Christmastimes, Part IV: The Lead Up

 The internet came back up around 10am this morning. It bounced a few times for a couple of hours before remaining stable afterwards.

Too little, too late -- Daisy and I ordered the T-Mobile 5G internet hub three hours before that this morning. It's almost half the price of my current ISP and is supposed to be much better service. It arrives sometime next week, at which point I'll plug it in and see how we like it. We have a 30-day trial period for it. If it turns out it's not our thing, or it doesn't work with our electronics or my work computer, we just cancel and return it. But the goal is to get off the teat of the ISP I'm on now, who couldn't even provide me any reason for outage for thirty hours of downtime. Their statement was "the internet failed because it was cold."

Are you fucking kidding me?

Yeah, that was their official answer. I was one of many people affected, enough to where it made the news here in Omaha -- and that was what they told the press. 

Well, no more. I've been a loyal customer of this ISP for thirteen years, but "it was cold" is where I draw the line. It was -17 to -19 for a three or four day stretch earlier this year and my internet didn't die on me then. Sometimes having multiple choices in a free market is a wonderful thing.

The outage still isn't "officially resolved" as of my writing this -- there's still another two hours before they estimate it will be restored for everyone affected.

Anyway.

As the sun sets on December 23rd we hit zero hour for Christmas. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve and Sunday is, of course, Christmas Day. Daisy had about six different packages arrive in the mail today. I'm guessing they're mostly presents for me (I've been ordered not to touch anything that is delivered with her name on it, not that I would anyway). 

The snow came -- not much of it, but enough to suck -- and behind it came the cold (as, ahem, mentioned above). Today is the first day in three days that the temperature made it above zero:

And let me tell you, that feels positively balmy compared to the -13 it was yesterday morning. 

We're not supposed to get back to "respectable" temperatures that accurately reflect what they should be for this time of year until the middle of next week -- when, get this, there's the possibility it will get warm enough to rain and thunderstorm on at least one day of that. 

With Christmas approaching and my internet restored (well, for now anyway) I can finally relax a bit and can enjoy the last four days of my holiday vacation in the ways I expected to -- by doing as little as possible and trying to get some real rest, interspersed with holiday activities. Daisy picked up a pack of rechargeable batteries on the way home tonight so that we can play her Wii (we need the batteries for the remotes) and get some quality time together. The next two days will be sort of hectic, but apparently this year we're foregoing the traditional Christmas Eve church service -- I asked Daisy's mother tonight to confirm that -- so while that particular tradition won't be observed, it also means I don't have to get dressed up and can wear sweats all day and all night.

I've yet to confirm the schedules for everything, but I would assume we'll venture over to the parents' sometime tomorrow afternoon and do dinner with them, then return home -- where I will be confined to my upstairs office while Daisy will be awake half the night wrapping Christmas gifts because she always waits until the last minute. On Christmas morning we'll have the customary group voice/video calls with the family, I'll call my own parents, and then we'll have breakfast and open our own gifts for one another before we head back over to the parents' for Christmas lunch/dinner/whatever works. Generally on Christmas night, Daisy and I also drive around the neighborhoods looking at Christmas lights, but as it's been so cold I don't know if she'll want to, or still want to, do that this year. I'm fine either way, honestly. 

We're both off on Monday -- which will likely be much-needed decompression time for both of us -- I took the day off in advance and Daisy gets it off from her job as the "holiday observed" day of the calendar. We both return to work on Tuesday, her in the morning and me at night. Her morning will be truncated a bit as it's also the day that our cat gets some stitches removed from a minor mass removal she had done on her face earlier this month. 

So, I mean, the next few days will be full of activities but not necessarily anything soul-draining or otherwise unexpected or unpleasant. 

Today I did multiple loads of laundry, including stripping the "cat blankets" off the couch and washing them. I also cooked and ate a full meal for the first time in a long time, and ran the dishwasher twice in order to clean up after myself. I brought in every delivered package even though the cold was nut-numbing (even moreso now that I have a shaven crotch) and made sure the cats were fed and happy. I also backed up my hard drive, balanced the checkbook, and worked on some story notes for some of my professional writing. 

As we're in a bit of a lull before the real festivities of the season begin, what else has been going on?

Well, I ordered a few new pairs of glasses. I guess that's "news" to an extent. Our FSA dollars run out at the end of the year and don't roll over (Daisy got a completely different provider at work, so whatever isn't used by 12/31 is just gone and we don't get it back). So, taking advantage of the rather large amount of money we have left in there, I got three pairs of glasses (it was buy two, get one free) with the best possible lens upgrades and frames that I won't feel like it's a waste of money to replace the lenses in upon getting a new prescription next summer.

Did you know that Amazon has an entire storefront dedicated to nothing but FSA-approved items? I didn't until last week. You'd be surprised what's covered under FSA -- heating pads, massage guns, those fancy Star Trek-head scanner thermometers, the works. Believe me, we're going to have some fun doing some healthy shopping after Christmas. I want to buy so much cold and allergy medicine that I get put on some sort of watchlist. 

But, I mean, vitamins, probiotics, etc. Personal care products. Face wash. Antimicrobial sanitizers. There are many, many possibilities. 

Anyway.

As mentioned briefly above, our cat had to go in for surgery for the second time this year to remove a non-cancerous cyst/mass from her head. The first time was on the top of her head and it was huge; this time it was a beauty-mark like cyst from her face, between her lip and nose. The doctors did a hell of a job of stitching it up, and it looked angry and swollen/painful for our little old girl for a few days before she was back to normal again:

She very much did NOT like the inflatable collar Daisy put her in so that she couldn't tear out the stitches.

I am, however, happy to report that she's been back to her normal self now for about a week, and the stitches do not seem to bother her in the least. If they do, she at least doesn't try to tear at them or pick at them. And they're getting removed Tuesday morning anyhow, so eh. This is the same cat who is in stage 2 of kidney failure, occasionally pees on herself or on the floor because of it, and has to eat special diet food that costs something like $60 a bag. For the small bag. She's old. She's not that mobile or active anymore. We just want to make sure she feels good and is comfortable, because frankly she's likely on borrowed time as it is. Watching my little old girl deteriorate is deeply sad.

But she's a very loving cat, a very sweet cat, and she's definitely a very vocal cat with a "give me all the love" personality. The girls at the vet adore her, and she is my companion every night as I work because her spot on the couch is right next to me at my work desk/computer. She even made the back of the Christmas card this year (a prestigious honor in this household). 

Speaking of those cards, I have a group of people who didn't receive one (because, well, I only made 60 of them) who are clamoring for their unveiling on Facebook. I usually do that on Christmas Eve (or thereabouts), so tomorrow is this year's unveiling of the front and back designs. Next year I'll likely need to order 70 or 75, as I've gotten a lot more people added to the list this year.

My goal for the next few days, especially tonight and tomorrow night, is to actually go to bed and sleep with the wife at the same time. 

Most people wouldn't think this is a "goal" per se, but the norm. Well, it may be the norm for them, but when you work opposite schedules, sleeping time together, in the same bed, at the same time comes at a premium -- as in, it almost never happens. I will sleep either during the day, or I will fall asleep in my chair before Daisy comes upstairs for the night, or I won't be tired when she goes to bed and won't sleep for many hours after she does so -- etc. Well, I've been waking up at 5, 6, 7 or so every morning this week no matter when I've gone to sleep, and actually did go join her in bed a few nights ago for several hours. I'll be awake during the day for the next few days -- there's no reason or excuse not to go to bed with her when she goes to bed at night. 

It's actually been a few days since I slept in the bed -- I do tend to crash out in my chair pretty frequently and pretty hard. As I usually only sleep for about 5-6 hours at a time, if I wake up early I wake up early and can get up -- but I crave the safety and intimacy that sleeping with my wife provides. 

