No, I'm not talking about my penis.
Hi there everyone. It's been a long time.
Truthfully over the past ten months I've come to this blog several times to try to write something, only to get interrupted in the middle of it, lose interest, and come back to it a few weeks later to see what I was going to post no longer applies.
Some updates that are relevant for those of you paying attention:
Yes, I am still vaping. I have not had a physical cigarette since June or so, and have only smoked 1.5 cigarettes since I quit last April. One of those was a luxury Nat Sherman cigarette one of my friends had at a wine-and-music event last summer, and the other was one a friend gave me at work last fall -- that made me sick, but I was so stressed out at my job I needed something to kill it.
I do my part to educate people on the benefits of vaping and to dispel the stigma of it, and have gotten a few friends who were previously smoking to start vaping instead as a means to quit the cigarettes. I have about ten devices, numerous tanks and atomizers, and about thirty different flavors of juice. It has become quite the hobby, and sometimes an expensive one, though in the long run it is much cheaper than cigarettes, with the benefits far outweighing the costs.
Speaking of outweighing the costs, the downside is that since I quit smoking, I have gained about 50 pounds in the past ten months -- putting me back up above my college weight and making me feel like a supremely fat fuck. As such I have had to purchase a lot of new clothing that will actually fit me and donate a lot of what no longer does. Weight gain is a very common side-effect of quitting smoking, because suddenly one gets an appetite again. And because the winters in Nebraska suck and are usually really cold and snowy, I feel even more lethargic than usual -- so I have no energy to get up, get out of the house, and be active. That's a problem. The wife and I plan to start an exercise regimen once everything thaws out for good this spring, the temperatures get to be tolerable outside (consistently, anyway), and the days get longer.
I still drive my Silverado -- haven't done anything to it physically or upkeep-wise since I got it from our brother-in-law (aside from put a Team Instinct sticker in the back window -- yes, the wife and I play Pokemon GO, I'm level 26 now, she's 25). It desperately needs new tires, which I'm sort of half-assed saving for as it'll be about $800. Because of this it won't really go anywhere in the Nebraska winter and we take the wife's car most places -- I take the truck to work and back if there's no snow/ice on the roads, and that's about it.
My student loans can be put off no longer and are now due every month on the 11th -- to the tune of over $600. To put that in perspective, I pay more on my student loans every month than I paid for rent every month in my house in Kansas -- by a substantial amount. This is, of course, a shit situation, but it can't be avoided. That's also part of why it's very difficult to try to afford tires for the truck, and means the wife and I have to very tightly budget everything now, to the point where we are afforded very few luxuries.
That's fine, I suppose -- I have learned to save quite a bit of money on household stuff by getting it directly from Amazon, shipped to my door. About the only things I don't get on Amazon these days are perishable foodstuffs that they wouldn't really be able to mail. Almost everything else is purchased and is delivered to us a few times a week, depending on what's ordered. Carrying cat litter, paper towels, toilet paper, laundry detergent, etc etc in from the car is a thing of the past.
The cats are fine, by the way -- they're all turning ten this year. The girls like to sleep and eat, and Pete likes to be a bastard the same as usual. If there's been one constant in my life over the past ten years it's been those little furry buttholes.
I did pass the milestone of ten years living in the midwest around Thanksgiving or so, and barely gave it a second thought. It's so long ago now. Hell, Daisy and I have been married almost three years. Our bills are getting paid, we have food in the house, the lights are on, and the years just go by. Milestones are generally for the sentimental, and I'm more of a nihilist than anything else.
No, we do not have a child yet. It is one of our long term goals, as is getting out of this apartment and into a house of our own. In the time since we've been married, both of Daisy's sisters have each had another child -- the latest being a new niece born right around Christmas. Meh. We'll either have kids eventually or we won't. We'd like to, but given our monetary situation and lack of time as it is, honestly it's on the back burner at this point.
I suppose I should mention that Daisy acquired a new job last fall; she is now working for a bank. This means she has much better hours and all state/federal holidays off. Her pay is about the same, however. She likes it much better than working overnights (and then, later, during the day) as a shift manager for a gigantic telecommunications corporation, as she did before.
I also got a new job -- I'm working overnights as a shift manager for a gigantic telecommunications corporation.
Surprisingly enough, these two occurrences are not related.
In August I (finally) got promoted to Area Manager on dayshift, leading one of the top teams in the building, when my superior was moved to a different segment. After being an interim over that team for three months, one of our overnight managers moved to Dallas around the same time some restructuring was done with the teams on dayshift and my team/position was eliminated. As they needed someone to fill the spot on overnights and I already knew and had worked with all of the After Hours people previously (I started on After Hours in that place before moving to days, as you may recall), I volunteered to take the third shift position as an interim with the full promotion being awarded to me once the dust settled and leadership decided who would be moved to my team -- and they agreed. I started the overnight position (8pm to 7am four days a week) in October and received the official promotion to Area Manager during the first week of November. I am still hourly as of right now, which is a good thing for many reasons -- for one, it means I can still get any and all overtime offered to me, and for two it means that when my work day ends, it ends. My move to salary was postponed indefinitely when the federal edict on overtime got overturned/erased back in December, and while there is still plans to get me over to the salaried payscale, I'd rather not hurry it when I'm getting 4-6 hours of sweet, sweet overtime every week.
The downside is that I was supposed to be awarded back pay for my interim months and that's on record (it was part of my hiring documentation), and that has not come through yet over four months later. I've been told it's coming and is being taken care of, but as of late my inquiries about it -- as well as inquiries about becoming salaried -- have gone unanswered.
As an aside, I really like working overnights. I work Sunday through Wednesday, I work with a group of people I've known and trusted for years (as well as a Director who is awesome and actively cares about the job and his employees), and while overnights does deal with a fair amount of bullshit and stupidity, it's way less than I had to deal with when I was on dayshift in that place. For the most part, I believe I am wanted, needed, and respected -- as well as appreciated when the shit hits the fan -- and right now, that's really good enough for me. Because of my experience and tenure, as well as the fact that there's a shift differential and I am a valued employee, I got something around a 25% pay raise in my promotion as well. Swimmin' pools, movie stars money.
Well, not really. But it's nice to be making more than I did before. Really, the extra pay goes almost directly to my student loans with little, if any, left over. So I sort of break even.
My overnights schedule doesn't really intersect with the wife's day schedule, though -- that's a bit of a downside. However, it does mean we get to share evenings and weekends together. She works a normal day schedule to 8-5. I get home at 7am, spend some time with her as she gets ready, go to bed when she goes to work, and wake up an hour or three before she gets home. We spend the evening together and then I go back to work at 8. This repeats for four days, and then Thursday/Friday/Saturday nights (not to mention Saturday day most of the time) we spend together and get our quality time -- with the benefit that I still get some decompression time to myself in the overnights as long as I stay on my normal sleeping schedule. Lately, that time has been spent watching Netflix and/or playing a video game to turn off my brain.
Another downside is that, especially during the winter months, my energy levels are at all-time lows. I get up in the evenings and need to pound coffee to wake myself up for the night shift, and I can't really eat or I'll get all groggy and even weaker. If I wake up in a bad mood or I have anything else happening that stresses me out, I carry that mindset into the entire night because I'm being forced to wake up and deal with it. Daisy long ago realized that it's generally a bad idea to try to have serious conversations with me in the first hour or two that I'm awake, because in that time I am a vile, horrific person. I really can't help it, and I've done all I can to curb it -- but it's chemical/biological more than anything else as it's usually caused by me not having any caffeine or nicotine in my system. I am not a "get up and go" type of person -- it's a slow roll.
Anyway, it's probably time I get to the overall point of this post, and why I wanted to start writing it in the first place: we have a new president.
I have tried to stay as silent as possible on the subject of Donald Trump. Really I have. I don't talk much about it on social media, and truthfully I am so sick of there being no news anymore but Trump news, anywhere, to the point where I've stopped paying attention to most news in general because I just can't take it. Please, news sources, anything but something else about Trump. There is more happening in the world, I know it -- please report that instead.
But, since we're now stuck with Trump, I suppose here's my two cents.
I never thought my country could be so stupid.
I never thought my country would allow what is currently happening, as a whole, to happen.
I never thought my country would see injustice, blatant violations of the constitution and civil rights, the closing of our borders and the slow-roll of a burgeoning police state coming to power all happening and do little else but some "we're upset and don't like this" protests and sharing stories on social media outlets before moving on to more pictures of cats.
I never thought I would see such a complacent "oh well, what can we do?" society form, instead of throngs of people taking to the streets with pitchforks and torches.
I've never seen a more milquetoast reaction to our rights, powers, and privileges as the people of the United States being stripped away one by one. And to those people saying "well, he's only in there four years," they're not seeing the big picture. The actions he's taking will set back our society's progress by fifty years or more as people keep getting dumber and more complacent.
I once thought, optimistically, that we would see the formation of Starfleet in my lifetime. A real Starfleet, ex astris, scientia -- from the stars, knowledge -- a unification of Earth's ideologies gathered for the common goal of exploration and settlement, the broadening of our knowledge and cultures and experiences for the benefit of the planet, the species, as a whole. I now know that will never happen, not as long as I'm alive, not as long as it's not made a priority and the number one goal of our planet.
It was a lofty goal, to be sure, but it is one I could've seen coming together within 20-40 years if, say, Bernie Sanders had won the presidency.
Now we have Voldemort and his death eaters in the White House, leading the most powerful country on the planet and systematically dismantling all the progress the past several decades of sane, rational leaders have made. We rational, intelligent Slytherins disowned Donald Trump long ago, much as I'm sure not every Slytherin (or even most of them) supported Voldemort.
I know I'm making a lot of pop-culture references here, but bear with me.
For the record, even though I voted for her, I don't think Hillary Clinton would've been much better. I didn't want to vote for her, I wanted to vote against idiocy. My man was always Bernie Sanders from the beginning of the actual race, and I think there was a lot of shady or otherwise underhanded shit Hillary did to basically steal the nomination -- for a job she couldn't win. She couldn't win it eight years ago and she won't win it four years from now. Also note how deafeningly silent she's been since she lost the election, too.
Then again, with the exception of Barack Obama, I have a history of voting for losing candidates. I was a month too young to vote in the 2000 election, but I would've voted for Al Gore. In 2004 I backed John Kerry to get Bush out of office. Both of those elections failed spectacularly.
That's also not to say that there aren't some of Trump's policies I agree with -- there are, they're just very few and far between. For example, I do believe strongly in bringing jobs back to America and penalizing American companies who outsource or build factories in other countries to ship products back to us. Hell no; build those factories here, put those jobs here. Working in telecom has shown me the evils of outsourcing as many of the best technicians I previously worked with had their jobs outsourced to Asia or the south pacific. And let me tell you, I'll gladly pay $50 more for an iPhone or laptop if I know it was built here in the states. I want to see the best cars in the world built in America again.
I believe very strongly in rebuilding the infrastructure of this country -- hospitals, airports, roads, bridges, our electrical grid and other power plants, schools, universities, and the like, from the bottom up. I want to see people at work making this country a better place -- but that also comes with paying people what they're worth. Teachers, professors, cops, firemen, public works people, etc -- all of them need a liveable wage. All of us do, but start with the people who shape society more than anyone else and keep it running.
I also disagree with a lot of what's happening, obviously. "Building the wall" is a really stupid, dumbfuck idea that won't make this country any safer overall and will bankrupt our treasury. The travel ban isn't helping either. There's a lot of immigration policy I disagree with most liberals on, but I definitely agree that the wall and the travel ban are both really dumb. For the record, I don't support the ICE raids that are happening in a ton of different states right now either. I support it on paper, but putting that into practice like the Kool-Aid man smashing through the walls of workplaces, arresting illegals, and leaving homes where kids don't know if they're going to have parents to come home to after school is holy shit level fascism.
The bad part is that it's all going to get worse before it gets better, until there's some sort of actual revolution in this country. And given the complacency of the populace thus far, I fear that will never happen. If it does, I also fear that the revolution will be quelled so quickly and the leaders quickly condemned as crackpots by the media that anyone else will fear to make any more waves. It is by complacency and by the hands of those who sit there and do nothing that this country will meet its end -- and I am sure there's no shortage of other societies around the world who will be happy to see us crumble and fall apart when we do.
So, on that happy note, I'm going to end this post. I've said all I need to say on the subject.
In two days it's Valentine's Day. I proposed to my wife on Valentine's Day four years ago. This year it's the "kitchen gifts" anniversary, apparently, as I've gotten her a few gifts that she's wanted for a while. Life goes on, right?
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Monday, April 25, 2016
The Helper
By 5:15 PM tomorrow night, it'll be a full two weeks for me without cigarettes.
I'm fine. The cravings hit a peak last week, into the weekend, before basically going away almost completely. Most of the time now I don't even think about it. And even being around people at work who are still smoking doesn't bother me.
It's exceedingly weird.
No, really. It's really strange that I don't have the urge to get up in the morning, go out on the porch, smoke two or three cigarettes, and then actually start my day. That doesn't happen anymore. I get up, make some coffee, check my phone, sit on the couch and vape for a while (sometimes I won't even touch the vape until I've been up for 40 minutes or so) and then go get dressed for work.
When I'm at home on the weekends my sleep schedule is so messed up anyhow that I'm never sure when I'm going to bed or getting up, so obviously it's a bit different. Still, there are very few times where I ever just absolutely crave a cigarette anymore. The vapes have taken care of that.
I mentioned before that I've pretty much settled on my rotation of vape juices that I cycle through, with the exception of some limited edition flavors or promotional ones (meaning, flavors I get for free or have gotten in promotional deals, flavors I've only purchased because of free shipping on an order with other stuff, etc), and I think keeping a regular rotation helps a lot. Changing it up too much or having a new flavor every week messes with me, and I've found that while I'll like to vape a tankful of a flavor to try it, I get really tired of it after that -- if I've ordered a big bottle of it, it'll just sit there until I want it again or until I give it away. I've spent entirely too much money on vape shit in the past several months only out of sheer curiosity, and as part of the goal is to stop spending as much money on this stuff, I really need to scale it back.
So, I have my stable of pretty regular flavors. Every once in a while I'll rotate one out and rotate another one in -- for example, for a month or so I really liked Fruit Hoops (read: Froot Loops cereal flavor), but got burnt out on it. I rotated it out and replaced it with something else, just to keep it interesting. I like routine, but too much routine makes it all boring, and if it's boring I'm likely to go back to cigarettes just out of habit. Part of what's keeping me off them is the excitement of new things, new parts, mods and flavors -- the hobby aspect of it all. And there are indeed ways to do that cheaply that doesn't involve me spending $50-100 a week on new things, as I never spent that much on cigarettes (thank fuck). Having ordered two more backup tanks this weekend, and waiting for two more and two boxes of coils to arrive, I think I'm pretty much done for the next several months when it comes to hardware -- I even gave one of my mods to a friend at work when he broke his and broke his tank. He gave me a $10 bill, two 12-packs of soda, and a bottle of juice in trade and still got the better deal, but I don't care because I like helping people. I like being the helper.
