August, Part III: Things Going Boom

 Well, The Box is almost full.

For those of you paying attention over the past month or so, you will know that The Box is my personal media drive, a 4TB external hard drive filled with basically everything I've ever archived. It is reaching its max capacity, which is wild to me as I never would have expected to fill a four terabyte drive so quickly. 

"What is all of this for?" Daisy asked me. "Like what if you die? What am I going to do with this stuff?"

Now that's an interesting way to phrase a question, I guess.

"Watch it," I said. "You'll have entertainment for years."

That is kind of the goal, to be honest with you. I've always been of the mindset that everything is temporary. If we somehow end up living in some post-apocalyptic wasteland in the next decade or two and the internet has been wiped off the Earth, at least I'll have hard drives full of entertainment. You know, provided electricity is still a thing, of course. I guess it applies if we have to go live off the grid somewhere in a cabin in the woods too. Otherwise, this stuff is a time capsule for family and friends who may, eventually, stumble across it. 

Likewise, as my time of archiving may be coming to a close, The Retrodrive Project for the kids in the family will soon be complete as well. Most major cartoons of the 80s and 90s are represented at least in part, if not in entirety. I'd like to expand it if possible, but the Retrodrive HDDs are only 500GB each. This sounds ludicrously large, but it's not. Some of the larger series are something like 20-60GB each, and that space fills quickly. So it is a highly, carefully curated collection. 

I am a very tired man. I have not slept well in a week or so. I don't know why. Normally now that I'm no longer addicted to nicotine, my body isn't waking me up every 4-6 hours for its next hit and I can get some good sleep most of the time. However, the past week or so has been especially challenging for me, and it's sort of puzzling. I am not under any more stress than normal, work has been better so far in August than it was in July, and I'm looking forward to the upcoming Labor Day weekend, but...there is this sense of...doom? dread? Something like that lurking just around the corner. Mind you, there's stuff coming up that I'm not completely crazily enthused about like the beginning of repayment for our student loans and the like, but it seems like it's something...more than that. 

Could it be that I watched not only Gone Girl for the first time this weekend, but The Lovely Bones too? Both are amazingly well-written and well-acted films, and both are very fucked up and not movies I ever need to see again. There's probably 15 or so movies on the "This is great and I will never ever have a desire to watch it again" list, and these two were just tacked onto that.

It is, I think, that everything is finally reaching a critical mass point and coming to a head one way or another.

Last week, while we were out and about, Daisy's car (read: the only car we have) began shaking violently at the steering wheel.

Now, mind you, this could be any number of things, and I told Daisy as much -- being a car guy, I know these things. "Tie rods, tie rod ends, bushings, upper or lower control arms, power steering controller, the steering box itself, tires, brakes, alignment..." I said, trailing off. "None of them are without a significant cost for a car that is now nearing twenty years old."

This is correct; our Sonata is a 2009 model. It's seventeen years old. Daisy has had it since before we were together. We celebrate being together for fifteen years next summer, so...

Anyway. 

Daisy made an appointment with our regular car repair folks, who have worked on the family's vehicles for many years. She dropped the car off on a Wednesday morning and was immediately told that the lead mechanic at the shop had quit, and the only one there working on any of the customers' vehicles was, well, the guy she was talking to.

Look, we both work from home, we don't plan to have any medical emergencies anytime soon, and all of the cats have had their shots and medical visits for the year unless some shit goes really wrong. So, Daisy was very caring and sympathetic with him and was like "That is fine, take your time, we don't have anywhere to be or anywhere to go, I can pick it up in a few days."

And honestly, we kind of forgot about it in the hubbub of everything else going on as of late. Work for both of us has been busy, but not crazy -- I have, again, not really gotten an amazing amount of rest, and therefore have been a bit crabby or frazzled here and there, and we've been dodging severe weather forecasts off and on, but getting a lot of rain -- which kills chances to mow the grass when the temperature goes down enough to do it without dying of heatstroke.

Add to this we were still nervous about Charlie as well, and it was the perfect storm of "we can only deal with one BS thing at a time, please" stress that I loathe and dread having to deal with. 

The next night, the mechanic called Daisy back, late -- as in, I was already working for the night -- and told her that the car had a number of issues. The steering wheel shuddering was caused by the front tires being absolutely shot and basically peeling off the car. Now, mind you, this was not surprising to me -- I had told Daisy for at least a year or more that the tires desperately needed to be replaced. I told her we needed to just make an appointment at Discount Tire or someplace and just get it done as it wasn't really something we could wait on. But, that wasn't the only problem. The rear passenger wheel bearing was going out as well, and that also needed to be taken care of. He wasn't sure whether the front passenger one needed to be replaced as well, but it also sounded loud.

The tires would be $300 parts and labor and the wheel bearing, to replace it, was another $300. It would also need aligned after the work was done. Daisy looked at me for the answers. I nodded.

Now, look...I drove my Monte Carlo for years on dying wheel bearings and nearly bald tires, but that was because I had to at the time. I did not have much of a choice, I had to have a vehicle that would run and move regardless of whether it did so safely or not. But, Daisy I never want to have to go through that, and roll the dice on risk. Add to this that we are not dying or destitute -- as much as we may have to juggle bills and budgets at times, we do both have good jobs and we are people of means. So, I nodded, and told her to go forth with having everything done. 

The next day, Daisy got the call that the car was ready. The tires and wheel bearing had been replaced, and all was well -- however, he was correct in that the front passenger wheel bearing was growly as well, and when he was up under the car, he found that the struts are completely shot. To do the work to fix the other wheel bearing as well as replace the struts, he gave us the fair warning that it would be well over $2000, and it could be done if we wanted to, but likely for a car of that age, it wasn't worth the money. Not doing the work on those things won't kill the car, at least not immediately, and I'm getting to the point with the Sonata that I got to with the Monte Carlo and my Silverado -- if it doesn't kill it then we drive it until it dies of natural causes. So, we declined to have more work done on the car and just took it home. It does drive, steer, and ride far better than it has in years, but it is very clear that this is a vehicle that's on its last legs, and Daisy and I have discussed this at length.