I'm sure some of you are reading this as if this is a completely alien concept -- not sleeping with your spouse in the same bed all the time, every night, no matter what -- but it is what it is when I work overnights and she works days. She goes to bed at night when I'm working, and usually has at least one of the three cats sleep with her. In the mornings when I go to bed, if she's working from home that day she can come into the bedroom an hour after I've gone to sleep to find me with two of the three cats, who look at her as if to say "this is our dad sleeping time, go away." There are pictures.

The third cat is our little stitched-up girl above, who never really leaves the couch unless she's drinking water or going to/from the litter pan. 

If I take a nap on the couch during the week, on my lunch hour in the middle of the night, my little old lady cat will always walk up and down my body and stick her nose in my face to make sure I'm all right. When I tell her I am, she is satisfied and sleeps on my legs or lays down on my outstretched arm, just so I know that she's there and she's watching over me. Occasionally, Pete -- the wife's cat, and I've now resigned myself to that fact as he loves Daisy more than the world -- will join me as well and try to sleep in my arms or on my chest, but that's rare of him to do on the couch. Every morning he joins me in bed though, without fail. 

Thus is my life, I suppose.

Pete does frequently want in my office with me, and most of the time I let him in -- he sleeps on my chair or on my ottoman and doesn't really want anything else other than to be with me. When he wants out, he gets antsy and tries to get into things, and that's when I show him the door. 

So yeah, that's really about it for the moment. I'll make sure to give everyone the Christmas rundown once we resurface from the holiday. 

Christmastimes, Part III: The Dark Ages

 

Hello all. I am currently writing this shortly before 4am on December 23. I am also writing it in a text document to post later, because, well, my internet has been hard down for about 26 hours and counting now, and there is no estimated time to repair.

Well, I should say...it’s not been hard down that entire time—it did come up twice, once for about five minutes yesterday morning and a second time for about twenty minutes yesterday afternoon. Other than that, it’s been dead in the water. There is an outage affecting our neighborhood, per my ISP (so, it’s not just me). I don’t know anything other than that.

The temperature outside is -9. Yesterday morning it got down to -13. The wind chill outside is consistently between -30 and -40. There’s an inch or so of snow and packed ice on the driveway and sidewalks that, because of the cold, can’t really be de-iced, shoveled, or snow-blown to clear it until the temperature gets well above zero, which at this point doesn’t look like is going to happen until...after Christmas.

Yes, we have power and heat, and no our pipes haven’t frozen (yet—because I know my luck if I don’t include the “yet”). Yes, I would much rather have power and heat than internet.

I am still...very frustrated. I am not really hungry. I can’t really sleep more than a few hours at a time. I am filled with constant anger and rage and stress during a time where that’s not supposed to be part of my life. I took this time off work specifically to get some downtime and to decompress, to de-stress, to get some rest. 95% of the things I do to get downtime and decompress/de-stress involve the internet in one fashion or another. It’s 2022, there’s no longer a way around that. I can’t shake the anger and frustration. I’ve tried.

Daisy, forever the optimist, said “Play a video game. Read. Take a nap.”

I’ve done all of those things. They don’t help. I am so sick of video games. If I try to read anything more than about 30 pages or so, it puts me to sleep—and then I wake up and the cycle begins all over again because there is still no internet.

I guess I can take solace in the fact that even if I’d not taken PTO and had actually wanted to work during this time, I wouldn’t be able to anyway, and that would’ve felt like a reprieve.

My executive director actually reached out to me last night and asked me if I could help out. I screenshotted him the 16 hours’ (at that juncture) worth of attempts to get any sort of estimated restoral time out of my ISP and called in two of my employees for overtime at his request (I do have a working 5G phone, just nothing else—and I hate using my phone for things I’d use my computer for otherwise). Yesterday would have been the best day possible for Daisy to work from home, with the cold/windchills and snow—she couldn’t do so because of no fucking internet, and was forced to go out and risk her life to get to and from work.

When I call my ISP about the outage—knowing full well that the customer service reps can’t make it resolve faster (it’s literally what my team does at work for a different telecommunications provider), but to get any information on what’s down and why—my ISP won’t even let me get to a representative. The automated voice tells me there’s an outage in my neighborhood (no shit?) that’s being worked on and says “speaking with a customer service representative will not help to restore service faster. Thank you for your call, goodbye.”

….That’s great, but I want a billing credit—and I also want to know what’s actually down, what’s actually broken, and why it’s taking so long to fix. And if the answer to the last question is “because our technicians are union and they don’t want to work/fix things when it’s cold, so we can’t force them” my answer would be “Great, then you can cancel my service with you, and I’ll go get a T-Mobile wireless internet hub and will have service today, in 15 minutes from opening the box.”

Which they probably know their customers would say, and is also very likely the actual reason it’s been down this long.

I’m not particularly anti-union, but I am also of the mindset that having home internet down for well over 24 hours for an entire neighborhood during the holidays is completely inexcusable. Not being able to talk to a living person to get a billing credit or information is inexcusable. Not having a known time to repair for over 24 hours is inexcusable. This is not business-level internet where outages have large enterprise-wide causes and solutions (for one, those outages actually tell the customers what’s going on and usually have a known estimated time to repair—I know this because keeping customers informed about those things is quite literally my job) – this is residential, which is handled by different teams and is usually fixed much more quickly. Not knowing the wheres and the whys, and just being left in the proverbial dark ages about all of it is inexcusable.

Yes, I realize the irony here. It’s still patently ridiculous.

In my downtime, and I do refer to it loosely as that, I was able to wrap all of the Christmas presents, do all of the household laundry, strip and wash the bedding, disassemble the cats’ water fountain to clean it and replace the pump, and run two loads of dishes through the dishwasher.

I also shaved my crotch, took a shower, and had three good shits, but I’m sure you didn’t need to know all of that.

When Daisy got home I tried to be sweet and loving as much as possible, but I was still a white-hot ball of anger. I made sure to make it clear to her that I was not angry with her but the situation, and that I didn’t want to take it out on her. She tried to help, tried to mitigate the issue with some creative solutions (including finding a way to stream Netflix from her phone to the TV) and I appreciated that, but she couldn’t and can’t solve the overall problem of no internet. She does not have an Internet Wand.

“You get so fixated on things and just become miserable because of them,” she told me. “I don’t stress about things outside of my control that I can’t fix.”

“That’s the difference between you and me,” I said. “It is that lack of control that makes me stressed out about these things. If they were in my control, I would have no reason to be stressed about them.”

I then explained to her that this is supposed to be my relaxation time, the time where I’m not supposed to be angry or stressed since it’s the holidays and since I’m off work, and basically how it always seems that one thing or another happens to completely ruin that for me—as if I’m never allowed to really enjoy anything in life if I’m not somehow also suffering in some small (or large) way. As it stands I’ve lost a full day (and am going into a second) of my vacation time feeling like I’m trapped in a jail cell, completely disconnected from the outside world and waiting to die.

Metaphorically, of course.

It honestly just feels like this entire holiday season has been hollow and superficial. I’ve tried to make the best of it and have tried to reminisce on the good feeling of holidays past, that sense of “Christmas magic” I suppose—but while there’s a little of it still there, it feels like most of it is completely gone. I haven’t spent a Christmas with my parents in a full decade, and the last time I did, I got stranded in West Virginia two extra days because of a snowstorm. I buy and send gifts to people and I receive some in return, but it all feels like I’m going through the motions without feeling moved by any of it. The crushing cold weather has made it worse and has added on a new layer of stress, because if the internet can stop working for a few days, so can the power, so can our water.

Birthday Number Forty

 Well then. I'm 40.

Do I look 40? Well, I look more like it than I don't.

Do I feel 40? Very yes.

I'm sitting here at my desk wearing a decade-old ugly Christmas sweater and the nerdiest pair of glasses I own. I have been trying to grow by beard back out since Halloween and it is...growing slowly. Every day I see more gray in my beard and in my hair than ever before. I'm guessing I have less than five years before I'm more gray than any other color. 

