The Rise of Fall, Part III: Northern Turkeys

Of course, with the onset of fall means the holidays are rapidly approaching. But, before Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas we here in the states tend to miss one of the biggest holidays of the year for Canadians -- Canadian Thanksgiving.

I've written about it here before; Canadian Thanksgiving is celebrated far earlier than the American version of the holiday is. It is always the second Monday in October, and coincides with Columbus Day -- or, as they're rebranding it now, Indigenous Peoples' Day here in the states. It's just as big of a deal in Canada as Thanksgiving in November is down here for the Americans, they just do it a lot earlier. As Daisy's mother is fully Canadian, as Daisy's father is (I believe) 75% Canadian, and as Daisy herself has dual citizenship, we celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving here just as much as we celebrate American Thanksgiving. 

This year, Canadian Thanksgiving involved Daisy volunteering to do the vast majority of the cooking of the dinner and us hauling it over to the parents' for a family meal. Neither of the parents have been feeling that great over the past few weeks/months, but it was important to us, as well as them, that we do a Thanksgiving meal. So over the course of a few days, Daisy and I did some food shopping to get the requisite vegetables and other ingredients to create a good dinner -- and through a monumental effort and time, Daisy pulled together corn, green beans, a giant amount of mashed potatoes, a half-gallon of vegan gravy, homemade vegan/gluten-free stuffing, carrots, a vegan turkey (oh, that part was all me, of course) and made a blueberry pie. Mama made cranberry sauce and her famous mustard pickles, as well as a giant basket of dinner rolls (at, ahem, my request).

It was fantastic.

I'd told the team at work I would be in late that night, because it was a Monday -- not one of my normal days off -- and even though I start at 10pm, I knew there was no way that eating a mountain of food like that wouldn't put me into a coma for at least a little bit afterwards. 

We did dinner around 5, and were home by around 8-ish. True to form, I quickly passed out for about two and a half hours in my chair upstairs once we got home, as I knew I would. By around 11:30 or so I was awake and conscious enough to process rational thought again, and started work shortly before 12.

There's still some Thanksgiving leftovers in the fridge even now. I finished the rest of the vegan turkey and what was left of the half gallon of gravy last night, but I know there are a few of the rolls left and there are probably some vegetables or leftover stuffing in there too. It was a very large amount of food. The picture of the plate above does not do it justice. The above picture is about 3x what I would eat in any normal sitting for a meal. Okay, maybe not 3x, but at least double. 2.5x; we'll settle on that. 

This same process will likely repeat itself in a little over another month, of course, when we celebrate American Thanksgiving -- though it's likely that unless we have family in town again we'll be doing some other sort of meal. Daisy is always fond of suggesting off the wall things like "let's just do tacos" or something like that when it comes to holiday dinners, because it's far easier overall to make and clean up, and it's not like it's questionably less satisfying or anything like that. 

We honestly don't know what plans are yet for the holidays. I've already taken off the night before Thanksgiving as well as the following Sunday, to stretch it all into a five-day weekend for me -- the final bit of downtime before the headlong rush into the big holidays of Christmas and New Year's Eve/Day. I have only planned as far ahead as taking those days off around Thanksgiving -- I have no idea what I'll be doing around my birthday and Christmas this year or how much PTO I'll have around those times to cover the time I would ideally want to take off. My birthday is on a Friday, which would normally be good (I don't work Fridays) but to actually enjoy it and not sleep through it, I need to take the night off beforehand. Christmas is on a Wednesday. I absolutely don't want to come back to work on the day after Christmas, a Thursday, but similarly I don't want to have to work the days between my birthday and Christmas either as those days are generally used to prep for the holiday itself -- wrapping presents, making sure the last of the cards are sent out, making and executing various Christmas plans, etc. Adding to this, after my lengthy trip to Canada earlier this year as well as my trip to visit my parents in NC, my PTO is running slim right now and I don't know how much of it I'll have to spare before the holidays roll around. It does help that November has three pay periods and there are five more total before the end of the year, through which I'll accrue approximately 32 more hours of PTO to use (translation: four days) but needless to say, there's going to be some planning involved to make the most of the time given the need for time off for me. 

Halloween, at least, is set. Well, sort of.

I took Halloween off because we're attending our friend's wedding, even if I'm not officiating it. 

Mind you, I don't usually do weddings. I don't really like going to weddings or funerals -- neither has ever been my thing. I only attend weddings of those who are either very important to me, or conversely, if it's very important to Daisy that I attend with her. We're not really people who are into social gatherings anymore of any sort, really -- we tend to stay at home with our cats and streaming services and work ourselves into nice little ruts on the couch in our respective spots -- but occasionally it's important enough that we attend an event that we do it. 

In this case, we've both known this friend for over a decade -- she worked with both Daisy and myself at what is Daisy's former job as well as me at my own current job -- and over that time we've become somewhat close with her. Not like, invite-her-to-the-house close, but close enough to consider her a friend, and we are picky about our friends these days. 

I should add here as an aside that I'm okay with weddings that are fun, and have attended a few of those over the years. Daisy's best friend (the one whose Halloween party we went to last week) had a destination wedding five years ago in one of the most beautiful resorts I've ever been to in Colorado Springs, and that was a blast. Another of Daisy's friends had a Harry Potter-themed wedding a couple of years ago as well, and that was just as fun to attend. Now, the Halloween wedding isn't exactly Halloween-themed, per se, but it is a very small gathering and it's somewhat informal. There's not a big bridal shower or giant reception afterwards or anything like that -- it's a small wedding involving proabably ten or fifteen people at most in a park on Halloween. The bride is wearing a black dress. I'm wearing a Misfits t-shirt and have a head of freshly-dyed blue hair to go along with my Chuck Taylor-style sneakers with flames on them. Etc. I consider that sort of wedding fun. Because, having been married for well over a decade at this point, I also know it's not the wedding ceremony itself, but the overall following marriage that counts. A ceremony is a ceremony -- it can be as lax or as formal as one wants, but in the end it's just one day when the rest of the marriage in the future, after that day, is what actually matters. And for the record, I think the future for the couple in question will be perfectly fine.

Daisy did re-dye my hair the blue velvet this weekend -- the color that was supposed to be more violet than blue. 

That...is not how it turned out.

I used some color-stripping stuff in my hair beforehand to try to get out the rest of the blue I'd had in there from the summer. It did not work that well. It pulled some of it out, yes, but not even the vast majority of it. I figured okay, fine, the new color is dark enough to where it won't matter. And for the most part, I was correct...however the more-violet-than-blue was not the case.

"This looks really blue," Daisy said as she began applying it to my head. "Is it supposed to be this blue?"

"It's supposed to be the color on the box," I said. 

 Now, that picture makes it look very blue, but I promise I got the "blue violet" one circled in the photo and the box is decidedly more violet than the one in the picture.

Well...

On the plus side, I now have something close to the original blue color I wanted in July when I dyed my hair the first time, but there's a bit of false advertising in the violet part of it.

Oh well. It is what it is. It's just hair, and the finished result looks fine. I'm sure I'll fade out in the coming months and I'll be able to re-blue it a few times with the remainder of that tube as well as the blue-depositing leave-in conditioner I have. Plus, I have another jar of the dark smoky blue from another company coming to me in the mail this week, a full bottle of "Purple AF" from yet another company, and I also have an unopened bottle of purple-depositing leave-in conditioner too, so I don't expect to have hair of any normal color anytime soon. As my hair gets longer over the winter, it's going to be interesting to see what it looks like. 

Anyway.

I have no plans for my birthday this year. I alluded to this a bit above but I really have nothing I'd like to do or really accomplish. I've found when we make plans in advance for my birthday, I either don't have the energy to accomplish them or I find that I really don't want to do them by the time my birthday actually rolls around. 

I thought about setting up an appointment with the artist I really like at my local shop (the one who did the blue jay on my arm) to see if she could do a black cat tattoo -- since I, yeah, own two black cats and they're both very important to me -- but that's going to come down to budget and whether I really want to do that. Since I got the blue jay about 16 months ago, I've had my tattoo needs sated for the time being and I haven't had the real need or desire to get another one. Perhaps that will change, perhaps it won't; my mind can sometimes be as fickle as the breeze.

And, honestly, it's hard for me to think too far ahead. Most of my day to day life just consists of work and sleep and keeping the cats and the wife as happy as possible, and sometimes (read: frequently) that saps all of my energy and spirit right out of my body.

The cats are fine, by the way. Empress celebrates her first birthday in about two weeks, and I got a little pink party hat/bow tie/bandana to put on her for pictures. She has, in her first year, become a massive beast of a cat -- while she is not the heaviest (Hank is still the heaviest) she is very likely the largest, and seems like she's still growing. As she grows in size, so does her love for us as her parents. She will spend hours playing fetch with me or Daisy, she now accepts most love and cuddles, and she has taken to sleeping with me on my legs in bed. She is a very sweet, smart girl.

Mable, however...