I know a lot about vehicles. You may or may not know this about me already; it depends on how long you've known me and how closely you've been paying attention over that time. I am, as mentioned above, a car guy. I know a lot about what vehicles to buy and not to buy, I know about reliability and safety ratings and gas mileage and reviews and customer experience. I not only subscribed to Car and Driver and Motor Trend for several years, but I am a huge fan of Top Gear and am a longtime watcher/subscriber to Youtube channels such as Vice Grip Garage. Trust me when I say that, for the most part, I really do know what I'm doing and that my automotive viewpoints and opinions should be disregarded at one's peril. 

That being said, I've got Daisy on the ropes and am almost ready to deliver the knockout punch (um, er, proverbially speaking) on us getting a newish Ford Bronco Sport as our next vehicle.

We have experience with the Bronco Sport. We had one last fall in Nova Scotia as our rental car for our trip up there. There are few more capable, beautiful and spacious but all at once barebones and utilitarian little trucks I've ever been inside. I fell in love with the Bronco Sport we had for the brief week we had it. Was it perfect? No, of course not. No vehicle will be. But, was it something we could absolutely see ourselves owning and really enjoying? Yes.

A used one from 2022, 2023 at this juncture is anywhere between $20k and 25k. Which is not bad. New vehicles are a scam, y'all. If you absolutely must have a new vehicle, understand that you're just doing it for your own neuroses/psychological reasons. Certified and refurbished used vehicles are perfectly fine, fam.

The Bronco Sport is not the only vehicle I've had my eyes on. I've shown her some Subarus (Outbacks and Foresters) and some Honda CR-Vs, Toyota RAV4s, etc. There's even a few little Nissans and Mazdas that I've kind of been interested in but haven't really done a lot of research on. I've already told her to get the idea of anything Jeep or any General Motors-based SUV out of her head, because they will absolutely be junk and will fall apart, and while I would've trusted Hyundai/Kia a decade ago, not these days -- not with the track record I've seen with a lot of their stuff over the past five years or so. Daisy's parents had a Hyundai Santa Fe -- it was barely ten years old when it blew its head gasket and destroyed the engine. Out of the blue, with no warning and no prior major problems. I told Daisy that experience alone, seeing them have to deal with that, would turn me off to anything from Hyundai post-2012 or so.

Daisy is open to it, especially as we have an end-of-life timetable on the horizon for the Sonata. She does not want to junk it or trade it in; it could and frequently would be useful to have two cars around the house again, like we had in the old days -- though I can tell you I don't like driving the Sonata. Don't get me wrong, I can drive it just fine and it's a decent point-A-to-point-B vehicle, but there's nothing fun about driving it to me. I don't really fit in it comfortably, I don't like the dashboard design and controls, and everything in it creaks and rattles. Does it function as a car? Sure. For now. But I told Daisy, and she agrees, that the metric of when to look for a new vehicle is whether we would trust the Sonata to, say, drive to Chicago and back again, or to Denver and back again, for a week/weekend trip. And for me, the answer to both of those at this juncture is a resounding no. I trust the car to drive us in and around town and on short adventures (like to the wildlife safari in Ashland, or if we wanted to take a weekend in Kansas City or something). I don't trust it any further than that. And Daisy really doesn't at this point either. 

So I guess we're going to be passively looking for a new vehicle over the course of the next few months to a year or so, and when we can, we'll pull the trigger on it. 

Anyway, once that crisis cleared, we still had our sweet little Charlie to worry about.

All of the test results, all $600ish of them, came back -- turns out that Charlie is just fat and has allergies, like his parents. 

Everything else is clear. No cancer. No heartworm. No feline leukemia. No heart disease or pulmonary issues or anything other than fat and has allergies, maybe asthma.

Our course of action? Get him an inhaler that we give him once or twice a day if he seems particularly wheezy, until hopefully he only needs it once or twice a week, then maybe a few times a month, then rarely if at all. And put him on a diet.

That second part is a lot harder than it sounds.

We have six cats. I don't think any of them are gluttons. Well, not really. They're cats. They enjoy their food. We have four feeding stations in the house for the children -- two small bowls upstairs (one in the hallway, one in the master bedroom) and two gravity feeders downstairs, a large one and a small one. That's it. We give them small cans of wet food on a plate in the kitchen 2-3 times a day, which they all split between themselves. I don't think any of them overeat, and even Charlie I don't think is that fat. Pete in his heyday topped out at 21 pounds and I think Maggie hit 22 or 23 at one point. Pete liked food, but he wasn't a glutton. Maggie absolutely was a glutton. So I mean, we've had a long run of experience in the category of "feeding cats."

But, the fact remains that you can't put one of the cats on a diet without putting all of the cats on a diet when they have four feeding stations around the house. To do this in any semblance of the term "diet," it means they must be switched to individual meals. Which, for six cats and with two people who work pretty much opposite schedules, is a huge pain in the ass. 

I frankly don't have time to prepare six cats six different meals at different times of the day, nor do I think it is necessary to do so. You can't gauge when cats are going to be hungry enough to eat, and if they're not hungry at mealtime, then they don't eat...because you have to pick up the food when mealtime is over? So that the others don't eat it? It's going to create a lot of hassle, a lot of food anxiety and stress for these cats who won't understand why, all of a sudden, they are being starved, and to me it's absolutely not worth the time or energy to me simply because Charlie is a little fat. 

I don't want to traumatize my children, I don't want them to experience food stress or food insecurity (I lived with that myself and it is not fun) and I just can't be pestered by one cat or another 24/7/365 for food because they don't understand where the food went or why they're being punished by not having it available. So, overall, I absolutely hate this idea. It is not going to work and it is going to create far more stress and more problems between the cats in the household than Daisy can possibly foresee, and will likely create stress and fighting between Daisy and myself too. I've tried to work with Daisy on this idea, but I am also very much waiting to say "I tried to warn you that this would not work and you didn't listen" / "I told you so" for all of this. It comes down to optimism versus realism. 

August, Part II: The Cats, The Shats, and The Future Trips

 As we continue through August into the fall, I realize that I've been lax about writing on a lot of things here that would otherwise be fully covered were I to write here more often than I do. That is, honestly, on me. On my days off now I generally have a lot to do because it's the only days I can get those things done. As the temperatures begin to cool and we head into fall, my to-do list gets longer as more and more yard work gets added to it.