My eyes hurt. My joints ache. Did my eyes always hurt and did my joints always ache? I don't know. I don't remember a time where they didn't, to be honest with all of you. 

My 40th birthday is bittersweet because of multiple reasons. I always said as a teenager (and even well into college) something along the lines of "psh, like I'll make it to 40" as if that was a far off future time, far off future year. Well, I guess back then it really was, but 2022 came fast and the future is now, old man. 

My 40th birthday also starts this year's Christmas vacation for me, which is bittersweet because yes, while I do get some of that fabled, precious time off, the weather is going to be atrocious starting tomorrow -- up to 7 inches of snow predicted and temperatures expected to be below zero for highs pretty much now through Christmas, with windchills of up to -50. No, I'm not making that up. I don't know when I decided to live north of The Wall, but I am no longer here for it. 

This weather has thrown a wrench into almost all of our plans leading up to actual Christmas. As you folks know, I only want one thing for my birthday every year -- a tattoo. I got my first in 2019, had to skip 2020 because of the pandemic, and last year got my second. This year (well, as you can see), my birthday is on a Tuesday. Having a Tuesday birthday and a Sunday Christmas is like the worst possible pairing for any sort of holiday celebrations ever. Tuesday is right in the middle of my work week, and with Christmas being Sunday it's like nobody's schedules really change for businesses and/or industries. Holiday is on the weekend? Cool, work normally right up to it and then go right back to work after it. It doesn't feel like a holiday. It just feels like a normal day off before going right back to the grind.

I took off my birthday and the two following days -- days I had to submit PTO for because holiday time off in the United States is a fucking joke -- and took off the day after Christmas too. I wholeheartedly recommend this for anyone who can do it -- never work the first business day after a major holiday if you can take it off. If you work that day, especially if you work in a service industry, you will deal with vast multitudes of bullshit that you'd normally not see otherwise. We call it "holiday fallout" in my job. And I've already reached the point of the holidays where I'm very glad I work from home, because I'm pretty sure the clients and my bosses would not appreciate how loudly I say Oh go fuck yourself, it's Christmas to any bitchy email that hits my inbox this time of year. 

Anyway, I digress.

My birthday itself was fine. I worked the overnight before, got up in the afternoon and got ready, and Daisy and I went to her parents' for dinner -- a poutine dinner, as is tradition:

This was then followed up by the birthday gift I'd asked Daisy for -- her famous pecan pie. 

Mama had quilted a long banner for me with a moose on it; she must have spent hours making it, if not days. It's beautiful, and will soon hang above my desk on the wall here in my office. I'll likely take a picture and share here once I get it put up.

Afterwards, on the way home we stopped at the local vape shop because I had a huge birthday coupon that I wanted to use in order to get a few more disposables (which I did) and, for the first time since summer, a bit more juice to try to use up the last of my tanks.

We then returned home in the single-digit cold and I passed out in my chair.

So, the full list of 40th birthday things are, in no particular order:

• 96 people wishing me happy birthday via Facebook
• Zero people wishing me happy birthday via Twitter
• Six birthday texts
• Four messenger IMs from friends/family who had not posted on my actual Facebook
• Three "happy belated birthday" messages
• Three birthday cards (one from my parents, one from Daisy's, and one from my aunt)
• Zero tattoos

The tattoo thing was expected. Because of the extreme cold/winter storm coming in, plus knowing that we wouldn't even be able to get to a tattoo studio before dinner with the parents -- much less get one done, that was put on hold. We're now expecting to get my yearly birthday tattoo on Monday, the 26th...weather permitting there as well, of course, and also if the studio I like is resuming normal business hours on that Monday (since Christmas is Sunday). I've already told Daisy that if it doesn't happen, eh, it's not a big deal.

So that was my 40th. It was a good day. I enjoyed it. The end. 

Christmastimes, Part II

 There's a lot of stuff we do in the last two weeks of December to wrap up the year. Not all of it is holiday-centric, though a lot of it is. The last two weeks of the year are usually interspersed with some PTO and events surrounding my birthday (I don't really count my birthday as a "holiday," per se).

This time of year also usually involves some shitty weather, travel headaches, or something else thrown into the mix, too.

All Christmas cards I sent out should have already arrived at their intended destinations, even the international ones and one that I had to re-send because I got the wrong address the first time around. If they're not there at this point, it's in the hands of Space Jesus now:

Yes, this is me, I did that AI thing through the Lensa app. Or, rather, Daisy put me through it. The art is shockingly accurate.

All gifts I've mailed out to people, with the exception of a stack of comics I sent my dad yesterday, have already arrived safely and with confirmation. 

I have two nights of work left (tonight and tomorrow) and then I'm off for a full week.

I turn 40 in two days. Christmas Day is a week from today.

People around me and in my life are moving slowly this year when it comes to holiday things, like nobody is really in the spirit for it or is just sick of the thought of it. I sent 60 holiday cards, and have thus far (on December 18) have received only ten or so in return, which is an extremely low amount -- yes, I track this every year. 

I've gotten two birthday cards, one from my parents and one from my aunt. Usually I get far more. I don't know if people just stopped caring over the pandemic years or what. 

I've had several friends announce on Facebook that they're not doing cards this year or that they've stopped doing them completely. 

I normally receive Christmas or birthday gifts in the mail from a few friends. This year I have gotten nothing so far. I know at least two friends are sending us baked goods (they'll likely arrive in the coming days). My parents always send us a box of stuff for Christmas too, and that did arrive as planned -- with a nice watch for me and a beautiful bracelet and socks for Daisy. 

Mind you, I've told basically, well, everyone that I don't want anything for my birthday or Christmas. And I really don't. There's not anything that I really need that anyone can give me as a gift. It's sort of like that John Lennon quote where he said his teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and his response was "Happy," and she said he didn't understand he question, so he responded that she didn't understand life.

I am happy. I've actually been happier in my life this year, and especially over the past several months, than I've been in a very long time. I don't need physical gifts. I don't need things. I have too many things as it is. I just want to continue the trend of happiness and relatively decent health. The things I want can't be put in a bag or a box. They're things like peace and downtime and not having (and not needing) a job. Nobody can give me those things. 

December this year just feels strange, like it's not going fast enough and it's moving too fast all at the same time. When I take time off work, it's always a blur because it goes too quickly. I usually fall into a slight depression after the holidays are over because there's nothing else to look forward to, just three months of cold, dark winter. And already, it is bitterly cold and nasty here in Omaha. Temperatures this coming week -- before Christmas, mind you -- are already supposed to be in the negatives. We're also supposed to get about five or so inches of snow between now and Christmas, too. 

Christmastimes, Part I

 Good day, all.

As I write this, it is the beginning of December. 

Thanksgiving is behind us. 

We've already had Daisy's work Christmas party (last weekend). 

All of the custom, fancy photo Christmas cards I make every year (60 in total, at the cost of $135 this year -- plus stamps) have been ordered, addressed, stamped, sealed, and mailed. People have already started getting them.

All of the Christmas presents for each other, the family, and the numerous friends/work colleagues I or we get gifts for have been purchased and are ready to go. In some/most cases, they've already been shipped via whatever companies we've gotten them from, whether that be Amazon or other places. The ones that have already shipped have in some cases already arrived, and the remainder will arrive between now and December 23. 

I turn 40 years old in ten days. Christmas is two weeks away. 

Daisy and I generally do a lot around the holidays. Not so much present-wise anymore; we've gotten to the point where we're older now and we don't feel the need to give each other crazy, lavish gifts or piles of presents. I spent a little over $100 this year on Daisy on small, useful things and food (the food part isn't a secret, it's what she always asks for -- treats, foods, etc). I told Daisy she doesn't have to get me anything, because there's nothing I really want or need. I mean this more this year than perhaps any other year, but because that sentiment seemed to frustrate her a bit (especially because I told her -- many times -- how much I myself hate getting food/treats for gifts and forbade her from getting me anything like that this year and all years moving forward), I showed her a hat that I like that I'd never get for myself, and told her a specific type of glow-in-the-dark rock I wanted a set of and the size I wanted them in (also something I'd never get for myself).