Mable -- who has more Maine Coon DNA in her than Empress, even -- has now grown to be almost Pete's size (though she is far lighter in weight) and her coat has begun to fill out and get thicker, longer, and shinier. She is definitely still growing and I expect her to end up probably close to Emmy's size -- it's just genetics, really. She is still a little goblin, though not as much anymore as she was several months ago. She loves to be held and made over, and she was perfectly content to be zipped inside my hoodie with me or to lounge inside my bathrobe while I'm working, for long stretches of time. However, she's not all the way there yet when it comes to play and human contact. Sometimes she still bites our toes, sometimes she still jumps on stuff, climbs on things, knocks things over, and is...well, a goblin. But she's growing quickly and maturing quickly. She loves to cuddle up with Pete (and sometimes Sadie) on the couch, but she tends to spend time with everyone fairly equally. She loves laying down on Daisy's chest, and she loves laying at my feet or against my legs -- or, sometimes, next to me -- as if she's my protector.

Hank is Hank. He's 14 or 15 pounds at this point and is by far the heaviest cat in the house -- He is a very sweet boy and will always run upstairs in the morning when I'm done with work to burst into my room with me and get what I call "dad love time," where he's the only one there and gets to be the 100% center of attention for cuddles and belly rubs. Hank is very vocal and likes to talk to us, and is becoming more cuddly with us as he gets older. He frequently sleeps with both of us, he likes being with us, and he loves cuddling with Emmy. Surprisingly enough, he doesn't really make over Mable as much as we do, or as much as Pete does. Pete loves that little girl so much and she adores him in return. Hank has also had no further health issues whatsoever for about a year now (or close to it) and I don't really expect that to change anytime soon.

The oldies are still old and are still alive. Pete is slowing down a lot in his old age and is beginning to look more haggard, like Maggie did before she passed. He's still the same Pete though, for the most part -- very much the same cat he always was. Sadie is about the same; she is slowing down quite a bit too, and is now basically skin-and-bones -- but she eats like a horse and is still relatively active. As I've mentioned here before though, neither of them likely have that long left. We could have a really shitty set of holidays ahead of us if one or both of them take a quick turn and pass before the end of the year. While I don't necessarily think that'll happen with Pete, Sadie has been really deteriorating since Maggie's death and I think she knows to some extent that she's on borrowed time as is. Sadie is one of those cats who could die tomorrow or could live another two years out of spite for the other cats in the household, so you never know.

Plus, if either of them die, it'll really sort of ruin this year's Christmas card, which memorializes Maggie on the back. 

We've discussed end-of-life plans for both cats, as difficult as it has been. I want Sadie to be cremated and scattered in the park like Maggie was, so that the two sisters can be together again. Daisy wants to cremate Pete as well, but she also wants to keep his ashes to either save or scatter herself somewhere. She wasn't really clear as to why. However, Pete is the oldest and he's been Daisy's baby and her favorite cat ever since we've been together, and I'll respect her wishes and let her do whatever she likes with the old man. 

I've not been in a great headspace as of late when it comes to death; I know it comes for everything and everyone, but as I myself age more it seems so much more close to home, so much more real and concrete than it did when I was younger and more detached from it. Don't get me wrong, when I was younger, I had several friends die, some of them quite close to me. And I was greatly saddened by their deaths because all of them were so sudden --

Two (not one, but two different friends) were murdered by their partners.

Two more died in car crashes.

Two very close friends died of cancer, or of complications from cancer. Both were fairly sudden and I didn't know either one was going to die.

One committed suicide by shotgun.

Another I didn't know that well died of a heart defect in her first year of graduate school.

These were all friends from high school or early college. I'm sure there are others who have died since that time that I don't even know about and would probably be floored or otherwise devastated by. I don't keep up with a lot of people from college or even grad school anymore, and fewer still from my high school days. All of it feels like it was so long ago now that it may as well have been another life. 

And yet, this week, when I saw it was the 19th anniversary of my friend Robbie's death in a car crash, it really affected me. Nineteen years is a very long time. I'm part of his memorial group on Facebook but I couldn't bring myself to say anything. I don't know that there is really anything to say, honestly. It's very hard for me to process grief and death in general.

Of course, all of the above doesn't count all of the numerous friends and work colleagues who have died in the time since. I would need both hands to count all the work people I've known who died -- some of them acquaintances, some of them fairly close at one time or another, and one of them my former manager who taught me a lot of what I know. Well, I mean, a decent chunk of it, anyway. It's a tragedy that you don't know how well liked, loved, and respected you are as a person until you die, and then everyone comes out of the woodwork. 

I've had a thought in my mind for years that I am old enough now to where I'll likely see most, if not all, of my heroes die before I do. The touchpoints for that were always my favorite actors or musicians and for example, I've always used Harrison Ford -- there will be a time, likely soon, where I'll see Han Solo and Indiana Jones dead. And I'll know I'm truly old and/or mortal when that happens. It's just a strange quirk I've always had in my head. I'll likely live to see the remaining Beatles die. I'll likely live to see Bob Dylan die, or Mario Lemieux, or Kevin Smith -- basically anyone I've seen as a cultural touchstone, touch point, for me specifically. It's a strange thought.

I knew, though -- at some point I would be old enough and removed enough from my time as a professor to start seeing my students die. I never really thought about it before, but I knew it was going to be something that came up eventually. And, to be fair, I've had a few of those students die over the years, where I'd read their name in the news and be like "oh yeah, I know that name" and then see the picture and be like "yep, I taught him/her in English 101 in 2010. That's sad." 

It's been very few, thankfully -- less than five -- and it's been very rare. Again, there could be more; I surely do not remember the name of every student I've ever taught; it's been in the high hundreds, possibly close to 1,000 -- and I haven't taught a class in over ten years. 

But the students I was close with, that I developed friendships with either during my class or at the end of the semester when they were no longer my students -- those were actual friends. Those were people I cared about and kept in touch with for years. 

Jordan was one of those students.

Jordan was a very small, mousy little girl in the very first English class I ever taught in 2010. She was quiet and kept to herself and was an excellent writer -- she very much did not need to be in my class; she could have tested out of it and could have never bothered with it. But, she was a transfer student, having moved to Kansas from a little town in Georgia, and needed the credits.

As I recall, anyway.

During her time as my student, she (as did the rest of the class) kept journals that were turned in periodically and were graded as a decent chunk of the grade for the class. Sometimes I'd give prompts in class to write about, sometimes I wouldn't. The students were expected to write in them independently as an ongoing assignment, whether they used it to write creatively, brainstorm ideas for papers, or just scribble out thoughts like a diary -- it was an exercise; the purpose of it was to open the mind to writing, to organize thoughts and to be able to lay them out in a coherent, flowing fashion. 

Half my students either did the bare minimum, well below the bare minimum, or wrote nothing at all/never did the journal part of the class and took the grade hit for it, deeming it a waste of their time (hey kids, I didn't write the curriculum at that point, I just had to follow it). Some others wrote about all the drama with their girlfriends/boyfriends. Some did the prompts and would write pages upon pages of straight up drivel. 

Most of the time I did not read-read the journals -- I would skim them and leave a comment here or there so that the students would know I was paying attention when I was grading them, but on some level it felt like I was invading privacy if I pored over every word, especially with the students who were somewhat candid with their lives and did not care who knew all of their juicy gossip.

I must admit, some of those ones were...interesting.

And then there was Jordan. Jordan, who wrote almost effortlessly, who wrote of her abusive boyfriend/abusive ex, her struggles with her health, about her life in Georgia versus Kansas, and brainstormed ideas for her fantasy novels and short stories she desperately wanted to write. 

I don't know why or how I connected with Jordan as much as I did. She was a kid and I was almost 30 at the time. It wasn't a sexual thing or a power thing (I was in a relationship at the time that -- well, at that time, was still a happy one) and I barely saw myself as a professor as it was the first class I'd ever taught. She was talented, she was smart, she was funny, but she seemed sad and alienated, like she'd been through and had seen a lot of shit in her young years -- I saw a lot of myself in her.

Jordan aced every paper in the class. She missed some time due to her health issues, which I let slide (though the department very much would not have let me had they known). She aced the final too, I believe. She got full credit for her journals. Ironically these are the details I'm somewhat fuzzy on after all these years, because my true friendship with her didn't start until after she had left my class, and it developed gradually. We bonded over nerdy things, we bonded over our cats -- she had a gorgeous black-and-white cat named Molly Boo-Monster, who is still to this day one of the prettiest cats I've ever seen. She told me she wanted to be an English major -- more than that, a Creative Writing major -- because she wanted to write her fantasy stories, her books. She would let me read drafts of her writing, tag me in notes on Facebook that were drafts of her "chapters," etc. Over time, she and I became close. She was a good friend to me and I was to her. I supported her when she left her abusive boyfriend and found a good man, and she supported me through my breakups with the two she-who-shall-not-be-named women before Daisy. She got pregnant, had a really rough pregnancy, and gave birth to a beautiful little girl (who has to be close to ten now, maybe older). When Daisy and I got together and later got married, she was very happy and excited for me.

Over the years though, we slowly grew apart. I saw her around the department a fair amount but those times became less and less as I had to dive into my work to finish grad school on time. The last time I saw her in person was probably 2012 or so -- I needed some furniture and she had two end tables she wanted to get rid of; she gave them to me and I stuffed them in the backseat of my Monte Carlo to take back up to Newton -- and I gave her a giant stack of comics in thanks. Both end tables are currently in storage downstairs in my garage right now as I write this, but I used them for years.