 Add to this that Daisy's work schedule has changed for the moment and she's back on M-F, and that takes Fridays away from us once again. That's good for me when it comes to chores like mowing the yard or doing all of the laundry in the house, but it sucks for spending actual time more than one day a week with my loving wife. She feels that strain too.

So, to those ends, I figured I'd give everyone here a general update on the state of the household and how things are going. 

Well...I guess I should start by saying that -- as of right now of course -- we have been very lucky and so far this year, we have not had any severe weather affect us, hit us, or damage our home here in Omaha. It is highly unusual that we don't see at least a few severe storms that are bad enough to make us terrified or cause damage/power outage/internet outages, etc. We've had some close calls, and the tornado sirens have gone off a couple of times, but nothing -- and I mean nothing -- in comparison to some of the worst years of far worse storms we've had in years like 2019, 2021, and 2024. 2026 has been, so far, a blessing for us when it comes to avoiding severe weather. And thankfully, we are now winding down and exiting the true severe weather season for the year. Meteorologists are already talking about snow forecasts for the fall, and have predicted our first snow for the Omaha area for the beginning of the second week of November. This is generally a lot earlier than we get snow. Aside from the first year we lived in this house when we got a freak snowstorm in early October that melted almost as soon as it was finished, generally we do not get our first snow before Black Friday (and, for the past few years, at least a couple of them hit that bullseye exactly). Most of the time Omaha doesn't even have a White Christmas, though there have been multiple years where we have had a very White Christmas. Generally our heavier snows, the accumulating ones in storms and the like, don't come until mid-January through mid-March, and sometimes into April. 

This was also part of why I was like Daisy, get me the fuck out of here and to the beach in March when we went to see my parents this year -- by the time we'd gotten to that point, I desperately needed to get away from Omaha cold and snow and be on a Carolina coastline with water lapping at my toes. 

My parents have mentioned to us in the past that they want us to come visit in October, which is apparently the best time of the year for their weather and for the town, because all of the tourists have gone home and the temperatures there hit 75 or so at highest during the day and 50 or so at the lowest at night -- the ideal "get outside and actually enjoy North Carolina" weather. And I would really like to do that, of course, but time and money are a factor. I have floated the idea with Daisy of going to see my parents twice a year, once in the spring (like we did in March) and once again in the fall, like they've requested us come down in October. We use our airline miles for the flights, so they're essentially free at this point (for a while, anyway, until we use those miles up) which means basically all we have to pay for on these trips is the rental car and the gas for it, and whatever food and incidentals/shopping we do when we're there. That makes a trip halfway across the country a pretty damn cheap getaway for a few days, with the bonus of being at the beach and spending time with my parents. 

However.

Daisy's schedule change at work wasn't just a willy-nilly thing, but part of her taking on a different role. She is not sure whether the PTO she already had on the books for the rest of the year is even valid now, and we'll now have to schedule around both her schedule and mine for doctors' appointments and the like, let alone planning another trip for the fall. So, unfortunately, it really looks like that's not going to happen this fall -- and we should focus on seeing my parents once more in the spring. This is a bit disappointing to me because I wanted to call my parents and be like "hey, surprise, we found some time in October to come see you, like you have asked" and that is no longer in the cards. I'm fine with us waiting until the spring again of course, but the winters in Omaha are long and miserable and sitting here writing this in August makes that time seem very, very far away.

So, there's that.

Truthfully I don't have the time at the moment to request, in advance, for any trips for the rest of the year. I am slowly building up my PTO once more after the trip to Canada in June, and only have about three days available right now. Most of those I'll be using for around the holidays, including whatever else I accrue between now and then. For example, my birthday is on a Sunday this year, so I'll actually have to take it off. Buuuuut I am very much looking forward to Labor Day weekend, which -- as I am taking the holiday this year and the Sunday before it -- will give me a five day weekend next month and some much-needed breathing space away from the grind. Would be nice to go visit my parents during that time, but eh...

What else is going on? Well, we both seem to be doing well on the Mounjaro, and we actually have to set up our next appointments to check in with our doctor for sometime next month. But it does, unfortunately, have some side effects that we have noticed over the course of the past six months or so of being on them, and they hit us differently. 

It slows down our digestion considerably -- it's supposed to do that, apparently -- but for Daisy it will slow it to an absolute crawl. For me, it'll slow it down for a couple days, and then...like a cork in a champagne bottle, stuff has to come out. And when it does, I'll, ahem, sit there as it does for about 45 minutes or so.

You think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. It woke me out of a dead sleep tonight and I timed it from start to finish. Luckily, I didn't have anywhere else to be or anything else to do during that time.

Other than that, also luckily, I seem to have had no side effects whatsoever from the Mounjaro. However, unfortunately, I have had no weight loss either. My weight has remained almost exactly the same for the past six weeks no matter how much or how little I eat or how much or how little exercise I get. It's very strange. The Trulicity at least, for all its faults and as much IBS as it gave me, at least had me dropping weight like a stone while I was on it. I am going to ask for a dosage adjustment for the next higher level when we go in for our next appointments next month. Yes, I'd like to see my A1C down lower than it was before, but I also want to start losing the weight on this stuff as so many others have. The fact that's not happening is really throwing a wrench into me staying below 300 pounds (since I was last there, I now am back up to 311 and holding anywhere between 305 and 311).

Anyway, moving onward.

We used to be able to say that Hank was the biggest cat in the house, both size-wise and weight-wise. This is no longer the case. We had Hank and Charlie in to the vet today, and Hank tips the scales at 15.1 pounds -- the exact weight he was last summer, with no change. Empress, when we had her in about six months ago, was 15.8 or 15.9. That means that Hank is now in third place in the house, because Charlie is 18.1 pounds.

Today was Hank's yearly appointment for vaccinations and the like, so this was the rote standard for the orange man. He wasn't happy about it, but he got through it.

Charlie, on the other hand, we brought in because we had some concerns about our little flame point boy. When Charlie runs and plays hard, he will pant -- yes, pant -- like a dog. It doesn't even really have to be a sustained level of hard play anymore, but a few minutes. Given that he's a wheezy boy anyway and snorts and snores and has always seemed like he's perpetually had allergies his whole life, normally we wouldn't pay this a lot of mind -- but the panting thing is relatively new. Our catsitter noted that he was doing it whole we were out of town, too, and I know she wasn't playing with them that hard with the wands or the laser pointer. 