The wife and family are still very proud of me, by the way. I'm glad they are. The positive feedback helps out a lot. My wife is extremely happy I'm no longer smoking. Of course, not having to stop at the gas station every 3-4 days for more cigarettes is nice too, and not having to spend money on them out of pocket is great as well (though that savings is, again, pretty much negated by all of the vape stuff I get). I need to fill the truck up with gas this week, and it'll be the first time I've done so without going inside for cigarettes. It's bizarre.
The truck is still going strong, by the way. No issues with it yet, though I do still need to get new tires and get it tuned up (oil change, spark plug checks, etc). Chevrolets are workhorses -- I know that from the years of owning the Monte Carlo. As long as it's in one piece, it'll run -- and nothing's started falling off of it yet. When the relatives come into town over the summer (whenever that will be), I can't wait to show them that it's still going and still running strong...ahem, provided that it doesn't blow up on me now that I've said that. I'll renew the registration and plates in July, around the time they'll be here.
The wife and I have to renew our lease here in the next week as well. I say "in the next week" because, well, it runs out at the end of the month, and while we let the complex know our intentions to renew (we had to do so by the 1st of this month), they have to schedule a time to have us come up and sign the paperwork. They have not yet done that, so in the morning I will be calling the office to tell them "hey, we need to do this, when's the best day/time for you, 'cause we both work weird hours and will probably have to do it on our lunch break" or something like that. It takes about fifteen minutes at the most, but it's still a relative pain in the ass.
It's a payday Friday this coming week, so I have bills that are coming due that will have to be paid in addition to our rent -- as does the wife. Still, as we go deep into the spring, it appears that most crises are settling down and we're able to get out from under a lot of the stuff we've been paying on for a while now, with the exception of our taxes. I don't know if I've mentioned it here in recent weeks (and right now, frankly, I'm too lazy to care/check if I have) but we owed a shitload of money in taxes this year...all because on my own W4s with our company, they had me marked down for two federal exemptions for no reason. That's not something that can be changed retroactively, and we didn't figure it out until we got our taxes ready this spring. I cannot tell you how absolutely batshit pissed I was, especially as getting a decent-sized refund would've let us pay down some credit cards and would've paid for the aforementioned new tires on my truck. The taxes are paid, thanks to having high-limit credit cards with 0% interest for eighteen months, but we're both very angry. I went in and changed my W4 to zero exemptions shortly after we found out what had happened, as if I didn't we would probably owe again for 2016. Fuck it, let 'em take out all the taxes they want now so when this time rolls back around next year, we don't have to worry about it.
The weeks pass by quickly, and the weekends even faster. Soon, we will be coming up on our second wedding anniversary at the end of May, and both myself and the wife have requested the day off of work so that we can get an extended weekend. We do not have any plans, at least not yet -- the parents asked us last night if we were going anywhere or doing anything. We had to laugh at that to a certain extent, as it's so rare for us to ever go anywhere or do anything we don't have to or that isn't required by law. Shit, there are at least five large boxes and ten giveaway clothing bags for Goodwill (or a similar charity) which have been sitting here in the spare room with me since we moved into this apartment in 2014. The wife's wedding dress is in the exact same spot she left it when she took it off on our wedding night.
I've already purchased and gifted the wife's anniversary present to her -- I bought her the high-end expensive replica of Hermione Granger's wand. I had asked previously and she claimed Hermione was her favorite character in the entire Harry Potter series, so okay. I have several favorite characters, most of whom die quickly (some offscreen, even -- what a tragedy). However, the wand that called out to me was the wand of Narcissa Malfoy, Draco's mother.
I ordered that wand for myself, and during play-fighting with the wife and her wand, it broke in half. Very quickly. Fuck. I ended up getting Snape's wand, so both of us have wands now. The object is to take photos with them for our anniversary. Because we're nerds like that.
The broken wand? Added to the pile of clutter.
"We're cleaning on Saturday," the wife told me matter-of-factly when she came into the spare room a few moments ago on her way to bed.
To be fair, the house is a mess -- it needs a good vacuuming and steam-cleaning of the carpets, a good dusting, a good scrubdown of the bathroom and kitchen, including the floors -- etc etc. I have Mondays off, so a good chunk of the day every Monday is me doing upkeep on the house as much as I can reasonably do based on time and energy levels -- reorganizing the kitchen, doing all the laundry and putting it away, washing the bedsheets, cleaning the cat box and sweeping out the cat room, etc. That's hard to do if I'm not feeling well or if I sleep late, however. And some Mondays I don't even have the energy to mess with a lot at all -- or I want to decompress and play video games and listen to podcasts and let the entire world just go away for a bit. Because, of course, I have those weeks too.
Will keep you posted on any happenings, of course. However, now's the time for me to go to bed as I've been up way too late as it is.
I'm fine. The cravings hit a peak last week, into the weekend, before basically going away almost completely. Most of the time now I don't even think about it. And even being around people at work who are still smoking doesn't bother me.
It's exceedingly weird.
No, really. It's really strange that I don't have the urge to get up in the morning, go out on the porch, smoke two or three cigarettes, and then actually start my day. That doesn't happen anymore. I get up, make some coffee, check my phone, sit on the couch and vape for a while (sometimes I won't even touch the vape until I've been up for 40 minutes or so) and then go get dressed for work.
When I'm at home on the weekends my sleep schedule is so messed up anyhow that I'm never sure when I'm going to bed or getting up, so obviously it's a bit different. Still, there are very few times where I ever just absolutely crave a cigarette anymore. The vapes have taken care of that.
I mentioned before that I've pretty much settled on my rotation of vape juices that I cycle through, with the exception of some limited edition flavors or promotional ones (meaning, flavors I get for free or have gotten in promotional deals, flavors I've only purchased because of free shipping on an order with other stuff, etc), and I think keeping a regular rotation helps a lot. Changing it up too much or having a new flavor every week messes with me, and I've found that while I'll like to vape a tankful of a flavor to try it, I get really tired of it after that -- if I've ordered a big bottle of it, it'll just sit there until I want it again or until I give it away. I've spent entirely too much money on vape shit in the past several months only out of sheer curiosity, and as part of the goal is to stop spending as much money on this stuff, I really need to scale it back.
So, I have my stable of pretty regular flavors. Every once in a while I'll rotate one out and rotate another one in -- for example, for a month or so I really liked Fruit Hoops (read: Froot Loops cereal flavor), but got burnt out on it. I rotated it out and replaced it with something else, just to keep it interesting. I like routine, but too much routine makes it all boring, and if it's boring I'm likely to go back to cigarettes just out of habit. Part of what's keeping me off them is the excitement of new things, new parts, mods and flavors -- the hobby aspect of it all. And there are indeed ways to do that cheaply that doesn't involve me spending $50-100 a week on new things, as I never spent that much on cigarettes (thank fuck). Having ordered two more backup tanks this weekend, and waiting for two more and two boxes of coils to arrive, I think I'm pretty much done for the next several months when it comes to hardware -- I even gave one of my mods to a friend at work when he broke his and broke his tank. He gave me a $10 bill, two 12-packs of soda, and a bottle of juice in trade and still got the better deal, but I don't care because I like helping people. I like being the helper.
The wife and family are still very proud of me, by the way. I'm glad they are. The positive feedback helps out a lot. My wife is extremely happy I'm no longer smoking. Of course, not having to stop at the gas station every 3-4 days for more cigarettes is nice too, and not having to spend money on them out of pocket is great as well (though that savings is, again, pretty much negated by all of the vape stuff I get). I need to fill the truck up with gas this week, and it'll be the first time I've done so without going inside for cigarettes. It's bizarre.
The truck is still going strong, by the way. No issues with it yet, though I do still need to get new tires and get it tuned up (oil change, spark plug checks, etc). Chevrolets are workhorses -- I know that from the years of owning the Monte Carlo. As long as it's in one piece, it'll run -- and nothing's started falling off of it yet. When the relatives come into town over the summer (whenever that will be), I can't wait to show them that it's still going and still running strong...ahem, provided that it doesn't blow up on me now that I've said that. I'll renew the registration and plates in July, around the time they'll be here.
The wife and I have to renew our lease here in the next week as well. I say "in the next week" because, well, it runs out at the end of the month, and while we let the complex know our intentions to renew (we had to do so by the 1st of this month), they have to schedule a time to have us come up and sign the paperwork. They have not yet done that, so in the morning I will be calling the office to tell them "hey, we need to do this, when's the best day/time for you, 'cause we both work weird hours and will probably have to do it on our lunch break" or something like that. It takes about fifteen minutes at the most, but it's still a relative pain in the ass.
It's a payday Friday this coming week, so I have bills that are coming due that will have to be paid in addition to our rent -- as does the wife. Still, as we go deep into the spring, it appears that most crises are settling down and we're able to get out from under a lot of the stuff we've been paying on for a while now, with the exception of our taxes. I don't know if I've mentioned it here in recent weeks (and right now, frankly, I'm too lazy to care/check if I have) but we owed a shitload of money in taxes this year...all because on my own W4s with our company, they had me marked down for two federal exemptions for no reason. That's not something that can be changed retroactively, and we didn't figure it out until we got our taxes ready this spring. I cannot tell you how absolutely batshit pissed I was, especially as getting a decent-sized refund would've let us pay down some credit cards and would've paid for the aforementioned new tires on my truck. The taxes are paid, thanks to having high-limit credit cards with 0% interest for eighteen months, but we're both very angry. I went in and changed my W4 to zero exemptions shortly after we found out what had happened, as if I didn't we would probably owe again for 2016. Fuck it, let 'em take out all the taxes they want now so when this time rolls back around next year, we don't have to worry about it.
The weeks pass by quickly, and the weekends even faster. Soon, we will be coming up on our second wedding anniversary at the end of May, and both myself and the wife have requested the day off of work so that we can get an extended weekend. We do not have any plans, at least not yet -- the parents asked us last night if we were going anywhere or doing anything. We had to laugh at that to a certain extent, as it's so rare for us to ever go anywhere or do anything we don't have to or that isn't required by law. Shit, there are at least five large boxes and ten giveaway clothing bags for Goodwill (or a similar charity) which have been sitting here in the spare room with me since we moved into this apartment in 2014. The wife's wedding dress is in the exact same spot she left it when she took it off on our wedding night.
I've already purchased and gifted the wife's anniversary present to her -- I bought her the high-end expensive replica of Hermione Granger's wand. I had asked previously and she claimed Hermione was her favorite character in the entire Harry Potter series, so okay. I have several favorite characters, most of whom die quickly (some offscreen, even -- what a tragedy). However, the wand that called out to me was the wand of Narcissa Malfoy, Draco's mother.
I ordered that wand for myself, and during play-fighting with the wife and her wand, it broke in half. Very quickly. Fuck. I ended up getting Snape's wand, so both of us have wands now. The object is to take photos with them for our anniversary. Because we're nerds like that.
The broken wand? Added to the pile of clutter.
"We're cleaning on Saturday," the wife told me matter-of-factly when she came into the spare room a few moments ago on her way to bed.
To be fair, the house is a mess -- it needs a good vacuuming and steam-cleaning of the carpets, a good dusting, a good scrubdown of the bathroom and kitchen, including the floors -- etc etc. I have Mondays off, so a good chunk of the day every Monday is me doing upkeep on the house as much as I can reasonably do based on time and energy levels -- reorganizing the kitchen, doing all the laundry and putting it away, washing the bedsheets, cleaning the cat box and sweeping out the cat room, etc. That's hard to do if I'm not feeling well or if I sleep late, however. And some Mondays I don't even have the energy to mess with a lot at all -- or I want to decompress and play video games and listen to podcasts and let the entire world just go away for a bit. Because, of course, I have those weeks too.
Will keep you posted on any happenings, of course. However, now's the time for me to go to bed as I've been up way too late as it is.
Monday, April 18, 2016
The Last of the Cigarettes, Part II
At 5:15 PM tonight (central time), I will have gone a full seven days without a cigarette.
It's hard sometimes; this weekend was especially difficult as the craving for cigarettes was almost too much to bear at times. I'm not sure if I can describe why, really, aside from the fact that on weekends, when I'm off work, I have the time and ability to smoke if I want to, when during the normal week I do not. During the work week, I'd have to get up from my desk, go downstairs, go outside, smoke, come inside, wash my hands, go back to work. Or, conversely, I could only go outside on my deck and smoke when I was at home, could only do it in my own private time and I would have to meter out that time for it -- only when I had the time or energy to do it, and only when it wasn't interrupting something else (like shower time, sleep time, etc).
Up until this week, I didn't realize how much of my actual day was taken up by me being outside with a cigarette in my hand or on my lips. It's a fair chunk of time, I realized, that I was basically locking myself outside to take part in this nasty habit. I don't have to worry about that with vaping, as I do that indoors anywhere I want, anytime, unless I'm at work or in a public place (like a store or restaurant). Sadly, we're not allowed to vape at our desks in the office. If we could, I'd get so much more work accomplished as I'd only have to get up to go to the bathroom or grab another cup of coffee from the break room.
In the mornings now, I make my coffee at home and sit in the living room with the cats, who usually look at me funny, with my vape mod in my hand. I vape as much as is necessary, then I get up, go get dressed, and go to work.
As for health or energy effects, I really notice no differences.
I don't notice any difference in my ability to breathe, or any real difference in my allergies. The wife says I don't cough nearly as much now, but I remind her that my cough wasn't so much from smoking, but from my allergies, and that I still cough occasionally on vape (especially if I take too large a hit or have the watts turned up too high on one of my mods).
I don't have any more or less energy. I don't sleep any better or worse. My libido is the same. My bowels are regular. I don't feel dehydrated or over-hydrated. For all intents and purposes, everything's pretty much the same.
Except my ability to smell -- which has definitely come back quite a bit, even in a week's time. I have noticed that. Smokers basically have an incredibly dulled sense of smell and taste. My taste is normal, but my sense of smell has indeed increased now that I'm off the cigarettes -- which is good, at least.
People have told me the first week is and will be the hardest of all, and while I understand that, the vast majority of the time I've felt...well, normal. I have had cravings from time to time, but vaping for a bit does tend to lessen or eliminate those. Sometimes the cravings are quite bad, quite strong, to the point where I pace back and forth and want to pull my hair out. But they do, eventually, go away. Keeping busy helps -- finding something to occupy my mind, even if it's playing a game on my phone for a few minutes or reading a news article -- will make it ease off somewhat.
"I can't promise I'll never smoke again," I told the wife. "I can't say that I'll never go to the store and pick up a pack of smokes when and if I want them."
I am correct in saying this; I can make no absolute promises that I'm not sure I can keep. In the short run -- I've only been a non-smoker for a week -- I can deal with it, stay off the cigarettes, compartmentalize and vape a lot more to make up for it, but in the long run? I don't know, I can't promise anything. I can only take it day by day, one week at a time. As the days go on, the cravings do get worse -- I won't lie. It's either going to come to the point where I can push through them and ignore them long enough to where they go away, or I can't.