Over the past few years, Jordan's health began to greatly decline. She was very badly diabetic and probably had some other underlying health conditions as well. I know at some point, her kidneys had shut down and she had moved into an assisted living facility (mind you, she was young -- I doubt she was even 30 when this happened, though I could be wrong). Prior to this she and I were in pretty regular contact, sending each other snapchats of the cats and her sending me cute videos of her daughter. When she got really sick, all of this stopped on a dime. Messages went unanswered when I tried to check in with her. 

Periodically -- and I mean by that once every six months or so -- she would post on Facebook to let people know that she was okay, she'd just been really sick but was doing better. She had been so sick for some time that she'd basically gone nonverbal and couldn't speak. Earlier this year she posted that she was finally well enough to leave the assisted living facility and was going home -- much to my happiness.

More than that, though, her mother would periodically post on Facebook health updates about her -- she was doing better, she wasn't doing well, she was in or out of another care facility, etc. 

Until a few weeks ago when she posted and announced that Jordan had died. She was 35 -- a little less than a year younger than Daisy. I had apparently miscalculated her age and she was older than I thought when she was my student. I also found out from her obituary that she had been born in Kansas and most of her family was still there. 

She was laid to rest on October 4th. She had died on September 26th -- almost a month ago now.

Oh yes, she certainly did love all of those things.

I did not find out about her death, of course, until her mother posted about it. I was overcome with grief. I didn't know how to process it; mostly I just stared off into space. Her sweet little daughter will now have to grow up without a mother. I don't know if the girl's father is in the picture or not; he remained mysteriously unmentioned in the obituary. They are no longer a couple on Facebook (well, for obvious reasons now) and he hasn't posted anything publicly since 2022.

I will miss Jordan very much. There's a black hole now in that part of my soul, to see a friend so young and so talented -- and the mother of a sweet little girl -- just gone now. I'll miss our (admittedly infrequent) conversations and Snapchats. I'll miss so many things.

Anyway. Now that I've brought down the room quite a bit, I'll end this here. There's more to come, of course, as we once more begin our descent into the holiday season.

The Rise of Fall, Part II: Weird Science

So, we're back...

Picking up where we last left off, on Saturday we celebrated Mama's (Daisy's mother) birthday. She turned 70 this year -- a monumental birthday for anyone really -- and to celebrate Daisy's oldest sister, husband, and their four boys came into town for a "birthday party" for her.

That is the short short version of the story. 

The much longer/more detailed version is that they were coming into town for but one day -- arriving on Saturday morning and leaving early Sunday morning. Basically, just for the birthday celebration itself, an overnight of sleeping fast, and then back on the road back home. This wouldn't be a huge deal if they lived an hour away, or a few towns away, but they live in Denver. It's a ten-hour drive, roughly, one-way -- a twenty-hour round trip hauling four boys here and back across Nebraska. Ten hours may not seem like a lot, but I promise you that drive is very long and very boring for the vast majority of it. 

Daisy said that it was important to her that we maximized the time they would be in town to spend the vast majority of it with the family, and I agreed. She'd made big plans on Friday for us to get several things accomplished, including going to pick up food for dinner (her sister was bringing the dessert) and getting Mama's gifts ready. Friday was my day off, so I planned to go do the shopping with her and to help her in her other endeavors as I could.

And then, Friday afternoon, I got a call from my executive director -- asking essentially what he would need to do for me in return to get me to work that evening and cover as director again. My direct boss would still be out of town until Monday and the weekend director took the weekend off for a family event, and her backup was unreachable/otherwise unavailable. In a situation like that, leadership's hands are tied and they have to start calling people in or otherwise we have no management coverage for what is generally one of the busiest times of the week for us -- Friday night. 

I agreed to do it, primarily because it is very difficult for me to say no to my big boss, but also because I have a sense of honor, duty, and a work ethic and don't want the team to be thrown to the wolves when I do have the ability and capacity to help. So, I got some caffeine in me and logged in, and worked until three in the morning -- until everything was in a good enough place to where I could step down from the proverbial podium and slip into the shadows for the remainder of the night.

However, this meant that I got very little rest before Mama's birthday party. I passed out in my chair sometime around 4 and woke up around 9, groggy and disoriented with a crick in my neck. Daisy had already gotten up by that point and was running around getting things ready, getting dressed, etc. We'd eschewed going grocery shopping for dinner and instead Mama wanted us all -- the full family -- to go to El Basha (our town's best mediterranean restaurant) for lunch. I knew from it being one of the places we frequently get food from that they don't even open until 11am, so I had some time to wake up and try to force myself to be a person again, to get a shower and put on nice clothes to appear to be somewhat human, etc., before I'd be around the family all day.

Daisy let me know she was going over there early, around 10 or so -- her sister and the kids hadn't arrived yet, and wanted to know if I wanted to go over early. I looked at her like a bear who had just been awakened from hibernation and told her no, I wasn't a person yet. She said she'd swing back to pick me up before lunch, and off she went. 

The rest of the day was spent doing that lunch, having cheesecake much later for a dessert, and spending time with Daisy's sister, her husband, and their four boys while they were in town. Mama had a good birthday, filled with love and family and surprise presents. The weather was gorgeous -- it's been very unseasonably warm here in Omaha for October and we've been breaking temperature records left and right -- and when we left to come home, even though it was late and well after dark, it still had to be in the 70s.

The family was set to leave town the next morning around 11. We told them we'd be back over to see them before they left. We even specifically mentioned that I would be there in the morning too, as I didn't have to work that Sunday night because I'd worked on Friday (normally this is not the case). This was the plan, and they'd acknowledged it -- they knew we were coming back to see them off.

Daisy and I slept in the overnight and got up early -- we were in the car and over there by the 10am hour...only to find that they'd left forty minutes beforehand. No calls, no texts, no Facebook messages to tell us that they were leaving, nothing. They'd been rushing to get out the door since 6-something that morning, and apparently us coming back was an afterthought.

How nice.

We'll likely see them again for Thanksgiving (the American one) and we'll definitely see them for Christmas, as it's their year to be in Omaha for it -- which is part of why I've been making so many tie-dye shirts.

About those -- I have now passed probably 40-50 shirts created over the course of the past month or so. In all sizes, too. Their four boys range from ages 5 to 16 and their sizes vary wildly across the board. Our brother-in-law is close to a foot taller than me and is built like me (read: large), and Daisy's sister is much shorter and is beanpole thin. Add to that the shirts I'm making for the parents and it is quite a lot. 

Daisy has questioned this hobby/holiday project, saying that it's expensive and/or too large in scope, or that it's becoming a compulsive obsession (pick one). I'm just trying to give the kids and parents a good Christmas. If we have the rest of Daisy's family come in (her other sister, husband, and their five kids) for Christmas, I'll have more than enough shirts for all of them too. If not, everyone gets a lot of shirts.

I project that by Halloween or so I'll be completely done, and can divide them up, box them, and gift-wrap them. I will need to get some mailer boxes and/or envelopes to ship out the ones I'm sending to other friends and family. 

It is a labor of love, of course. More than anything else it just takes time. I can dye a shirt in five minutes, but the 8-12, sometimes up to 24-hour dye "set" time is what makes it take so long. There is a sort of weird science to it; sometimes I think my color combinations are going to be awful and they come out great, and other times I think they're going to be beautiful and turn out to be absolutely dogshit. I have some "color remover" packets to use in case of emergency, like if a set of shirts get browned out really badly or something like that, but so far (luckily) I have not had to use them. Even the more iffy shirts tend to have some sort of morbid beauty to them. The beautiful ones, of course, are beautiful regardless.

The worst (and really, the only bad) part of this work is that I don't know if it is actually rewarding work -- I won't know until people open up their boxes on Christmas morning, or open up their packages sent to them in the mail. I told Daisy that once the shirts are gifted, they're out of my hands -- if people like and love them and wear them that's great; if they don't and they immediately get chucked into the Goodwill giveaway bag, that's on the giftee, not the gifter. What is that thing they always say? It's the thought that counts? Yeah. That. We'll go with that. 

In other news, to wrap up this entry, tonight we attended a Halloween costume party hosted by one of our closest friends.

Now, mind you, I'm not a huge party/gathering person -- I am even less of one now that we seem to finally, after four years, be fully coming out of a mass pandemic. In that time I more or less became feral and mostly regressed in my social intelligence to not knowing how to handle groups of people anymore. I went from being someone with a rather quiet, but still active social life to the hermit who never leaves the house unless he has to. And honestly, I rather like the latter version of myself -- it's more me than I've been in many years -- since before Daisy when I was living alone. 

Because I've gotten so into that groove (or rut, more appropriately), I haven't left it much.

But Brandon, you might be saying, didn't you spend two weeks surrounded by family in Canada this summer, and another week with your parents this fall?

I did, but those are special circumstances. I don't really count vacations.

Anyway.

When our friend bought a new home late this past summer, one of the things she wanted to do was throw a Halloween party this fall. It wasn't necessarily a housewarming party, per se, but part of it was indeed to show off the new house -- which is gorgeous, by the way -- and to see those of us she was close to for an evening of Halloween-themed food and costumes. I adore this friend; she's likely Daisy's best friend ever and was the Maid of Honor in our wedding -- I know her quite well. Over the years she has been a close ally and strong advocate for not just Daisy, but for me and for us as well. Her teenage daughter is a great kid and we go to all of her school plays. Her husband has always been wonderfully sweet to both Daisy and I. They are likely the closest friends we have in town. So, when she mentioned that she'd be doing the party, I was excited to go. 