Our vet, with our permission and instruction, in some cases, ran the full gamut of tests on Charlie and took x-rays of him to see if any problems could be seen. Upon looking at the x-rays, it appears Charlie has an enlarged heart. Now, this in itself isn't hugely concerning -- that same vet said he suspected Hank of having an enlarged heart as well compared to other cats, and Hank is fine -- but we never had x-rays taken of Hank. Charlie's heart is big and appears quite enlarged, but our vet doesn't know at this juncture if that's due to a problem, genetics, or the fact that Charlie is a big boy with a few extra pounds on him. 

The blood tests we requested will essentially determine, beyond a shadow of a doubt, whether Charlie has a defect, the cat version of heart disease/congestive heart failure, or if he's just fat and has allergies and that's the reason for his wheezy, panting self. We even had them run the test for heartworm, even though the chances of that are very very small. It's a hard three-day wait for the results. In the interim, of course, Daisy is very sad and upset. We just lost Pete at the end of last year, and Charlie is the cat that is most like Pete in regards to how he wants to be held and cuddled like a teddy bear, and loved. When Pete died, Charlie more or less stepped up into that role. Yes, Dolly serves that role too, but Charlie has a deep soul connection with Daisy that is so very similar to what Pete had with her.

Or course, I'm upset too, but I am attempting to remain cautiously optimistic. This is because if the tests come back for heart issues in Charlie, it's essentially a death sentence -- he's got six months to two years, max, before he's done, and that's likely with medications. The heart problem he's being tested for, with a very long clinical name, is the number one cause of sudden death in otherwise healthy-presenting cats. Once cats begin to present symptoms (say, like wheezing or panting when under duress or exercise), you're already in the end game. 

All of this, yes, sounds very shocking. And it is. And Daisy is devastated that there is the very real chance that we're going to get some very bad news and Charlie will have a much, much shorter life than we ever expected. There's also just as much of a chance that we'll get the news that he doesn't have anything wrong with him heart-wise and he's just fat and has allergies. I told Daisy that if he has heart issues, it's not like we would've known and it's not like anything we have or haven't done would have been able to prevent those issues -- we can't blame ourselves for it. 

If he's just fat and allergic, we do what we can to adjust diet and he likely gets an inhaler (yes, they have those for cats) that we'll give him as necessary. If he presents with actual heart issues, we will need a second scan from a cat cardiologist to fully confirm and he'll have to be on some form of medication for the rest of his life. If we get him on it now, of course, it will help extend his life, but I mean...it's likely overall a losing battle. 

The good news is that he does not appear to be on the struggle bus. Charlie is still a very good boy who loves getting attention and love and treats from us. He is still active, he still plays with the other cats and is, honestly, the sweetest boy in the house. He appears to be completely unaware or oblivious to any health issues he has.

Hank, when at the vet, was big mad and looked at everyone like someone had shit in his cereal. I love Hank very much, and I have a very deep soul connection with that orange man, but it is and always has been very clear that he is the orange house loaf and does not like, or want, anything outside his very defined comfort bubble. But, he does appear healthy per the vet; we will likely eventually need to get his teeth cleaned and our vet recommended that we start trying to brush his teeth on a regular basis again (yes, that's a thing), but otherwise, healthy weight and all of his orifices look good. Our vet also remarked that his eyes looked great, and I mentioned that his eyes have been so good that our next appointment for a check up/check in with his eye doctor is November. 

As for the other cats? Well, we haven't had to take any of them to the vet as of late for anything, so no news is good news on that front. 

Dolly is growing like crazy and is now almost as big as Gary. She has retained her very sweet personality and is incredibly loving. Everyone loves Dolly and everyone gets along with her. The boys adore her, and she frequently cuddles up and/or plays with Emmy and Mable as well. She is nine months old now and I can't wait to see what she'll look like when she's fully grown.

Gary is in his second growth spurt that I've noticed; while he's coming up on his 2nd birthday at the end of the year, as he has the most Maine Coon in the house and they can continue growing until age three or four, I don't think Gary is done yet. He's a sweet, smart boy who always wants to be around us or know where we are, and as of late he's been getting more affectionate with Daisy too -- wanting to climb up on her chest and cuddle, or wanting to sleep with her, etc. It's very sweet. 

Mable and Emmy are still in the throes of their sibling rivalry war, which ebbs and flows. Sometimes they'll get along just fine for days if not weeks -- for example, when we came home this morning from the vet they were literally lying next to each other at the top of the stairs, sharing space without fighting about it. Mable has also been letting Emmy come upstairs once more, as most days when I wake up now, Hank and Emmy are snuggled up with me. Emmy has been protecting me at night, too, while I work -- she'll sit on the couch or the floor next to me and will be my guardian.

Mable is...strange. I've always thought she was a very loving, but very weird cat. She is the most sensitive and anxious cat in the house. She will wail so very loudly outside Daisy's office door when Daisy is working, and usually the only thing that will stop that is if I get up, go get her, bring her back to bed with me, and put her on the bed. She will, generally, then calm down and go to sleep. It's not that she wants me, either -- she wants Daisy, and specifically to be in Daisy's office with her. I am merely the substitute father, the spare human.

All of them, however, unfortunately still have some fleas. And Daisy and I are very frustrated about that. 

Apparently, according to our vet, the flea medications like Frontline and PetArmor are 99% effective. But, with fleas, it's a numbers game -- if there are 10,000 fleas in the house and 99% of them are eliminated, that still leaves 100 fleas that can each lay 50 eggs a day. Mind you, there are nowhere near 10,000 fleas in our house, but you get the idea. It explains why once every few weeks, Daisy or I will pull a flea or three off one or more of the cats despite them being on the medicine.

So, instead, for the next three months we're going to have the cats on a medication called NexGard (I think that's how it's spelled/stylized). It has a 100% guarantee, to the point where they'll send Terminix to your house to professionally treat it for free if you haven't eliminated the fleas and anything else by the end of the three month period. After that, doc says we can go back to the PetArmor or Frontline as a baseline preventative. 

