and done last summer, I'd just been diagnosed with diabetes a week or so prior, so I had to get the full treatment done -- retinal scans, dilation, etc -- all the checks they'd perform on a diabetic to help stave off diabetic eye disease taking hold (it, thankfully, has not taken hold). I was also informed that I'd have to now make yearly appointments on a tight schedule and do all of these things every year, because of the diabetes. I got a new, much stronger prescription then, got a set of glasses from the optometrist, and then ordered a lot of spare pairs -- some sunglasses, some normal, some transitions lenses -- from online stores. 

So, flash forward to last weekend. I'd set my eye appointment up a few weeks in advance and had confirmed it, as did Daisy. I didn't think my vision had changed that much in the span of this past year -- the 2021 prescription was still very good and was/is what I'm currently using now (more on this shortly) and I expected minor updates only, if any. Daisy knew hers would change (one of her eyes actually changed quite a bit). When we went in last weekend, I took two things with me -- the original two pairs of glasses from 2015, and a bag of donation glasses from old prescriptions that were no longer current, as they used to have a glasses donation bin where you could donate old glasses and they'd be redistributed/represcriptioned (I'm sure) for the less fortunate. We got in there and here I am holding a legit 13-gallon trash bag full of donation glasses and...no bin. No hint of a bin anywhere. I asked the front desk staff where the donation bin was and they looked at me like I was an idiot, or as if I had come from some parallel universe where this sort of thing was done. I finally asked the eye doctor himself, who had sort of the same response, but also took the bag of glasses from me and said he'd find out where and how the donations were now done, and would take care of it. When we left the exam room, I noticed the bag of glasses sitting on the desk in his office as we walked by, and found it sort of amusing.

My prescription did get slightly updated -- at a glance it wasn't any different, but when I looked at the numbers between my old prescription and my new one, there were some decent changes. It was at this point when they asked me if I wanted to get glasses that day while we were there, to pick out new frames, etc etc -- I said no, and had Daisy pull out my two original pairs of glasses from 2015, and said "put new lenses in these with the new prescription."

As mentioned, one of those pairs, the solid titanium pair, was a four hundred dollar pair of glasses. The other horn-rimmed pair was about $100 or so and has long been out of production by the manufacturer (believe me, I checked, I even sent letters of inquiry). 

"Sure," the lady said. "$248."

What the fuck. Whatever. Those are my two most expensive, best fitting, and overall favorite glasses I've ever owned. Sure. We have a FSA card for our insurance. Sure. Just do it. 

"And you?" she said, turning to Daisy. "Will you be getting new glasses today?" 

"I'll just get mine from Zenni," Daisy said, with a wry smile.

So I left the old glasses there with the request, paid the required amount, we got our prescriptions printed out and handed to us, and off we went. It took probably four hours, and a nap, for my eyes to fully un-dilate again. 

My re-lensed glasses have not yet been completed. It could take two weeks or so, but I'm betting Daisy gets a call on Monday to come pick them up. Until I can test them out and until I can see if the new prescription looks/feels accurate, I'm not ordering spares from any of the websites I'd normally get new glasses from. If the prescription isn't right, I'll have to redo them, and the exam, anyhow. And I'm not just going to waste money.

Daisy has not yet, to my knowledge, ordered new glasses from anywhere and is still using her older ones.

Our physicals would be up next -- on Daisy's birthday. Which, also purely coincidentally, was also the day we would be picking the parents up from the airport. So, three major things happening all at once, all on the same day.

I'd like to think that most of the time I am a calm person, I am a rational person. And truthfully, most of the time, I am. I am very even keel and go with the flow in public situations or in mixed company, and nearly nobody would ever think otherwise. But privately, by myself or with Daisy and/or her parents, they see the real me -- a ball of stress and anxiety who has really terrible stress reactions that are mostly out of my control (when they're not and/or when I get angry, it's generally because of the situation, yes...but a large contributor to it is that people around me don't have the same reactions to things that I do and I get split-second outraged that they don't). 