It's been some time since I've actually dressed up for Halloween in any sort of recognizable fashion; back when I worked in the office and not at home, we used to organize Halloween events and everyone working on Halloween night -- which, for 3rd shift, was anywhere between seven and ten people, generally -- came in costume, we brought food for Halloween potluck dinners, employees would bring in their kids and they'd trick or treat in the office, etc. It was fun. One of our team leads is big into the "haunt" scene -- as in, he's one of the guys who designs and works crew for haunted houses and other scare-based attractions, goes to conventions for it, etc -- and he used to bring his whole family to site, all of them in costume. It was pretty fun. Over the years we were in the office, I wore various costumes -- one year I was Cyclops of the X-Men, one year I was Mega Man, one year I was Captain America, one year I was a Team Rocket grunt, etc. You get the picture. One year I just wore my bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers because fuck it. Point is, it was a fun experience.

Until we all got off work at 7am on November 1st, when everyone is no longer in the Halloween spirit and they're all coming to work to start their shifts at the time we're getting off and going home -- people who seemed somehow shocked that the overnight crew would be in costume, because who are the overnight crew going to see, and Halloween is over now right? 

Yeah, there always has been a huge chasm of personalities between the types of people who work the overnight and the types of people who work dayshift.

Now, working from home, I haven't dressed up in years. I don't think Daisy and I have even done a Halloween "party" since before we bought the house. The only ready-to-go costume I have on hand is my full-spandex Superman suit, and I will not leave the house in that as that spandex is really thin and it zips up the back -- I cannot use the bathroom, at all, in any way, without taking it almost entirely off. So when I have worn it, it has been for exceedingly short durations of an hour or two at most. And that was several years ago -- I have no idea if it even still fits the same anymore. My weight and body has fluctuated quite a bit in that time. 

Daisy went shopping for Mama's birthday and for our friend's upcoming Halloween wedding about two weeks ago and found two very fuzzy, brown robes at Forever 21 on deep clearance -- she got one for each of us. Her thought was maybe we could get some bear ears and possibly bear noses off Amazon and go as teddy bears for our friend's party -- a couple's costume. I said sure, I was on board for that; the pictures would be hilarious and cute at the very least. 

As the days went on, I told her I needed an answer on if that was what she wanted to do or if she wanted to split off and have us do individual costumes, because likely whatever we needed to get would come from Amazon and I'd need to order it in order to get it here before the party. She flip-flopped on it several times, she did not know what she wanted to do. I offered her another option -- I had black slacks and a Star Trek uniform shirt already (I'd ordered the shirt for funsies many months ago) and if she didn't want to do the teddy bear thing, I was more than happy to just go on Amazon and order the phaser I'd had on my wish list for years to complete the costume. It would be quick and simple for me. Bonus: I could go use the bathroom as necessary in the Star Trek uniform. 

She eventually decided that the robes would likely be too hot to spend a few hours in at a party and told me to go order the phaser, which I did -- she'd find something else to wear. She had some ideas milling around in her head. 

One day while I was asleep last week, she went to the local Goodwill looking for costume ideas. She returned home with a queen-size, olive-drab-green jersey bedsheet -- appeared to be new and unused or very lightly used at best -- a rainbow scarf, and a vampire cape. She said she was going to take the sheet over to the parents' and turn it into a dress that she could both wear on the daily as well as wear as part of a "forest goddess" costume for the party. The cape and the scarf were just bonuses that she may or may not wear for the party. Sounded fun to me.

What followed was two straight days of her bent over her sewing machine at the parents' house, working with Mama to turn a big green bedsheet into a dress. Now, as you know, Daisy is not a small woman. She's big and thick and I love her for it (if she wasn't I'd likely snap her in half like a twig, because I myself am not small). Dresses for big women are different than those for smaller ones. They have to fall on and fit the body comfortably, naturally, but also in a way that is stylish. When making a dress all of this has to be taken into account even more. When making a dress from a bedsheet with no real start-end points in mind and only mental patterns (and I am sure some physical ones/ rough plans) to go off of, it's a lot harder than it sounds. 

Daisy worked on this dress for two solid days -- all day yesterday and all day today before the party. Throughout the whole process I tried to be as helpful and supportive as possible, though the process itself was frustrating her immensely. Last night she came home and was feeling ill, and said she'd just go back over in the morning and finish it. When she did that this morning, very early, she spent the entire day finishing it up before declaring it "good enough" for the party, and once I was in my Starfleet uniform, we were off.

The "party" itself was very small; it was our friend, her husband, her mother, her daughter and her boyfriend, some cousins up visiting from Missouri with their own kids, and us. It was a fun, intimate experience -- especially as we (and I guess her daughter's boyfriend) were the only people there who weren't actual family...but she considers us family. They put out a massive spread of food, making sure that most of it was vegan/vegetarian and/or gluten free, to try to cater to both Daisy's and my own dietary needs. There was a lot of it that was not, of course, but she made sure to point out those things. I was very impressed.

We stayed for probably 2 hours, maybe a little longer. Her husband even put the WVU vs. Iowa State game on the TV for me because I was missing it by being at the party. Our costumes went over exceedingly well, and I even got to use the line "yes, that IS a phaser in my pocket, but I am also happy to see you." 

Her costume, by the way? She was a Cybertruck. She'd built a suit for it out of cardboard boxes. Her husband was a vampire, complete with amulet, collared cape, and fangs. Her daughter and boyfriend were Morticia and Gomez Addams. Daisy, of course, was a forest goddess in her new dress, with some decorative flowers attached -- in beautiful makeup, and with a flower crown. 

It was a fun experience. There were many pictures taken. If you're on my Facebook, the two of us in costume is now my current profile picture. T'is the season, after all. 

We came home, and Daisy -- who was now completely burnt out -- showered and had some vegan pizza, and I watched the remainder of the WVU game before setting another few shirts on to dye and passing out for a short, hour-or-so nap. When I awoke, she was already in bed and had been for some time. 

So, that's all for now. But, believe me, there is much more coming.

The Rise of Fall, Part I: The Reverend

 So.

In the time since we've returned from visiting my parents, quite a bit has happened -- as I mentioned previously. I have not had time to sit down and lay it all out yet, primarily because I was trying to tell the story of that trip. 

I should probably start from the beginning, and the beginning takes us back to mid-August or so -- a few weeks before we left.

As you know, I work from home -- I have been working from home since March 2020, the real start of the pandemic. It is something I was born to do (not the job, but the concept of work from home). I am very good at it, my productivity levels have been through the roof since we moved to a work from home platform, and I can actually concentrate and lead better from a remote position without feeling like I'm being too overbearing or micromanaging my employees. Conversely, I don't have a line of employees in a constant stream to my desk asking me stupid questions one after another (we have Teams for that now). 

Plus, as I've also mentioned before -- no dress code at home, I have access to food/drink/vapes, I am surrounded by my cats, I can listen to my podcasts or music, and I can take a nap or play on my PS4 for my lunch hour if I want to. And, big bonus, Daisy is here. Whether she's awake or asleep, she's almost always here in the house with me while I'm working. The only real drawbacks to the current situation are that I have to work downstairs in the living room as our company-issued PCs have to be hardwired into the router (no wifi on them) and there's not really an opportunity for career advancement unless someone above me quits or dies. 

Or gets fired.

In the middle of August, one of our two program directors was removed from our program for, and I will not go into further detail, justified reasons.

It has always been assumed, but of course never guaranteed, that when/if one of those two directors were to move on to proverbial greener pastures, I would be promoted up into the vacated director position. My current boss knows that's the overall plan, my executive director knows and has agreed with me in the past that's the overall plan, and the dayshift teams -- many of whom I've known and worked with since I started in that job ten years ago -- were eagerly awaiting the day I'd take the reins. It's a bit like royalty, like peerage -- Your time has come, my son. YOU must now wear the crown. Etc. I'm sure you get the idea.

My executive director -- the man who interviewed and hired me for my original low-level position  there many years ago, so we go back to the beginning -- let me know the news that said director was no longer with the company and I shit you not, my first immediate question was "so when should I expect my offer letter?"

Look -- I am cocky about very few things. I try not to be overly so. This was something that, after a decade there, I was completely justified in asking -- I mean, given the audience and the history. 

Well, of course, it's not that simple because it never is. I was originally asked if my schedule could change, if I'd mind doing the director shift as a backup. I agreed to this, because of course I'd be thrilled to spend my weekends not sleeping and missing every football game.

In reality I agreed to it simply because my big boss asked me to and because if I hadn't I'd never be considered for the actual position no matter my skill level or tenure. 

So, it was arranged that the following week, I'd take off a couple of normal working days and flip my schedule to cover as Acting Director™ for the weekend teams. Nothing, of course, was set in stone (and wouldn't be, but I'll get to that) but we needed coverage, and needed someone my executive director could trust to handle everything in a skilled, business-professional manner even for things that were highly escalated or involved company executives. I was that person.

For two weeks in a row -- leading right up to us leaving for NC -- I was that director. 

Director shifts are very different than my normal 10pm to 7am overnight shift. For one, it's a four-day week instead of five. For two, my day starts in the 2pm hour...and can end anywhere from 12 to 14 hours later, depending on what's going on that night. For four days straight. And it's 24/7 on-call.