The NexGard is something like $200 a month for all six cats, total. Which is a ludicrous cost, of course, but it is what it is. If it allows us to permanently get rid of fleas in the house and we can go back to our normal preventatives to keep them from gaining a foothold again? Cool with me. A temporary higher cost to be sure, but worth it in the long run. 

And since you've made it this far, here, have a new collage of all six:

Top row: Dolly, Hank, Gary

Bottom row: Charlie, Mable, Empress

August, Part I: The History, The Box, and The Plan

I've always said that there are two months of the year that are bad luck months for me (and in general, but usually for me). One is October, and the other is August. August is a month of events and anniversaries, both good and bad. I am not generally a superstitious man, but I do understand and recognize patterns. August has always been, in many ways, a month of death and rebirth for me. 

Let me explain through some example events so that all of you can understand just a little bit better. 

Starting from before I was born to set the stage -- August was the month my mother was born, the month she got married, the month my grandparents got married, and (now into the years I have been alive) the month she divorced my father.

August, in West Virginia, was when school started. I was always back in school around the 20th. It was a new, fresh start every year, where I got to show off my new school clothes, new backpack, new Trapper Keeper or haircut. I could fashion a new personality as possible; I could always try to present myself as the person I wanted to be and give myself a new outlook, new style, new anything. In 1995, I was just me. In 1996, I was proud of my football jersey and wore it a lot. In 1997, I had acquired a pair of black John Lennon sunglasses and a tie-dye Star Wars t-shirt, and attempted to make my more laid-back, now a lot more nerdy personality the real me (this, uh, sort of evolved a bit more over the years). But August was other things, too -- it was meeting the new girl in the class, the one from out of town who didn't know anyone and wanted to fit in, or the new guy who had a similar from-out-of-town-story but also played football, so, y'know, he'd fit in fine. It was getting excited for the fall television season, because all the new stuff premiered in August or September back then and if you hadn't seen the new episode of Babylon 5 or Deep Space Nine, you would have to get the recap from your friends or wait six months to catch it in reruns. 

But, at the same time, it was always a return to the old -- catching up with friends you hadn't seen all summer because they lived on the opposite side of town, trading summer vacation stories, showing off new scabs on knees and elbows and that new box of Magic: The Gathering cards you'd carefully curated over the previous three months. There was something about August that was always charged with positive, hopeful energy. Yeah, returning to school sucked, especially when it was still 90 degrees outside, but this was life. 

Then reality began to happen, and suddenly August wasn't hopeful or fun anymore, it was just another reminder of how real, and depressing, the world could be.

In August 2001, my mother and I were rear-ended in heavy rush-hour traffic on a 90+ degree day coming home from work. It did $1300 worth of damage to the car.

A week later, my aunt Eilene died suddenly. Her funeral was the last funeral I've been to where there was an actual body present; other funerals I've been to since have simply been memorial services or the deceased had been cremated, so if they were there, they were only there in ash form. It was also the last time I saw to this day many members of that side of my family in person -- including my actual father, who was brother-in-law to my deceased aunt. 

A week after she was in the ground, I started college at West Virginia University as a brand-new freshman. For the next three Augusts afterwards, returning to WVU to start the new year was a bittersweet process. Yes, I still worked there (well, most of the time; I worked my position in Microbiology until 2004ish) every day, but my friends did not -- my friends would go home for the summer, some of them to faraway states, only to return in mid-August to start the next school year. Some of them summarily disappeared from one year to the next -- dropped out, transferred, or otherwise seemingly fell off the face of the planet. Some of them I would never see or hear from again, and after a few years they would begin to fade from memory until they were truly and completely lost. 

In August 2007 -- shortly after adopting all three original cats (Pete, Sadie, and Maggie) and moving into a new, much nicer apartment -- I opened this website. So, yes, this month is its 19th anniversary. I started it to write about my experiences working in a grocery store while living in St. Joseph, Missouri between the years of 2007 and 2009, and there were a lot of great stories there. After I left that job and moved to Kansas with my girlfriend at the time, the story and website not only expanded into working subsequent jobs, but also starting grad school. 

In August 2010, I started graduate school at Wichita State University. With a brand-new desktop computer, along with a leather jacket and a new electric guitar, I thought I would reinvent myself again. I wore mirrored sunglasses. I grew my hair and beard long. I made, and wore, a lot of tie-dye. I taught English. The students called me English Jesus. I felt like I was part of a community of people again in academia, like-minded people who could appreciate me and really respect me. 

I was wrong. I was mostly a joke, at least amongst my peers. And this is where it began crashing down again. 

There was nothing like grad school to prove to me that I was not the best at everything I ever did, and more than that, I was looked upon like an idiot poser at most of what I did do well. Make no mistake, as part of our creative writing program at WSU, I did have talent, and I had a lot of it -- it wasn't exactly a competition, but most people in the program saw it that way. It also didn't help that they held an actual competition every year for the best writer from each segment of the program to win a fellowship. Still, at least on the poetry side of things, there were people I could out-poem any day of the week and I was barely trying. Poetry wasn't my passion -- never was, still isn't -- it was a means to an end. I could do it, and some people liked it, and therefore that was enough to get me my MFA. That's all there was to it. Poetry was a steppingstone and a tool. 

We'll focus more on this later. 

Anyway. I wasn't exactly respected by most of my peers. I had a few great friends there who liked me, respected me, and will be lifelong friends -- but everyone else sort of rolled their eyes at me and dismissed me as a tryhard, or (worse than that) thought I was there simply because my girlfriend at the time was also in the program and I was let in due to nepotism of sorts. This was false, of course; the people making selections for the program do it as a blind process without bias. Still, it seemed awfully convenient.

In the beginning of August 2011, for the first time in over six years, I was a single man again and was starting a new life alone in my rented house in Kansas -- and, summarily, I revamped and completely overhauled this website. The first four years of posts were archived and deleted, and eventually turned into a book that I sold on Kindle for about a month before the few people who bought it reported major technical formatting issues with its manuscript. I took it down for a re-edit, which never happened...and it's been shelved ever since.

In August 2014, after a few months of being unemployed after our wedding, I started the first iteration of the job I am working now, and thus...began soakin' up paycheck once more.

In August 2024, after some of the worst storms we ever had, we were without power for over three days and lost probably $500 worth of food from the fridge and freezer.

