It's Really a Lot, Part I

 Hi everyone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Eye appointments for both of us

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

3. Daisy's birthday

4. The installation of our new gas line. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progression, Part V

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intermissions: A Numbered List

 Hi everybody.

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

1. I got a bonus and a raise.

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

2. Our oven died.

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

3. Daisy's grandfather is bad off.

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

4. Plans made and broken

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

5. Yard work and gardening

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

6. Health and wellness things

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

7. A very intrusive gas line

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

8. The beardening

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

9. The cleaning

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

10. Finally, the writing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anniversary Year Eight

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, it does look really good there. 

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

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

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

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

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

Here's to many more anniversaries. 

Progression, Part IV

 

The first story is done. It's still rough, I won't lie. But it's done. It's likely as done as it will ever really be, save for a few small edits here and there.

I am...not exactly proud of it, really. I likely should be, but I'm not. 

People always say that our harshest critics are ourselves, though. I don't know about that. I'm for sure not the best writer I know. I'm likely not even in the top ten. I'm just me. My process and style is so different than most others that I'm not even sure I actually have a style.

The writing world is full of self-doubt.

The creative process is a strange one. While writing and editing this story (a process that took the better part of two months, overall), I came up with four other premises for four other, completely separate pieces. The five stories, together, will comprise the entire collection. 

I've gotten a lot of good feedback from people -- nobody who's actually read my stuff, mind you, because nobody has yet -- telling me that they're glad I'm writing again. 

Uh. 

I never really stopped writing. They act like I gave it up.

I stopped writing poetry, yes, because I..well, I don't like poetry.

Never mind that my MFA is in poetry. My MFA is in poetry because it was easy and allowed me to say I have a Master's degree. Those are, quite literally, the only reasons.

Progression, Part III

I've had to change the title of the collection to something similar, but different enough to where I won't get sued -- apparently someone has a song with the same title. Everything else has remained the same.

Truth be told, this past week has been a train wreck of emotions and very little downtime. A mass outage at my workplace led me to dive in and burn through most of my Saturday -- morning, evening, and half of the overnight -- pitching in to help deal with the crisis in any way I could. Truth be told, I didn't get a weekend. Neither did many of my colleagues. 

Because of all the time spent, I get a "comp" day to make up for it. I chose this coming Thursday. My executive director also offered to buy me dinner or something to that effect, but I don't need that. I'm happy enough that I'll get an extra day off later in the week for my efforts. 

The outage is still going on, by the way. We've been assured it will be fixed by this evening. All we were able to do was stop the proverbial bleeding a bit. 

The writing process is a tough one. Some nights, words flow like melted butter. Others, no matter how much I want to write, I can't get the sentences to form properly and I become frustrated. 

Fatigue factors greatly into all of this. I've not had real decent sleep since Wednesday or so. Today is Sunday.

The collection has a core of four stories thus far. Two are partially written. A third is simply an idea at this juncture that I don't know how I will execute, but I know I want it to be the closing piece. The fourth is the title piece, which I've got a rough plan for, but will likely need major revision before it hits the page. I've decided to add an inspirations/dedications section at the end to help explain some things, but don't yet know how I'll execute that, either -- or if I'll leave it in or not. 

Everything is a work in progress until it's completed. Given enough time and energy to work on it, I expect the story referenced in the photo above to be done in another week, save for any final editing. And then it's moving on to start/finish the others. I'm hoping to have everything done and "locked" so to speak by the holidays. It's all about being mission-focused.

Daisy tells me she wants me to write the screenplay she read the synopsis of earlier this year, and I had to tell her that until this book is finished, that's a far back-burner project. I will get to it eventually, but right now it is not a priority. It is a perfect story for the screen, but stories for the screen need to be sold, and right now I'm not at the level where I can sell anything. I won't be for a few years yet, likely. 

Progression, Part II

 

I feel like a lot of it is slow-going.

Some days I'll write a few pages. Other days I'll write a paragraph or two.

Then I'll go a week or more without writing anything.

I'll go back in, remove an entire section or heavily edit it, and do nothing else.

Then I'll wait a week and write another page or two. 

My original draft of this story was 21 pages. It was okay, but not great or even good.

This story isn't even the tentpole piece of the collection; that story is yet to be written, though it is plotted out. 

Yes, it is a short story collection. While I have a few other ideas I could expand into novels, I truthfully need to get my confidence levels up first, and put my writing out into the world first. What I've learned in taking the time to write again -- truly write -- is that not every story, not every idea, is expansive enough to be a novel. They're just not. A singular concept, an event, a process, is much better as a short story.

The above piece will likely be the longest in the collection. I expect to have about 7-10 stories total within it.