On some level, I think I'm going into a psychological or physiological panic mode. I have smoked for so long that when I stop, even with vaping, everything inside me panics at full throttle. I hear those little voices inside my head (not schizophrenic ones, but more like the devil on my shoulder) telling me things like how long can you do this? or do you even know who you are without cigarettes? do you like that person? are you even the SAME person? And I honestly don't know how to answer those questions.
I know the answer to the last one, at least, if I don't have some sort of nicotine replacement to get me off the cigarettes, and the answer is an absolute no, I am not the same person.
I know the answer because the last time I had to quit smoking it was not because I wanted to, but because I had zero money to do so. I had just moved to Kansas, the ex had just entered grad school and I was jobless and unable to even get the local sub shop to hire me, much less able to get a job anywhere else, and I had $3 in my bank account when a pack of cigarettes at the time was about $4. My mind was foggy. I couldn't sleep well. I was having cold sweats off and on, and was almost constantly constipated. I was a terrible, evil person to be around at any time for any reason, and was very close to having an absolute psychotic break. When I finally was able to get a pack of cigarettes again after a few weeks, once the ex got her first paychecks and we could afford to go to the grocery store again, I smoked through three of them in rapid succession and cannot describe or put into words the sense of euphoria and bliss I felt, and all was well again -- I was, once more, myself, in the span of ten minutes or so. It was an immediate night and day difference.
That's the hold cigarettes have on me. I'm sure if you are or have ever been an addict for anything, you understand what I'm taking about.
I've been a smoker for all of my adult life, and this is the first time I've ever quit willingly and made the choice to do so. I mean, the vapes absolutely are the only things helping me to do it, yes, but that only goes so far -- the rest is willpower. The rest is me wanting to be done. And the funny thing about willpower is that I have a bunch of it when I have my vape in front of me and accessible, but have absolutely none of it when I don't or when the vape doesn't seem to be working the way it needs to.
For as much as I do not care what people think of me in most situations, however, the same does not hold true when I'm trying to stay off the cigarettes. I have purposely not mentioned anything on my personal Facebook page about me quitting, nor will I make a big deal about it to anyone but close friends and family (namely, the wife and her parents, and very few others). This is because, in the case that I do fail, with the more people who know the more I will be judged and the more I'll have to admit to my shortcomings. I'm a Slytherin; we don't like admitting our shortcomings. Ever. And I do not take criticism of any sort well -- I never have. I don't want anyone to have expectations of me that I fail to live up to. I don't want people to look at me down their noses and think (or say) "oh, so he's not perfect, he is fallible." My choices, as well as my abilities or inabilities to complete my goals, are mine and mine alone -- I refuse to be judged poorly for them by anyone.
I will, of course, keep everyone updated on what happens and how I feel.
It's hard sometimes; this weekend was especially difficult as the craving for cigarettes was almost too much to bear at times. I'm not sure if I can describe why, really, aside from the fact that on weekends, when I'm off work, I have the time and ability to smoke if I want to, when during the normal week I do not. During the work week, I'd have to get up from my desk, go downstairs, go outside, smoke, come inside, wash my hands, go back to work. Or, conversely, I could only go outside on my deck and smoke when I was at home, could only do it in my own private time and I would have to meter out that time for it -- only when I had the time or energy to do it, and only when it wasn't interrupting something else (like shower time, sleep time, etc).
Up until this week, I didn't realize how much of my actual day was taken up by me being outside with a cigarette in my hand or on my lips. It's a fair chunk of time, I realized, that I was basically locking myself outside to take part in this nasty habit. I don't have to worry about that with vaping, as I do that indoors anywhere I want, anytime, unless I'm at work or in a public place (like a store or restaurant). Sadly, we're not allowed to vape at our desks in the office. If we could, I'd get so much more work accomplished as I'd only have to get up to go to the bathroom or grab another cup of coffee from the break room.
In the mornings now, I make my coffee at home and sit in the living room with the cats, who usually look at me funny, with my vape mod in my hand. I vape as much as is necessary, then I get up, go get dressed, and go to work.
As for health or energy effects, I really notice no differences.
I don't notice any difference in my ability to breathe, or any real difference in my allergies. The wife says I don't cough nearly as much now, but I remind her that my cough wasn't so much from smoking, but from my allergies, and that I still cough occasionally on vape (especially if I take too large a hit or have the watts turned up too high on one of my mods).
I don't have any more or less energy. I don't sleep any better or worse. My libido is the same. My bowels are regular. I don't feel dehydrated or over-hydrated. For all intents and purposes, everything's pretty much the same.
Except my ability to smell -- which has definitely come back quite a bit, even in a week's time. I have noticed that. Smokers basically have an incredibly dulled sense of smell and taste. My taste is normal, but my sense of smell has indeed increased now that I'm off the cigarettes -- which is good, at least.
People have told me the first week is and will be the hardest of all, and while I understand that, the vast majority of the time I've felt...well, normal. I have had cravings from time to time, but vaping for a bit does tend to lessen or eliminate those. Sometimes the cravings are quite bad, quite strong, to the point where I pace back and forth and want to pull my hair out. But they do, eventually, go away. Keeping busy helps -- finding something to occupy my mind, even if it's playing a game on my phone for a few minutes or reading a news article -- will make it ease off somewhat.
"I can't promise I'll never smoke again," I told the wife. "I can't say that I'll never go to the store and pick up a pack of smokes when and if I want them."
I am correct in saying this; I can make no absolute promises that I'm not sure I can keep. In the short run -- I've only been a non-smoker for a week -- I can deal with it, stay off the cigarettes, compartmentalize and vape a lot more to make up for it, but in the long run? I don't know, I can't promise anything. I can only take it day by day, one week at a time. As the days go on, the cravings do get worse -- I won't lie. It's either going to come to the point where I can push through them and ignore them long enough to where they go away, or I can't.
On some level, I think I'm going into a psychological or physiological panic mode. I have smoked for so long that when I stop, even with vaping, everything inside me panics at full throttle. I hear those little voices inside my head (not schizophrenic ones, but more like the devil on my shoulder) telling me things like how long can you do this? or do you even know who you are without cigarettes? do you like that person? are you even the SAME person? And I honestly don't know how to answer those questions.
I know the answer to the last one, at least, if I don't have some sort of nicotine replacement to get me off the cigarettes, and the answer is an absolute no, I am not the same person.
I know the answer because the last time I had to quit smoking it was not because I wanted to, but because I had zero money to do so. I had just moved to Kansas, the ex had just entered grad school and I was jobless and unable to even get the local sub shop to hire me, much less able to get a job anywhere else, and I had $3 in my bank account when a pack of cigarettes at the time was about $4. My mind was foggy. I couldn't sleep well. I was having cold sweats off and on, and was almost constantly constipated. I was a terrible, evil person to be around at any time for any reason, and was very close to having an absolute psychotic break. When I finally was able to get a pack of cigarettes again after a few weeks, once the ex got her first paychecks and we could afford to go to the grocery store again, I smoked through three of them in rapid succession and cannot describe or put into words the sense of euphoria and bliss I felt, and all was well again -- I was, once more, myself, in the span of ten minutes or so. It was an immediate night and day difference.
That's the hold cigarettes have on me. I'm sure if you are or have ever been an addict for anything, you understand what I'm taking about.
I've been a smoker for all of my adult life, and this is the first time I've ever quit willingly and made the choice to do so. I mean, the vapes absolutely are the only things helping me to do it, yes, but that only goes so far -- the rest is willpower. The rest is me wanting to be done. And the funny thing about willpower is that I have a bunch of it when I have my vape in front of me and accessible, but have absolutely none of it when I don't or when the vape doesn't seem to be working the way it needs to.
For as much as I do not care what people think of me in most situations, however, the same does not hold true when I'm trying to stay off the cigarettes. I have purposely not mentioned anything on my personal Facebook page about me quitting, nor will I make a big deal about it to anyone but close friends and family (namely, the wife and her parents, and very few others). This is because, in the case that I do fail, with the more people who know the more I will be judged and the more I'll have to admit to my shortcomings. I'm a Slytherin; we don't like admitting our shortcomings. Ever. And I do not take criticism of any sort well -- I never have. I don't want anyone to have expectations of me that I fail to live up to. I don't want people to look at me down their noses and think (or say) "oh, so he's not perfect, he is fallible." My choices, as well as my abilities or inabilities to complete my goals, are mine and mine alone -- I refuse to be judged poorly for them by anyone.
I will, of course, keep everyone updated on what happens and how I feel.
Monday, April 11, 2016
The Last of the Cigarettes
I mentioned a few posts back in my blog that I am vaping now. I am, as they say, one of those vaper people.
I am okay with being identified this way.
I smoked cigarettes for over fifteen years. I am sure, over that time, that they contributed to a decline in overall general health for me. I was a pack a day smoker, or more, for all of that time -- sometimes, in college, it was two packs a day.
As an early birthday present in December, the wife said she would be more than happy to help me quit by switching over to vaping/vape devices. She told me to pick out a kit, pick out any accessories I would need, and she would get it for me -- order it online right then and there -- as she wanted me to get something I wanted and to be happy.
Mind you, I'd tried vaping before, about three years prior -- I'd had an electronic cigarette, one of the little tobacco-flavored ones, which was fine -- but it was not a cigarette. I used it off and on, and then used some of the disposable ones (which would run out of charge/flavor juice inside too quickly and go dead), before getting a little eGo battery starter kit with some high-nicotine (18mg) "Turkish Tobacco" juice. I liked it, but it made me cough and hurt my throat. I went down to 9mg nicotine a short while later, got a fruity-flavored juice in a new tank, and it did the same thing -- plus the tank leaked everywhere no matter what I did. I gave up on it and went back to cigarettes full-time as it had made me somewhat frustrated.
In the interim between that time and four months ago when I dove back in, the vaping market -- no, the vaping culture -- exploded. Different companies began producing different juices, setups (known as "mods") and tanks -- all of which was foreign to me. I saw friends and co-workers carrying around large mechanical mods made of stainless steel and/or copper, mods that looked like lightsabers or sonic screwdrivers. I saw them taking deep breaths from their devices and watched them exhale full-on clouds from their lungs, enough to fill rooms and fog up car interiors or windows. I was fascinated, if only in a morbid-curiosity sort of way -- if these people could get off the cigarettes with these electronic things, why couldn't I?
So I consulted with these friends and coworkers for advice -- what's the best juice? what's the best "bang for the buck" when it comes to mods? how much nicotine should I use? what is your favorite tank and/or setup, and why? I pooled as much information together as I could about all sorts of things I had previously no clue about. I asked for suggestions, for websites to purchase materials from, for reviews, for every bit of input I could get.
Finally, after a few weeks, I just let the wife pick out a mod kit for me after giving her some basic requirements of what I thought I would need. She picked an Eleaf 60w iStick, a good basic device that wasn't too weak and wasn't too powerful, and was a good base starter kit. She also made sure I had two rechargeable batteries (the mod only needed one, so I'd have a spare), a wall charger for said batteries, and a battery case. Once it all arrived, I went to one of the local vape shops here in town and purchased a bottle of The Milkman, a favorite flavor of one of my coworkers, and went to town on it. Proverbially, of course.
I liked it. I liked it a lot. But, at the time, it was simply a novelty more than anything else -- a "hey guys, look at me, being one of the cool kids now" and, I definitely want to stress, it was not a cigarette. It helped, and helped a lot, but it was definitely not a cigarette.
Still, I was able to cut back on my smoking by a decent amount. I vaped through the first bottle of The Milkman pretty quickly, and immediately ordered two more bottles from VaporDNA, who shipped them out quickly and painlessly. I acquired a few more bottles of different flavors from my friends, and found Vape Wild, the site I now use for all of my juice purchases, to sell great juices in large quantities for unbelievable prices. I began ordering sample packs and larger bottles of single flavors almost in bulk, spending $35-50 every two weeks or so on all of the juices I wanted to taste and to try.
And then, shortly after Christmas, the worst thing ever happened to a new vaper: my mod stopped working. I switched out tanks to my backup tank, still nothing. I switched coils in both tanks, fiddled with the connectors, even used stabilizer O-rings to make sure everything was connected properly -- still nothing. The mod would fire intermittently and give me a breath of vapor, and then it would either fry the coil or would stop working completely, giving me "atomizer short" errors.
I was beyond frustrated. I felt like I had wasted so much time, effort, and money on not only the mod itself, but all of the juices, tanks, and accessories I had purchased. It was also the beginning of January, and it was cold outside -- and while I could vape in the house, I could not smoke in the house. While I was already smoking a lot less than before, I was still smoking -- trying to wean myself off with the vape more than anything else.
After a day or so of frustration, I took stock of everything I had. I'd spent about $200 on juices and another $50 on tanks (not to mention extra coils for the tanks as well) and I wasn't about to give up now. I'd just gotten an increase on my credit card limit for one of my best cards, and now was as good a time as any to use it. With the mindset of if this gets me off the cigarettes, it will save me money as well as probably my life in the long run, I bit the bullet and logged on to purchase not one, but two more new mods -- I wasn't going to go without having a "backup" again. Those mods were the Smok Micro One 80w and the Eleaf iStick 40w, the latter being the smaller and slightly less powerful version of the mod that had died on me. Both had internal batteries that charged via USB as well, so I didn't have to worry about carrying spare batteries or making sure I had one charged and ready to go at all times.
Fast forward to today, and I use both mods on a daily basis -- sometimes it's hard to choose which one I want to take to work with me, or which one I want to carry when I go out to run errands and/or do shopping or dinner with the parents.
My collection grew, as well -- as much as it was a means to an end, it became a full-on hobby, a minor obsession. Right now I have three full time mods I switch between (the third being a red Kangertech KBOX 120, which I'm using right now), a backup 40w iStick that is still sealed in its box, a Kangertech KBOX Mini 60w Platinum which I also keep as a second backup, and today I ordered a Smok Stick One Plus kit simply because it bills itself as a "smart" mechanical mod. Right now I have close to ten different tanks -- several multiples, some small, some large, and two more still coming to me in the mail even now -- all with enough extra coils to last me for months on end. And, not to be outdone, I have probably fifty bottles of juice hanging on the wall in the living room in a spice rack specifically purchased and mounted to keep the juice in.
The wife, of course, finds all of this quaint and exceedingly amusing. She'll watch me order a bunch of juice only to see me give half of it away to friends over the course of the weeks/months following (I've now found my 5-7 go-to flavors, and buy it in bulk -- but I do go for the "special" or "limited edition" juices from time to time, depending on what they are).
For the record, my go-to juices are Circus Bear (strawberry/banana custard), Wrecking Ball (banana cream), Fruit Hoops (like a similarly-named cereal), Strawberries & Cream (no flavor explanation necessary here), Murica (bomb pop), Bombshell Batter (blueberry/lemon pound cake), Butterbeer (butterscotch cream soda) and Smurf Cake (blueberry cake-pie).
There are others, of course, but those are my staples. I like the coffee and nutty/toffee juices too, as well as a few menthol flavors, but not all the time and only in small amounts.