Now, mind you, my job now is technically 24/7 on call, but there's legit no business need for anyone to be calling an overnight manager during the daytime when all of the daytime managers are there. It is very rare I get a call from anyone in my off hours. Occasionally I'll get one on the weekend overnight when I'm off-shift, and won't see it or get the message until the next morning, by which point it's already been dealt with. 

Near the end of those two weeks of my Acting Director™ tenure, I of course made sure my fellow leadership and executive director knew hey, I'm going to be out of state for a few days over Labor Day, so, y'know, someone's going to have to account for that. There was indeed a plan for that -- we do have another director, for one of our offshore sister sites, who could cover when I was going to be out. She was who the corporate overlords wanted to install as the full-time replacement for the position because she already had the title of director, and thus no offer letters or salary changes would need to be put into place -- lateral moves, etc.

This didn't necessarily sit well with me and didn't sit well with my executive director for multiple, and some very obvious, reasons. The biggest problem is that there are a lot of directorial duties this lady cannot contractually do because she's not stateside -- some of our stuff can only be worked/touched by stateside employees. Another factor is that she's been here less than a year and was a recent promotion to director (as I understand) simply to fill the necessary role -- and while from what I've seen of her she's been fine, she doesn't have the decade of experience in leadership in that company that I do. 

As such, I was informed that my role would return to normal once I got back from NC and that she would just fill the vacancy...pretty much indefinitely until the full business case could be made that I needed to be put into that role permanently. There were several discussions had about this process and the implication was made that I likely wouldn't be waiting long, so to speak.

I was, and am, fine with this. Most people likely wouldn't be, and most people would say I was robbed of the position that was, in many ways, rightfully mine. To those people I say patience is a virtue, and when I need it I can exhibit it for as long as necessary.

So I headed off to NC for a week -- after two weeks of high praise for fulfilling that Acting Director™ role really well, and returned to work on my normal schedule to many messages from multiple people telling me how they were upset and upset for me that I hadn't automatically gotten the position. I simply told them it was what it was at the moment, and nothing was set in stone anywhere that I'd heard. What some of them fail to realize (and others just didn't want to realize or admit) was that I can't just be promoted out of the blue without discussion, like King Charles bestowing a knighthood on someone -- the last holder of the position left it (we'll leave it at that) and therefore the position has to be posted, there has to be an application and an interview process for any and all candidates who would be interested, and then the leadership teams would need to make their decision and extend an offer just like any other job within any other company. Everyone who gets promoted there has to go through the same process, even if it's a formality -- I interviewed multiple people for the Team Lead positions under me and everyone got a fair shot even though I knew from the beginning who would be picked for it and who wouldn't be. This sort of thing would be no different. 

That's where stuff stands now, by the way; I am currently in my normal position at work I've held for over eight years, although I will tell you that I am doing the directoring thing this week again as my own boss is out of the office on vacation -- so for this week's shifts of work I'll be working three 12-14-hour days in a row and will be happy to do so. It'll change up some stuff a bit. I like my schedule and role being shaken up a bit here and there, on occasion, and getting to do things differently than I normally would. As long as it's not a constant-change thing. and as long as it doesn't destroy my mental state or ability to sleep, it's a fun endeavor. Plus, and let's be honest here at least a little -- it's a power trip. Yes, there's more responsibility, but I can tell you it feels great to proverbially point at someone and say "You -- you're on this issue tonight, fix it or make it go away."

Kneel before Zod.

Anyway.

So that's fun. That's what's been going on at work for the latter half of the summer. But, summer is over now, and we're into the fall...and there's a lot that's already been happening this fall. 

Fall means cooler temperatures, pumpkin spice, Canadian Thanksgiving, US Thanksgiving, Halloween, Gravy Season, and the headlong run towards the best parts of the year: the holiday season encompassing my birthday, Christmas, and New Year's. 

To those ends I have been going down through everything on my own personal to-do list one by one and have been taking care of them as much as possible; as the list balloons, so does the highlighting on it denoting what I've already taken care of. 

Over the summer -- and I may have mentioned this before earlier -- I have been making tie-dye shirts again. I purchased a lot of various colors of dye and many packs of white t-shirts, and have been doing it as a hobby. Most of them I've kept for myself and/or Daisy, but some I made for my parents for their birthdays and some I made for Daisy's father just because. 

Well, that has now ballooned into me getting three final six-packs of white shirts tomorrow in the mail -- L, XL, and 3X -- and multiple weekends of spending my decompression time, my relaxation time, making shirts for the family as this year's Christmas presents. It is, and I don't want to overstate this, a grand undertaking. The materials aren't that expensive (they're not cheap either, but they're not prohibitively expensive by any means) but the process is very time-intensive and can be a bit messy. Daisy doesn't really wear t-shirts of any sort most of the time, so I'll be doing other stuff for her for Christmas -- but with the rest of the family that will likely be in town for Christmas, I've got eight people to make a few shirts each for...so it takes time, design, planning, making sure I have sizes correct, etc. I'm also doing it for a couple of friends too, so their own sizes and color considerations have to be taken into account. Each batch of shirts has to be rinsed out of the package, then soaked in soda ash-laden water for a while to make them ready to receive color, then carefully dyed, rinsed again and hang-dried, and then finally washed/tumble-dried with a very mild detergent and very mild fabric softener (to make sure they're not going to bleed more color)...then folded carefully and packed away for Christmas. The longest part is the actual dyeing process, as for them to really get good color to set the shirts have to basically marinate for 8+ hours or more. Sometimes longer, sometimes a lot longer. 

I have made approximately fifteen shirts over the weekend in various sizes and colors. I'm getting there, as they say. My goal was to be done with all of them by the beginning of October, and that's (very obviously) not the case. 

It's not a huge secret I'm doing this, so I feel comfortable with writing about it here -- but it is sort of a secret, so I'm not going into great detail about it. I should be done with the vast majority of the work for it by sometime next week. I can make about 3-6 shirts per batch if I'm really cooking along. And it's fulfilling to me -- it's handmade presents, creative presents. I'm great at presents for the close family, but I am terrible at picking stuff for the nieces and nephews and the brothers-and-sisters-in-law. So, universal options like tie-dye things tend to work really well. I also don't know who will be in town for the holidays (I have a decent idea, but nothing confirmed) so if I end up making more than I currently need, well, there we go. 

I also became an ordained minister last week.

No, I'm not kidding. Let me explain.

To make a much longer and more detailed story short, one of our mutual friends wanted to get married this month (October) but did not want to do a huge ceremony -- just something really small and intimate, quick, quiet, etc. She was having trouble finding someone who could officiate the wedding. I told Daisy I would be more than happy to fill out the paperwork and go get ordained by the Universal Life Church and do it myself for her for free, out of the goodness of my heart. Because, honestly, why not? 

Everything is an adventure. I like adventures.

Because of this, I got to have this wildly unhinged conversation with my boss:

Me: So, I'll likely be out of office on Halloween, because I am:

    a. Going to a wedding

    b. will be officiating said wedding

    c. It is [Name]'s wedding.

Boss: Yeah, that tracks. 

So last weekend, I went and filled out the paperwork, got myself ordained, and ordered the hard copy paperwork and ID badges and everything I'd need to perform a wedding ceremony. All together, it was about fifty bucks from start to finish. 

Man, if you'd told me at the beginning of this year that before the end of it I would have blue hair and would be an ordained minister performing a wedding ceremony on Halloween, I would've said you were crazy. But, here we are.

Anyway.

I found out the morning I became ordained that my services were not required and our friend had been able to find an officiant who was willing to do the exact ceremony she wanted and already had knowledge of the process involved (pagan-ish stuff I believe). So, we'll still be going to the wedding, but I won't be performing it...and I'm still a reverend.

Again, not kidding, I guess that's my official title now. The Rev. Brandon [Surname]. I told people at work they can start calling me Reverend anytime they want, but as of yet it hasn't stuck.

I got the hard copy paperwork in the mail a few days ago, and it has a wallet card that proves that yes, I can act as the proverbial hand of God, in addition to a diploma-like certificate to display, a book on different types of ceremonies, a few marriage certificates, and a car placard that I can hang up on the mirror to signify that I'm a member of the clergy. What a wild ride.

In other news, I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my iPhone 12 Mini to a new iPhone 16 Pro. It's much larger and much heavier. I just got it today and it's still in the box; I haven't messed with it yet to transfer my stuff over, and likely won't until later tonight or in the morning (depending on when and how I sleep). I love my 12 Mini, and there's really nothing wrong with it except the battery life has greatly diminished over the past nearly four years, but I figured it was time. With the 16 Pro, it's the first time I can say I've owned a current-generation phone -- I've always waited until the new model has come out and then I've gotten the previous one as it's usually the only time it'll be cheaper. For example, I got my 5c when the 5S was the standard, my 7 when the 8 had just been released, and the 12 Mini when the 13 had just come out. I plan to keep the 16 Pro until at least the 20 is released, barring any unforeseen circumstances. I didn't necessarily want something that big, but as they don't make the "Mini" models anymore, it is what it is I suppose. It's more for the battery life and the latest chips/hardware anyway.