I don't expect accolades or congratulations. I don't expect a publisher to go wild over my work or to sponsor a book tour or anything like that. I don't expect an advance that would be worth me quitting my job over, or allowing me to do anything but not worry about bills as much for a few months. I don't have an agent. I don't have a cover design. I would like the wife to paint the cover design.  I do have a title for the collection, which I think is very fitting for not only myself, but for the collection itself and its overall themes.

Yes, there are overall themes. 

No, the stories are not interconnected.

Everything is a process. Sometimes it's not pleasant. Sometimes you have to go to a very dark place for your art.

Last week, while working on the third story in this collection, I read aloud to Daisy a short excerpt of that piece that disturbed her so much that she said she did not want to read the final story when it was finished. 

My wife of eight years, who I've been with for almost ten, was so disturbed by something I'd written that she said right then and there, based on a paragraph I read aloud to her, that she did not want to read it when it was finished. My wife who has read everything I've written over these past ten years. My wife who knows everything about me, every experience, every secret. 

Last night, while working on the story in the above photo, I wrote a dream sequence so terrifying that I didn't think I'd be able to really sleep well afterwards. It was only about four paragraphs, but the imagery I created on the page is so burned into my mind that even now it's unsettling.

I don't know where this comes from, but when I'm writing it just flows out of me. I've not felt this creative in years. I've not felt this connected to any project in years. I don't have a muse, and I'm not really releasing my stress in writing. But, things just come out of me, and sometimes they're really disturbing, frightening things. I don't do it on purpose -- it's just what hits the page.

Four stories are in progress. The other stories are in their planning stages or idea stages. Three of those four I should have finished and ready for the final collection within another month or so, barring any unforeseen setbacks. The others will take longer. 

Progression

 

It's going.

This is one story of several I'm currently working on. 

My first short story collection should be complete by fall 2022.

I have not yet completely settled on a title. Or a publisher. Or even the order I'll place the stories in within the collection itself.

I have help. I have connections who can get me contacts -- contacts who can help me fulfill my goals. 

Heavy editing and additions are required. A lot of the writing is very much work-in-progress.

It's not perfect. Nothing ever is. 

Luckily, I have a few peers and friends I can trust to read through my drafts and give me constructive criticism and feedback, which in this case I am very open to. 

More to come. 

Ben

 In the early 2000s, I wrote a short story called Seeking Listrania. It never went anywhere, though I do believe it was one of my better pieces -- and at the time, I considered it my masterpiece, the culmination of several years' worth of creative writing classes and a sense of entitlement. With some polish and editing, I could probably expand upon it or get it published in a literary mag somewhere even today, twenty-plus years later.

Seeking Listrania was purely a fiction piece, a "love story" of attraction and addiction. Though fictional, I'd heavily based it on interactions with my friends at the time. I'm sure there's a lot of fiction writers out there who do the same thing. There were only three characters in the story -- a fictionalized version of myself, the character Listrania (based on my friend Ingrid --yes, that is her real name, who there was a sort of mutual infatuation with for a brief period in real life) and my character's friend, Ben -- who was, for all intents and purposes, a carbon copy of my actual friend Ben. Much of the dialogue in the story between my character and Ben's character was very close to, if not verbatim, actual conversations I'd had with the real Ben in real life, about real women. Ben serves as the moral compass of sorts in the story.

Reading through the story again now, it is very clear that it was written by someone in his early twenties. It's not bad, but it's quite far from being "good." I'd intended to submit it to different places, to use it as a steppingstone, a portfolio piece I could point at and say "look, I actually can write." Ben read through the draft of it once I'd finished it, and was concerned. I remember him asking me if he should be worried about me doing the same things in real life as the character based on me did in the story. I told him no, it was fiction. He countered with the fact that his character seemed like a pretty realistic portrayal of him, so he wanted to check. 

Ingrid never read the story. The title character, loosely based on her, dies in the end. Spoiler alert. The reader doesn't find out how. It's an unflattering portrayal of a person, to be honest, and I'm glad she never read it. I lost contact with Ingrid a few years after college; she'd been engaged to her boyfriend the entire time I'd known her, but at some point that fell through and I just sort of fell out of contact with her. I looked her up a few years back -- what information I could find on her was sparse, but she appeared to be married (she'd changed her last name, so that's usually a pretty good signifier) and was living/working out of state somewhere. 

Ben, however, remained in my life and was sort of an inspirational figure in it for many years. I met Ben in 2002, during his first year at WVU. I am not exactly sure how or when. He was part of a freshman class to WVU that included a number of lifelong friends I acquired pretty much all at once. All of them had gone to high school together and had all come to WVU at the same time. I have no idea how we all met up and became close, but it was likely at the Mountainlair, WVU's student union, which was like a second home to me throughout my undergraduate education. Ben was a bit of a legend until I met him; I'd heard stories about this man who did X things in Y places and lived to tell the tale. Sometimes those stories were true, sometimes they weren't -- as I'd get clarification on a lot of them throughout our friendship. Sometimes, the stories you expected to be complete bullshit for someone his age -- like blacking out drunk while trying to get laid, and waking up the next morning in the homeless shelter -- were absolutely true. 