I'm also the person who, if I have to be awake and active, wants to be out the door taking care of business at like 7am, get done whatever needs to get done, and return home as quickly as possible. My goal, when accomplishing tasks, is always to GTFBH -- get the fuck back home, as soon as possible. Daisy is very much the opposite -- on Saturdays, for example, when we have things to do, she is very much the "I'll get up when I get up, you're not going to rush me, and we'll say we'll leave the house by 1 but probably won't actually leave until 3 or 4" when, if I'm awake and we have a to-do list, that laissez-faire attitude does not mix with me. I want to have been home and done with tasks for the day by 3 or 4, not leaving the house to start them. I have finite energy, and when I have it -- especially on a day off and especially when my sleep schedule is turned around in order to do said things anyway -- that time and energy is very much use-it-or-lose-it.

So with that being said, I made sure to get some good sleep the night beforehand -- I should add at this juncture that I took two extra days off this week, one for Daisy's birthday anyway but a second because I had flex time that I'll lose if I don't use it. I got up, I showered, took my pill, drank close to eighty ounces of water and had nothing else (bloodwork/physicals mean you have to fast beforehand, it's not optional). You all know that I've had trouble in the past with getting blood taken, and I've been told that trouble is sometimes partially due to dehydration before coming in. Well, that wasn't going to be a problem this time around. 

I also knew that because of the diabeetus they were likely going to ask me to do another urinalysis too, so I needed to be able to, well, basically pee on command. I guess that's basically a requirement now when you're diabetic. Not the peeing on command, but the urinalysis at every physical thing. Since I once had blood in my pee like two years ago, likely from a kidney or urinary tract infection at the time, I guess they want to check for that, too. It is what it is. I don't mind peeing in a cup. 

Our appointments were for 9am, the parents were set to land at sometime around 2-3, so we had a little breathing space. When we got to the doctor's office, I had already checked in online the day prior. Daisy had not. We found that yes, my appointment was at 9am, but Daisy's was at 8:30. Which she didn't know. We got there at approximately 9:05. The nursing staff was...ahem, not exactly happy with Daisy.

Aside from some appointment confusion and the fact that, as we were seeing a different doctor than usual and they tried to split us up for our appointments (we corrected them there, of course), the physicals were pretty unremarkable. The nurses were easily able to get blood from me. I didn't faint. I peed in the cup. We wore masks the entire time. What I'm saying is that it was fine. We picked up some vegan donuts and some chips and guacamole for the parents afterwards, and stopped to get a little Chinese food takeout before we returned home and ate. 

I'd been in contact with Mama all day as they made their way back to Omaha via a few different flights and layover times. They touched down in Omaha when we were about halfway to the airport to pick them up, and by the time we got to the terminal, we only had to wait on them for a few minutes before they came out. We took them home and spent a few hours of downtime with them, making sure they were okay, before finally coming home and getting some rest time ourselves. It had been a very long day.

Our first test results from our bloodwork had already come back by the evening, and both Daisy and I were completely normal. Nothing flagged, 100% in all normal ranges for both of us. But this was also not exactly everything -- as I write this, it is Sunday evening, and none of the other test results are available yet, four days later. That includes my A1C as well as my urinalysis and whatever else they decided to run on me because of the diabeetus. So those are all still unknowns. It's likely I'll know them by tomorrow, but still. Still. 

Anyway.

Daisy's birthday ended quietly. For her presents, I got her some crystals (a set of four, each of them with a different healing purpose) -- while I am not one of those hocus-pocus-crystal-people, Daisy loves all of the different stones and gems and rocks and collects them. I also got her a set of generic super-soaker-style water guns, a case of Cocomels, and a few bottles of the Crystal Light with Caffeine she likes, as it's gotten hard for us to find as of late.

As an aside, when I told Mama about the presents I'd gotten her daughter, she looked at me like I was nuts. I explained that for Daisy I always get three types of gifts -- mind and soul (the crystals), body (the foods) and something purely for fun (the water guns). This does not change for any holiday or gift-giving function, really. There's always variations of similar themes. 