So that brings us to the present day, August 2026, where I sit shirtless at my desk at 2:23 in the morning, with a reapplication of purple dye in my hair that needs to sit for another two hours before washout. I am 43 years old. I have been married for over twelve years, own six cats, and have diabetes. Our car is seventeen years old, is rusting in the wheel wells, and needs four new tires on it, but who has the time or the money? I work from home, as does my wife, but we own our home, so we have that going for us. We have an electric lawn mower and our doormat says GO AWAY in big letters on it. 

I don't think that August is necessarily bad luck for me anymore (though, now that I've said that, we'll see what happens this month -- 2024 wasn't kind to us) but it certainly isn't a month of new beginnings or excitement anymore. It is a month where I have learned, over time, to appreciate the more peaceful and adult parts of life -- fall weather slowly moving in, football season coming up, being able to work outside in the yard without dying of heatstroke, etc. I am in my 40s now. Were I to stop dyeing it, you'd be able to see a lot more of my gray hair. I'm at the age where I no longer need excitement or new beginnings; I want peace and quiet and harmony instead. 

This summer, but especially the past several weeks, I've gotten back into my hobbies. I'm once more archiving things again -- this time mostly movies or TV series that I'm digitizing and saving to a 4TB portable hard drive. Some of it is stuff I've had on disc for a while, other times it's series or movies found on the web over the years. For my nephews, for Christmas this year, I'd like to give them a 500GB portable hard drive full of all the stuff I grew up watching back in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. I have titled this The Retrodrive Project and I'm nowhere near done with it, but it will be something that continues for some time over the course of the next few months. I don't think they'll be in town this year for Christmas anyway, so it may be shelved for another year once it's completed.

Of course, I'm not doing it for just the kids, I'm doing it to keep myself busy and to sort of dissociate from the terrible world we live in, and to either watch or rewatch the stuff that was on the TV or in the theaters when I was a young kid, teenager, or (sometimes) in college. Some of it is reliving through nostalgia, and some of it is how did I let this slip by me when it was on television? Two examples: Top Gear, which I'd never really seen up until recently, and The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Both of these shows I'd seen in passing, of course, while they were airing -- never paid attention to them at the time. Now, as a much older adult, I am realizing how great Top Gear was as a series for and in its time, and while I remember flipping through channels and seeing episodes of Brisco County on TNT as a teenager, I never sat down and appreciated what an entertaining show it is until now. The 4TB drive I'm using for it all is about halfway full, and I call it The Box. Eventually, the box will be full, and if my drive for nostalgia is not sated, I will need to purchase a second Box. 

So much of adult life is trying to feel something, to recapture the feeling of youth, or to find something to actually enjoy -- because everything else about being an adult, especially a middle-aged adult, fucking sucks so hard. Music doesn't hit me as powerfully as it used to anymore, or it sounds different -- I could swear that so many songs I loved went harder -- I don't know how to explain it other than that. When I hear them today I'm like "no, that guitar should be louder, harder, faster -- is this a remastered version? Is this a re-recording off of some greatest hits album or something? This isn't the real one." 

But it is, usually. It is. The past burns so much brighter the further away it gets in the rearview mirror. 

So, with time escaping us all more by the day, I came up with a plan. 

At heart, I am a writer. That means I need to get my stuff written down, and I need to get it published and out into the world. I've worked actual jobs long enough, serving other people, companies, and corporations. No more. It's now time to make this writing thing my real job.

The "plan" is the framework and a timeline of getting things I've written already and are currently writing now out into the world. And it starts, of course, with things I've already written. That means my poetry collection from 2013 that I used as my thesis gets a slight re-editing if/as necessary and gets professionally published as a chapbook -- likely on Kindle only and it will very likely bring in no real money whatsoever. 

Next is the book I created from the original version of this website -- all 400ish pages of it. It will need to be re-edited and pared down, re-crafted into only the best content that suits the book (back in the day I was quite sloppy in the edit and rushed to get it to print, so to speak). Once that's done I will re-release it, likely also on Kindle only. 

Having those two to point to, then comes my first actual short story collection, the one I've been working on for several years. That in itself needs to not only be finished, but completely re-edited so that I can get it the way I want it and have the stories in it flow into one another. There are plans within plans for this and what I'd like to do with it and how I'd like to accomplish those goals change almost by the day, but the important part is that this is the first one that I initially want to shop around to potential presses. I'd need more than one hand to count the number of friends and colleagues I know who have successfully gotten their own books published (some more than once) and I will swallow my pride and consult them for advice as possible, also seeing if there are, say, contacts they could introduce me to in order to help make this happen. If not, Kindle store.

After that comes the second poetry collection of all new poems. I have a goal for this, and that goal is to make this a true, honest to God (just a figure of speech here) new full collection of 100ish poems. Not a chapbook, but a full-on collection. Surprisingly, this will likely be the easiest task of the entire list for me. Writing poetry seems to be remarkably easy for me. Am I the best poet in the world? Hell no. Am I objectively better than a lot of poetry I've read over the years by people far more well-published than me? Yes. I think so, anyway. I'm sure other people will think so too. So, a new collection of 100 or so should only take me 6-8 months at most from start to finish and I could probably get it done in half that time if I was bored and didn't have anything else to do. This one I'd also want to shop around to presses; it's about time I have a poetry collection on actual bookstore shelves for people to stumble across and purchase. 

These are the hard and set plans, of course. I have much more than this written down and hanging in the balance for when the above either goes well or goes tits up. That includes a book of family ghost stories, a book about the cats, and at least three more themed collections of short stories -- plus a screenplay and a few novels/novellas that I need to finish fleshing out the plans for. 

I'm not one of those people who just wants to write one Great American Novel™ -- one story to get it out of their system, to feel accomplished. No, I have so many stories in me. I feel like a Stephen King or Dean Koontz -- I could put out a book or two every year if it's all I was doing. I feel the great need to get these tales out of me and onto the page. 

It's a very lonely life, though. Daisy has told me that anytime I want to write and need her to leave me alone so that I can, just tell her and she'll let me. Well, if I were to do this, I'd be telling her that a lot. Writing is, in itself, a lot of work, and it is time-consuming. When I'm really in the groove of it, I can sit there and write for eight or nine hours straight and not realize how long I've been doing it when it's all said and done. About 15 years ago, I got an idea one night to write a Grad School Survival Guide of sorts -- a humorous book for kids starting grad school who didn't know what to expect. I was way into the idea, and in one night, again, one night, I wrote approximately 150 pages of it. Single spaced. I don't know how I did it, but I can tell you I can, absolutely, do it. 