He and I should not have gotten along. He was intensely charismatic and charming, and was well-built and muscled, with a shock of afro-like curly hair and a goatee. He was also one of the funniest people I've ever met. He was a competitive fencer and joined the fencing team at WVU; I believe he won some awards for that. Ben was also a heavy drinker (which explains the above story) in college, and was able somehow to balance that with being extremely busy at almost all times -- he had a scientific mind, so in the beginning he decided he was majoring in Biology or Chemistry or something like that, I can't remember. It was...rough on him. I, meanwhile, was the fat, nerdy English major who drank too much coffee, smoked too many cigarettes, and -- for as intelligent as I was -- I did not know a fucking thing about real-life, applicable chemistry or biology, especially not at the college level. I lived at home with my parents in a pretty sheltered existence; Ben was the very first friend I met who had his own apartment, in a prime location juuuuuust off campus, within a five-minute straight-line walk from the building that, at the time, housed the WVU English Department (so, I was always somewhat close by). 

On the surface, Ben and I were absolute polar opposites. But personality-wise, we were very similar. Both of us were very funny, sometimes loud and extroverted people (yeah, I was a very different person twenty years ago than I am now). We both loved the same types of music and media, as well -- we were both into anime pretty heavily at the time, and that's part of how we formed the WVU Anime Guild -- the first official anime club to ever exist at WVU, which later became the WVU Japanese Animation and Manga Society (or, as we called it, WVUJAMS). Ben was elected President for about a year or so, and I was his VP. We'd later swap positions, so that I could serve a term or two as President as well. 

Ben was a polarizing figure. There were people who loved him and people who could not stand him, or found him immature and cringe-inducing. I felt a kinship with him there as well, as a lot of people had the same love-or-hate feelings for me. I know there were a fair number of people I knew in college who I was absolutely grating to. Ben held some controversial views here and there, but it was the out-of-control persona and his unreliability due to his alcohol use that made some of the more straitlaced amongst us sort of roll their eyes and figuratively wave him off. Of course, I was a pretty heavy drinker at the time as well, though I wasn't as overt about it.

As our time in college went on, our schedules got busier. There were still, however, adventures -- I remember one morning skipping class and a few of us meeting Ben at his place to pile into his van -- a van with close to 350,000 miles on it or something like that, with a recording of Howard Dean's scream as a car alarm (or so he told me) -- to go to the Meadowbrook Mall in Clarksburg, something like 40 miles away...for...something. I have no idea why we actually went, but I remember that there was a purpose. For me, it was exciting. It was illicit, it was something I shouldn't have done, and something my parents probably would've been really upset about -- getting into a friend's vehicle for an 80-mile round trip? To a mall? In the middle of a weekday? When I should have been in classes and when nobody knew or had any clue where I was or that I'd left not only campus, but the city? It would have been scandalous. 

Knowing Ben was always like that though. There was always going to be a little debauchery here and there, some questionable decisions, some adventures. In 2003, he invented the term "anger soap," which I would write about in my blog at the time -- though I gave it the misnomer of "angry soap":

That was the kind of person Ben was. Always good for a laugh or some new terminology, a turn of phrase, an adventure. He once told me that his favorite game to play on Friday nights (because after all, WVU was and still is a "party school") was "Don't Get Arrested" -- where, well, I guess the name of the game gives away the overall goal.

This is an actual conversation we had circa 2003-04:

Me (6:15:51 PM): Were you drunk when you left me those messages at like 3:30?

Ben (6:16:09 PM): Oh man, not you too!

As well as...

Ben (11:40:51 PM): Woo!

Me (11:42:06 PM): o_o;;

Ben (11:42:20 PM): I'm drunk!!!

Ben (11:42:24 PM): And hyper!

Me (11:42:43 PM): Dude, calm the fuck down.

Ben (11:43:06 PM): woo!

Ben (11:43:10 PM): Heheh, ok.

Ben (11:44:12 PM): Man, you're the best.

Ben (11:44:22 PM): Haha, I know I'm being stupid drunk, but you're my bro.

Ben (11:44:26 PM): And don

Ben (11:44:31 PM): 't you dare fuckin save this convo!

Ben (11:44:34 PM): lol

Me (11:44:57 PM): Too late, I have a program that makes AIM logs automatically.

Ben (11:45:04 PM): Noooooo!