No, when I say we generally do a lot around the holidays, I mean acts of service to friends and family. Mostly family. We show up for the holidays. Daisy usually does a lot of cooking and baking. I create and send all of the cards, some of them to people I really don't even know, because we want them to know we're thinking of them. If any of Daisy's family (her sisters and their husbands/kids) are in town over any of the holidays, we spend a lot of time with them and try to take them on adventures or plan activities with them -- weather and time permitting, of course. This sometimes works out better than others, to be sure. For example, this Thanksgiving, the Canadians were in town as they were halfway through a move from Alberta back to the states, to Pennsylvania. We got to spend the day before Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Day with them, and then they were gone again. It's the first time we've all been together in a year and a half, and at least five or six years since we were all in the parents' home in Omaha together -- and it was for a very short window of time.

This Christmas, they will be in Pennsylvania (they're there now) and the Denverites are spending their Christmas with the in-laws' family, so it will be just the four of us here in town -- me, Daisy, and her parents. Since it's just the four of us, Daisy expressed the desire to finally have tacos for Christmas dinner, so I guess that's what we'll likely be doing. It's a lot less work and cleanup than any other type of "big dinner" and this is good, because Dad and I have been tasked with it. Which, for the record, I'm 100% fine with.

I'm out of office for a week over the Christmas holiday anyway. My PTO starts on the morning of my birthday, the 20th, and ends when I return to work the night of the 27th.

"What do you want to do for your birthday this year?" Daisy asked me.

It's a question that I sort of dread being asked every year, but this year it's worse because it's my 40th. The 40th birthday is supposed to be a milestone birthday, I guess. I don't feel like it is. I just feel older and creakier and more tired. 

Now, my real answer to Daisy's question is sleep and be left alone, but I can't give that answer. There are social expectations that must be fulfilled on one's birthday, and she took the afternoon off so she could come home and spend the day/night with me. I work the night beforehand until 7am of the morning of my birthday (I didn't have a choice; I do not have the extra PTO to put in to take the night beforehand off, and I have to wait another week and a half to submit the last of my PTO for the 26th too). The greatest "birthday gift" I could be given would be some downtime leading into the holidays, which is good because that's what I'm going to get between my birthday Christmas, until the 27th. 

"I just want a quiet birthday," I told Daisy. "You don't have to get me anything. I just want to get my next tattoo and I want to see the parents and/or have dinner with them."

This conversation came up last weekend too, once all the family had left town, and it was settled that we'd have a birthday dinner of poutine (my choice) with the parents on my actual birthday. Because of the timeframes I don't know when I'll be able to get my tattoo, but it likely won't be on my actual birthday this year -- no time, really, especially not when I have to work the night beforehand. Daisy took the 21st off too, so that'll likely be the day. 

It would also help if I knew for certain what I wanted to get. Because this time around, I really don't. 

I am not an indecisive person. I am just...tired. I am so tired. I haven't had the time and mental breathing space to just sit down and look through options to see what I'm interested in. 

But, with everything taken care of regarding the holidays' gifts and plans, all of the month's bills already paid, and no real stresses to worry about on the docket coming up anytime soon (that I know of, anyhow), I have been feeling really nostalgic and have been wanting to actually have a real Christmas season, like the Christmas seasons I had while I was growing up. This want has grown even stronger now that we're coming out of an almost three-year pandemic (well, depending on who you ask, anyway). 

When I was a kid, and even into my early 20s, every year for my birthday my parents would take me to Pittsburgh. We'd have dinner at the Olive Garden (which was fancy, for us) and then would spend the evening shopping at the Century III Mall -- where I would get my Christmas gifts for everyone. This was a strong tradition that we really only missed once or twice for well over a decade (the times we missed it were very likely due to bad weather, though I really can't recall now that I'm much older). The tradition sort of stopped once I entered college, due to mutual lack of interest as well as the mall basically becoming a shell of itself with nothing in it as the years went on -- it would eventually lose 60-70% of its stores even before I left town, and would close in the late teens, though I was long gone from the area before then; its decline was apparent well before I moved to the midwest.

In the early to mid 90s though, that mall was the place to be at Christmastime. And I loved it. I loved every bit of it, I loved everything about the Christmas shopping season, loved spending my birthdays eating "fancy" meals and shopping in a mall, where I was always able to find something for myself and for the family. I have vivid memories of purchasing NOFX and Ghost in the Shell t-shirts from Hot Topic in the 90s -- when it was still the real Hot Topic, and shadowing my brother as he searched for the newest PlayStation games. 

I obviously don't have those traditions anymore, but part of the mall trip was hitting up Burlington Coat Factory and Best Buy too -- back before Burlington dropped the "Coat Factory" from its name and back when physical media was still king and Best Buy actually had a reason to exist. Daisy and I did go to Burlington last weekend and we found a large amount of things, and while we do have a few Best Buy stores here in Omaha, I will only enter them if absolutely necessary -- there's nothing there I can't get off Amazon for far cheaper most of the time, sad to say. It's time for Best Buy to go away, honestly.

The other holiday shopping tradition I had was a trip to Big Lots. I don't know if Big Lots stores exist in all areas, but they're like a discount department store chain. Think of Dollar General or Family Dollar, but way upscaled and packed to the brim with overstock stuff from around the country, including furniture, bedding, cookware, food, movies/CDs, etc. That's Big Lots in a nutshell. And the one here in Omaha (I'm sure there's a few, but there's one right down the street from my house) is great. Daisy and I were last there right before the pandemic and I don't think we've visited since. I asked her mid-week if she wanted to hit up Big Lots this weekend, and her answer was a pretty stern no.

I just want the holidays to feel like the holidays again. The pandemic wrecked that for me and got me out of my normal patterns, and I don't know if I can enjoy them the same way again. The fact that I'm turning 40 makes me want to try to get what little enjoyment I can out of the season while I still have the heart for it. I'm already bitter and jaded enough; as I grow older I'm likely going to resent the holidays more and more. I just want to recapture a bit of that happiness again, that sense of wonder and excitement I used to have for my birthday and Christmas before I had bills, a mortgage, and a soul-sucking job. It feels like I'm seeing that magic blow away like dust in the wind just a little bit more every year. 

The Call of the Isle'd: A Canada Story, Epilogue

 (written between August 22 and September 5)

Upon returning home, and after making sure the house was still secure and the animals were safe, I had but one mission: unfuck the house.

We had left in such a hurry that there were many little things left undone or left half-done in favor of just making sure everything was locked up and safe, and that the cats would have enough food/water/litter to get by, and the vast majority of those things were done in the last six hours or so before leaving the house in one hell of a jumbled scramble. I also had a list in my head of things I already knew I'd have to do once I got home, like the yard work and cleaning out Daisy's office (where we'd stowed one of the cats so that she couldn't pee everywhere), cleaning out the fridge, etc. 

My primary concern, however, was my PTO and making sure I'd organized it correctly and submitted it properly so that I wouldn't immediately, or relatively quickly, have to return to work upon getting back home. I checked it and saw that I'd placed it correctly, enough to cover the week with no issues. It was August 20. While I could return to work anytime I wanted, nobody would expect me back until August 28.

So, let's stop for a moment and take stock of the situation. I was home, alone, with the cats. I was alone in the house and would be alone for the longest stretch of time since before Daisy and I were married, and for what would be the longest time we had been out of each other's presence since we were married, at the greatest distance apart as well. At the time, I did not know exactly when she would return. I had over a week of time that was already paid for with vacation days. I was, in essence, getting a vacation from my vacation.