The old iPhone 12 Mini I will wipe back to factory settings and ship back to T-Mobile within the next few days, as that's how the device upgrade/turn-in process works. I don't know if I'll do it here from the house or if I'll just take it in to the store and have them process it or have them show me how to do it, etc. Daisy took her previous-model Galaxy into the store and they helped her with it, so we'll see what happens. I don't have any experience with that, honestly. My 5c I owned outright (it's still in its original box in my office up here, behind my lounge chair). With the 7, I ordered it online and had it delivered to the apartment, and then when I upgraded to the 12 Mini I did it right there in the store and they took it from me there when I got the new one set up. So I mean, it's a completely new process for me on how they do it now. 

[Edit: I set it up this evening and it was a pain in the ass to get signed back into everything, but it works and it is very nice. The case doesn't arrive until later this week, so I will have to be really careful with it until then.]

My hair is still blue; I had it the dark "blue panther" for a while, but that has since faded out and it's faded back to its original, more bright/shocking blue. Even that is now fading out and my roots are growing in, so some days it looks more blue than others and some days it looks more seafoam green-ish. I used the color-depositing conditioner for a while and it cemented a more normal, stabilized blue color when I was using it on a regular basis, but for the past few weeks I've just been letting it fade out as much as possible -- I got a color-remover solution to take the rest of it out, and I'm going to make it "blue velvet" (a more violet-hued dark blue) sometime before our friend's wedding. That's likely a couple of weeks off yet, however.

This year's Christmas cards have been designed, ordered, and already delivered.

I know that's likely shocking to you (heavy sarcasm intended) but it was more difficult this year compared to past years. 

Why? Well, for one, we lost Maggie this year. Either Maggie or Sadie would grace the back of the Christmas card almost every year. It was a running tradition (however, one year we used Pete, and last year, Hank). I knew I would have to put some sort of tribute to Maggie on the back of the cards -- but even though Shutterfly (the company I make the cards through) is highly customizable, not everything can be customized. One design I wanted allowed a photo collage, and I liked that a lot but was iffy on the front of the card. Another design allowed the photo placement I wanted on the front but left a lot to desire about the back of the card's design. I liked them both equally for different reasons.

In the end, I did something I've never done before -- I ordered two sets of cards, 30 of each. Some people will get one, some will get the other. The ones that have the photo collage I like Daisy hates, and the one that we both love the front of I'm not a huge fan of the back. It is what it is. Daisy thought the one she disliked, with a photo collage of Maggie on the back, was too -- and I quote -- "DEAD CAT, BE SAD" for her liking. I thought it was a beautiful tribute.

"You can send those cards to your friends and family," she said, "and send the other ones to mine."

I mean, okay. It's really not bad.

The other reason it was more difficult this year than last is that we have acquired two more cats since Christmas last year -- Empress and Mable. Empress we got on December 29 (and her birthday is coming up soon, early November) and Mable we got on April 11. I wanted to make sure they were included on the cards somehow because, I mean, they're important. They're both on the face of the card that Daisy really liked and their names, at least, are on the front of the other one. Do you know how hard it is to put seven names on a Christmas card when you're given a limited allotment of text? It's difficult.

Anyway, it's done, they're here in my possession, and the great mailing begins on Black Friday. I've gotten a new variety of stamps this year, including hippie designs, Dungeons & Dragons, and "Save the Manatee" stamps -- in addition to a new sheet of international stamps for those members of our family in the Great White North. So, I think we'll be fine. As is customary, I'll post both designs on my Facebook on Christmas Eve -- which I think is generally when I post them as by that point, if cards haven't arrived in the mail I can't help it. 

My driver's license, which expires on my birthday this year (so, less than three months from now) has also been renewed online and I'm waiting on that to get here in the mail. I'll have to renew my passport soon as well, if I'd like to be able to visit the aforementioned Great White North again next year (budget permitting). Daisy will have to do the same; they last ten years, and ours were last done in 2015 shortly before our very first trip together to Canada. I don't have any gray hair in that photo, if that tells you how long ago ten years was. The good thing is that now it can all be done online, and you upload your own photo and everything...so...the USA has finally leapt into the 21st century -- a quarter of the way through it. 

We finally got the DNA test results back for Mable -- our youngest child -- that we'd sent out the week we left for Canada. I was pretty shocked:

...that's more of a percentage of Maine Coon than Empress has. And Empress looks FAR more like a Maine Coon than Mable does. The rest was just as wild:

Two different wildly eastern breeds and a decent chunk of exotic.

The Siberian and Ragdoll, along with the small percentage of Norwegian Forest Cat, don't surprise me. But I was not expecting to see anything in there like "more Maine Coon than the actual Maine Coon we have." By almost two percentage points, by the way.

But, as she has grown, she is certainly showing the Maine Coon features -- giant fluffy tail, long and thick fur (but not really a longhair), a sharp/angled face, and giant tufts of hair on and in her ears. She has more than tripled in size since we got her in April, and seems to be getting ever larger by the week. I told Daisy that it is very likely she'll be a giant cat and it's just taking her a while to get there. It took Empress quite a while to get large, and she is now likely the largest (but not the heaviest, that's Hank) cat in the house. She is also still growing.

So that should probably be the end of this entry, as it is getting long. There is, however, more to cover coming up...

Brandon and Daisy Venture to North Carolina, Episode II: "Into the Bagel'd Sky"

 The next morning, after making sure all of our laundry was done as necessary and everything that could be stuffed into our baggage had been done so, we said our somewhat-awkward goodbyes and left Oak Island for Wilmington once more. 

On the way to the airport, Daisy wanted to make sure we got bagels for breakfast from a vegan bagel place we'd meant to stop at earlier in the journey but had not gotten the chance to. I love a good bagel, but I saw the trip at the time as a somewhat needless waste of time and money. Daisy, however, is not like me and actually needs to eat more than once a day -- she could not and would not really be able to travel without eating. Me? I'm pretty flexible, I don't really care -- the end goal for me is getting to the destination without becoming a headline on CNN that finishes with "...killing all passengers on board."

The bagel place was insanely out of the way of the airport -- as in, on the other side of Wilmington. And we were on a timeframe, as we would still have to drop the car off, get through security, and then get to the plane. 

I'll also add that throughout all of this -- in fact, most of the trip -- we were both in intestinal distress to one degree or another. Daisy was more afflicted than I was, as she'd been trying to remain mostly gluten-free for months on end as it makes her feel better, but did not really bother trying to do this for a large chunk of the trip. Mind you, if there was a gluten-free option for something she'd go that route, but for a lot of what we ate while traveling...that wasn't really a thing. Finding good vegan food is one thing; finding good vegan and gluten-free food is generally quite another. So, after a certain point of the trip she pretty much just gave up. 

Bagels are decidedly not gluten free unless you go somewhere that specifically makes them as such, usually at a high price premium for it. But, as I'd spent the last several days living off whatever we could get at vegan restaurants, Utz chips, rice cakes, and cheese sandwiches at my parents' place...I wanted something different and a bagel with wild toppings like carrot lox, vegan bacon and/or sausage, and cream cheese sounded magnificent. It sounded like actual sustenance.

That being said -- I didn't need it. I would've been fine without. But the stop was very important for Daisy, and when we travel together I always want to indulge her in doing the things she wants to do and going to the restaurants she wants to visit, too -- it's not just about me. We do enough things that are labeled as more for me than for her. 

It took us over an hour to get to the bagel shop. This was cutting into our time we'd need to drop off the car and get to our flight. It was a miserable, humid, traffic-filled drive through weird-ass streets in Wilmington, through residential neighborhoods and industrial areas, to finally reach a main drag where there was this tiny little bagel shop in a strip mall. 

So we got our bagels -- I'm fairly sure they charged me for the two that I asked for and they only gave me one, but fuck it we were in a hurry and could not spare the time -- and made our way to the airport. We dropped off the car painlessly and we were headed to the security line when it happened.

I felt a low rumble. I felt pressure and pain down south. I had a countdown. Daisy looked at me and knew I was in distress and said "just go."

And I did everything I could to keep it together, in a busy airport on a Tuesday morning, to get to the men's room and into a thankfully open and freshly-cleaned stall before my stomach unleashed its fury for twenty minutes.

It was a terrifying experience. I think I've only ever had to, ahem, use the full facilities in an airport bathroom once before in my entire life. It just wouldn't stop. I had my eye on my watch and was texting Daisy that I was sorry, I couldn't help it, but I also couldn't stop it.

I hadn't even eaten the bagel(s) yet. 

When the bathroom gods had decided I'd had enough and finally let me loose from their grip, I collected myself -- cold sweats, disheveled looks and all, and we made our way through security and to our gate, where we finally could eat our absolutely wonderful bagels in peace. 

The flights home were fine, but long; I seem to recall we got held up/delayed in Chicago and our gates changed a couple of times. I bought fries from a McDonald's kiosk at one point. My phone battery almost died because it does that now if I'm not in constant connection with wifi or an otherwise T-Mobile signal. Daisy read a large chunk of her book. I took anti-diarrheal pills and was blinded by the sun on the plane because we were flying west. Y'know, travel things.

The parents picked us up at the Omaha airport without incident and brought us home to our cats who, of course, were wildly happy to see us after we'd been gone for a few days. I let my parents know we were home, and immediately began doing all of the laundry from the trip. I returned to work the next evening.

So, that's the overall story of our trip to the Carolinas this year. As I write this, it has now been almost a month since we returned home. Life has resumed much as expected, and a LOT has happened since as we head into fall. That stuff, of course, I'll cover in the future here.