I loved Ben. I felt a true kinship with him. He was like a brother to me, despite his flaws -- and there were many. This is the man who ate raw bacon that was half-frozen just to tell us the story ("It mostly just tastes like ice"). This is the man who did know, even then, that he had some...ahem...major problems with alcohol and acknowledged it, but also at times reveled in it. This is the man who went on at least five dates with one of my friends I went to high school with (this was purely coincidental; she ended up being on the fencing team with him) and he still didn't know if she was "into" him. But, this is also the man who went to Japan to teach English for a few years after graduating from college. This is also the man who would listen to you talk about your problems not just because he was there, but because he wanted to help -- and sometimes, he gave great advice. If back then were today, Ben would have been canceled so many times over by so many people for so many things, his sense of humor being just one of them, but it wouldn't change the fact that he was, as they say, a good dude. I don't think there was a dishonorable bone in his body. He always prided himself on doing good, in the same way that Superman does good. 

In the years after college, I moved out here to the midwest and contact with a lot of my friends back home, including Ben, became largely sporadic. While a lot of my friends from college gradually moved away from a lot of contact-by-instant-message, I steered even harder into it, as it was my only means of communication with many people, especially after I moved out here. As such, Ben was one of many folks I slowly, over a period of time, slipped out of regular contact with. We'd see each other online here and there for a few years, but after 2010, 2012, something like that, I don't think we actually had any further conversation. He'd occasionally comment on my Facebook or drop me a line here and there, but after a while even that stopped. 

Ben died three days ago at the age of 37, "after a brief illness." His funeral was today. There's been no confirmation of what the "brief illness" was, but I've heard from some friends through the grapevine that it was likely pneumonia that went septic. I have no real way to confirm, and honestly, it doesn't really matter anyhow. He's gone now, like so many others we've lost over the years. 

I've had a not-insignificant number of friends die suddenly, not just from illnesses but from accidents and suicides, and two of them (two!) were outright murdered. Every one of them touched my life in one way or another. Some were casual acquaintances. Some I was closer with. Some may as well have been family. Ben was almost family to me. I'm not going to say he was far more significant to me than he was, but he did feel almost like a brother, and I have a lot of core college memories associated with him.

In the days since his death -- and I found out the day it happened -- I've been trying to process my grief, but it almost feels like I should have more to process. It's almost as if I feel like I'm not grieving enough, or like I'm not caring enough. Ben's death feels so distant, as if he died in an overseas war or on a galactic starcruiser on the other side of the galaxy, but he didn't. He died in West Virginia, where he was born, grew up, and lived most of his life. My lack of feeling makes me question myself as a person, as if I'm beginning to lose my empathy, or if I'm just becoming numb to tragic events. Ben's death was surprising and unexpected, but it wasn't the sharp punch to the gut that knocks the wind out of you that my friend Meredith's death was, or the car accident that killed my friend Robbie was, or the murder of my friend Shannon was. I was deeply in shock and in a deep grieving process for those friends. Why don't I feel the same punch to the gut for Ben? I just feel an emptiness, like the universal starlight just got a little bit dimmer -- but I am not sick with grief, and to some extent I feel guilty about that. Maybe it's part of the process. I don't know. 

Also in the days since his death, I have done my part in reaching out to those of us in our friend group who did not already know, essentially making me the bearer of bad news for a good chunk of people. When I did this, it was shocking to me to find how few of us are actually left and still in contact with, well, anyone from our friend group really. I felt a sense of duty, though, as his friend, to make sure other people from that era who would have also considered him a friend knew about his death. I would want others to do the same for me. Nobody I broke the news to actually knew of Ben's death. Part of that may have been to his own design; as an adult and after college, I got the sense that Ben was an intensely private person. He wasn't posting on Facebook every day (the last post I saw actually from him or by him was in 2017, thanking people for wishing him happy birthday). He may have been active in one online community or another, but I never saw any of it. The last time I personally heard from him one on one, it seems, is 2014 -- eight years ago, a few months before Daisy and I got married. I was still living in Kansas at the time. That seems like a lifetime ago now. We were in contact pretty regularly up until that point, though it started to wane around 2010, 2011. 

Ben was not married. Ben did not have any children (to his knowledge; that was a running joke in college that I still use to this day). Regardless, as far as I know he never had any kids. He had girlfriends here and there, including a long-term one for several years running, but his Facebook says "single." I know that to be incorrect, as his obituary mentions a girlfriend by name. I cannot imagine what she's going through. 

As he got older, just like many of us do, Ben appeared to have let himself get out of shape and he put on some weight. Hey, I don't judge. The latest few pictures I've seen of him, including some photos from what appears to be a friend's wedding about eight months ago as well as the photo included with his obituary, shows that in his later years he filled out a bit and became a heavier man, much like myself. That tells me that he was at least somewhat comfortable in life. He was still recognizably Ben in these new photos, but seeing him in them compared to when I knew him and when I was close with him was much like Luke Skywalker unhooding himself at the end of The Force Awakens, showing the fans how much he'd aged.