The wife will listen to me talk about different juices or mods or tanks or what-have-you for hours on end at times, all with a wry smile on her face -- she doesn't care that she doesn't know about everything I'm talking about (though I'm sure she's learned a lot), but she is happy to see me have a passion of sorts that I am vocal about, and is very proud of me that I've almost quit smoking. I've even helped several people at work get on the vaping train, including one Director and his wife, to help them get away from smoking. It's like I'm a pusher -- only the first taste is free, etc. In the short few months I've been really "into it," I've become a bit of an expert -- I've even joined a few groups on Facebook which I am fairly active in, all to help people out and give them advice. I've studied, I've done research, and it has, indeed, become a passion of mine.
That being said, however, is not the point of this post.
The point of this post is that I have not, unfortunately, been able to completely quit smoking.
As I mentioned above, vaping is many things, and it is very fun, therapeutic, and something I very much enjoy -- enjoy more than many other things in my life, in fact -- but it is not a cigarette.
For those of you who are current or former smokers, you know what I'm talking about. Whether you smoked five cigarettes a day or fifty, it is not a habit that can easily be broken no matter what you try to do to replace it or wean off of it. It is a dirty habit, a shameful one, and an (increasingly so) expensive one. I take no pride in the fact that I smoke, especially not when I'm still smoking after many months of being one of the biggest vaping advocates I know. I feel like a traitor, or at the very least, a hypocrite.
But it is hard. It is very hard to just quit, to switch from one habit to another, all with the goal of being done with everything completely at some point. Because, honestly, that is the goal here -- for all of the time and money I've put into the vaping thing, the overall goal is to be able to quit that as well after some time. I don't want to turn one habit into another, at least not forever.
That being said, I have gone from being a pack a day smoker down to four packs a week, then to two. Presently, I have five singular cigarettes left, and I want them to be the last cigarettes I ever purchase.
It's time; I want to be done with them. The goal was originally to be done with smoking completely by the beginning of summer, when it would be nice enough to sit out on the porch every morning before work and not freeze, drink a cup of coffee and hold my mod and not need a cigarette instead. But that goal got pushed up as I began to smoke less and less, and as I purchased more vapor accessories, flavors of juices, mods, and tanks. I've gone whole hog on the vaping thing at this point, and it's really something I enjoy -- I no longer have a true physical or psychological need for the cigarettes, it's just a habit. And it's a habit that finally, I can say I want to be completely rid of. The latest catalyst is the two aforementioned tanks that are on their way to me now via international mail -- they're tanks I've been looking forward to owning and using for months (the Smok TFV4), which I already know I'll love as I have the miniature version already.
Many friends have told me that the only way to stop smoking is to stop allowing myself to smoke -- I vape now, so just quit buying them. Quit buying the cigarettes, remove yourself from situations where you'd want to smoke, and make the resolve to be done.
That's really all it is at this point -- being steely in my resolve. I can't tell you how many times I've fantasized about waking up in the morning and not needing a cigarette, or have wanted go out somewhere and not have to check all of my pockets for my pack and my lighter beforehand. Smoking in my house in Kansas turned the walls of that place from white to brown; I can't imagine how much better my lungs will feel once they don't have to deal with that anymore.
Is it going to be hard, is it going to be rough going for those first few days or weeks? You bet. The juice I vape is 3mg nicotine; it's very low. Higher nicotine levels than that burn my throat or make me cough like crazy (especially in all of these new, high-tech sub-ohm vaping devices), but that's good -- it means that I've already done more than half the work for myself. Vaping that low means I've already cut myself off from a lot of nicotine.
I've gotten good support from my friends, the wife (of course) and the wife's family; my own parents seem sort of ambivalent or aloof about my goals here, though that's probably due to them not knowing a whole lot about anything I'm talking about when I mention vaping to them (they've mostly ignored it). As contact with my parents has become more and more sporadic since I got married, oh well. There's not a whole lot of talking or chatting between us anymore as I am usually so swamped with work and there's always something else to do around the house.
So that's where my life is at right now. Hopefully, in my next post I will be able to tell you how many days/weeks I've gone cigarette-free.
I am okay with being identified this way.
I smoked cigarettes for over fifteen years. I am sure, over that time, that they contributed to a decline in overall general health for me. I was a pack a day smoker, or more, for all of that time -- sometimes, in college, it was two packs a day.
As an early birthday present in December, the wife said she would be more than happy to help me quit by switching over to vaping/vape devices. She told me to pick out a kit, pick out any accessories I would need, and she would get it for me -- order it online right then and there -- as she wanted me to get something I wanted and to be happy.
Mind you, I'd tried vaping before, about three years prior -- I'd had an electronic cigarette, one of the little tobacco-flavored ones, which was fine -- but it was not a cigarette. I used it off and on, and then used some of the disposable ones (which would run out of charge/flavor juice inside too quickly and go dead), before getting a little eGo battery starter kit with some high-nicotine (18mg) "Turkish Tobacco" juice. I liked it, but it made me cough and hurt my throat. I went down to 9mg nicotine a short while later, got a fruity-flavored juice in a new tank, and it did the same thing -- plus the tank leaked everywhere no matter what I did. I gave up on it and went back to cigarettes full-time as it had made me somewhat frustrated.
In the interim between that time and four months ago when I dove back in, the vaping market -- no, the vaping culture -- exploded. Different companies began producing different juices, setups (known as "mods") and tanks -- all of which was foreign to me. I saw friends and co-workers carrying around large mechanical mods made of stainless steel and/or copper, mods that looked like lightsabers or sonic screwdrivers. I saw them taking deep breaths from their devices and watched them exhale full-on clouds from their lungs, enough to fill rooms and fog up car interiors or windows. I was fascinated, if only in a morbid-curiosity sort of way -- if these people could get off the cigarettes with these electronic things, why couldn't I?
So I consulted with these friends and coworkers for advice -- what's the best juice? what's the best "bang for the buck" when it comes to mods? how much nicotine should I use? what is your favorite tank and/or setup, and why? I pooled as much information together as I could about all sorts of things I had previously no clue about. I asked for suggestions, for websites to purchase materials from, for reviews, for every bit of input I could get.
Finally, after a few weeks, I just let the wife pick out a mod kit for me after giving her some basic requirements of what I thought I would need. She picked an Eleaf 60w iStick, a good basic device that wasn't too weak and wasn't too powerful, and was a good base starter kit. She also made sure I had two rechargeable batteries (the mod only needed one, so I'd have a spare), a wall charger for said batteries, and a battery case. Once it all arrived, I went to one of the local vape shops here in town and purchased a bottle of The Milkman, a favorite flavor of one of my coworkers, and went to town on it. Proverbially, of course.
I liked it. I liked it a lot. But, at the time, it was simply a novelty more than anything else -- a "hey guys, look at me, being one of the cool kids now" and, I definitely want to stress, it was not a cigarette. It helped, and helped a lot, but it was definitely not a cigarette.
Still, I was able to cut back on my smoking by a decent amount. I vaped through the first bottle of The Milkman pretty quickly, and immediately ordered two more bottles from VaporDNA, who shipped them out quickly and painlessly. I acquired a few more bottles of different flavors from my friends, and found Vape Wild, the site I now use for all of my juice purchases, to sell great juices in large quantities for unbelievable prices. I began ordering sample packs and larger bottles of single flavors almost in bulk, spending $35-50 every two weeks or so on all of the juices I wanted to taste and to try.
And then, shortly after Christmas, the worst thing ever happened to a new vaper: my mod stopped working. I switched out tanks to my backup tank, still nothing. I switched coils in both tanks, fiddled with the connectors, even used stabilizer O-rings to make sure everything was connected properly -- still nothing. The mod would fire intermittently and give me a breath of vapor, and then it would either fry the coil or would stop working completely, giving me "atomizer short" errors.
I was beyond frustrated. I felt like I had wasted so much time, effort, and money on not only the mod itself, but all of the juices, tanks, and accessories I had purchased. It was also the beginning of January, and it was cold outside -- and while I could vape in the house, I could not smoke in the house. While I was already smoking a lot less than before, I was still smoking -- trying to wean myself off with the vape more than anything else.
After a day or so of frustration, I took stock of everything I had. I'd spent about $200 on juices and another $50 on tanks (not to mention extra coils for the tanks as well) and I wasn't about to give up now. I'd just gotten an increase on my credit card limit for one of my best cards, and now was as good a time as any to use it. With the mindset of if this gets me off the cigarettes, it will save me money as well as probably my life in the long run, I bit the bullet and logged on to purchase not one, but two more new mods -- I wasn't going to go without having a "backup" again. Those mods were the Smok Micro One 80w and the Eleaf iStick 40w, the latter being the smaller and slightly less powerful version of the mod that had died on me. Both had internal batteries that charged via USB as well, so I didn't have to worry about carrying spare batteries or making sure I had one charged and ready to go at all times.
Fast forward to today, and I use both mods on a daily basis -- sometimes it's hard to choose which one I want to take to work with me, or which one I want to carry when I go out to run errands and/or do shopping or dinner with the parents.
My collection grew, as well -- as much as it was a means to an end, it became a full-on hobby, a minor obsession. Right now I have three full time mods I switch between (the third being a red Kangertech KBOX 120, which I'm using right now), a backup 40w iStick that is still sealed in its box, a Kangertech KBOX Mini 60w Platinum which I also keep as a second backup, and today I ordered a Smok Stick One Plus kit simply because it bills itself as a "smart" mechanical mod. Right now I have close to ten different tanks -- several multiples, some small, some large, and two more still coming to me in the mail even now -- all with enough extra coils to last me for months on end. And, not to be outdone, I have probably fifty bottles of juice hanging on the wall in the living room in a spice rack specifically purchased and mounted to keep the juice in.
The wife, of course, finds all of this quaint and exceedingly amusing. She'll watch me order a bunch of juice only to see me give half of it away to friends over the course of the weeks/months following (I've now found my 5-7 go-to flavors, and buy it in bulk -- but I do go for the "special" or "limited edition" juices from time to time, depending on what they are).
For the record, my go-to juices are Circus Bear (strawberry/banana custard), Wrecking Ball (banana cream), Fruit Hoops (like a similarly-named cereal), Strawberries & Cream (no flavor explanation necessary here), Murica (bomb pop), Bombshell Batter (blueberry/lemon pound cake), Butterbeer (butterscotch cream soda) and Smurf Cake (blueberry cake-pie).
There are others, of course, but those are my staples. I like the coffee and nutty/toffee juices too, as well as a few menthol flavors, but not all the time and only in small amounts.
The wife will listen to me talk about different juices or mods or tanks or what-have-you for hours on end at times, all with a wry smile on her face -- she doesn't care that she doesn't know about everything I'm talking about (though I'm sure she's learned a lot), but she is happy to see me have a passion of sorts that I am vocal about, and is very proud of me that I've almost quit smoking. I've even helped several people at work get on the vaping train, including one Director and his wife, to help them get away from smoking. It's like I'm a pusher -- only the first taste is free, etc. In the short few months I've been really "into it," I've become a bit of an expert -- I've even joined a few groups on Facebook which I am fairly active in, all to help people out and give them advice. I've studied, I've done research, and it has, indeed, become a passion of mine.
That being said, however, is not the point of this post.
The point of this post is that I have not, unfortunately, been able to completely quit smoking.
As I mentioned above, vaping is many things, and it is very fun, therapeutic, and something I very much enjoy -- enjoy more than many other things in my life, in fact -- but it is not a cigarette.
For those of you who are current or former smokers, you know what I'm talking about. Whether you smoked five cigarettes a day or fifty, it is not a habit that can easily be broken no matter what you try to do to replace it or wean off of it. It is a dirty habit, a shameful one, and an (increasingly so) expensive one. I take no pride in the fact that I smoke, especially not when I'm still smoking after many months of being one of the biggest vaping advocates I know. I feel like a traitor, or at the very least, a hypocrite.
But it is hard. It is very hard to just quit, to switch from one habit to another, all with the goal of being done with everything completely at some point. Because, honestly, that is the goal here -- for all of the time and money I've put into the vaping thing, the overall goal is to be able to quit that as well after some time. I don't want to turn one habit into another, at least not forever.
That being said, I have gone from being a pack a day smoker down to four packs a week, then to two. Presently, I have five singular cigarettes left, and I want them to be the last cigarettes I ever purchase.
It's time; I want to be done with them. The goal was originally to be done with smoking completely by the beginning of summer, when it would be nice enough to sit out on the porch every morning before work and not freeze, drink a cup of coffee and hold my mod and not need a cigarette instead. But that goal got pushed up as I began to smoke less and less, and as I purchased more vapor accessories, flavors of juices, mods, and tanks. I've gone whole hog on the vaping thing at this point, and it's really something I enjoy -- I no longer have a true physical or psychological need for the cigarettes, it's just a habit. And it's a habit that finally, I can say I want to be completely rid of. The latest catalyst is the two aforementioned tanks that are on their way to me now via international mail -- they're tanks I've been looking forward to owning and using for months (the Smok TFV4), which I already know I'll love as I have the miniature version already.
Many friends have told me that the only way to stop smoking is to stop allowing myself to smoke -- I vape now, so just quit buying them. Quit buying the cigarettes, remove yourself from situations where you'd want to smoke, and make the resolve to be done.
That's really all it is at this point -- being steely in my resolve. I can't tell you how many times I've fantasized about waking up in the morning and not needing a cigarette, or have wanted go out somewhere and not have to check all of my pockets for my pack and my lighter beforehand. Smoking in my house in Kansas turned the walls of that place from white to brown; I can't imagine how much better my lungs will feel once they don't have to deal with that anymore.
Is it going to be hard, is it going to be rough going for those first few days or weeks? You bet. The juice I vape is 3mg nicotine; it's very low. Higher nicotine levels than that burn my throat or make me cough like crazy (especially in all of these new, high-tech sub-ohm vaping devices), but that's good -- it means that I've already done more than half the work for myself. Vaping that low means I've already cut myself off from a lot of nicotine.
I've gotten good support from my friends, the wife (of course) and the wife's family; my own parents seem sort of ambivalent or aloof about my goals here, though that's probably due to them not knowing a whole lot about anything I'm talking about when I mention vaping to them (they've mostly ignored it). As contact with my parents has become more and more sporadic since I got married, oh well. There's not a whole lot of talking or chatting between us anymore as I am usually so swamped with work and there's always something else to do around the house.
So that's where my life is at right now. Hopefully, in my next post I will be able to tell you how many days/weeks I've gone cigarette-free.
Monday, April 4, 2016
#slytherinpride
I am a Slytherin. I am a proud Slytherin. I absolutely embody many traits of Slytherins (though I embody several traits of the other houses as well).
I'm sure this surprises some of you, and for others, you are probably thinking "yeah, that's about right." When Pottermore got its makeover, it was roughly around the time the wife and I purchased the Blu-rays of all eight Harry Potter movies -- none of which I'd seen in years (and several which I'd never seen all the way through from beginning to end), and I took the sorting hat test.
I thought for years that I would be, as one of my friends likes to call herself as well, a "textbook Ravenclaw." I have many House Ravenclaw traits, including the quest for knowledge and the dedication/desire to be the smartest and the best.