I immediately called my parents to let them know I was okay and home safely, made sure the cats had new, fresh food and water, and changed out the litter pans downstairs. I then ordered pizza (because it was 9000 degrees outside and I wasn't about to cook) and unpacked my suitcases to do the laundry.

Over the course of the next week, I would do the following things:

• Mow and string trim both the back and front yards.
• Unfuck the garden by mowing/trimming inside it, and pull off all the vegetables that were both ready to eat (one pile) and rotten/rotting (tossed into the side of the yard for the raccoons).
• Strip the bed and wash all blankets, sheets, and pillowcases.
• Strip the cat blankets off the couches and wash them.
• Grab all rugs and mats, including bath mats, and wash them along with the shower curtain and liner.
• Clean out the fridge, essentially gutting it as about 65-70% of the food in it was old and/or spoiled and no longer good.
• Vacuum the entire house (with the exception of the hardwood floors), twice.
• Undo the hold on our mail so that it would begin being delivered again on August 22.
• Run the giant box of "documents to be shredded" through my shredder over the course of about three days (creating six giant, very full trash bags of shredded papers).
• Wash, dry, fold, and organize every piece of laundry in this house -- both mine as well as the wife's -- and put it away in the closet (more on this later, but it took about three days to do it all).
• Do two separate grocery orders from different places in order to have food in the house to eat and to replace the food that had to be tossed.
• Do several Amazon orders to replace the household supplies I could not get or were otherwise unavailable from the grocery stores (i.e. cat food and litter, light bulbs, tissues, batteries, garbage bags, deodorant, incense, etc).
• Let the cat out of Daisy's office, stripped the office and cleaned it, aired it out, and burned through most of a box of patchouli incense to refresh it.
• Because I liked what I'd used on the trip so much, went back out to the website I'd ordered my disposable vapes from and ordered $300+ more of them (they still haven't shipped yet, even now...well, okay, a few of them have, but the bulk of them have not). 
• Saw that my favorite site had graphic t-shirts on sale again and placed a few more orders there, including a birthday present for Mama.
• Dumped the giant litter pans from the cat that was holed up in Daisy's office, and hosed them out in the back yard.
• Watered the garden hard, as it hadn't rained here since we'd originally left town. 
• Ordered a new laptop from Woot to replace my Chromebook, which has aged out of real useful life.
• Ordered two Christmas presents for Daisy, also from Woot -- starting my Christmas shopping season already.
• Scrub both toilets in the house.
• Spray down and clean the bedroom full-body mirror.
• Organize the kitchen counters, then disinfect them and the kitchen sink.
• Unhooked, recharged, and replaced the back yard camera.
• Paid the bills that were coming due and made sure Daisy paid the ones that only she has access to the accounts for.
• Waited until I could, then purchased/installed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection on my PS4.
• Cleaned the litter pans every other day or so, and replaced the litter/liners entirely at least three times.
• Ordered two new pairs of glasses (one was free, the other is a second pair of sunglasses).
• Canceled two comics' subscriptions (both DC books).
• Subscribed to TV Guide (it was a $5 Amazon deal, which means it's less than ten cents an issue for a full year).
• Subscribed to Car & Driver (which I've also been meaning to do for years; it was an $8 Amazon deal).
• Called to refill my prescriptions.
• Took care of sorting and opening all of the mail once it arrived after it had been on hold. 
• Broke down numerous cardboard boxes laying around the house to prep them for recycling.
• Backed up my hard drive. Twice.
• Wrote the first three posts in this series.
• Cooked several full meals of varying levels of healthiness.
• Ordered P.F. Chang's Chinese for delivery (it's not bad. It's not great, but it's not bad), which I wouldn't finish all of until the night before Daisy returned home.
• Moved around items and junk in the garage so that I could get the garbage and recycling cans in and out the back door, since our car is still in the garage.
• Ran cleaning cycles on the washing machine and the dishwasher.
• Had the repairman come not once, but twice to finish repair and restoral of our microwave (it now works like new)
• Washed the cat water fountain also not once, but twice.
• Ordered a raised water/food bowl set so our old, crippled cat can't lay down in the water when she drinks it, assembled it, and set it up.
• Gave a ton of fresh vegetables to the neighbor, and did the same once again once Dad brought over a lot more from the family garden.
• Edited, uploaded, and posted an entire album full of photos I'd taken on the trip.
• Called my parents multiple times to talk to them and reassure them that both me and Daisy were okay.
• Talked to Daisy's parents multiple times to let them know I was okay.
• Stripped the bed and washed it all a second time before Daisy would return home, so she could sleep in a clean bed.
• And, finally, caught up on almost all of the Marvel stuff I'd had backlogged -- I watched Spider-Man: No Way Home, both Doctor Strange movies, both Ant-Man movies, Black Widow, and the first three episodes of She-Hulk. None of these I had ever watched before.

Throughout all of this, I was also taking my meds normally, talking to Daisy via video call almost every day (there were some days/times she wasn't available or was already in bed when we'd have our chance to talk), regularly showering, regularly sleeping (though it was difficult when she wasn't here; see below), and I was also doing minor upkeep stuff around the house and on social media. I let my close friends know I was home a few days into the week -- Tuesday or Wednesday or so, and made sure to send in my bereavement paperwork to my bosses and let them know my return date of the 28th. The rest of the time was just free time, time that I would never, ever normally have to just decompress and be me.

During this time, because of course it would happen when I would be using it the most, the garbage pickup was delayed by four days. Our normal garbage and/or recycling pickup is Wednesday. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday came and went with no pickup for not just me, but our entire street. This did not work for me when I was cleaning the house and was creating probably 3-5x more trash than I normally would during any given week, not to mention all of the food from the fridge I'd cleaned out, and the cat piss and shit I had cleaned out of their pans multiple times since returning home. I called the city waste management company once a day every day, always in the morning as soon as I got up, to tell them "hey, they missed our street again" until finally, on Saturday morning that week, they came to get the garbage four days after they should have. 

On the following Wednesday they had picked it all up before I'd even gotten off work that morning at 7am. I guess they learned their lesson.

I can be a real pain in the ass when I want to be, though with every call (I talked to the same lady every time I called) I was very, exceedingly polite.

Anyway.

I returned to work on Sunday the 28th, to much fanfare and the relief of my coworkers and my team. The week at work was hell, as a number of new policies had been put into effect while I was out which slowed absolutely everything we do down to a crawl. It put me into a foul mood for most of the week, which bothered me a lot internally because this was supposed to be downtime, time where I wasn't supposed to be "on," but was forced to be because I didn't have any more PTO to spare. I slogged through the week night by night, only sleeping a few hours each day because for some reason it was very difficult to sleep knowing Daisy wasn't there, wasn't in town, wasn't even in the same country. I could never really place my finger on why, even when I was as exhausted as I was. 

During the week, one of my close colleagues/friends got Covid and was down for the count, taking several days off to recover, and one of my agents let me know that it was quite possible she had mouth cancer and may have to get all of her teeth extracted.  Yeah. It wasn't a great week.

Daisy and Mama's return date was set to be September 1, which was a Thursday and my last working day of the week. They'd leave Canada on August 30, spend two nights in Maine visiting family friends and family graves, and then fly back out of Bangor on the same flights that Dad and I took to get home eleven days prior. Dad was set to pick them up at the airport on Thursday afternoon when they arrived, and I'd told Daisy to just call me when she was in the driveway so I could let her in the house -- after all, I had the house keys and it's not like she had the car/garage door opener. 

Well, in the interim -- starting right as they left Canada and arrived back in Maine (also without incident) both Daisy and Mama began to get really sick. Now, mind you, all of us had been exposed on some level multiple times to folks who later came down with Covid while we were all up there, though none of us had gotten Covid (to our knowledge, anyway). Mama and Daisy tested themselves multiple times -- because tests up there are free and are widely available at public libraries, apparently -- and every time they took one, they tested negative. This did not change the fact that they both felt and looked like hell. By the time they were flying home on Thursday, they were ill. As in, looking and feeling like death. Daisy sent me a Snapchat as they were leaving the hotel and both of them sounded like they were thirty-year smokers and looked as pale white as notebook paper. 