I'm sure Ben would appreciate being compared to Luke Skywalker, as well.

I have relatively few photos of Ben in my collection of pictures I've saved over the years, but no other photo of the man I've ever seen more exemplifies the Ben I knew than this one -- tan, muscular, thoughtful, and wearing the Mario shirt I must have seen him wear 20 times or more over the years. 

Thank you, Ben, for the memories and for your friendship.

I'll see you on the other side, brother.

Linux No More: A Labor of Love

 Hi all.

This is a brief story about a labor of love. It is the story of my new PC. Feel free to ignore if you're not particularly interested; however, I have some feelings about everything that's transpired since I got this new computer, and wanted to write about it here. Some of the following is going to be technical and/or very boring if you're not deeply into computing, so if you're not -- look, I get it. It's okay. 

Shortly after Christmas, in late December 2021, I finally purchased the refurbished machine I'd had my eye on for a while. What that machine is, is a refurbished and updated Dell Optiplex 9010. It is the replacement for my old Acer machine that spectacularly died on me last fall, and was chosen because I use a smaller, simpler (I guess) Dell Optiplex 9020 for work -- the 9020 is the machine my company issued me when I needed to replace my old HP work machine last year.

As you know if you've been following this blog for a while, I did purchase and had been using, up until recently, a slightly more beefed up version of the same HP machine I had for work -- which I purchased as a backup machine for about $140 or so. It ended up becoming my primary machine when repairs on the Acer failed. More on that below. For now, back to the main story.

This is a brief, partially inaccurate rundown of what my new machine has in it:

My PC has the i5 processor, Windows 10, and 16GB RAM. It does include a DVD-RW, but not a Blu-ray writer. And, the hard drive is 2TB, not 1TB. 

The 9010 came in a number of different configurations upon manufacture -- there were two small form-factor versions (a small and an "ultra-small"), a desktop, a mini-tower, and an AIO (all-in-one, where everything is one unit, including the monitor -- plug in a keyboard and mouse and go). I have the "mini-tower," which is the largest of all of the units. I did this on purpose -- I want the machine to be upgradable and I want to be able to easily swap out drives if/as necessary, as well as have room inside the machine to move my hands around, easily be able to plug in another 16GB RAM stick or what have you. Keep in mind that I have another 2TB HDD from the Acer that is just taking up space and has been fully wiped clean, so I may add that in for extra storage eventually...or I may end up just putting it into an enclosure and attaching it to my PS4, who knows.

Anyway.

I ordered the PC from Amazon in the end of December. I did so because the HP I had been using as my "backup" machine had become my primary machine, and even with Linux on it, it was dreadfully slow. It was loud, it took forever to load programs, sites, videos, its network card seemed more than a little wonky (it would just randomly drop internet connection, for no reason, and would need me to unplug/replug in the wifi extender to reset and re-obtain a connection multiple times per week, and sometimes multiple times per day). It was the very definition of a backup computer -- use it in a pinch until you can get something better and then put it into storage, because it's not built for anything but the most basic of computing needs.

Well, that was always the plan from the day I purchased that machine. My life is spent on the computer and on the internet. You could say, and be mostly accurate, that my life at this juncture is irrevocably entwined with being online, and that it would be very difficult to function without a computer that could meet my needs. There was no way I could just not have a fully functional, working computer that I could use without worrying whether or not it was going to fail catastrophically on me, as the Acer did. Add to this that in the few weeks leading up to Christmas, the HP had been freezing/crashing a fair amount for unknown reasons and with unknown causes -- it would just randomly freeze up and decide it didn't want to do anything. I had similar issues on my old, old HP Pavilion about twenty years ago now too, and it turned out that was the motherboard slowly dying on me. Eventually, it just blew out. This was absolutely not an experience I wanted to deal with again. 

The new Dell was about $200, give or take -- professionally refurbished and with a fresh installation of Windows 10 Professional included. Remember this, it'll be important later. $200 is not an insignificant purchase for me, especially for one singular item, but it did give me the baseline of what I needed to get back to the sort of computing I was used to -- namely all the RAM I'd need for daily use and a 2TB HDD for my storage needs. It came with a generic $5 keyboard and $5 wired optical mouse, the latter of which I accidentally broke into a million cheap plastic pieces when I was unpackaging the giant box this new PC came in Oops. It doesn't matter, I have a fancy LED-backlit mechanical keyboard and wired, LED-color-changing optical gaming mouse anyhow, but it's nice to have spares, I guess. I have another similar gaming mouse in a box behind my television too, in the event that my current one dies or what-have-you. I have options and I come prepared. 