But I have arrogance, I have ego, I have a desire for power and control of all things possible. I am always trying to climb the proverbial ladder, in almost all situations. I am not evil (which many of you can attest to), but I do have an evil side, yes, a mean streak that will occasionally come out. I have little patience or understanding for incompetence or failure, and even less patience for incompetence or failure in someone I know to be competent and successful. I am not in blatant disregard of the rules -- in fact, I tend to follow the rules as much as I can, and expect others to do the same -- yet I can and will absolutely bend said rules as much as possible if in doing so I can gain an upper hand in any given situation, and cover my tracks behind me.
These aren't just things I've noticed in passing -- many of these personality traits are core parts of my personality, my soul, that make me who I am.
From the Pottermore Wiki page:
Slytherins are associated with cunning, ambition and a tendency to look after their own. Their Pottermore welcome letter describes Slytherin as the "coolest and edgiest house in the school." which most Slytherins can confirm. Slytherin has produced its share of Dark witches and wizards, but unlike the other houses, members are not afraid to admit it as one of the Slytherin traits is ambition and greatness. Its students are often feared by the other houses, but most Slytherins are actually very kind (unless you happen to get on their bad side for some reason).
Many view Slytherin as an evil house. According to the welcome letter, this is not necessarily true. It is true that some Slytherins have achieved greatness through evil deeds, but there are just as many if not more who have done great, non-evil things to achieve greatness.
Slytherins are always striving to be the best, something they have in common with Ravenclaws. However, Slytherins will never leave their own to be the best.
And, from the official Harry Potter Wiki:
Slytherins tend to be ambitious, shrewd, cunning, strong leaders, and achievement-oriented. They also have highly developed senses of self-preservation.[7] This means that Slytherins tend to hesitate before acting, so as to weigh all possible outcomes before deciding exactly what should be done.
Well then.
I knew almost as soon as I began the sorting hat test that it would place me into Slytherin -- the test isn't perfect by any means, but it is the one sanctioned by Rowling herself, so it's the one everyone should and does trust.
For the record, as I'm sure you're curious -- my wife is a Hufflepuff, as is her mother, one of her sisters, and several of our close friends. The sister and brother-in-law who gave us my truck are both Gryffindors. I know very few Ravenclaws -- true Ravenclaws, anyway -- and even fewer Slytherins. It sort of makes me the odd man out in our combined family as well, as I am the only Slytherin I know of in both my family as well as the wife's.
Well, let me take that back -- I'm fairly certain that if my mother took the test, she'd be a Slytherin. As well as at least one, if not both, of my brothers. I'm much less certain about either of them.
When I found out I was Slytherin, I went "whole hog" with it, as they say. I got us banners for the wall in our bedroom -- Slytherin on my side of the bed, Hufflepuff on the wife's. I own no fewer than three Slytherin shirts (with three more on the way to me in the mail now) and a Slytherin coffee mug. My Facebook is covered in Slytherin things, and my profile message on our work IM program is #slytherinpride, with my avatar photo the Slytherin crest.
The wife finds it all very amusing and nerdy, especially for a guy who's never read any of the books (well, I read about half of the first one about ten years ago). I have, however, seen the movies. I am disappointed with the way most Slytherins are portrayed and have had long discussions about this with my wife -- most of them are portrayed as one-dimensional characters, at least in the films. It's all "hey, we're Slytherins, let's be dicks because this story needs villains!" And I'm all like "no, just because the biggest dick in the wizarding world just happens to be the heir to Salazar Slytherin and he kills a whole bunch of people doesn't mean that all of us are fuckholes."
In my research to learn more about Slytherin House, I came across an interesting little quiz; these seventeen questions were written from the perspective of a Gryffindor as questions Gryffindors have for Slytherins. They came from this article, which was posted some time ago on Buzzfeed. As a Slytherin, I feel it is my duty to answer them.
1. How does it feel to be a part of the most loathed house at Hogwarts?
Oh, I don't know, how does it feel to be in a house full of cocky little pricks who think they're better than everyone else just because Harry Potter was one of you?
2. Do you ever secretly wish you were a Gryffindor?
Do you ever secretly wish Merlin was a Gryffindor? I bet you do.
3. Are you proud of the reputation your house has in the school?
Wouldn't you be?
4. Do you honestly believe the teachings of Salazar Slytherin? The whole pureblood thing?
No. Truthfully, I couldn't care less about it.
5. Could someone tell Millicent Bulstrode to stop spreading cat hairs everywhere?
Ugh, again with the cat hair. Stop whining.
6. Does it bother you that, like, 99 percent of the world believes Gryffindor is the best house?
I can't help that people are stupid. Plus, it keeps the attention off of us.
7.
Although not all Slytherins are terrible, do you ever feel weird
knowing that your crest was named after one of the most hated creatures
of all time?
What, the snake? There's nothing wrong with snakes. They eat rats, keep the pest population down, scare whiners...
8. Does it make you feel weird that Malfoy, your Quidditch seeker, had to buy his way on to the team?
Malfoy is a sniveling little snot who doesn't deserve to be a Slytherin anyhow, so I don't believe this question warrants a response.
9.
On a scale from one to 10, how mad were you all when Dumbledore awarded
Gryffindor the House Cup after the whole Philosopher’s Stone thing?
Do you mean on a scale of one to fucking horseshit? I think that's what you meant, right?
10. Do you feel a little weird knowing that some of your parents are Death Eaters?!
Meh, we all have our own goals and passions. Who are you to judge? Besides, while I don't approve of the Death Eaters' actions, you have to admit that the Dark Mark is badass.
11. Could one of you notify Blaise Zabini to drop by the Gryffindor common room one day? He’s cute.
Oh yeah, like he'd associate with any of you little pricks.
12. Does it suck that your common room is located in the dungeons?
You mean "under the Black Lake"? Because that's where the common room is, and let me tell you, that's pretty fucking awesome.
13. Are you guys ever astonished by how dim Crabbe and Goyle are?
I'm sure the other houses have some idiots in them too, you know.
14. Harry was definitely the winner of the duel between him and Malfoy in year two, right?
Who cares?
15. Do you all ever make friends with people in other Hogwarts houses?
Of course, but that's because I don't have prejudices against people just because a hat told them what part of the building they're going to sleep in for seven years.
16. Is it annoying that the most popular person who ever lived is a Gryffindor?
Popularity is vain and fleeting.
17. And finally, if you could be sorted again, would you ask the Sorting Hat to be a Gryffindor?
Psh, no.
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Musings During Snowpocalypse 2016
WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM MIDNIGHT TONIGHT TO 4 AM CST WEDNESDAY...
* TIMING... A MIXTURE OF RAIN AND SNOW IS LIKELY TO DEVELOP BY EARLY
THIS EVENING BEFORE CHANGING OVER TO ALL SNOW TONIGHT. SNOW... HEAVY AT
TIMES... WILL CONTINUE INTO TUESDAY BEFORE DIMINISHING LATE TUESDAY
EVENING.
* WINDS/VISIBILITY... NORTHERLY WINDS OF 15 TO 25 MPH WITH GUSTS TO 35
MPH ARE EXPECTED THROUGH MOST OF THE DAY ON TUESDAY. THE COMBINATION OF
HEAVY SNOW AND STRONG WINDS WILL RESULT IN NEAR BLIZZARD OR
INTERMITTENT BLIZZARD-LIKE CONDITIONS... WITH BLOWING AND DRIFTING SNOW
FOR A PROLONGED PERIOD OF TIME. EVEN THOUGH WINDS WILL DIMINISH SOMEWHAT
ON TUESDAY NIGHT... AREAS OF BLOWING AND DRIFTING SNOW WILL STILL BE
POSSIBLE.
* SNOW ACCUMULATIONS... STORM TOTAL SNOWFALL AMOUNTS UP TO 7 TO 11 INCHES ARE LIKELY... WITH LOCALLY HIGHER AMOUNTS POSSIBLE.
In case you've been hiding under a rock as of late, that's what's going on here right now. It's the first "big snow" of the winter. Yeah, we've had a few smaller snowstorms -- including eight inches over the course of about six hours on Christmas Eve -- but this one was actually predicted a full week in advance, and started getting some major media attention by the middle of last week.
Despite the totals of "7 to 11 inches" above, the Weather Channel's forecast for my area has it set for 3-5 tonight, 5-8 tomorrow, and another inch tomorrow night. For those of you counting, that's 9-14, not 7-11. Not a small storm by any means, but definitely not the worst I've ever seen (remember, I grew up on top of a mountain in West Virginia -- a foot of snow is nothing to me).
However, it is something to people here in Omaha. Omaha isn't used to getting really heavy snowstorms -- something this size happens once every 3-5 years or so. Most of the time it's just cold and windy, and while Omaha does get snow, it's usually no more than the 4-6 inch range. This storm -- which they've apparently named "Winter Storm Kayla" got enough attention to where The Weather Channel's Jim Cantore is in Omaha right now to do live reporting on it.
All of this being said...it hasn't started snowing yet. It's not starting until after midnight, apparently -- which is good as they originally thought it would start in the early evening hours.
In the buildup to this storm, I let the wife know that I was going to burn ten hours of my (precious) PTO, and put in for said time off for tomorrow -- on Friday. Even if the storm wasn't that bad, I reasoned, I still could use the "mental health day" that is not having to go to work on a terribly cold, nasty day. Three of the four days I worked last week, I was at least two people as I was filling in for someone else. Two of those days I was in charge of our entire team. Yeah, I need a mental health day, and one that I'm paid for. Now, as the storm approaches and it looks to be every bit as bad as they were calling for last week when they first started running projections, I am glad that I had the foresight to plan ahead.
To those ends I have charged my vape mods, I have prepared new coils and new juices for them so that I can just refill-and-keep-going, and the wife and I made a large shopping trip over the weekend to gather any and all supplies we'd need to be able to sit around the house and wait to be able to leave again.
Mind you, Daisy is a manager at work while I am not -- and she doesn't have the PTO I have (though hers will roll over sooner than mine will based on our hiring dates). She can, however, remotely access most of her important work stuff from home and from her phone, so there's that. It also doesn't help that the work we do is performed on a 24/7 basis, weather or any other factors be damned. Our office building will never close -- there is always at least two people in that building 24/7/365 no matter what. We don't work in a field that can just up and close down its offices for even a day. Doing so would be impossible at best, and would put people's lives in danger at worst. So, uh, we as well as all of our friends and colleagues who work with us are...sort of stuck, and stuck in a difficult place when something like this happens. Based on the timing of the storm, even, it looks like we'll be stuck here inside until at least Thursday morning, as the apartment complex won't be able to fully plow everything out and clear a path to the road out of our parking lot until probably Wednesday afternoon -- and that won't help in the least if the roads are still impassable.
So because of this newfound wealth of free time this week, I figured I'd drop in here and provide a few life updates.
My parents back east, of course, are still reeling from the major storm that just hit them about a week and a half ago -- a snowstorm that makes this one look like a dusting. When I talked to my mother on the phone last weekend, she let me know that there was almost four feet of snow on the ground at the house. I don't know when they were able to go back to work after that storm, but an email from my mother this morning said that it's all melting off now -- slowly, of course, and that they were out and about all weekend.
Daisy's parents here in town are fine, though both of them are sick right now with what might be the flu, so we stayed in this weekend and did not go over there for our customary, weekly Sunday dinner. Instead, we (and by "we" I mean "mostly the wife") spent the day cleaning, doing laundry, vacuuming, and cooking. She was able to go to work today, as the storm's not hit yet, but as I have Mondays off I was able to relax in the silence of our home, sitting in the chair with one or more cats lounging with me (at one point, I had all three of them) and playing the new Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game on my 2DS. As we'll be stuck inside for the next two days, more than likely, this sort of lounging will likely continue by both of us.
Don't get me wrong -- I did wash and dry two loads of laundry today, loaded and ran the dishwasher, showered and changed my clothes, and switched out my old tennis shoes with my new ones (which is sort of pointless until I can actually wear them outside, I know). I'll also clean the catbox before bed, on the off-chance that it's not so godafwul in the morning that the maintenance guys do pick up the garbage at 6AM as per the usual. I can almost guarantee that those hopes are in vain, but the box needs to be cleaned anyway.
I wish I could be in more of a creative mood. I feel almost like I am losing the ability to follow my dreams again, nine years after the last time that happened when I originally started this blog (yes, this thing has been running for almost nine years now). At that time I was working in a grocery store and living in a one-room efficiency apartment in Missouri with my ex-girlfriend and the cats, and I really hated my life and situation. Yes, I had enough money to pay the bills and be able to afford groceries, go out to eat once in a while, splurge on a few things on Amazon or at Target/Kmart/what-have-you...but it was a very unfulfilling existence. I used the term "treading water" a lot, because that's what it felt like I was doing. I wasn't doing anything meaningful with my life; I was just subsisting and surviving on what I had.
To a large extent, grad school was like that too -- though I had a clear goal and a purpose then as well as afterwards. I was teaching, I became a professor, I was financially responsible and independent, living alone and working to better myself and my station in life, which I was able to do -- I mean, I did find the love of my life, I got out of Kansas, moved to Omaha, got married, got an upgraded vehicle, health insurance, cut down my smoking drastically, stopped drinking almost completely.
However, for the past almost eighteen months or so, since I got the job I'm currently working...I feel like I've been in a holding pattern. Because I don't make enough at this job to pay them, I've suspended my student loans twice -- I have ten months to go before I have no choice but to start repaying them every month (probably until I die). While I have a very happy marriage with Daisy, I no longer feel creative or inspired to do...well, much of anything. I've stopped creating and have begun observing. Consuming, really. I used to be a professor, a well-respected, though bottom-rung professor. I used to have a drive to change people's lives for the better, both through my teaching and through my writing. I was the proverbial light that people were shown as an example to live up to. I didn't want to leave that sort of life -- I did it out of necessity as I couldn't pay my bills sustainably with that career, and nobody was offering me any opportunities at career advancement up the ladder -- promises were made, promises were broken, and nothing came of anything.
Many months ago I read through my graduate school thesis again -- a collection of poetry, an actual publishable book -- and wondered what happened to the man who wrote it. The poetry in it isn't great by any means, but it is good. I don't know if I could sit down today and write like that again. I mentioned this to Rae afterwards as well -- what happened to that man? Oh, that's right, [super-large multinational corporation I work for now] ate him, and he's no longer with us.
Even as I was re-reading the book, I was thinking to myself that with a fresh set of eyes almost three years later, and some choice edits here and there, I could get said book published as a chapbook or collection in its own right. But the second thought after that was the most depressing one -- that would be work, that would be time, that would take so much devotion that my heart just isn't in it anymore.