Daisy went out for dinner with her best friend to the Indian place we like, but as I was very tired and hot and just needed downtime, I elected to take a nap and to let them have girl time together. Her best friend (also the maid of honor in our wedding) has her own birthday on the day before Daisy's, so it was sort of a birthday dinner just for the both of them. As much as I like the Indian food, I was tired and absolutely didn't want to eat it that night, or be a third wheel for their girl time, despite the fact that it was assumed I was going to go previously. Nah fam, you have fun. 

I woke up in my chair, dazed and confused, just as Daisy was going to bed for the night -- and rather early at that. She wasn't feeling well and was afraid she was coming down with Covid. She'd been exposed to a coworker last week, and said coworker had developed and at the time was still very sick with Covid. Daisy had tested negative (because we do have those free tests from the government) but was worried with the way she was feeling that night that it might have been late-onset for her. She slept, and I stayed up for a few hours before passing out again myself for a few more hours of sleep.

When I awoke the next morning, Daisy had already been up and was moving about a bit, and my immediate concern was to begin getting ready for the utility people to arrive to install our new gas line, because that was the day they'd picked that worked the best for us. Daisy had also taken the day off work prior to the scheduling of the gas line installation because she wanted to stretch out her weekend, so this worked well. I do need to backpedal a bit, though, because there's some explanation here that all of you will likely need.

I have written previously about how strangely our house is set up. Our house was built in (I believe) 1973, and then very quickly destroyed in the Omaha Tornado of 1975. At that point it was rebuilt to what it is now, and aside from some minor modifications here and there by previous owners, it has remained what it is today. And the house has had at least three sets of previous owners. Well, at some point, possibly when it was rebuilt, because we don't have a basement our gas meter was indoors on the bottom level of our house, in the center of the bottom level of our house, in a closet under the stairs. Once a year or so the utility people would call us and make an appointment to come inside to read it.

I've since learned that this is not that uncommon for houses built in the 1940s through the early 1980s, especially houses without basements. Even for some houses with basements they'd build the gas meter inside -- it's just how it was done depending on the type of construction.

Well, probably in March at some point (if memory serves) I was getting ready to go to sleep one morning when an entire crew of utility workers knocked on my door. Daisy was at work, so I had to deal with it. During this visit, they explained that they were replacing all of the residential gas lines in the city and with that came the need to replace meters. Our meter, as it was inside, would need to be moved to the outside. 

This I was fine with; this made sense. However, what he said afterward did not.

Because our meter was in the center of the house, that's also how the inlet line was built. The inlet line goes through all of the lower walls of the house and the house was, essentially, built around it. When the old gas meter would be removed, and new one installed on the side of the house, the old inlet line couldn't be removed and instead the gas would have to be piped to the original inlet. This entailed drilling a hole through two walls and the side of the house, as well as running a nasty, snake-looking pipe across the ceiling of our living room. That was all there was to it -- there was no way around it, no other way to do it, it just was what it was. It was either that or we just don't have a gas water heater and furnace anymore. 

Well, our home warranty will cover repair or replacement of larger systems like the water heater or like the furnace, but they have to be broken -- they won't replace them just as an "upgrade" or anything like that. If we didn't want a gas line running through our living room, the only other option would have been for us to go completely out of pocket in replacing the gas water heater and gas furnace with electric -- a lot of money just for the actual appliances and even more for installation and making them actually work off the house wiring/breaker system we have, which they likely wouldn't, so we'd probably have to get a new breaker box installed. That in itself is several thousands of dollars, and one of the things our realtor told us to avoid when looking at older houses. If they had an old fuse box, either the seller or the buyer would have to replace it to get the house up to code/pass inspection, etc.

Or we could just let them run a gas pipe across our ceiling. Our choice. 

So, what I'm saying is that we really didn't have a choice at all.

The utility guy left me his card and gave me his number, told me to program it into my phone so that I would have it and know it was him when he called to schedule the installation appointment. When I asked what the timeframes were, he replied with "Months, several months."