My first step upon its arrival was to back up everything I had on the HP to my external HDD, so that I would not lose a single, solitary file. This was a long, arduous process on that old HP -- while the Acer backed up stuff/copied files relatively quickly, my external HDD is eight years old, and it's a disk -- it's not solid state or anything like that. So, a slow machine moving files to a slow, old drive was an incredibly ponderous process that would legitimately take hours -- just my 200GB podcasts folder alone usually took about 4 hours or more to copy over. Everything else would take, on average, about three hours to move. 

Keep in mind that I didn't trust the HP at all, so I was doing these backups weekly -- usually every Friday or Saturday night -- over the course of the several months I used the machine as my primary computer. 

In the interim, I had gone out and fetched the latest Ubuntu Linux distro and burned it to a DVD, as well as making a second copy on a blank bootable USB drive. I also went to our linen closet and grabbed a spare pillowcase (from my Star Trek: The Next Generation sheet set, if you can believe that) -- this will also be important later. 

The new versions of Ubuntu are very...feature heavy? I guess you could say? They're bloated with a lot of stuff that most users don't want and will never use, along with a few different atrocious "desktop environments" to choose from that are either stupid-looking, hard to use and unlike anything Windows/Mac has to offer, or both. I always used the GNOME desktop environment on my Linux distributions, simply because it was more like a traditional Windows/Mac environment -- top and/or bottom bars, easily accessible menus, desktop icons, the ability to pin things to bars or to menus, etc. As that GNOME got "upgraded" over the years, it also got more bloated and difficult to use/configure properly, and eventually became something completely different than what it originally was supposed to be. Frequently, I would have to go back out and re-download it back onto my machine after an OS upgrade and reconfigure it by hand, which was not something I was a fan of doing, as it eventually got dropped completely in favor of another desktop environment called Unity. 

It got a little easier when after some outcry, a few years ago they released "GNOME Classic," which more accurately mimicked the systems that all of us had used for many years -- but it was far from perfect and not anywhere near as customizable or useful as it looked like it would be (or as old-school Linux users were used to). And really, that was the big part of what I liked about Ubuntu Linux from 2006 to around 2019 or so -- you could really make it your own system, make the tweaks and upgrades you wanted, have it look and operate the way you wanted it to, and not sacrifice functionality. Sure, it was a little more complex to use and if you were a novice to how it ran, you'd be lost until you learned the basics -- but I had many years of Linux experience under my belt and the extra effort was worth it to me to say that I had a lightweight, free-to-own-and-use, open-source operating system with a community of dedicated users supporting it and continually upgrading it.

After a while though, especially from around 2019 forward, that began to change. Once Ubuntu began reaching the 20.xx versions, it began to get slower and less compatible. Programs I'd install and run -- that were said to have full Linux functionality -- would freeze or crash, even though I far surpassed the technical specs needed to run them. It became less customizable and you were more or less forced to use the desktop environments the way the developers wanted them to be. Different media file types stopped being supported, despite the proper codecs being installed and tweaks being applied. One of the system upgrades even broke my default display drivers and forced me to go in on the command line to manually switch to some sort of universal display driver -- something that a novice computer user would never have the patience for or knowledge of how to do. Certain software packages couldn't be disabled or removed or it would break the entire system, but if you didn't have them on your machine and configured properly from a previous legacy upgrade, the machine would also become mostly unusable. I had the Acer configured to work mostly how I wanted it after several OS upgrades and my own personal tweaks over the years, as I'd owned it since 2017, and it did mostly everything I wanted it to -- but every year I would become increasingly more jaded at Linux with each new major upgrade. I still believed in the concept and overall goals of the Ubuntu project, but it felt hollow. I wasn't really enjoying using it anymore. I felt constrained by what it used to be able to do but could no longer do, and truth be told, I'd lost the excitement in making things work the way I wanted them to work -- I just wanted everything to function properly without needing to manually reconfigure every time something changed. It all became so damn tiresome. 

So, all of this being said, I did some research into how to seriously dual-boot with Windows 10 -- meaning, taking a computer with an existing Windows 10 installation on it, and installing Ubuntu Linux alongside it with the choice of which one to load into at boot. There are a few ways to do this, though it used to be far, far easier to do with the much older Ubuntu releases, as well as with earlier Windows releases. Basically, you have to create a partition on the hard drive to hold the Ubuntu OS, blank it out (for lack of a better term) and then when you boot from the Ubuntu DVD or USB stick, install it to that partition. You also have to make sure a secure-boot setting is disabled and check a few other tweaks as well in order to make the machine let you select which OS you want to boot into upon startup. It was simple enough and seemed pretty straightforward, so once I set up the new Dell -- which included fully setting up and customizing Windows 10 a bit -- I made the necessary tweaks and was ready to give it a try.