Even now my friends from graduate school tag me in posts on Facebook when a poet I liked back then gets something new and amazing published, or when a new journal opens up that wants submissions from people like us...and as sad as it is now, I ignore those posts and frown at them as the comment threads fill up my inbox -- I see them as nuisances. These people are seeing me as the person I used to be, the poet, the artiste. I am not that guy anymore, sadly. I'm not even a professor anymore. I am a corporate cog in a cube farm, forced to dress business casual ("no shirts without collars, and no tennis shoes except on Fridays!"), surrounded by other corporate cogs in other cubes -- some of whom have been there so long their eyes have glazed over and they carry the look of well-worn defeat with them everywhere they go. This isn't how their lives were supposed to go, this isn't where they wanted to be in their forties, fifties, and sixties. These are the people who steal coffee out of the break room because the job doesn't pay them enough to buy their own and because they want to be able to say they actually got something out of that place. These are the people who are intelligent in their own right, but missed a big opportunity here or there -- or five or six in a row -- and had to settle for lower-middle management for a baseline salary just to be able to survive. And sadly, I fit into the latter category. I'm not stealing coffee (mainly because the office coffee is terrible, and most people on my team are now bringing in their own cans of coffee from home) but everything else is pretty much true. I make a live-able wage, yet it would take almost an entire two weeks' paycheck to put new tires on my truck -- something that desperately needs to be done, yet we can't afford to do even on a two-income household with one of us making substantially more than the other because, well, bills.
I shouldn't complain; I did win a $700+ gift basket from this company with an iPad in it at Christmas, after all. Tax-free. And the job isn't a bad job. It is stressful at times and very detail-oriented, but I can do it and I do it very well -- not to toot my own horn here, but I am one of the most well-liked and well-respected individuals in the entire building, the one people come to when they have questions or need to know the process to complete a task, because I'm the one who knows it. And it's not just because my wife is a manager there, either -- most people who know me in a passing fashion had no clue my wife was actually my wife until I told them or until they eventually found out on their own (though both of us having the same last name should have given at least something away). I do take pride in what I do and at times I do genuinely feel like I am helping people. Many fellow employees look upon me as a mentor and/or a father figure of sorts, and I'm okay with that, because when I say something akin to "I got dis" I'm not lying. I have taught many new employees how to do their jobs and how to do them well -- I've actually been training two new ones for the past three weeks or so. I have been in the running for and have interviewed for management positions for at least three different segments/teams within the past several months. But, suffice it to say, I know how the game is played. Keep in mind that the wife worked there for over a year before I did, and it's not like I got special treatment from her once I started -- no, but she did teach me a good chunk of what I know. In turn, I dove in and taught her many things as well...once I learned the nuts and bolts of things, of course.
Right now, it's shortly before midnight. The storm has started, half-assedly, with light cold rain. Still, nobody can settle on a good range of snow totals. Accuweather has basically thrown up its hands and said "well, could be between 2 and 14 inches." Thanks.
As an aside, I should've gone for a meteorology degree. They had them where I went to grad school. I had several meteorology students in the classes I taught.
Anyway.
Despite my lack of time, creativity, or drive, everything is going somewhat well. I don't have a lot of worries most of the time -- at least none that aren't self-imposed, and for any of you who know me well, you'll realize that's a big deal. I have always been a worrier, mentally hand-wringing over basically anything that's out of my own control. I think in the last six months or so, I've been able to relax quite a bit. I couldn't really tell you why or how, honestly. And I still have the occasional nightmare that will wake me up in a cold sweat, and that nightmare more often than not is over something stupid. Sometimes it's about the cats. Sometimes it's me reliving some shitty part of junior high or high school. Sometimes it's about work. Etc.
For the most part I let things go pretty easily now. I think part of that is maturing and getting older; 33 is, in my mind, officially one's "mid-thirties." Part of it is that I'm so tired and have so many things on my proverbial plate at any given time that anything that's not crisis-worthy I wave off and go "meh" to. Mind you, not all things, but a lot of things that I used to flip out about or get so anxious that I couldn't eat or sleep has now been given the "meh" treatment. Probably some things I shouldn't go "meh" to as well, but I can't force myself to care about everything, folks. It's not that I've gone all zen or anything, but I've learned to let a lot of things (and, sometimes, people) go. Why waste the time or energy? Sit back, have a cup of coffee, take a few long pulls off the high-power vape mod, and give it the finger.
So that's about all I have to say right now, really. Time moves on, as time does, and so do I. I'll keep you updated with the important stuff, of course -- but right now I'm just riding things out to see how they go.
Monday, January 4, 2016
Answers for Questions
Hello, everyone.
I think I wrote the least here in 2015 compared to all other years this blog has been open and active. Truth be told, as I've said before...well, I've been pretty damn busy living life. Not the good kind of living life, mind you, the kind where people go off on vacations to faraway lands (though, uh, that did happen) but the day-to-day, taking care of business, eating, sleeping, showering, etc. As it's 2016 now, though, I figured I'd give a rundown of some answers to questions I'm sure many of you who aren't in contact with me very often have for me. So, that's what this blog post is about more than anything else.
1. Yes, the wife and I -- as well as the cats -- are perfectly fine. We're still living in Omaha, we're still in the same large apartment we've been in since shortly before our wedding, and both of us are in overall good health.
2. Everyone in the family is fine too, both on my side and hers.
3. I did procure the truck, as mentioned in my last post here, and it has become my daily driver with few, if any, significant issues. It runs well, it has a warm heater and ice cold air, and for a full-size V8 it does pretty well on gas mileage, especially as the only real driving I've done in it is from home to work and back. However, due to the holidays and time off during said holidays, I haven't driven it anywhere in close to two weeks. I'll be taking it out tomorrow morning to go to work, and that'll be the first time I've driven it since before Christmas.
4. Yes, I did say tomorrow morning. In October -- while we are still with the same company and doing roughly the same jobs -- the wife and I both moved to dayshift hours. I work four tens, Tuesday through Friday, and she works a normal Monday through Friday schedule. It's different, but not incredibly so. The best part about it is that I still have a day during the week to myself (it's Monday, now) and that during the latter half of the football season, I had Saturdays off. We're on different teams now, taking care of different issues than before, but the jobs themselves are largely the same for both of us.
5. Yes, we have seen Star Wars. We went last weekend. Best movie I saw all year, and that's all I'll say about it as I'm not going to be one of those fucks who spoils plot points and gives away details.
6. No, the wife and I do not have any children yet, nor are we currently expecting any.
7. If that changes, however, we'll probably have to trade up my truck for an SUV or a van. I hate vans, so....
8. Over the holidays, the wife (and most of her family) were knocked flat on their proverbial asses by some godawful almost-flu sickness. I say "almost-flu" because the wife went to the doctor (after being sick for nine days straight and getting progressively worse almost by the day) and they gave her a flu test -- which told her she didn't have the flu. Dad and I remained mostly unaffected, though shortly before the new year I got a pretty evil (though not severe) head/chest cold that wasn't pleasant -- one that I'm still recovering from now, slowly. I am mostly okay now, and Daisy has mostly recovered from her own sickness -- but today is the first full day of work she's been able to do since the 22nd of December or so.
9. Daisy has purchased a high-end Nikon camera and is attempting to start a photography business as a second job. She took high-res photos for our office Christmas party and has now done headshots and the like for several friends as well in order to help build a portfolio. One or two weddings a month (or something along those lines) at reasonable rates would help us greatly out of the whole living paycheck-to-paycheck thing. As my lovely wife has a really good photographic eye, I am sure she could make it a full-time profession if she so chose -- and that would eliminate a lot of stress from her daily life.
10. I was able to get my student loans postponed for another year -- the last year I'll be able to do so. This means that me, Daisy, or both of us will have to get better jobs by December 2016 or that whole "paycheck-to-paycheck" thing will very quickly become unsustainable.
11. I am delighted to say that I am slowly weaning myself off cigarettes and have moved on to vaping. Yes, I do still smoke -- but I have cut down on the amount of cigarettes I smoke per day/week/etc drastically, to the point where a pack will now last me about three days instead of one. The wife bought me a 60w mod for an early birthday present, which I used for close to a month before it started shorting out on me and finally stopped working almost completely. I have since purchased two other mods (one 40w, one 80w), two more tanks, and close to twenty different types of e-juice, and can confidently say that this is probably what will get me to quit smoking completely -- if anything will. And, as a bonus, I can vape inside, instead of needing to go out into the cold to get my fix. Unless I'm at work, of course, where inside vaping is still prohibited. As I'm not an asshole, I don't vape inside in public places either (like the grocery store or post office or what-have-you). I do it in the car, though. It doesn't bother Daisy, and because I vape mostly vanilla, caramel, or coffee-based juices, the resulting vapor smells wonderful most of the time.
That's about all that's going on that I can talk about in relatively short little updates.
Christmas went well with the family, as well as could be expected with both Daisy and her mother very sick with whatever it was they had (Mama is still sick now, though she's slowly getting better). Daisy's sister and our brother-in-law, the man who performed our wedding ceremony, were in town from Denver with their three boys, and we had a nice family Christmas. I got Daisy many things, including several games for her Wii -- which we set up in the living room a few months ago -- and some clothing and socks she needed. Daisy, in turn, got me the one thing I've been wanting for several years -- an inexpensive record player, upon which I spun two of my favorite records this morning -- ABBA's Gold Collection.
Don't you judge me.
I'll be getting other records soon as well, once I can afford them and am not worried about balancing our checkbook and getting the bills paid on time and the like. She also got me Sgt. Pepper's and the Ghostbusters soundtrack, both of which I had specifically requested.
She got me many other things as well, including Darth Vader's lightsaber (the really expensive, adult-collector Black Series one) for my birthday, as well as a few sweaters, a new calendar, a mug-and-brush shaving kit (the one I've been using has the bristles falling out of the brush as I've used it for close to ten years now) and some games for both the Wii and my PC.
The time since Christmas has been spent around the house as much as possible with both of us attempting to recover from our respective sicknesses. I've had a sinus headache for most of the day today as my immune system is still trying to clear out the onslaught of neon-green mucus indicative of a sinus infection, and the wife has been immersing herself both in New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Mario Kart Wii, which we each got one another for Christmas while she's been trying to feel better. We've visited with the parents a few times, we've gone grocery shopping twice, and we did go see Star Wars last weekend -- but aside from that we've barely left the house. I had to work two days last week leading up to the New Year, but starting tomorrow I'm back on the normal grind as always, a grind that (as I mentioned previously above) the wife started back on today. Now that the holidays are over and we're into January, it tends to be a rather depressing and long ongoing time of the year in our job(s) as there are no paid holidays coming up for anything (I'm pretty sure MLK Jr. Day is business as usual for us) and it's almost constantly cold and snowy -- we got a big snowstorm of 8+ inches on the morning of Christmas Eve, and another 4 or so inches a week ago today. I hate the winter, I hate the cold, and I hate the snow, so forcing myself to go out in it every day before it's fully light outside and to return home when it's been fully dark outside for close to two hours is, on many levels, really sad and depressing. But that's life, you know? I won't work this job forever, and neither will Daisy.
That's about all that's going on right now. I've covered most of the pertinent things. But I will say that it does feel good to write here again. It's like coming back home.
I think I wrote the least here in 2015 compared to all other years this blog has been open and active. Truth be told, as I've said before...well, I've been pretty damn busy living life. Not the good kind of living life, mind you, the kind where people go off on vacations to faraway lands (though, uh, that did happen) but the day-to-day, taking care of business, eating, sleeping, showering, etc. As it's 2016 now, though, I figured I'd give a rundown of some answers to questions I'm sure many of you who aren't in contact with me very often have for me. So, that's what this blog post is about more than anything else.
1. Yes, the wife and I -- as well as the cats -- are perfectly fine. We're still living in Omaha, we're still in the same large apartment we've been in since shortly before our wedding, and both of us are in overall good health.
2. Everyone in the family is fine too, both on my side and hers.
3. I did procure the truck, as mentioned in my last post here, and it has become my daily driver with few, if any, significant issues. It runs well, it has a warm heater and ice cold air, and for a full-size V8 it does pretty well on gas mileage, especially as the only real driving I've done in it is from home to work and back. However, due to the holidays and time off during said holidays, I haven't driven it anywhere in close to two weeks. I'll be taking it out tomorrow morning to go to work, and that'll be the first time I've driven it since before Christmas.
4. Yes, I did say tomorrow morning. In October -- while we are still with the same company and doing roughly the same jobs -- the wife and I both moved to dayshift hours. I work four tens, Tuesday through Friday, and she works a normal Monday through Friday schedule. It's different, but not incredibly so. The best part about it is that I still have a day during the week to myself (it's Monday, now) and that during the latter half of the football season, I had Saturdays off. We're on different teams now, taking care of different issues than before, but the jobs themselves are largely the same for both of us.
5. Yes, we have seen Star Wars. We went last weekend. Best movie I saw all year, and that's all I'll say about it as I'm not going to be one of those fucks who spoils plot points and gives away details.
6. No, the wife and I do not have any children yet, nor are we currently expecting any.
7. If that changes, however, we'll probably have to trade up my truck for an SUV or a van. I hate vans, so....
8. Over the holidays, the wife (and most of her family) were knocked flat on their proverbial asses by some godawful almost-flu sickness. I say "almost-flu" because the wife went to the doctor (after being sick for nine days straight and getting progressively worse almost by the day) and they gave her a flu test -- which told her she didn't have the flu. Dad and I remained mostly unaffected, though shortly before the new year I got a pretty evil (though not severe) head/chest cold that wasn't pleasant -- one that I'm still recovering from now, slowly. I am mostly okay now, and Daisy has mostly recovered from her own sickness -- but today is the first full day of work she's been able to do since the 22nd of December or so.
9. Daisy has purchased a high-end Nikon camera and is attempting to start a photography business as a second job. She took high-res photos for our office Christmas party and has now done headshots and the like for several friends as well in order to help build a portfolio. One or two weddings a month (or something along those lines) at reasonable rates would help us greatly out of the whole living paycheck-to-paycheck thing. As my lovely wife has a really good photographic eye, I am sure she could make it a full-time profession if she so chose -- and that would eliminate a lot of stress from her daily life.
10. I was able to get my student loans postponed for another year -- the last year I'll be able to do so. This means that me, Daisy, or both of us will have to get better jobs by December 2016 or that whole "paycheck-to-paycheck" thing will very quickly become unsustainable.
11. I am delighted to say that I am slowly weaning myself off cigarettes and have moved on to vaping. Yes, I do still smoke -- but I have cut down on the amount of cigarettes I smoke per day/week/etc drastically, to the point where a pack will now last me about three days instead of one. The wife bought me a 60w mod for an early birthday present, which I used for close to a month before it started shorting out on me and finally stopped working almost completely. I have since purchased two other mods (one 40w, one 80w), two more tanks, and close to twenty different types of e-juice, and can confidently say that this is probably what will get me to quit smoking completely -- if anything will. And, as a bonus, I can vape inside, instead of needing to go out into the cold to get my fix. Unless I'm at work, of course, where inside vaping is still prohibited. As I'm not an asshole, I don't vape inside in public places either (like the grocery store or post office or what-have-you). I do it in the car, though. It doesn't bother Daisy, and because I vape mostly vanilla, caramel, or coffee-based juices, the resulting vapor smells wonderful most of the time.
That's about all that's going on that I can talk about in relatively short little updates.
Christmas went well with the family, as well as could be expected with both Daisy and her mother very sick with whatever it was they had (Mama is still sick now, though she's slowly getting better). Daisy's sister and our brother-in-law, the man who performed our wedding ceremony, were in town from Denver with their three boys, and we had a nice family Christmas. I got Daisy many things, including several games for her Wii -- which we set up in the living room a few months ago -- and some clothing and socks she needed. Daisy, in turn, got me the one thing I've been wanting for several years -- an inexpensive record player, upon which I spun two of my favorite records this morning -- ABBA's Gold Collection.