As an aside, when Mama and Daisy get sick, Dad and I are usually unaffected. Daisy used to have a horrible immune system and would pick up anything anywhere around her -- someone could cough in the same house three rooms away, and the next day, Daisy would be sick. In recent years she's gotten much better and her immune system has strengthened, but generally when she and Mama come down sick with something, Dad and I remain immune to it -- or at least mostly unaffected. Three or four years ago at Christmas (before Covid), both of them got so sick that it didn't completely go away for several weeks. I was fine, and Dad was also fine. I honestly can't remember the last time I had a cold -- it's been since well before Covid -- and the last time I had the Flu was likely 2017 or 2018. Before that it was 2015, and that Flu sucked. But, I do try to stay relatively close to my normal diet of mostly healthy foods, and I do take vitamins every day -- a lot of vitamins, actually. From a body chemistry point of view, I'm in pretty good shape and have a fairly tough immune system most of the time.

Their return flight was delayed by, eh, an hour or so, though they were able to make up some time in the air, or so they were told. My phone rang around 1:20pm on Thursday, and it was Daisy telling me they were about ten minutes away from the house. This gave me enough time to get up, put on my clothing and my glasses, and go downstairs to help Daisy into the house. I brought her suitcases upstairs (well, at least one of them anyway, I was half asleep so I don't really remember much) and Daisy collapsed onto the couch to spend some time with her fuzzy little son who missed her so much. 

I worked that night, and Daisy went to bed early, but in the time since she's returned, it has now become Labor Day weekend. Daisy is still sick -- she told me that the past two days (Saturday and Sunday) were likely the days she felt the worst, and as such, this weekend we've done fairly little while she recovers. She did a Whole Foods grocery delivery yesterday morning, vacuumed again, and took care of the cat pans, and I've wound down the last real vacation time I'll get before Thanksgiving week by mowing the grass and doing the trimming again, washing all of her laundry from the trip, and doing some writing here. Life has basically returned now to what it should be, now that September is in full swing and we're now at the traditional "end of summer" with it being Labor Day and all. Daisy will return to work on Tuesday -- a work-at-home day for her, before returning to the office on Wednesday. I return to work Tuesday night after the holiday.

The shirts I ordered, my new glasses, and the first set of disposable vapes I ordered will arrive beginning this week. We have groceries. The bills are paid. The cats are fine. I still have not left the house since my arrival home on August 20. The car has not left the garage since August 10. We may need to go pick up some meds and we may go see the parents today, depending on how Daisy feels (and how Mama feels, of course), and there are a few small errands we need to run (dropping off cardboard and glass recycling, etc). But slowly, life returns to the status quo.

With everything else I've been doing since, well, a month ago now almost, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that my professional writing -- the book -- is sort of on hiatus at the moment. It is very clear that I now will not finish it by the end of the year, as the beginning of fall means we are beginning to enter the season of holidays, which tend to be busy times for us. My parents wanted us to fly out to have Thanksgiving with them in North Carolina, which we may or may not do depending on money and time (remember, I used almost all of my PTO, and Daisy used the vast majority of her own), but it is indeed a plus knowing that we can get a direct flight on American Airlines from Omaha to Charlotte and back, and it only takes like three hours. 

Daisy was not happy that while she was gone, I washed, dried, folded, and put away all of her laundry into her closet (it disrupted her "system"); it made her possibly the angriest I've seen her in a very long time, despite the fact that I did it out of love and organized it in a very logical way. It overwhelmed her until she saw it and actually looked at how I'd done it, and over the course of about two hours I helped her move and reorganize it back into her "system" the way she wanted it. 

From Canada, Daisy brought back a lot of things -- I made the joke to my coworkers on Thursday night that "when my wife goes to Canada, she goes hard" and this was accurate. In addition to one of her grandfather's hand-built guitars (in a hardshell case), she brought back an entire new, extra suitcase of clothing, rocks, seashells, bags of coffee, candies, chocolate, a candle, two souvenir coffee mugs, food, and various other items she'd purchased while she was up there for three weeks. And yes, she had stopped in Maine to bring back more coffee brandy as well. All of this has been slowly unpacked and dealt with in the few days since she's returned home. I can't really say I blame her, as, well, when and how often do we spend an extended amount of time in Canada? The last time we were up there was eight years ago. It's not somewhere we can just jaunt off to on a whim, you know. 

I brought back relatively few Canada-centric things, or things at all really from the trip. I bought a Canada-branded sweater and a tank top while up there, and some pins for my jacket. I brought home some ketchup and all-dressed chips, and the maple candy I purchased in the duty-free shop across the border. In Maine, I bought a vest, a t-shirt, and some underwear. Once I was at home, I ordered a Cape Breton shirt and a Nova Scotia flag shirt in my size, as I couldn't find either one when I was up there (I felt bitter about doing so once I was at home, because I don't think souvenirs really count if you get them after the fact). I could've gotten so many more things if only I'd wanted to (or had the space to) bring them back, but I really didn't want or need much else. It was enough for me to bring back what I did; the trip itself was experience enough for me.

I'll also mention that the stuff I purchased after returning home -- including the groceries, food delivery, vapes, the new laptop, etc -- was far more than any amount of money I would've ever wanted or needed to spend in Canada, so, there's that. I'm not exactly proud of that, but, whatever. 

That new laptop is a nice little machine, actually. I didn't really say that before. It is a manufacturer-refurbished Dell 11.6-inch laptop made specifically for education -- basically, it's the specs they'd have for issuing laptops to high school kids -- and it was about $80 on a pre-Labor-Day sale on Woot. It's built really well and has a full installation of Windows 10 on it, which -- after it was fully updated -- makes it a very capable little machine for very little money, and will serve me well for my laptop needs (such as travel, writing, or if my main desktop here tries to die on me again). While I adored the little Chromebook I got at the beginning of the pandemic, the ChromeOS it runs has aged out as of about a year ago and can no longer be updated, and while it's still functional to some extent, it's not a Windows machine and its usefulness will be fairly limited moving forward. I'll put it in my closet with my other older machines for other, emergency-use only purposes. 

So, life returns to normal again, or at least somewhat normal. I'll nap this evening to reset my sleep schedule, and Daisy and I will return to our normal work-a-day lives tomorrow. I'll go back to writing my book when I can, I'll go back to normal routine. My beard and hair will grow throughout the fall and winter. Pictures will be edited and posted of the trip. Pictures will be taken for this year's Christmas cards. The holidays are coming. I'm about to turn 40. Life goes on. 

The Call of the Isle'd: A Canada Story, Part III

 

At 7am Friday morning, the 19th, Dad arrived at the hotel where Daisy and I were staying. I kissed Daisy goodbye, threw my giant, tightly-packed suitcase into the trunk, and we were off down the road. 

I will mention here at the start of this story that I've never traveled alone with Dad before. We've traveled together with him lots of places over the years, but never just me and him -- the boys, so to speak. Dad and I are very similar people, and Daisy and her mother are very similar. I've often said (and I've likely written it here before) that Daisy married her father, and I married her mother. In most marriages this would cause problems -- but, I am very lucky in that I adore Mama. She is absolutely the best mother in law I could have asked for, and I feel the same way about Dad. 

That does not mean that traveling with Dad would be easy, however, and I knew that it likely wouldn't be. While we are very similar on many things, there are many other things that we are very different on. Dad is a Vietnam veteran -- he was a helicopter gunner. He is tall and lanky, eats like a bird, has a great distrust of authority figures, is very stubborn and set in his ways, and can be quite argumentative and combative (not physically, of course) when he wants to be. He also, at times, lacks tact and sympathy/empathy. I have always gotten along with Dad really well, probably much more so than Daisy's sisters' husbands.