I'd like to pause here for a moment to say that outside of work, or for a few minutes messing around with Daisy's laptop, I've never had any real experience with any Windows OS past Windows XP 20 years ago. Even my experience with Windows 10 was limited to what my work PC would allow me to access and do on it, which is shockingly little -- IT has all of those machines locked down to do nothing but the minimum of what the company will allow its employees to do on them. All settings/updates/performance tweaks and enhancements are locked up like a vault at the bank. The system runs fine for our work uses, but as a user you don't get a feel for what Windows 10 is or what it can do -- it is as barebones as it gets for our work PCs, with almost everything disabled or removed from the OS itself. When I started at my job, all of the machines had Vista on them. This was updated to 7 for everyone, and then to 10 about 2-3 years ago -- shortly before Covid hit and we all migrated to work from home. All three operating systems were locked down, and 10 has so far been locked down far more than the others were.

As for Windows XP -- the last version of Windows I really used before I started on Ubuntu in 2006 with version 6.06, I loved that operating system. I was a Windows fan in college; it did everything I needed it to do quickly and efficiently, it allowed me to play almost any game I wanted (mind you, games from 20 years ago were a lot less hardware-intensive than they are now) and my Computer Science 101 course at WVU was literally nothing but Office XP. I mastered a great deal of Windows XP and only moved to Ubuntu in 2006 because my computer was quite literally dying and I needed something lightweight to squeeze another few years of useful life out of it. Ubuntu fit that bill and worked wonderfully on my aging PC, allowing me to use it until 2010 when it would've otherwise been completely obsolete by around 2007 or 2008. After that I put Ubuntu on all of my machines from the get-go, completely wiping whatever version of Windows it came with. 

This time around, however, I did not want that to be the case with my new Dell. I wanted options, I wanted to be able to be happy with the PC that I'd just spent $200 on. With Ubuntu becoming increasingly bloated and more restrictive, I wanted the ability to say "today I want to use Windows and boot up a game that wouldn't run in Linux because it's unsupported" and other days, say "today I want to use Linux and do everything I'm used to the old way."

This. Did not happen.

Though the .ISO disk image of the new Ubuntu burned flawlessly, and the new Dell booted into it from the DVD drive, it errored out spectacularly upon loading -- giving me dozens of pages of random failed code scrolling down my screen. 

I switched the options on it, upon boot, to a "graphics safe" install (meaning, mostly text-only) -- it sat on my screen and tried to load for fifteen minutes before hanging up and again displaying crazy-long lines of failed code. 

I thought perhaps I'd just burned an old/failed DVD, or that the disk image itself was corrupted somehow. I grabbed the last install DVD I'd made, when I got the HP and was setting it up, and instead stuck that one in. It was an OS-upgrade older, but it would still work -- I'd just have to perform a system upgrade once installed. It also failed. 

Okay, I thought, maybe this machine doesn't want to boot properly from the optical drive. I rebooted the Dell again with the USB stick plugged in, so it would recognize and boot from that -- it also failed. It wouldn't recognize the bootable USB no matter what I did. 

Hm. 

I reassessed the situation. I could either see if the DVD would do a live-install, as the older Ubuntu OSes did, I could get a much older version of Ubuntu off the online archives (like, ten years old or more) that I knew would work, I could go in and mess with a bunch of the configurations in Windows to see if I could get it working -- without knowing exactly what I was doing or if it would break my machine, or.....I could just figure it out later and use Windows for the time being, as theoretically I already had all the parts in place to install Ubuntu alongside Windows basically any time I wanted, whatever version I wanted -- I could go get an old one and configure it all the way I wanted it to run, then carefully upgrade multiple times to make sure it didn't get rid of my configurations (this option would take the better part of a few weeks, likely, of a few hours every day of mindlessly watching an OS download and install, knowing any failure would likely be catastrophic for my data). 

So I made the hard decision to, for the time being, let Linux go and embrace Windows 10. It was, indeed, a difficult decision and one I didn't take lightly. I just no longer had the infinite patience to fuck around with trying to get Linux to install properly and configure it from scratch on yet another machine, or risk deleting/wiping yet another perfectly good Windows installation just to say that I'm still "the guy who uses nothing but Linux no matter what."

What I found was surprising. Windows 10 is...delightful.

Now, mind you, I am far from a Microsoft shill. I don't really like any big corporations for much of anything, and try to stay out of the mainstream on a lot of big corporate tech -- the only real exception being that I've owned three different iPhones over the course of the past eight years. As long as I can remain an iPhone guy, I will always be an iPhone guy. But I am...very impressed with Windows 10. Like, far more than I expected to be. 