Don't you judge me.
I'll be getting other records soon as well, once I can afford them and am not worried about balancing our checkbook and getting the bills paid on time and the like. She also got me Sgt. Pepper's and the Ghostbusters soundtrack, both of which I had specifically requested.
She got me many other things as well, including Darth Vader's lightsaber (the really expensive, adult-collector Black Series one) for my birthday, as well as a few sweaters, a new calendar, a mug-and-brush shaving kit (the one I've been using has the bristles falling out of the brush as I've used it for close to ten years now) and some games for both the Wii and my PC.
The time since Christmas has been spent around the house as much as possible with both of us attempting to recover from our respective sicknesses. I've had a sinus headache for most of the day today as my immune system is still trying to clear out the onslaught of neon-green mucus indicative of a sinus infection, and the wife has been immersing herself both in New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Mario Kart Wii, which we each got one another for Christmas while she's been trying to feel better. We've visited with the parents a few times, we've gone grocery shopping twice, and we did go see Star Wars last weekend -- but aside from that we've barely left the house. I had to work two days last week leading up to the New Year, but starting tomorrow I'm back on the normal grind as always, a grind that (as I mentioned previously above) the wife started back on today. Now that the holidays are over and we're into January, it tends to be a rather depressing and long ongoing time of the year in our job(s) as there are no paid holidays coming up for anything (I'm pretty sure MLK Jr. Day is business as usual for us) and it's almost constantly cold and snowy -- we got a big snowstorm of 8+ inches on the morning of Christmas Eve, and another 4 or so inches a week ago today. I hate the winter, I hate the cold, and I hate the snow, so forcing myself to go out in it every day before it's fully light outside and to return home when it's been fully dark outside for close to two hours is, on many levels, really sad and depressing. But that's life, you know? I won't work this job forever, and neither will Daisy.
That's about all that's going on right now. I've covered most of the pertinent things. But I will say that it does feel good to write here again. It's like coming back home.
Friday, July 3, 2015
New Things
Hi, folks.
I haven't written here in a long time, but that's okay -- I've been waiting for something good, something new to happen that I could share with all of you. Well, several of those things have happened, and since I'm a total procrastinator (and also very busy during any given week) I've been putting off writing about them here.
Oh, believe me, I've thought about it multiple times: hm, I should really document that in the blog, or ooh, this will be fun to write about, but I kept putting it off as there was always something more important or something more pressing to do.
Now, here I sit with an hour or so to kill before I have to go to work, freshly showered and shaved with clean clothing on and a cat at my feet, and I began thinking to myself well, now's as good a time as any. So let's begin.
This past week, I celebrated my first anniversary with my wife, who I have always referred to in this blog as Daisy, and Daisy has changed my life in many ways during the almost three years we've now been together (with, of course, more than a year of being married under our belts now), but I've seen the most changes -- most of them upgrades, actually -- in that past year. No marriage is perfect, of course -- everyone fights and bickers at times, everyone has little things about their partner that drives them up the wall (I'm sure Daisy has a long and detailed list of those things for me), but the good far, far outweighs the bumpy spots by about a 95% / 5% ratio, and there's not many ways I could be happier in my marriage. I'm also pretty sure I speak for both of us when I say this, as well.
We celebrated our wedding anniversary in a rather low-key fashion -- we went out to eat at Uncle Maddio's, and then played games at the Dave & Buster's next door for a few hours. Daisy got a stuffed monkey, and I got two new nerdy coffee mugs and a t-shirt from all of our ticket winnings. Then we came home and went to bed.
This is the smallest, however, of things that have been going on as of late.
Daisy has, throughout the course of our relationship, done everything she can to keep me healthy. That's not just the vegan foods, of course, but in general. Over the course of the past three months or so, I have been to three different types of doctors/specialists for various things, when previously I hadn't been to the doctor for anything since before she and I were a couple.
I'm not a fan of doctors or medical environments, generally speaking -- I don't like being around sick people, I don't like leaving the house and taking some of my downtime to go off and do something I don't see as absolutely essential, and until I got my current job, I had terrible health insurance (or none at all), so visiting any sort of doctors for any ailment would have cleaned out my bank account.
Anyway, in the past three months I have been to the doctor's office once (when I had a nasty case of Influenza-B in March), the dentist twice, and the eye doctor twice -- and I am much better for all of those visits, even if they were/are still expensive even with our insurance.
I got my teeth cleaned at the dentist for the first time since the late '90s. Two weeks later I had two small fillings done, and was told that aside from my broken wisdom teeth (which aren't causing me any pain), my mouth is healthy and in good shape -- especially for someone who hasn't gone to the dentist in close to twenty years. I will have to go back in and get the wisdom teeth taken care of this fall at some point, once I have more PTO at work -- the aforementioned flu wiped me out of about 80% of it.
Two weeks or so after the fillings were done, I was eating a piece of pizza at work and one of those aforementioned wisdom teeth fell out of my goddamned head. It came out in two or three pieces, the largest of which I still keep in my desk at work (as it's interesting to look at). The root of the tooth is still in there, below my gumline, and there was no pain involved -- still no pain involved even now. As the dentist said there was no need for concern unless it abscessed or started causing me pain, and that getting said teeth taken out would be on my own time, as with the way they're situated in my mouth and how they came in (i.e., straight, not causing any other issues) is good, I'll get around to it.
I have still not been billed for my dentist visits, however, even though I got my insurance statement for it. I will have to call the office on Monday to see if they just didn't send me one, or if it got lost in the mail, or what. I meant to do that yesterday, but, y'know, always busy with something.
[Edit: I just sent them an email this afternoon, and will call Monday if I hear nothing back from them by then. Their office is closed now.]
[Further edit: No bill, everything's paid off -- they got back to me quickly.]
After the dentist visits, our next task was to schedule eye appointments.
If you know me, you may already know that my eyes have been bad for years, and have been slowly getting worse. I've worn reading glasses off and on since I was in college, and last summer when I registered the Monte Carlo in Nebraska and switched my Kansas license to a Nebraska license, I barely passed the eye exam in the DMV office -- I was told that I should get to an eye doctor soon.
So, in classic Brandon fashion, I waited a year until my wife dragged me there.
To be fair, I'm not the only one with eye issues -- Daisy's eyesight was getting progressively worse as well, worse to the point where she couldn't read the episode descriptions for series on Netflix when she was sitting 3-5 feet closer to the TV than I was. Daisy has never had eye issues until the past year or two, and as she told me, it was getting to the point where she really couldn't see much of anything clearly. As she drives a lot more than I do (since, y'know, destroyed and junked Monte Carlo and all that), we made it a priority to go get eye appointments/exams together on the day after Memorial Day, as both of us had the day off work.
Both of us needed glasses. Daisy needed them badly. While I can see just fine without mine, reading things across the room and whatnot, Daisy's eyesight was bad enough to the point where I can't imagine what she was actually seeing (or not seeing, as the case may be). The eye doctor told me I'm farsighted with slight astigmatism, and told Daisy that she's nearsighted and that her astigmatism is worse. So, with our new prescriptions for glasses in hand, we picked out frames. The result? Well, here's mine (I'm not sure if she'd want me to post a picture of her in hers, so I'm just showing mine):
Not bad, right?
I opted for light, rounded metal frames instead of the big, bulky plastic ones I had before for my reading glasses, mainly because I wanted something comfortable that wouldn't easily break and wouldn't fuck up my peripheral vision or give me headaches (as the plastic frames sometimes did). These glasses are comfortable, and I wear them about 80% of the time now -- especially at work. I don't need them all the time (I rarely wear them when I'm just here at home bumming around the house), but there is a night-and-day difference in clarity when I'm wearing them versus when I'm not. Daisy, on the other hand, does need hers all the time and she does wear them all the time, since she can actually see now when she has hers on.
So there's that.
However, I've saved the most significant -- well, to me, anyway -- news until last.
About two months ago (give or take), we were informed that our brother-in-law (not the one who performed the ceremony at our wedding, but the other one) had gotten into seminary school. This is his life's calling, and therefore it's important to him and the family, so more power to him, we're happy for him. However, with this came the not-so-great news -- for the family, anyway -- that said seminary school is in Vancouver.
No, not some little town named Vancouver out here in the midwest somewhere, the actual Vancouver. The one in British Columbia. As in, way west and into the great white north of Canada.
O, Canadaaaaa....my home and native laaaaand.....
Ahem.
I know I've written about Daisy's sister's family here a long time ago, and touched on them briefly at best then. Of the three daughters in the family, this one was the middle daughter -- Daisy is the youngest. She also married first, married young, and became deeply religious after marriage. I don't know if she was deeply religious before marriage or not, as I didn't know her then, but suffice to say, she (as well as the rest of the family) is now. She had four children over the span of nine years, all of whom are wonderful little kids -- if a bit rowdy -- and she homeschools them, while her husband (the aforementioned seminary schooler) works in an IT job, I think for hospitals or something. Actually, it's never occurred to me to ask him exactly where he works. It won't matter soon enough anyway, as he'll be the proverbial preacher man.
Because this is a rather sudden development, and because they have four kids, own their house, and own (up until recently) four vehicles, one of which is a huge Suburban, they've had to make some tough decisions on what needs to be kept and gotten rid of, but basically it boils down to "whatever doesn't fit in the truck and the trailer either needs to be put into storage, sold, or otherwise gotten rid of."
This includes the house, of course -- a huge, spacious house with a massive garage and downstairs apartment in a nice neighborhood out in the country about two hours north of here. Believe me, if I wanted to drive back and forth four hours every day for work, I would've already made an offer on it.
So, a few weeks ago, I got a call from my brother-in-law. Actually, all of us did -- me, Daisy, and even Rae -- trying to reach me. I was at work at the time (and he'd had Rae's number from the organization of my bachelor party before the wedding), so I didn't know what was going on. He messaged me on Facebook the next day asking me to call him, so I did.
One of the four vehicles they have/had is a 2002 Chevy Silverado. It's white, banged up, with a lot of miles on it -- it used to be a city works truck before my brother-in-law's father purchased it as a daily driver. Since then, my brother-in-law has been using it as his own daily driver, using it to get him to/from work every day. With the Suburban, they can't take it with them. They wanted to know if I wanted it.
"Yeah, of course I do," I said, jumping at the opportunity. "What sort of work does it need done to it?"
"Not a lot," my brother-in-law said. "It had some engine valve gunk in it a while back, but I think we got that mostly cleared up. Still runs a little rough, though. It has some dents, some rust, the driver-side mirror is broken and bent in -- but it runs and drives, doesn't leak or burn oil, and it's a good little truck. Doesn't have many bells and whistles on it since it was a city truck, but the radio does get AM and FM. I'll get it worked on and tuned up for the little stuff before I turn it over to you."
Truth be told, a truck that's thirteen years old is going to have a lot of little cosmetic things like that wrong with it anyway. Am I concerned about dents, rust, and a broken mirror? Hell no. My Monte Carlo had rust and dents, as well as a host of other things wrong with it. Does the truck start up and run? And it'll get me back and forth to/from work every day somewhat reliably? Sold. No questions, just sold.
"How much do you want for it?" I asked.
"Eh, it's between family," he said. "I'm not going to charge you anything for it. It's not reliable enough for that."
He drives this truck to/from work every day, I thought. That's all I'll be using it for, too.
"I'll at least give you a few hundred bucks for it, if nothing else," I said.
"If you were to pay us for it and then have some major part blow on it in a month or two, I'd feel really guilty. Don't worry about it. Again, it's between family."
"Fair enough," I said, stunned. "I get that."
I really couldn't come up with any other real response. It's not every day I'm offered a free truck.
"Good," he replied. "I'd rather someone get some use out of it, or get something out of it for as long as they can instead of selling it, and I know what happened to your car, so I thought I'd check with you."
"Well I'm glad you did," I said. "I'm very grateful. Thank you."
This entire exchange was at least a month ago now, probably longer. I talked to Daisy about it that night as well:
"I don't feel right not giving him anything for the truck," I said. "I mean, I absolutely understand his logic here, but he's going to take it in for servicing before he turns it over to me. I'm going to at least offer to pay for that, since that'll be a few hundred bucks, more than likely.
"That's fair," Daisy said.
It's a full half-ton Silverado; it's not like it's a little truck like an S-10 or Ranger. Servicing said truck probably won't be cheap. On the plus side, there are a million of those trucks on the roads, some of them much older than this one -- so if anything does blow up on it, parts should be readily available.
The next week, I not only got to see it, but I got to drive it:
(license plate covered for privacy's sake, duh.)
Our brother-in-law made it sound like it was falling apart, and/or wasn't reliable. It's actually in really good shape for a work truck that was a city work truck before it fell into private ownership. You can, however, see the broken driver-side mirror and the dented front quarterpanel right below that. That does look worse in person, but as Daisy replaced the mirror on her Sonata all by herself a few years ago, it shouldn't be that difficult to replace one on a truck.
We'd gone up to their house on Memorial Day weekend in order to help them clean up and pack, help them put stuff in storage, and repaint/tear up the carpet in their master bedroom. During the day of work, myself and the brother-in-law took the truck over to the storage area where they were putting some of their larger stuff that wasn't coming with them. The storage area was maybe three miles away, so it was the perfect opportunity for me to test-drive the truck.
There's just one thing: I'd never driven a truck before.
Cars, yes. Speedy cars, yes. Vans, yes. Never a truck.
Well, no, let me correct myself on that -- the only time I've ever driven a truck, I crashed it into my house in Newton. Backwards.
Yeah.
So, needless to say, I was fairly nervous....
And it drove like a car. No, seriously, a car. The shifter is on the column, which I'll have to get used to, but it handles really easily and mostly smoothly, and it seems just fine (at least when I drove it that day, anyway).
Now for the troubling things I noticed...
The "service engine soon" light was occasionally flashing even in the three miles to the storage unit and the three back. That means there's a misfire, usually caused by at least one bad spark plug or wire. As long as the engine in that truck isn't dumbassedly backward as the one in my Monte Carlo was, that's more than likely a pretty easy/inexpensive fix.
I noticed the battery light was on too -- I don't know if it power-cycles through all of the lights when it fires up or if there's a genuine battery problem, but even if there is one, that's maybe $150 at the most to fix.
The brakes are a little loose -- loose as in, they're not touchy and you have to put the pedal down pretty hard. I don't know if that's a truck thing or if I was just spoiled by the Monte Carlo and Daisy's Sonata. Or if the brakes/pads will need replaced soon. Take your pick, right?
Acceleration from a slow speed to a fast speed, quickly, is really slow and jumpy -- I noticed this when I was trying to make it through the yellow light before it turned red, so I put the hammer down...and there was at least a one-second delay before it recognized it and revved up. That could be attributed to the spark plug problem as well, or the gunked engine valves (also something I can clean out fairly easily).
Aside from that? It's all good. Shit, that's nothing. Free truck. I put up with a lot more from the Monte Carlo over all the years I drove her.