Brandon and Daisy Venture to North Carolina, Episode II: "Cape Fear'd"

 We were in North Carolina for roughly five days total -- we arrived on a Thursday night and left on the Tuesday morning after Labor Day. I count the night of arrival and the morning of departure as one day because they were basically travel days and not a whole lot of time was spent doing proper vacationing.

On Sunday, Daisy had made plans for us -- the only real plans we'd had for the entire trip, in fact, when it comes to real "event things" we wanted to do while we were there -- we were scheduled to go on a dolphin-watching boat tour off the coast. This tour required you to book tickets in advance, and then drive down to Myrtle Beach to the location to where the boat launched from.

It's a decent hour's drive to Myrtle from where my parents are; it's not an awful drive, but it takes time. And this was Labor Day weekend, to boot. Traffic was nuts, and the dolphin-watching boats were booked solid. Thankfully, Daisy had gotten us our reservations/tickets a few days beforehand. We were told to dress for all weather as the boats went out rain or shine, and of course, if was very likely you'd get wet while on the boat itself, as you'd be out in the ocean for some time and...waves. Splashing. Winds. Etc. 

Well, Sunday turned out to be an incredibly godawful hot day, with clear skies and a lot of blazing sun, and the temperature shot up quickly. I made sure to pack my sun hat with me -- a denim oversized bucket-hat I'd purchased down there last year -- and we slathered ourselves in sunscreen. The dolphin-watching tour was estimated to take about two hours, sometimes more and sometimes less, depending on how many times the boat would need to stop to look at dolphins. Etc. It was a very detailed experience with a full webpage full of notes and suggestions to follow for it.

Now, mind you, this is not the first time Daisy and I have gone on a boat trip for pleasure reasons -- we'd done the Lake Michigan boat tour from the Navy Pier in Chicago a couple of years ago, and earlier in the summer we had of course done the whale-watching tour in Nova Scotia. At this point, both of us know how this game is played. Boats are nothing new for us. And honestly, I wanted to see dolphins up close. The whale tour had left a lot to be desired, such as...the only whales we saw were like 30 yards away. Dolphins are everywhere, especially in the Carolinas, and they tend to travel in giant pods of large numbers.

So we drove down to Myrtle Beach -- not North Myrtle, but Myrtle proper -- and ventured down a number of sketchy looking back roads and side streets to get to the highway that would eventually take us to this port where these boats would launch from. There were so many people there. Daisy and I parked at least 1/4 mile away from the docks/restaurant/launch point and had to hoof it in the sun, get our tickets counted, and then...wait in a line of about 200 people that stretched waaaay back up towards where we parked. 

I don't know what the boats' max capacities were -- there were two of them, the Sea Thunder and the Sea Screamer. Both of them were identical except for paint jobs, and I don't even remember which one we were on. They would disembark on opposite-ish schedules, so as one was coming back in, the other would go out, constantly exchanging great numbers of passengers. We had our pictures taken -- I guess this is a Coast Guard regulation in the event someone goes overboard -- and we were ushered onto the boat we'd been assigned...with, likely, about 50-60 other people. Yeah.

The boat seats were not comfortable. They were smaller than airline seats, by a lot, and were hard plastic, like stadium seats. Daisy and I are larger people, of course, and well...we both had a lot of trouble fitting into them. Daisy had to change her seating a number of times because it was so uncomfortable for her. 

The boat took us out a very long, canal-like passage (with water so brown that it could have been Coca-Cola) and then out of a seawall and we were finally on the open ocean. The skipper gunned it, and we were shooting away from the mainland and into the seas. 

And we saw....nothing.

About fifteen minutes after getting out into the ocean, the boat was approached by a few jet-skiers who told us that they'd seen a pod of about 100 dolphins or so going nuts about a mile from where we were. The skippers were like "okay, that's where we're headed then" and once again gunned it in that direction.

We got there...and we saw nothing.

We went out another few miles and made a big circle...and we saw nothing. Not a single dolphin. Not a single jumping fish or otherwise any signs of life. The coastline was a hazy blur far behind us, many miles away, and...we saw nothing.

The skipper turned the boat around and headed back towards shore. Apparently one of the (many) children on the tour saw a large sea turtle swimming near us. I did not see it. 

An hour later, once we got back into the dock, the skipper let everyone know at that point that none of the tours had seen any dolphins all day, and that everyone who'd been on the trip would get a free voucher that never expired for another trip out to see dolphins -- they could use the voucher tomorrow, next year, or many years down the road, it didn't matter because, again, no expiration. Later, Daisy would confirm with me that she did receive it in her email, so I guess the next time we visit North Carolina we've got a "free" boat trip waiting on us.

By the time we got back to the car, we were both very hot and thirsty, and were hungry.

We had asked the parents that morning if they were planning to go see a friend of my dad, who had a band that was playing in Southport that night. They'd told us they were originally going to go, but had decided they weren't really feeling well enough to do so and were tired, so they didn't want to. That was fine with us; we told them we'd likely get something to eat on the way home then and not to worry about us, and that we'd be home for the evening before dark. 

This to me was a pretty set plan -- as in, not something we would have expected to change. So, Daisy and I searched for some vegan or vegan-ish restaurants in Myrtle Beach, since we were deep in the heart of Myrtle already, and found an Indian/Mediterranean place we wanted to try, got the directions, and drove there.

By the time we were in the parking lot, we'd each gotten multiple missed calls and texts from my mother, saying they'd changed their mind and that they were going to go see the band play, and, could we be home by X time etc?

We could not be. We were well over an hour away from home, and were about to sit down for a meal. Even if we weren't, we would not have made it back home before they left.

We weighed our options. The carry-out/pickup on the restaurant's website advertised 15 minutes or something like that, and the place did not look busy. We figured we could eat, turn around and drive back home and get there eventually, even if we had to drive directly to the location ourselves and meet them there. Or, we could not eat and just turn around -- which wasn't really an option for either of us, we were both starving to the point where we were starting to get ill. 

Either I or Daisy (I can't remember honestly) let them know we were eating and would be down there when we could. Of course, had we known they would be changing their minds and would want to go, we would've come straight home after the dolphin tour, showered, changed our clothes, and we could've looked somewhat presentable. We didn't have that option anymore. My dad responded that they'd leave a spare key for us if we wanted to stop at the house and do all of that stuff before we drove to join them, but I believe Daisy told them that we'd just meet them there.

So we went inside the restaurant, sat down, and got our menus...and it took the servers forty minutes before they even came to take our order. After the order was done, it took another forty minutes to get all of our food -- and they even forgot one of the dishes I'd ordered (we weren't charged for it, so eh). 

We were mixed on the food -- I really liked a lot of the stuff I'd ordered, and Daisy hated most of the stuff she'd ordered. It was also ungodly expensive; the meal was something like $140 total. Was it worth that very high cost for a meal? No. Not at all. But I didn't think it was awful or anything like that. Again, overpriced, but not terrible for me. 

Once the bill was paid, we were back in the Malibu and headed north, out of Myrtle Beach and back up to North Carolina once more. We'd plotted the GPS to the bar's area in Southport -- I just assumed that it would be a normal bar, like a neighborhood bar the same as most of the ones my dad's bands played in as I was growing up.

I was wrong.

Southport has a residential area, and then it has the historic "rich white people" area, and on the outside of that area is the "rich white people bars and restaurants on the water where white people come and eat and drink a lot and listen to white people music" area. Guess where the bar was?

It was a Sunday night on a holiday weekend in Southport, where nobody would have to work the next day because Labor Day. It was also supposed to be the last "nice weather" day for a solid week, as it was supposed to rain and storm from that point forward, including on the holiday. We just wanted to make an appearance as it was important to my parents, be included in something they'd asked us to be included in, etc. 

Well, we tried.

The closest parking to this area was this time easily half a mile away from the venue, on some side streets with public parking next to a historical park/recreation area. Mind you, at this point Daisy and I were tired -- we'd been out all day, I'd been awake since around 6am, we'd already done a ton of walking and being out in the sun, and now we would be walking at least another mile (to the venue and then back, of course) to see my Dad's friend's band play.

Daisy plotted the GPS for walking to the location from where we parked, and we set off. As we approached the bar, it was very apparent which place we were headed to in a crowded on-the-ocean sea of strip-mall like restaurants, bars, and ice cream shops...because it was where the loud music was coming from. 

We were literally 300 or so feet away from the bar when we ran into my parents, walking the opposite way -- having been there and already left.

We were not upset -- my dad's maladies were acting up and it was really bothering him to be upright and to stay there to watch the band, though they had for a few songs. They had kept up appearances, so to speak, just like we were trying to do with them. They went back to their vehicle to go home -- their vehicle which was considerably closer -- and we told them we'd be home eventually, we had to get back to the car and pick up a few small essentials from the local Walmart first (we were both out of bottled water and I was out of sugar-free energy drinks -- the things that kept me going while I was there). 

The walk back to the car was beautiful, because it was literally along the coast. As in, there was a road and a bike path, an eight-foot wide area of sand, and then open ocean. The sun was setting. Most people were beginning to filter out of the bar areas and back to their own vehicles, or were otherwise out for an evening stroll. We took a number of photos of us together, including the one that will be used on this year's Christmas cards (more on this later) and finally got back to the car just as it was getting dark.