After downloading multiple large updates (apparently my PC had a fresh install that had never been updated whatsoever) and changing around some of the options and startup stuff, I had an incredibly functional computer that, honestly, seemed like it could/would do anything I wanted it to do. I immediately started adding software to fit my needs:

1. LibreOffice -- the open-source, free office suite I used on Linux, to get around needing to get/use Office 365 or something similar. I've used LibreOffice for years. I know its settings. I know its tweaks. All of my documents -- from about 2010 forward -- are formatted for LibreOffice. 
   
   
2. Windows CleanUp! -- terribly outdated (I don't think it's had a new version since 2005 or so) but the best program out there to wipe out old data, clear caches and cookies, delete old registry BS, as well as a bunch of other things that'll clog up your hard drive. I've used it since I had XP on any and all Windows machines I've ever touched, including my work machine. Unfortunately, I had to leap through four or five mirrors until I actually found an install file that Edge would let me download securely, since the program is so old. Speaking of that --
   
   
3. Microsoft Edge -- wow, what a browser. I'm not kidding. I've been a Firefox or Chrome guy quite literally since the early '00s, and I'm highly impressed with what Edge does. Microsoft may have, honestly, perfected the browser here. I do not say this lightly. I've used a lot of different browsers on all of my machines, from Netscape 1.1 and Internet Explorer 2.0 in 1996 to Firebird (the precursor to Firefox) and Opera, all the way up through the newest versions of Firefox and Chrome. Edge is really nice.
   
   
4. Google Chrome -- because even though apparently Edge runs off the same Chrome framework, I still want Chrome on my machine as a completely separate entity. I'll likely eventually install Firefox as well.
   
   
5. Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. It is a 20-year-old computer game that has been on every PC I've ever owned since the game's release, and has been my go-to game to zone out/decompress/release some stress ever since I purchased it back when I was in college. I do not expect this to change anytime soon.
   
   
6. PCSX2 -- I don't know if all of you folks have heard of this, but many of you likely have. PCSX2 is the best PlayStation 2 emulator available. Since I can't pop a PS2 disc into my PS4 and actually play the game (sadly, there's no backwards compatibility) I needed another option. PCSX2 allows me to put the game disc into my computer's optical drive, plug in a USB controller, and play it as if I were playing the game on my actual PS2 system. It'll play downloaded games too (I don't have any of those) and upon testing it last weekend with Star Wars Battlefront II, it seems to work really well. I'll now be able to put my PS2 systems into storage and keep a handful of games around in my office for when I want to play them. 

There's a lot of other stuff I should be able to do in my free time pertaining to gaming as well -- this new PC should be able to run stuff like Magic: The Gathering Arena and Star Trek Online flawlessly and natively in Windows, and I do still have my caches of NES, Super NES, Game Boy/Color/Advance, and Sega Genesis emulators and ROMs as well, some of them dating back to the 90s when I originally downloaded them. I'm purposely not installing all of this stuff yet because, frankly, I don't have the amazing amount of time it takes to play games all day/night on my days off. I could put Steam on this machine too, as I do have an account for it (as Steam did/does have some Linux compatibility) but, again, time.

Overall, I'm rather satisfied with my new machine. There's some stuff it could do better, but a lot that it could do worse. Here's a few of its more glaring drawbacks, though:

1. This particular machine is not compatible/capable to upgrade to Windows 11. My processor apparently isn't fast enough, per Windows itself. All of my other specs are fine.
   
   
2. Because so many versions of the Optiplex 9010 were built, unless all of them run off the same motherboard architecture (overall unlikely, especially for a PC I bought secondhand and professionally refurbished), it's going to be a nightmare to figure out what kind of RAM I need if I wanted to put another stick or two into it to max it out. 
   
   
3. Device drivers are likely going to become a pain again at some point in the future.
   
   
4. I do, once more, have to worry about antivirus and the like, which for Linux is not a thing that exists.
   
   
5. Windows is still Windows -- meaning yes, it's going to have painfully long updates that make me reboot my PC over and over for some of them.
   
   
6. A few programs I loved in Linux are either not compatible or don't exist for Windows 10, and the ones that do the same things generally cost actual money for the Windows versions.

So, all, there you have it. I've been running this machine for the better part of a month now on Windows only, and have been really satisfied with it thus far. I'll let you know if that changes, of course, but apparently I'm a Windows guy now. Again.

Oh, and since I mentioned the pillowcase earlier -- in the event this new machine does die or blow a major part, I slipped the old backup HP into the pillowcase -- protecting it from dust/dirt/vape residue, etc -- and it is now in "storage" next to me at the side of my desk. If I need to use it again, I will, but it can finally get some well-deserved, much-earned rest.