But that doesn't mean I'd travel well, or travel badly with him. Truth be told I was operating on about four hours sleep per night, in a hard hotel bed that destroyed my back and didn't let me stretch out the way I needed to, and running on energy drinks that had a little more than half the caffeine I was used to. I was tired. I was frazzled. I was in control of practically nothing. When I get into that state, normal Brandon goes away and a completely different Brandon takes over. It's sort of like when I'm working versus when I'm not working.

The drive to the border was mostly uneventful. We drove through a little rain, and through a lot more traffic than Daisy and I had encountered while going up there, but got to the border around 1pm or so.

"Don't make any jokes and don't say anything stupid when they ask you if you have anything to declare," Dad said.

What, like in 2015 when Dad was asked that question and he said "yeah, we've got a ton of liquor and cigarettes in the back"?

"I'm not an idiot," I said, rolling my eyes. 

"Where are you coming from?" the border agent asked. Dad answered.

"And why were you there?"

"Funeral of my father-in-law," Dad said, or something to that effect.

Immediately -- just like when Daisy and I had come across the border a week prior, the entire personality and mannerisms of the border agent changed, and he became very apologetic. He also handed back our Covid vaccination cards as soon as we gave them to him with our passports, saying he didn't need them and that he wanted us to hold on to them (which I found interesting; he didn't even look at them). 

"Do you have anything in the car that you're bringing back from Canada?"

We shrugged. "Just clothing and some food," Dad said.

"No ashes or cremains of the deceased, I take it?"

"No, no no," Dad said. "Those were buried in Nova Scotia."

The absurdity of that question made me laugh internally, but I get it. Dude's gotta be cautious, has to do his job and due diligence, etc. 

"No alcohol, tobacco products, marijuana, etc?"

"No sir," Dad replied. Truthfully, too. We weren't bringing anything back from Canada we didn't take in with us, aside from a bit of souvenir clothing and some ketchup chips. I did have my Vuse pod vape in my pocket, and in some places that would likely be classified as a tobacco product because vaping laws are stupid, but it had maybe 2ml of juice left in the pod, and I'd already used up and tossed all of my other disposables before I'd left. 

"Again, sorry for your loss," the border agent said. "Welcome home."

And we were back in the states.

Well, sort of. 

The border crossing at Houlton/Woodstock is actually well inside Canada, by a few hundred yards, maybe a half mile or so, etc. Between the border crossing and the actual border is the duty-free shop. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's basically a store without taxes where travelers can purchase things for their journey. As it was on the Canadian side, everything was in Canadian dollars and tax-free, so stuff was far cheaper than it would be stateside. When I was there in 2015, I picked up cartons of cigarettes, multiple cartons, for like $20 each -- so so much more cheaply than in the states. 

This time around, I had a mission: procure the maple syrup candy.

In 2015 when Daisy and I were last there, we'd come across these hard candies -- like, individually wrapped, life-savers-style hard candies -- that were made with maple syrup. They were amazing, and we'd only gotten one bag of each flavor (regular and blueberry). I went in there this time and bought three bags of each flavor. If I'd had more room in my bags I would've cleared off the racks. It was something like $18 total. 

And then we were on the road and in Maine. 

For those of you who have never been there, Maine is a beautiful, forested state with mountains, winding highways, peaks and valleys, and giant lakes. There are seaside towns and seaside cities. There are moose, there are deer, there are bear, there are wolves, there are fishers, and (so I've been told) there are lighthouses. The road between the border and Bangor is not a long one, comparatively speaking -- it's about 100 miles, give or take, all highway until you get into Bangor proper. Bangor is in south-central Maine, about an hour's drive from the ocean on the eastern side of the state. The locals there call this "Downeast Maine":

I mean, I guess.

Anyway.

I'm not sure I'd feel such a connection to Maine had I not been there before and if Dad wasn't from there. Because Dad is from there, this was like a trip through his old stomping grounds. He knew exactly where to go and how to get to each place, and we were on two missions before we returned home:

1. get some food in a restaurant that Dad wanted to eat at, where he hadn't been for a long time (Governor's Restaurant and Bakery, in Bangor), and

2. find Coffee Brandy and bring it back home.

Again, for those of you not familiar with Maine -- Coffee Brandy is exactly what you think it is. 

It is literally coffee flavored brandy. And you can't get it anywhere outside of Maine, apparently. We've checked. The girls gave us the mission of getting as much of it as we could fit into our checked bags to fly home with. Whether they'll do the same when they return as well remains to be seen (I'll get to this later). 

We got into Bangor around 3:30pm. The real "driving" portion of our trip was all but done. Dad navigated us to The Governor™, where he purchased a double-meat lobster roll and I had a decent but hastily thrown-together caesar salad as my one true meal of the day.

"Just a caesar salad and water?" the waitress asked. "You don't want chicken in it or anything? Do you want a roll?"

"No," I said, "just the salad and water."

Truthfully I didn't even really want the salad, I just knew I would be ravenous if I didn't eat something and I didn't just want to sit there and stare at Dad while he ate his lobster roll, trying to hide my impatience and frazzled inner self. That would serve nobody. When the checks came (yes, plural, Dad wanted to pay for his lobster roll separately, I guess), I paid for my salad and went outside to vape and get some fresh air before we made the next leg(s) of our journey.

The next leg(s) of our journey were, of course, to find the Coffee Brandy. Our first stop was Walmart, where they didn't sell liquor, but they did have the underwear I like on clearance -- remember how I mentioned that I had run out of clean underwear in Canada? Yeah. So I bought a pack of those and grabbed a puffer vest that was on deep clearance as well, as I'd wanted one for some time. It fit like a glove and I'd really wished I'd had the time or foresight to get two of them....and then we were off once again.

Dad, knowing Bangor far better than I, knew of a small grocery chain up the street where yes, they would sell the Coffee Brandy. We entered and almost immediately got separated, and I became lost. You see, in Bangor, every adult elderly male is tall, thin, and white-haired, just like Dad. It's a sea of Dads. They all dressed like Dad, they all looked like Dad. They all sounded like Dad. I wandered that store for twenty minutes trying to pick out Dad in an ocean of older white men in vests who all sounded and looked like him, is what I'm saying.

We did get the Coffee Brandy. It added nine pounds to my luggage, but I was able to make it fit. I was also able to have the foresight of packing two Hefty Forceflex trash bags into my big canvas backpack just in the off-chance that we'd need them for something -- we did. We tied the bottles of liquor into them and made the bags airtight/liquid-tight in the event that the bottles would leak in flight.

I prepare for everything, apparently.

We returned to the Bangor Quality Inn and I checked us into our room. It was a simple room -- some of the most basic lodging possible: two double beds, a bathroom, a table, and a sink. Dad immediately showered and got into bed. I stayed up for a bit and walked around the parking lot to wind down. I tried to call Daisy, but she didn't answer. Then I showered and got into bed myself, and was out like a light within twenty minutes.

When I awoke, it was dark. Very dark. We'd set our alarms for 4am because the flight out was at 7 and we'd need to get through security and get something to eat. I checked my phone and it was barely 2, but I could not sleep anymore -- I'd slept almost 8 full hours and could not lay in that hotel bed anymore. On the other bed in the dark, Dad was out like a light still. I got up, dressed in the dark, and went out to -- yes, you guessed it -- wander the parking lot again to kill time and vape. When my Vuse ran out, I yanked the pod and tossed it, and debated flying back with the actual Vuse power base/battery, because it really was a neat little device, but I did eventually decide to just trash it as I wouldn't need it when I was at home -- and it wasn't worth trying to justify taking it through security when I had no further use for it.

Dad would eventually awaken, and we made our way to the airport -- checking out of the room on the way. 