Well, he was right for that, but they've also been doing a lot of work outside the house on the street for the entirety of that wait time as well. They've dug giant holes in the yards, they've torn out and replaced sidewalks, and they've dug complete, long trenches under the yards to run the new gas lines/pipes up to the side of everyone's houses. The hardware and piping for the new meter on the side of our house was installed well over a month ago and I never heard or saw them do it -- even though our bedroom, where I sleep all day every day during the work week, is right above that new meter area and shares a wall with it.

Finally, about two weeks ago I got a call from the guy. He floated a few different days, we rescheduled once, and finally set Friday the 24th as the date it would happen. Okay. Cool, we were gonna be home that day, we had no outstanding plans, and nothing should stop the smooth installation. He let us know that we'd be the second stop of the day, roughly between 9am and noon for the arrival time, and the installation would take 2-3 hours max. It wouldn't be pretty, but it would be only minimally invasive and they knew the game plan already as there were seventeen other houses they had to do that were set up just like ours. 

They said between 9am and noon? Yeah, they were here right at 9 on the dot. We let them in, and as Daisy had already moved the furniture and everything out of the way, they had a clear path in and out to get the work done. She even closed the cats upstairs in her office (well, two of the three, anyway) to keep them out of the way.

Five minutes after the work had started, when the utility techs were beginning to drill, our phones lit up -- the Supreme Court had just overturned Roe v. Wade. 

What happened next? Well, that is a story for part II. 

Progression, Part V

 

On a good night, when I'm not too distracted or too tired, I can generally write five or six pages of good, solid work. This tends to take several hours, and on the next readthrough I'll catch an error here or there, or slightly rework a section of the piece I've been working on. 

The above is the current story I'm working on. I'm guessing it will take another 2-3 pages to complete, then another hour or three to edit, before I can call it done or "locked."

It feels like I'm not accomplishing that much in my writing work, but the truth is, I am. I just can't be turned on and creative at all times. The vast majority of my weekends, when I do the most writing, are spent doing non-writing activities -- house work, social obligations, shopping, etc. Sometimes I just want some downtime too, where I do nothing but play a video game or watch YouTube for a few hours. Sometimes I want to spend some time with my wife joined at the hip with her, going on adventures. Sometimes I just want to be me, not the writer me.

I find myself preoccupied with everything that has to go right for this book to get published, get off the ground, get on store shelves before I can actually feel accomplished or justified in all the work I'm doing on it. It's not a small amount of work, and it's not a work that most people would actually classify as work. It's difficult to, shall we say, keep a story straight in one's head when coming back to write it in multiple sessions, editing through it to make sure there aren't any inconsistencies, and then actually getting it to not only where you want it to go, but where the story needs to go in a narrative fashion.

I purchased a new keyboard a few weeks ago -- the $5 keyboard that came with this PC was beginning to have keys stick or become non-functional, so I splurged and spent nine dollars on a replacement. It'll do just fine until I have the money or the wherewithal to purchase another good, mechanical keyboard that won't break down or deteriorate on me over the course of a few months. I am looking forward to that, honestly. I am apparently too rough on my keys and they get a lot of use, probably more than the keyboard for my work computer (which, arguably, could stand to be replaced eventually as well). 

I'm still on track (hopefully) to have the book completed and ready to lock by the end of the year, and if I'm lucky, have it on shelves by first quarter 2023. There are a lot of steps to that process, as I alluded to above, and there will likely be major delays here and there. I just want to get the book done and out there, and let the work speak for itself. I have so many good stories still in me, stories waiting to be put on the page and read -- but I psychologically need the confidence a book release will give me before I can feel like yes, I can devote the time and energy to putting them on the page. It's all a fantasy until I see that paperback on the shelf and can feel it in my hands. 

Intermissions: A Numbered List

 Hi everybody.

So in the background, there's been a lot going on. As mentioned, this site is mostly on hiatus while I get my book put together, but here's a list of things that have been happening while I do that -- just so that you folks don't think I've forgotten about you.