No, no drugs were involved. I lived in Kansas and had no money, made $8500 a year as an adjunct professor, and didn't even have functioning air conditioning. I couldn't afford drugs.

So yes, there's a plan. I don't know how it's all going to work. Is it partially spurred on by watching my cousin become an author and reap the spoils of it? Yes, I'm sure it is. But I've also had these plans for a while. It's just time now to put them into motion and actually try, because I am not getting any younger.

July: Gus, Gretchen, Pile it On, and Daddy Spaghetti

 Weeks start and end incessantly, and three-day-weekends disappear in a blink, and before you know it you are more than halfway through July and, as such, in the midst of summer with not much to show for it. 

I realize that my story of our Canada trip probably left a bad taste in your proverbial mouths (it certainly did in mine) so I'm going to try to turn this around somewhat and move into more positive territory. It has been a month since we returned from Canada, and I must say that I do really miss it. However, I may miss the idea of it more than actually being there. I sort of miss the independence that traveling up there seems to provide. I miss the sea air, the fresh coffee, the giant gulls in every parking lot. I miss seeing the seals sunning themselves on the rocks only to whip themselves quickly back into the ocean when they see you're watching them. 

They're tracking several great white sharks (read: sharks that scientists have tagged) around Nova Scotia this month, some of them around the mainland and some of them up around the island. What a thrill it would be to see one. As I've mentioned before, I'm pretty sure I've seen sharks up there, fins moving through the water and not dolphin fins, and there was a little twinge of excitement there. 

A lot of things, little and big, have happened in the past month. A lot of them have come and gone with little fanfare, while others have been big events that have lingered for days or weeks at a time. I'm going to try to cover a lot of it as I can, in a go-with-the-flow manner from subject to subject. 

I should probably start with the bigger things the first of which is that both of Daisy's parents have had relatively important, major-ish surgeries since we've returned home. Yes, they're both fine now and have recovered normally, but it's a continual reminder that we are all but mortal and pretty soon (well, relatively speaking) neither her parents nor mine will be around at some point. And I have a feeling it's going to be a blink of the eye in relative time before that happens. We cherish time with Daisy's parents, and we make a special effort to visit mine in North Carolina every year as well. I'm getting to the point where it's so relatively inexpensive to go visit my parents in North Carolina that I am floating the idea of doing it more than once a year -- like once in the spring, once in the fall sort of planning. Daisy and I would, of course, need to work out the logistics of that a bit better, but as my parents have said that the best time to visit is October, and we had a good time and it was warm enough when we were there in March, it's not exactly out of the question to try to plan two trips a year for about 4-5 days each time. 

However, there's a bit of a wrench that has been thrown into any planning for that at this juncture, because starting next week, Daisy has a six-month promotion at her job. I call it a promotion because it's not a lateral move, really, but it is temporary. She's entering a program that is the stepping stone to higher-level leadership and/or other segments of her company. Once that program ends in six months, she'll either return to her old position with a higher-level skillset, or she will move to a higher tier (for lack of a better term) within the company. There's not really much, if any, real difference in pay (there's a slight difference in her bonuses) for this time period, but there is a change in schedule -- she is back to a Monday-Friday schedule, which means we won't have Fridays off together anymore. Friday has always been our day to take care of errands, shopping, doctor's appointments, etc. So, at least for the next six months, that's going to suck. She did, however, point out that on Fridays I'll have more me-time to decompress since she'll be working. However, I'd much rather have the time with her. I got so used to spending Fridays with her that it's going to be sad. It also means that she'll be able to watch football with me on Sundays once again though, which I'm sure she's thrilled about. Sarcasm intended.

My own job has been brutal. July has not been kind to us, and I have -- psychologically and motivationally -- been having a very hard time. It is very difficult for me to get up every day and boot up that laptop every night knowing it's going to drive me a little closer to having a mental breakdown, because of the abuse I'm about to face for ten hours straight. I am not exaggerating here, nor do I want to. Next month I cross twelve years at my job (relatively speaking; it's been doing the same job as a contractor for the same corporate overlords through three different companies, but it's the same job) and I've now finally gotten to the point where any care, drive, ambition, or aspirations I once had are just gone, and I am really just going through the barest minimum of motions every single day for the hours I'm there until I can logout and close my laptop. And at this point I am sure people are noticing, but I also...don't really care, to be honest with you. Fuck you, pay me. 

We are so horribly overworked and understaffed that the people who work there have been quitting left and right, and that includes one of the girls on my team...my team of four people, which means our staffing was cut down by a full 25% in one fell swoop. Now, mind you, she was my least important employee and I could have been justified in firing her a long time ago for being lazy. However, I didn't want to fire her. I couldn't fire her; she was a warm body I could assign tasks to. I just wanted her to do her fucking job. She did not want to do that, and when it was clear that she didn't have a say in the matter, she was like "okay, well, here's my two weeks" and was gone. Her replacement was a guy I am only passingly familiar with from the day shift teams, who -- in his first two weeks on 3rd shift -- had his laptop spectacularly self-destruct on him and then, once he got a new one, three days into the week had his cat die mid-shift. So, it's been...shaky, to say the least. I have some confidence in him, but full judgment is reserved until bad shit stops happening to him and he can work a normal week without a crisis. 

But, I will tell you, my job is not my life -- and, especially that one, it never will be. When I am off shift, I do not give a single flying shit about what happens when I'm not there. Not my monkeys, not my circus. We're not a big happy family. We're people there doing a task that we get paid for. 

Still, I get older every day, and each day is a cold reminder that I have never done and likely never will do what I would like to do with my life.

But, apparently, my cousin can.

In a development that came shockingly out of left field, about a month ago I received a text from my mother asking me if I knew my cousin had written a book. 

I did not, of course.

The cousin in question is one of the youngest cousins of my generation in the family from West Virginia, born in 1986 -- so, I guess, he is 40 this year. I remember seeing him in the hospital when he was born, so, I mean, I am a few years older than him. Only two of my other cousins are younger than he is. 