I mentioned before that the Bangor airport is tiny, and it is. The rental car lot is relatively small and a two-minute walk from the entry doors. You walk in, drop the keys off in the slot, and then print your boarding passes at the little kiosk, where you also swipe your card to pay the $30 to check your bags. They give you a printout, attach the sticker to your bags, and away it goes -- and then you go through security. The entire process takes about five minutes total.

Going through security at the airport is fun. At least for me. For me the trip is always quick, because I empty my pockets and make sure I'm wearing flip-flops and no belt to keep it all fast. Dad, however, I'm not sure I've ever seen wear flip-flops or not wear a belt during the over ten years that I've known him, so it will always take him longer to get through. He was right in front of me, and not only did he get pulled aside for additional screening, he also got wanded and basically shoved off to reassemble himself.

Me, I was in and out, x-rayed and into the airport, where I put my wallet and keys back in my pocket and slipped my flip flops back on. Dad, however, lost his belt. 

Momentarily.

His belt got trapped beneath the rollers and the bins and took a few extra minutes to roll through. He was able to find it and get it back on, but the entire process left him looking like he'd been assaulted. I'm sure he was just as tired as I was and I'm sure he was frazzled.

Our flight to Charlotte didn't leave for another 90 minutes or so, and as we were at our gate within five minutes of going through security (again, small airport), Dad got a breakfast sandwich from one of the little kiosk deli places and tried to relax a bit. I, meanwhile, had to pee like four times (I'd drank an energy drink -- my last one -- and an entire one-liter bottle of seltzer when I'd gotten up that morning, in order to carry less and not have to check more liquids in my bag. 

I also stopped at the little gift shop next to our gate, and used basically the very last amount of space in my carry-on canvas backpack to purchase a purple t-shirt with MAINE on it in big letters, a pin for my military jacket, and a bar of handmade vegan soap that was apparently "mermaid kisses" scented (or something like that, I can't remember if that's accurate or not). 

I am a...sentimental person I guess; everywhere I go, I try to bring home some little trinket or mug or t-shirt that proves I was there, that I can point to later and be like "hey, I got item X at Y place when I was doing Z thing in year 20XX," etc. I have a lot of items like this. I know people who are like "oh, I'll just go order something online when I get home" and I think that mostly defeats the purpose. I did do that this time around for two things though, and I'll get to that. 

The plane to Charlotte was a large plane, an Airbus A320, and it was...relatively comfortable, I guess. we got on it on time, the flight lifted off normally and landed normally in Charlotte...which I found was a very large airport. I had thought it would be small, because I mean, Omaha has a small airport, and Omaha and Charlotte as cities are probably roughly the same size -- though I will admit that about all I know about Charlotte is that I always wanted to name a daughter Charlotte and that it's where Nascar holds the Coca-Cola 600 every year. 

Well, Charlotte's airport is huge, and it was shoulder-to-shoulder full of people. We scanned the board to see where our connecting flight to Omaha was, I went to pee, and Dad...disappeared.

I called him. "I'm making my way to our gate," he said.

"Okay. I'm right behind you, somewhere, I guess." 

In reality I had no idea where he was or how far ahead of me he had gotten. The airport was bright, it was loud, and it was full of people in my way, people that if I wanted to get where I was supposed to go, I almost had to drop my shoulder and charge through them like I was still playing high school football. 

I want all of you to know that I am not generally an aggressive person. In public situations such as this one, I try to be very polite and kind, because I would want that same sort of treatment myself. However, there are some situations that if you want to get through them, you have to be aggressive and not defensive. So I have to admit I took, ahem, some liberties with how deftly I moved through the crowds. I didn't, like, knock down any children or old ladies, but if someone was in my way, I made sure they weren't. I was not feeling well, I hate being surrounded by people, and I just wanted to be home -- where my cats and my vapes and my silence all were.

The gate was completely full. As in, there were no empty seats anywhere around, and there were probably close to 50 people -- all of them waiting for our flight -- just standing around at the gate. Dad had gotten there and was sitting on one of the outside aisle seats (and it was probably the last one available when he'd gotten there). I stood on my feet with my heavy-ass canvas backpack on for close to an hour before they started boarding. When I did get to board, I was in boarding group 8. Eight. I don't even know how there is a group 8 on a small puddlejumper plane like we were on (yet another Embraer ERJ).

I guess I shouldn't call them "puddlejumper" planes since they can fly really long distances pretty quickly, but for a fat guy like myself they're tiny and cramped and leave a lot to be desired versus the larger, more comfortable planes like the A320.

And finally, after waiting there an hour and after strapping into this cramped little plane for another half hour, we were in the air towards Omaha. 

Throughout my flight I dozed off several times; I was in the middle seat on every flight we flew on with the exception of the last flight down into Bangor on the way there, so it's not like I could really relax or look out the window or do anything actually interesting other than just doze off. Dad was two rows behind me on the aisle seat. I was very grateful that I'd purchased a travel neck pillow after the very first flight on the way in. 

The plane landed in Omaha, on time and without incident, where the local time was around 12:30 PM and the temperature was about 85 degrees. We had but two things left to do:

1. hope that our checked suitcases arrived without incident, and

2. secure an Uber ride home for each of us.

Now, mind you, Daisy's best friend (the one who'd been watching over the houses/cats) was originally going to pick us up and take us home from the airport, but she'd had a slight medical emergency the day before we'd left, and let us know the only time she could get into the doctor was right when the plane was landing in Omaha, so she had to bail on us. I didn't mind it -- your health is far more important than picking up people at an airport, of course -- but that also meant that Dad and I would both have to spend money separately on Ubers to get from the airport back home.

"See if you can split it," Daisy told me. 

I had to explain to her that it really doesn't work that way, because it's paid for by the trip, not by the passenger -- meaning yes, I could have told them to take me home and then take Dad home too, on my reservation, but it would've charged me for both trips, and we were going in opposite directions, and then there's all sorts of different variables like surge pricing and time/distance and the like and yeah it doesn't really work like that. 

I had some passing experience with Uber and Daisy and I had used one to get to the airport the week prior (yes, our car was still safely locked in the garage at home the entire time) and knew how the app operated. Dad, however, barely knew what Uber was, and had never had the app on his phone and had never needed to use it. I told him it was basically an independent-driver taxi service (because, well, it is) and that they always have drivers waiting and ready at the airport -- or very close to it, so it shouldn't take too long to actually get in a car and get home. He got the app on his phone, put in his card info, and made sure it was ready to roll prior to leaving Bangor. 

Once we were off the plane and safely on the ground in Omaha, we made our way through the not-crowded-at-all airport to the baggage claim. My giant, seafoam-green hardshell suitcase with the neon-green luggage tag was one of the first suitcases to hit the belt, and I grabbed it. It was not leaking fluids, so this told me that the coffee brandy had survived the trip. 

And we waited. And waited. And waited for Dad's suitcase to show up. Everyone else had their bags and took them away, and it was me, Dad, and about two or three other people standing at the moving belt hoping and praying that their baggage was not lost. I could sense the anxiety and dread of the few other people standing around us. 

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Dad's bag got shoved through the rubber door and was on the belt. We were done. We had our things. We could go the fuck home again.

By this time, Dad had figured out the Uber app and had placed an order for pickup. I did as well, and we both made our way across the street over to the attached parking garage -- the bottom of which was the Uber pick-up area. Our pickup cars were there within 2 minutes (no, really) and we made our way to each one. I watched Dad get into his car and the driver head off in the opposite direction at the same time I was in mine and on my way out of the airport, and....our traveling together was over. 

Twenty minutes and $30 later, I was standing in my living room with two very happy-to-see-me cats and a third howling upstairs from Daisy's office, where she'd been held captive for the past nine days. It was the afternoon of Saturday, August 20, and I was finally, finally home. 

What has happened in the interim? Well, that's a story for our final post in this series.