1. I got a bonus and a raise.

Yeah, this happened. I got a 9% raise this month (it takes effect starting tomorrow's paycheck) and I got about a $100 bonus for helping out during the Friday the 13th weekend outage -- the repercussions of which echoed throughout the rest of the month, give or take. I am mostly satisfied with the raise, though I still think it's far less than what I'm worth. It is what it is. It's a good start, so to speak.

2. Our oven died.

On Saturday night, the oven shot sparks out of its sides and internally caught fire. Don't worry, it didn't last long. It likely blew out its electric heating element, as now it will sort of get warm, but won't get hot. It stressed us out at the time, but we have two air fryers, a toaster oven, and a microwave -- we'll be fine. And the burners up top still work. Once Daisy figures out what days she's working from home next week, we're going to open a ticket with our home warranty people to have it fixed or replaced -- as that's what we have the home warranty for.

3. Daisy's grandfather is bad off.

It's likely that Daisy's grandfather (maternal grandfather) will be entering the hospital sometime this week, and sadly will likely not return home from it. I should mention that he is part of Daisy's Canadian family, so when he dies we will be dropping everything to fly up to Canada to pay our respects. We're scheduled to head up there later this summer for a family reunion anyhow, but I personally will only have enough money and PTO for one single round trip before I'm tapped out. Daisy is determined to make both trips if necessary and possible, and if she can, more power to her -- but I don't know if that will be possible for her, given the same reasons of money and time. 

4. Plans made and broken

As mentioned in my last post, Daisy and I were off on vacation for the past six days, both for our anniversary and for an extended holiday weekend (Memorial Day); well, I was off for six, she was off for four. We both return to work today as per the usual. There are many things we wanted to do during our time off that we either didn't get to do, or didn't end up wanting to do -- or we changed some plans on the fly. Daisy was sick for most of last week with a cold or light flu (who knows, but it wasn't Covid -- we're both fully vaccinated and she took a test, negative, and I never felt ill). We were going to book a room at a spa/resort in Missouri, but with Daisy being sick and with bad weather supposed to hit -- it never did -- we didn't spend the money. We had planned to go see a movie, and there was nothing playing that she wanted to see, so we stayed in and watched Stranger Things. We were going to do an anniversary dinner at our favorite local vegan place, Modern Love, but instead ordered pizza and stayed home. I wanted us to go get new tattoos (I wanted to continue the flower motifs on my other arm), but decided against it. The money we would've spent on the resort trip and big dinner, along with the tattoo(s), we spent on the pizza, getting some groceries, and -- at least on my part -- TeePublic's 35% off Memorial Day Weekend sale. We did, however, plan a day trip to hike through the Iowa wilderness, and we took that trip on our actual anniversary (there is a picture from said trip attached to my last post here).

5. Yard work and gardening

Well, it's June now, so because of the warmer weather we've actually been able to get out into the yard and clean it up, mow a few times, and Daisy has gotten most of her garden planted for the year already. This was pretty much to be expected, though we (mainly her) got it done a lot more quickly this year than in previous years. Allergies this year have been terrible -- like far worse than the past few years -- which has slowed us down quite a bit as there are some days we'll just feel miserable, but overall, stuff is planted and it's growing, and I'm doing what I can to get into a routine of mowing once a week or so, and will never let the weeding (string-trimming) get as bad as it was when I did it a few days ago.

6. Health and wellness things

Daisy and I both have our physicals on the 23rd, during which we'll likely get another set of Covid boosters and I'll have my bloodwork/A1C done again to see if I've made any actual progress in staving off my diabetes. I also have my next eye appointment on the 18th, to see if I need an updated prescription (I likely don't, as with my current glasses I have pretty excellent vision) and to see if I can get the lenses replaced in my two favorite older pairs of glasses with my current -- or, if necessary, new -- prescription. We're also resuming our gym regimen starting now, too, as we've both been very lax about that. I've been eating like an asshole as of late and have gained six pounds over the past two weeks, so back on a much more restrictive diet I must go.