We then went to Walmart, which was mostly abandoned for it being an evening on a holiday weekend, and picked up those few essentials we needed. We also found one of the new Beetlejuice Beetlejuice apple Fantas, which we tried and both liked (it remains to this day the only time I've seen one in person in a store), before returning home and winding down the rest of the night.

The next day was Monday -- Labor Day -- and our final full day in North Carolina. My mother told us that Gabriel Brothers -- known colloquially and in most fashions these days as Gabe's -- had opened stores down there. 

I've talked about Gabe's before here, specifically referencing it in my stories about travel back home, as they are based and headquartered in my hometown of Morgantown, WV. They are a discount clothing and department store chain that dates back to the '60s, and was a huge part of my life growing up. They'd always had multiple locations in WV and PA, and a few in Ohio, but generally only in that small part of the tri-state area. Gabe's was my lifeblood growing up and remained so well into adulthood -- I still have clothing and items I purchased from Gabe's decades ago, some still in daily use and some that's traveled with me from location to location, state to state, apartment-to-apartment-to-house for almost my whole life. They were cheap, and because they were a discount store you had to carefully examine items that you purchased to make sure things like zippers worked, pockets weren't but out, stitching was normal, and there weren't holes in it....but as a kid, I was poor. Gabe's was where the poor people shopped in the 80s and 90s because it was cheap. I can't tell you the countless pairs of shoes I got for under $10 that I would wear for years until they fell apart. I can't tell you the number of $3 and $4 band/music/comic book t-shirts I bought there, or the number of $8 jeans and shorts I wore, or how many $6 gaudy Hawaiian shirts I owned in my college years that came directly from that store -- not to mention all of the food, DVDs, CDs, PC games, comic books, novels, greeting cards, cleaning/household/kitchen supplies, sunglasses, bedsheets, underwear, socks, swimming trunks, hoodies, gloves, and coats I got there over the years. It was my go-to store for almost anything I needed right up until I moved out of WV in 2006.

Well, in the past several years the store has expanded -- I know, a brick-and-mortar retail store expanding into new locations in the 2020s? Insane, right? -- and they have now built new locations in multiple states up and down the eastern seaboard and even as far west as Oklahoma and Missouri. One of those states, of course, was North Carolina -- in Wilmington.

I will state that the NC/SC locations were probably greatly influenced by the sheer number of West Virginian transplants who retired down there just like my parents did. My parents are far from being alone as WV natives down there -- there are a lot of people who have bought property in the southern coastal area of NC, including many people from Morgantown. It's somewhat bizarre to drive through Oak Island in the fall and see not one, but multiple WVU flags outside people's homes, or bumper stickers/car decals on vehicles, or people wearing WVU shirts (which we saw plenty of that Saturday we were there since it was gameday). 

Because my mother told us about the one in Wilmington, and because she and I used to have such fun going to Gabe's when I was a kid, we made plans to drive up there that Monday, on Labor Day, and peruse the store. As an aside, Daisy has experienced the magic of a Gabe's store with me before -- she did when we were visiting my parents in 2017, in Morgantown -- though I don't remember if she actually got anything at that juncture. I recall that trip being somewhat disappointing myself, in fact. 

My mother was lukewarm on the idea; she didn't know if she wanted to go, and didn't know if she would. I told her that was fine, we'd love to have her with us if she wanted to come, of course. 

That morning, as expected and predicted, it was pouring rain. Rain like I haven't seen in a long time. Coastal rain is different than inland rain -- if you get enough of it, it floods out streets and culverts, because when you're already at sea level, there's nowhere else for water to go. It floods out sewers, parking lots, and any/all low-lying areas (my parents would experience more of this when, two weeks later, a tropical rainstorm blew in and dumped close to two feet of rain on them in a 24-hour period, and flooded out the community college where my mother worked). It's why all the houses down there are on stilts. 

My mother decided against going with us, but Daisy and I decided to make a go of it anyway. It was the only chance we'd have to do it, and Daisy wanted to hit up the Sealevel Vegan Diner again while we were in Wilmington.

As an aside, and a wide aside at that -- one of my favorite movies of all time was filmed in Wilmington, and it's likely not one you'd ever guess. That movie is the 1986 Stephen King adaptation Maximum Overdrive, based on his short story "Trucks" from his first short story collection Night Shift. If the name doesn't ring a bell, it's the movie where a mostly pre-fame Emilio Estevez and a group of people (including Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa Simpson) hole up inside a truck stop when machines all over the world come to life and begin attacking humans. If that still doesn't ring a bell, it's the movie with the giant evil Green Goblin-headed semi truck.

Good lord do I love this movie. I urge you to find it and watch it if you never have. It occasionally circulates through one streaming service or another.

Make no mistake, the movie is not great. It has a great premise and a soundtrack by AC/DC, though (it's their compilation album Who Made Who). Well, I did some digging, and found out that the purpose-built truckstop for the movie was built on the opposite side of the river in Wilmington and is now a storage facility of some sort -- we legit drove by the filming location(s) multiple times while we were there. Mind you, the movie was filmed in 1985 and the area is way different now, but I still thought this was wildly fun to find out. 

Anyway.

So we drove up to Gabe's in Wilmington not knowing what we'd find there -- if it would be a small, crappy little store full of disappointing things or a sprawling behemoth of a place. My parents had been there before and said that it was relatively new -- as in, since the pandemic. That gave me hope. We also had to be mindful of what we purchased, as well; we both only had carry-on luggage. I myself had only brought my backpack as my entire goal was to pack lightly. Daisy had only her small suitcase with her, because it's not like we were on a weeks-long trip like we were to and from Canada. Anything we wanted to get we'd have to be able to fit into those bags -- and keep in mind, I'd already purchased a  large, bulky hoodie on this trip.. My dad had told us that he'd be happy to ship a box of stuff to us if necessary, but we didn't want him to have to do that -- especially not while he was fighting off several different ailments. 

The store was a sprawling behemoth of a place -- likely the largest and best/most well-stocked Gabe's I'd ever been inside.

Oh dear. This was a problem.

Throughout the entire time we were in the store -- which was so large that I could not see the other end of it and/or see where Daisy was about 80% of the time we were in there -- it was raining and storming so hard that I could barely hear the store's radio. The power flickered slightly at least once as well. I very quickly lost Daisy in the aisles and rows because there was just so many things I could have walked out of that store with that day. Most of these things, I decided against picking up, and it hurt me not to. I ended up getting a few small items, with the largest of them being a pair of Ecko Chuck-Taylor-style black high-tops with flames painted on them...for $6. New. Do I have any idea when I'll wear them? No, but I needed them. 

Over the course of an hour or two, Daisy found a few things, like some leggings and some vegan candy -- but I will tell you that if we had our large suitcases with us, we both likely would have spent hundreds of dollars in that store. There were so many things we wanted but just didn't have the room for. Gabe's will now be an absolute must-visit stop on all future trips down there to visit my parents. 

Unfortunately, however, the Sealevel Vegan Diner was closed for the holiday.

Upon returning home, my parents seemed...distant? Aloof? I don't know how to really describe it. I'd noticed this as a trend while we were there from the beginning this time around, but had mostly brushed it off because I knew my dad hadn't been feeling great. However, it was never more apparent than on that day -- just...malaise in both of them that I couldn't place. If my kids were visiting me, I'd be excited to see them and spend time with them while they were there. My parents were excited when we booked the trip, but once we actually got there, well...it seemed like a lot of that excitement had been greatly muted. Last year, my mother talked to Daisy for multiple hours on end. I also sat on the porch and hung out with my dad and the dogs for hours on end. This time around it was as if we'd already done that and there was simply nothing left to say, and we were just people in the house.

To be fair, my mother and I did have a very long sit-down conversation with me that was greatly intimate -- about our lives and where we were in them -- within a day or two of us arriving. I got a great sense of fear from her; fear for her own health as well as my dad's, fear of the future, and fear for both of us given our ages, levels of fatness (oh, because you'd best believe that came up again), stations in life, and finances. I assured her that we were fine and are still relatively healthy, neither of us are gaining weight, and that if our finances weren't stable we wouldn't have been able to afford the trip. This seemed to put her mostly at ease, but this was the only conversation of that sort we had during my entire time there, and even it felt really out of place and sort of disconnected. I wasn't sure what to make of it overall.

We understood, at least, that my dad's health was likely overshadowing our visit. He wasn't exactly feeling his best to put it mildly, and the cascade effect of that running down through my mother and to us was part of what made our interactions all seem so very stilted and muted. Not once, not once did either of my parents comment on the fact that both of us had oddly colored hair -- my parents have never seen either of us with dyed hair before. I tried to get them to say something on it, too -- I told them the colors we'd likely try next, gave them the details of what it took to do it and make the colors stay in the hair, etc. Nothing. I don't know if they were both purposely biting their tongues or they just didn't know what to say, or if it didn't faze them at all. When I accidentally dyed their guest towels lavender (because I accidentally washed them with our tie-dyes) my mother didn't care -- she just noted "we never use those towels anyway" when I apologized profusely. Ten years ago she would've lost her mind. 

It was just weird. Like, not pod-people weird, but the entire vibe of our interactions with my parents while we were there was definitely off. Even now, a month later, I can't really put my finger on what it was. I noticed that my mother seemed to be drinking far less than usual, but that alone doesn't seem to explain it in any sort of satisfactory way, so both Daisy and I just rolled with it, I guess.