"It's definitely an upgrade," I told the brother-in-law. "Keep in mind I am coming from a car whose radio didn't work, I couldn't lock the doors, I had to push and pull the windows up and down, only had a 25% or so chance of firing up on the first try, no air conditioning, a heater that wouldn't get warm until I drove 20 or so miles, bad defroster, transmission slips, no anti-lock brakes, tires that couldn't keep air, and burned oil and coolant as quickly as if I were pouring said fluids directly into a fire."
The last part is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
"I thought you said you never wanted a white vehicle," Daisy said coolly.
"[Daisy]," I said, "Free. FREE. It could be hot pink and I'd drive it if it were still free."
And this is true. I can be sure nobody would steal it or break into it to steal it, that's for damn sure.
All of this being said, I do not have the truck yet. I won't get it for at least another three weeks or so, as that's around the time they're leaving for the great white north. We'll get to see them and spend some time with them first, obviously, but the clock is ticking.
So, that's about all for now. I've been working on this post off and on for many days, so I'm putting it up. I do, however, have more to share, so I'll get on that soon as well...
I haven't written here in a long time, but that's okay -- I've been waiting for something good, something new to happen that I could share with all of you. Well, several of those things have happened, and since I'm a total procrastinator (and also very busy during any given week) I've been putting off writing about them here.
Oh, believe me, I've thought about it multiple times: hm, I should really document that in the blog, or ooh, this will be fun to write about, but I kept putting it off as there was always something more important or something more pressing to do.
Now, here I sit with an hour or so to kill before I have to go to work, freshly showered and shaved with clean clothing on and a cat at my feet, and I began thinking to myself well, now's as good a time as any. So let's begin.
This past week, I celebrated my first anniversary with my wife, who I have always referred to in this blog as Daisy, and Daisy has changed my life in many ways during the almost three years we've now been together (with, of course, more than a year of being married under our belts now), but I've seen the most changes -- most of them upgrades, actually -- in that past year. No marriage is perfect, of course -- everyone fights and bickers at times, everyone has little things about their partner that drives them up the wall (I'm sure Daisy has a long and detailed list of those things for me), but the good far, far outweighs the bumpy spots by about a 95% / 5% ratio, and there's not many ways I could be happier in my marriage. I'm also pretty sure I speak for both of us when I say this, as well.
We celebrated our wedding anniversary in a rather low-key fashion -- we went out to eat at Uncle Maddio's, and then played games at the Dave & Buster's next door for a few hours. Daisy got a stuffed monkey, and I got two new nerdy coffee mugs and a t-shirt from all of our ticket winnings. Then we came home and went to bed.
This is the smallest, however, of things that have been going on as of late.
Daisy has, throughout the course of our relationship, done everything she can to keep me healthy. That's not just the vegan foods, of course, but in general. Over the course of the past three months or so, I have been to three different types of doctors/specialists for various things, when previously I hadn't been to the doctor for anything since before she and I were a couple.
I'm not a fan of doctors or medical environments, generally speaking -- I don't like being around sick people, I don't like leaving the house and taking some of my downtime to go off and do something I don't see as absolutely essential, and until I got my current job, I had terrible health insurance (or none at all), so visiting any sort of doctors for any ailment would have cleaned out my bank account.
Anyway, in the past three months I have been to the doctor's office once (when I had a nasty case of Influenza-B in March), the dentist twice, and the eye doctor twice -- and I am much better for all of those visits, even if they were/are still expensive even with our insurance.
I got my teeth cleaned at the dentist for the first time since the late '90s. Two weeks later I had two small fillings done, and was told that aside from my broken wisdom teeth (which aren't causing me any pain), my mouth is healthy and in good shape -- especially for someone who hasn't gone to the dentist in close to twenty years. I will have to go back in and get the wisdom teeth taken care of this fall at some point, once I have more PTO at work -- the aforementioned flu wiped me out of about 80% of it.
Two weeks or so after the fillings were done, I was eating a piece of pizza at work and one of those aforementioned wisdom teeth fell out of my goddamned head. It came out in two or three pieces, the largest of which I still keep in my desk at work (as it's interesting to look at). The root of the tooth is still in there, below my gumline, and there was no pain involved -- still no pain involved even now. As the dentist said there was no need for concern unless it abscessed or started causing me pain, and that getting said teeth taken out would be on my own time, as with the way they're situated in my mouth and how they came in (i.e., straight, not causing any other issues) is good, I'll get around to it.
I have still not been billed for my dentist visits, however, even though I got my insurance statement for it. I will have to call the office on Monday to see if they just didn't send me one, or if it got lost in the mail, or what. I meant to do that yesterday, but, y'know, always busy with something.
[Edit: I just sent them an email this afternoon, and will call Monday if I hear nothing back from them by then. Their office is closed now.]
[Further edit: No bill, everything's paid off -- they got back to me quickly.]
After the dentist visits, our next task was to schedule eye appointments.
If you know me, you may already know that my eyes have been bad for years, and have been slowly getting worse. I've worn reading glasses off and on since I was in college, and last summer when I registered the Monte Carlo in Nebraska and switched my Kansas license to a Nebraska license, I barely passed the eye exam in the DMV office -- I was told that I should get to an eye doctor soon.
So, in classic Brandon fashion, I waited a year until my wife dragged me there.
To be fair, I'm not the only one with eye issues -- Daisy's eyesight was getting progressively worse as well, worse to the point where she couldn't read the episode descriptions for series on Netflix when she was sitting 3-5 feet closer to the TV than I was. Daisy has never had eye issues until the past year or two, and as she told me, it was getting to the point where she really couldn't see much of anything clearly. As she drives a lot more than I do (since, y'know, destroyed and junked Monte Carlo and all that), we made it a priority to go get eye appointments/exams together on the day after Memorial Day, as both of us had the day off work.
Both of us needed glasses. Daisy needed them badly. While I can see just fine without mine, reading things across the room and whatnot, Daisy's eyesight was bad enough to the point where I can't imagine what she was actually seeing (or not seeing, as the case may be). The eye doctor told me I'm farsighted with slight astigmatism, and told Daisy that she's nearsighted and that her astigmatism is worse. So, with our new prescriptions for glasses in hand, we picked out frames. The result? Well, here's mine (I'm not sure if she'd want me to post a picture of her in hers, so I'm just showing mine):
Not bad, right?
I opted for light, rounded metal frames instead of the big, bulky plastic ones I had before for my reading glasses, mainly because I wanted something comfortable that wouldn't easily break and wouldn't fuck up my peripheral vision or give me headaches (as the plastic frames sometimes did). These glasses are comfortable, and I wear them about 80% of the time now -- especially at work. I don't need them all the time (I rarely wear them when I'm just here at home bumming around the house), but there is a night-and-day difference in clarity when I'm wearing them versus when I'm not. Daisy, on the other hand, does need hers all the time and she does wear them all the time, since she can actually see now when she has hers on.
So there's that.
However, I've saved the most significant -- well, to me, anyway -- news until last.
About two months ago (give or take), we were informed that our brother-in-law (not the one who performed the ceremony at our wedding, but the other one) had gotten into seminary school. This is his life's calling, and therefore it's important to him and the family, so more power to him, we're happy for him. However, with this came the not-so-great news -- for the family, anyway -- that said seminary school is in Vancouver.
No, not some little town named Vancouver out here in the midwest somewhere, the actual Vancouver. The one in British Columbia. As in, way west and into the great white north of Canada.
O, Canadaaaaa....my home and native laaaaand.....
Ahem.
I know I've written about Daisy's sister's family here a long time ago, and touched on them briefly at best then. Of the three daughters in the family, this one was the middle daughter -- Daisy is the youngest. She also married first, married young, and became deeply religious after marriage. I don't know if she was deeply religious before marriage or not, as I didn't know her then, but suffice to say, she (as well as the rest of the family) is now. She had four children over the span of nine years, all of whom are wonderful little kids -- if a bit rowdy -- and she homeschools them, while her husband (the aforementioned seminary schooler) works in an IT job, I think for hospitals or something. Actually, it's never occurred to me to ask him exactly where he works. It won't matter soon enough anyway, as he'll be the proverbial preacher man.
Because this is a rather sudden development, and because they have four kids, own their house, and own (up until recently) four vehicles, one of which is a huge Suburban, they've had to make some tough decisions on what needs to be kept and gotten rid of, but basically it boils down to "whatever doesn't fit in the truck and the trailer either needs to be put into storage, sold, or otherwise gotten rid of."
This includes the house, of course -- a huge, spacious house with a massive garage and downstairs apartment in a nice neighborhood out in the country about two hours north of here. Believe me, if I wanted to drive back and forth four hours every day for work, I would've already made an offer on it.
So, a few weeks ago, I got a call from my brother-in-law. Actually, all of us did -- me, Daisy, and even Rae -- trying to reach me. I was at work at the time (and he'd had Rae's number from the organization of my bachelor party before the wedding), so I didn't know what was going on. He messaged me on Facebook the next day asking me to call him, so I did.
One of the four vehicles they have/had is a 2002 Chevy Silverado. It's white, banged up, with a lot of miles on it -- it used to be a city works truck before my brother-in-law's father purchased it as a daily driver. Since then, my brother-in-law has been using it as his own daily driver, using it to get him to/from work every day. With the Suburban, they can't take it with them. They wanted to know if I wanted it.
"Yeah, of course I do," I said, jumping at the opportunity. "What sort of work does it need done to it?"
"Not a lot," my brother-in-law said. "It had some engine valve gunk in it a while back, but I think we got that mostly cleared up. Still runs a little rough, though. It has some dents, some rust, the driver-side mirror is broken and bent in -- but it runs and drives, doesn't leak or burn oil, and it's a good little truck. Doesn't have many bells and whistles on it since it was a city truck, but the radio does get AM and FM. I'll get it worked on and tuned up for the little stuff before I turn it over to you."
Truth be told, a truck that's thirteen years old is going to have a lot of little cosmetic things like that wrong with it anyway. Am I concerned about dents, rust, and a broken mirror? Hell no. My Monte Carlo had rust and dents, as well as a host of other things wrong with it. Does the truck start up and run? And it'll get me back and forth to/from work every day somewhat reliably? Sold. No questions, just sold.
"How much do you want for it?" I asked.
"Eh, it's between family," he said. "I'm not going to charge you anything for it. It's not reliable enough for that."
He drives this truck to/from work every day, I thought. That's all I'll be using it for, too.
"I'll at least give you a few hundred bucks for it, if nothing else," I said.
"If you were to pay us for it and then have some major part blow on it in a month or two, I'd feel really guilty. Don't worry about it. Again, it's between family."
"Fair enough," I said, stunned. "I get that."
I really couldn't come up with any other real response. It's not every day I'm offered a free truck.
"Good," he replied. "I'd rather someone get some use out of it, or get something out of it for as long as they can instead of selling it, and I know what happened to your car, so I thought I'd check with you."
"Well I'm glad you did," I said. "I'm very grateful. Thank you."
This entire exchange was at least a month ago now, probably longer. I talked to Daisy about it that night as well:
"I don't feel right not giving him anything for the truck," I said. "I mean, I absolutely understand his logic here, but he's going to take it in for servicing before he turns it over to me. I'm going to at least offer to pay for that, since that'll be a few hundred bucks, more than likely.
"That's fair," Daisy said.
It's a full half-ton Silverado; it's not like it's a little truck like an S-10 or Ranger. Servicing said truck probably won't be cheap. On the plus side, there are a million of those trucks on the roads, some of them much older than this one -- so if anything does blow up on it, parts should be readily available.
The next week, I not only got to see it, but I got to drive it:
(license plate covered for privacy's sake, duh.)
Our brother-in-law made it sound like it was falling apart, and/or wasn't reliable. It's actually in really good shape for a work truck that was a city work truck before it fell into private ownership. You can, however, see the broken driver-side mirror and the dented front quarterpanel right below that. That does look worse in person, but as Daisy replaced the mirror on her Sonata all by herself a few years ago, it shouldn't be that difficult to replace one on a truck.
We'd gone up to their house on Memorial Day weekend in order to help them clean up and pack, help them put stuff in storage, and repaint/tear up the carpet in their master bedroom. During the day of work, myself and the brother-in-law took the truck over to the storage area where they were putting some of their larger stuff that wasn't coming with them. The storage area was maybe three miles away, so it was the perfect opportunity for me to test-drive the truck.
There's just one thing: I'd never driven a truck before.
Cars, yes. Speedy cars, yes. Vans, yes. Never a truck.
Well, no, let me correct myself on that -- the only time I've ever driven a truck, I crashed it into my house in Newton. Backwards.
Yeah.
So, needless to say, I was fairly nervous....
And it drove like a car. No, seriously, a car. The shifter is on the column, which I'll have to get used to, but it handles really easily and mostly smoothly, and it seems just fine (at least when I drove it that day, anyway).
Now for the troubling things I noticed...
The "service engine soon" light was occasionally flashing even in the three miles to the storage unit and the three back. That means there's a misfire, usually caused by at least one bad spark plug or wire. As long as the engine in that truck isn't dumbassedly backward as the one in my Monte Carlo was, that's more than likely a pretty easy/inexpensive fix.
I noticed the battery light was on too -- I don't know if it power-cycles through all of the lights when it fires up or if there's a genuine battery problem, but even if there is one, that's maybe $150 at the most to fix.
The brakes are a little loose -- loose as in, they're not touchy and you have to put the pedal down pretty hard. I don't know if that's a truck thing or if I was just spoiled by the Monte Carlo and Daisy's Sonata. Or if the brakes/pads will need replaced soon. Take your pick, right?
Acceleration from a slow speed to a fast speed, quickly, is really slow and jumpy -- I noticed this when I was trying to make it through the yellow light before it turned red, so I put the hammer down...and there was at least a one-second delay before it recognized it and revved up. That could be attributed to the spark plug problem as well, or the gunked engine valves (also something I can clean out fairly easily).
Aside from that? It's all good. Shit, that's nothing. Free truck. I put up with a lot more from the Monte Carlo over all the years I drove her.
"It's definitely an upgrade," I told the brother-in-law. "Keep in mind I am coming from a car whose radio didn't work, I couldn't lock the doors, I had to push and pull the windows up and down, only had a 25% or so chance of firing up on the first try, no air conditioning, a heater that wouldn't get warm until I drove 20 or so miles, bad defroster, transmission slips, no anti-lock brakes, tires that couldn't keep air, and burned oil and coolant as quickly as if I were pouring said fluids directly into a fire."
The last part is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
"I thought you said you never wanted a white vehicle," Daisy said coolly.
"[Daisy]," I said, "Free. FREE. It could be hot pink and I'd drive it if it were still free."
And this is true. I can be sure nobody would steal it or break into it to steal it, that's for damn sure.
All of this being said, I do not have the truck yet. I won't get it for at least another three weeks or so, as that's around the time they're leaving for the great white north. We'll get to see them and spend some time with them first, obviously, but the clock is ticking.
So, that's about all for now. I've been working on this post off and on for many days, so I'm putting it up. I do, however, have more to share, so I'll get on that soon as well...
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