7. A very intrusive gas line

A few months ago, utility workers came to the house and explained that they were redoing all of the city's gas lines and gas meters, and that ours would be replaced as well over the course of the next few months. They then asked where ours was, and we showed them -- in the center of the bottom floor of our house, in the closet under our stairwell -- which is, apparently some of the most asinine construction/meter placement possible. We told them we didn't build the house, we just bought it. Well, apparently, that's where the gas main comes into the house, and that meter in our closet will have to be removed and a new one installed outside on the opposite wall -- that means they have to drill through two walls, and the side of the house, and then run a pipe across the interior of our living room ceiling to install the new meter outside...in the middle of the wife's flower bed. Neither of us are happy about this, but per the utility board, it's the only way it can be done with the new regulations they have to follow. They will not reimburse us or cover the costs to cover the cosmetic damage to the living room, but when they do do it, it's supposed to be a really fast operation, so to speak -- two hours or so. They'll be calling us in advance to schedule it, and judging from the work outside they've been doing in the neighborhood up to this point, including in our own yard and sidewalk areas, I'm sure it won't be too far off now. 

8. The beardening

My beard is at full strength once more, and I intend to keep letting it grow out for most of the summer. It is, make no mistake, a huge pain in the ass to take care of, but Daisy absolutely loves it. I do, however, plan to get my hair cut short again soon for summer, in the short crew-cut-fade style I tend to do, in order to not have to go through a bottle of conditioner every two weeks or so and to keep cool when it's hot. I wanted to get this haircut over our vacation, but Daisy pleaded with me not to so that I could still have my long hair for our anniversary photoshoot. I wrestle with my appearance a lot; if I have my long hair and am clean shaven, I look like a woman. If I have my super-short crew cut hair and have my long beard, I look like a biker (or a hipster, depending on what I'm wearing that day). If I have my super-short crew cut hair and no beard, I look like a penis. Or I look like I'm twelve, either way. So, generally, I'll have more beard and hair than not. 

9. The cleaning

Our house is a wreck. It's rekt, it's Tyrannosaurus Rekt™. When I've had the time and the energy, I've been doing all I can to make it look not so much like a pigsty, with varying levels of success. Time and energy are indeed the biggest factors, and sometimes I'll run out of one or the other halfway through my list of tasks for the day or the week. It's the same with Daisy too, who tries as she might, but as she's also getting older, her previously boundless energy is starting to wane a bit. There's just so much to be done, and even on my days off I couldn't get it all taken care of. I could take a month off work just working on things around this house and probably still wouldn't be finished with all of it. It's frustrating. 

10. Finally, the writing.

I'm going to spend a bit longer on this section because I believe it deserves more attention. Yes, I have been hard at work on my collection. One story, as you know, is finished -- save for a few edits for some basic content and continuity here and there. I'm currently letting the wife and a few friends read through it. 

The second story (which will be third overall in the collection) is about 70-80% complete, and with luck I should be able to finish it sometime this weekend.

The third story (which will be the fourth overall in the collection) is about 15% finished, and is thus far one of the darkest, most hopelessly depressing things I've ever written. 

The fourth story (the second overall in the collection -- the title piece) and the final fifth story have not yet been started. I have notes for both of them but am finishing the others first. 

The acknowledgments section at the end of the book is about 90% finished. 

A final essay explaining the inspirations behind each piece, as well as discussing the creation of new worlds and universes, is about 80% finished as well. It will be the last thing I finish as I'll continually be adding to it and editing it throughout the entire process. 

Daisy has not yet started the cover art and likely won't until the manuscript is fully locked. 

I expect the final length of the book to be somewhere in the realm of 250-300 pages, depending heavily on typesetting and words per page for any given normal paperback book. It's not going to be short or leave the reader feeling "that's it?" when they finish. I want to create a satisfying collection, and what will hopefully be the first of many, but I'm not overdoing it. I'm not putting ten or fifteen stories in there of short lengths or varying quality, because that feels like I'd be half-assing it or not giving the writing itself room to breathe. I am meticulous about how this collection will be presented, because that's the one thing I have control of -- I don't have control of how it will be reviewed, received, read and studied, none of that. I do have control of what is in it and how it is arranged and presented. I don't even expect it to be reviewed or studied. I do expect some people I don't know to actually read it. 

So that's about all that's going on right now. I'll keep all of you updated with new things, sporadically, when I can.

Anniversary Year Eight

"I didn't get you anything for our anniversary," Daisy told me a few nights ago. 

"I didn't expect you to," I replied. "We're on vacation, we're spending time together, I got us the canvas thing, we're going to have a good dinner...all of that is enough, you don't need to do anything for me."

A few weeks ago, for Mother's Day, I found a website that would let you print any photo on a framed canvas. You know what I mean, I'm sure -- like those square canvases that wrap around a premade wood frame that you can hang on the wall. I printed up a photo of the two of us (one of the shots we took last fall but did not use for our Christmas card -- same session, though) on something like an 18x24" canvas and sent it to my mother so that she could hang a large, nice photo of us on the wall of the house. I told Daisy about this because I wanted to know whether she wanted me to do it for her parents too -- Daisy has made canvases for them before (two hi-def canvasses of their cats was a Christmas present we got them a few years ago). She declined, and we ended up doing other things for Mom for Mother's Day.

What I did not tell Daisy was that, at the same time I made the canvas for my mother I also made one for her/us -- a giant 24x36" with a photo of us kissing on our wedding day on it. It turned out really nicely. On the day it arrived, as it was wrapped on a giant wooden frame, it was too big to hide -- so I just put it across the headboard of our bed and forgot about it. 

That was like, three weeks or so ago. She came home that night from work and I'd forgotten it had arrived and that I'd put it up (when you work overnights, and don't sleep a lot, things tend to sort of slip your mind), so it wasn't until she mentioned it to me and thanked me for it that I remembered. I told her we could put it anywhere she wanted -- we have many a visible wall in the house that would benefit from a giant canvas of us -- but eventually we just decided to keep it where it was above the bed. 

I mean, it does look really good there. 

The last eight years married to Daisy have been a wild ride. And I say that with love, meaning it in the best possible way. It's not always been easy, of course. We fight, we argue over stupid shit sometimes. We don't always agree. We are individual people with thoughts, feelings, and opinions of our own that don't always mesh well together. But our fights and arguments are always rare and appropriate, and all of the good times far, far outweigh the bad by leaps and bounds.

Our relationship, and our marriage, is built on mutual trust, open and honest communication, and a very deep love for one another. I want you to read that again and really comprehend it, especially if you are married yourself: mutual trust, open and honest communication, and a very deep love for one another. There are no secrets Daisy and I keep from one another. If one of us has a problem, we talk it out. We may not see eye to eye on it, but we talk it out. There's nothing I couldn't tell her and at this point, likely not much she doesn't know about me already. I trust her completely. I know she trusts me completely. She knows she can talk about anything and everything with me and if she ever has a concern or a fear or a problem, I'm always going to be there to help. 

On that same token, I'm not going to say that our relationship is the same as it was in 2014 when we got married, nor will I say that it's the same as it was in 2012 when we fell in love. We've grown and changed together in all of those years, both as individuals and as partners. That likely sounds cliched, but it's true. Healthy relationships evolve and change, they roll with the punches (metaphorically of course). Healthy relationships are like trees -- what you see above ground in leaves and branches extends just as far below ground in the root structure. We are not the perfect couple, even though we've had several mutual friends tell us that we are their favorite couple. I do not think any couple can be perfect. True perfection will always be unobtainable. But, we can and do strive to be as good as we can for one another, and that goes a long way.

I've been on vacation for the last six days; Daisy has been off for four (Memorial Day weekend, plus our anniversary, allowed us to both take some time off, with an excuse). We've spent each of those days focused on doing things for, and with, one another -- just enjoying our time together. We did not do everything we'd originally planned or wanted to do, and that's okay. As much as I like it, not everything has to be about structure and metered time. We accomplished a great many things though, spending as much time together as possible, and spent our actual anniversary hiking through the Iowa wilderness. 

I love this woman so very deeply, with everything I have.

Here's to many more anniversaries.