Now, this cousin...he is absolutely the last person in the family I would have ever expected to write a book. I have always known him to be more on the redneck side of the family (and I say this with no real offense intended, but keep in mind I was a professor and now work in a highly skilled tech job, and the two cousins younger than him are also schoolteachers -- having gone into education as a personal choice).

So my first question was, of course, a book about what? This is the cousin who invited me to join a Facebook group promoting his self-run business, which is killing coyotes for fun and profit in rural Pennsylvania (they are quite the nuisance there to pets and livestock). He invited me to this group, the vegetarian married to a vegan, who loves animals and owns six cats...to a business page devoted to killing animals. I'm guessing he either invited his entire friends list, or he really doesn't know me as a person these days. 

Of course, I also have not spoken to this cousin, personally, in well over twenty years. I've been living here in the midwest for twenty years this fall, and I think the last time I saw him was a few years before that at a holiday family dinner, so... maybe he's a different person now than the goofy kid I knew growing up. Regardless, I was curious about his book. Was it a book about hunting? Being republican? (I'm only guessing here, going with the odds) A humor book?  A travel narrative? I know this guy married young and has a wife who adores him, the sister of family friends, and I know his side of the family is religious, so maybe it was a faith-based narrative about love and Jesus or something. 

It...was not.

I found the post on Facebook about it -- written by his wife -- and then I clicked through to the book itself on Amazon to see what it was all about.

It's a sci-fi supernatural thriller about a ghost/monster hunting detective.

What. The fuck. 

Not only that, he has another book that is about -- by the way it sounds -- a werewolf hunting two men in a forest. 

What in the everliving fucking fuck.

I was speechless and needed to take a few minutes for myself. 

Not only is my cousin doing the exact thing I got two different college degrees to do, but he is doing it on his own, with what appears to be some help in the art department (I must admit, the art for the covers looks great) and has not one but two books written in a similar vein/genre as the style of fiction I write and have been working on for years -- well, in a roundabout way -- and not only has them available on Kindle but has his own full author page and has hardcover/softcover versions too. 

I was, and still am to some extent, stunned.

So, I have Kindle credits. I save them -- you can earn $3 towards digital purchases if you choose no-rush shipping on a lot of stuff on Amazon, and if I order something I don't need immediately, I just set it for that no-rush shipping and rake in $3 for each qualifying item. Over the course of any given 2-3 month period, I'll rack up enough digital dollars to where I can buy an album by an artist I like, or will be able to get, say, the next volume of Absolute Batman or Absolute Superman digitally once it's available. It is very rare that I ever spend actual dollars on Kindle content or music, is what I'm saying.

I figured, okay, what the hell, like if he's doing it, I may as well support his endeavors. I purchased his new book, the one he just put out about the ghost/monster hunting detective -- which is the first in a series, apparently.

And then I summarily forgot about it for a couple of days.

Now, Daisy shares my Kindle account because we share a Prime account. This is also because I bought both Kindles at the same time and they auto-registered to me as the primary on the account. So, anything I've bought or downloaded for Kindle she automatically has access to on her own Kindle. I've bought some Supergirl collections on there (for me, of course) that I've also encouraged her to read, for example, as I think she'd really enjoy them.

So a few days later, I tell Daisy this story from the beginning, and I add that I had not read it yet or even opened the book file, but my off-the-cuff suspicion was that my cousin had gotten AI to write this book, or had written a really rough version and had put it through AI chapter by chapter to punch it up and make it sound professionally written -- solely because he was absolutely not the person I would ever expect to write anything like this, let alone in this genre. 

"Let's see," Daisy said, opening the Kindle app on her phone. She navigated to the book, opened it, and read a page or two of it silently.

"Well?" I asked.

"...I don't think it's AI at all," she said. "It really feels like a person wrote this."

I opened it a day or three later and read the first pages. Daisy is right. It does not sound like an AI wrote this book, or even really punched it up -- at least not from the scant few pages I'd read. I'm not sure it's a writing style I like or mesh with, but it doesn't seem to be written by a robot, at least.

Somehow that made me feel even worse. 

Like, make no mistake, good on him. He put up a post on Facebook about how he has wanted to do this for so many years and now his dream is a reality, and he thanks everyone who has supported him and bought the books and cheered him on throughout the process of getting them done, and honestly I am happy for him. I am still stunned, but, you know, good for him. He gets to live his dream. I don't even care if it's all or half AI or all genuine. At this point it doesn't matter to me. 

I think I've come to the conclusion of, essentially, I am not in competition with him. And I'm absolutely not, because I have never done anything commercial with my writing and have never had the opportunity to do so. But even if I had, or even if I do, eventually, get to publish the short story collection(s) I've been working on for years, I am not in competition with him. I wouldn't be doing it to be like "oh look at me, I can do this too" but I'd be doing it because, again, I've spent my entire life trying to be a writer only to have that dream be derailed, over and over, by needing to have an actual job to survive and pay bills. Over the years it's come down to well Brandon, what do you want more? would you rather have six cats and a lot of food in the house and a giant t-shirt collection, or do you want to barely survive and be miserably broke? And sadly the former has won every time. 

That's not to say that my writing hasn't gone anywhere. Daisy encouraged me tonight to start on that short story collection I'd been talking about.

"Start?" I said. "I've got four or five stories anywhere between 60-80% finished, but what happens is I'll get that far and run out of steam, and then I won't have the energy to come back to them and finish them for weeks or months, and then the spark is gone and I have to fight to try to get it back...which sometimes, most of the time, does not happen."

This is the most accurate description of this process I can really explain, honestly. When I have the spark for it, the drive for it, the energy for it....there is no stopping me, and I can write for eight, twelve, sixteen hours at a time, barely stopping. When I don't have that creative spark or energy? It can't be forced. And nothing I can do will make that spark happen.

I will be struck by inspiration sometimes, and I do have good ideas that I scramble to write down before I forget them, and then come back to refine them later. Grand plans, however, don't always translate into actions -- we all know that.

Anyway.

While we were in Canada, the catsitter had told us that she'd heard strange noises from our porch, under our back porch, against the house, etc.

"It's the groundhog," we told her, matter of factly.

Gus, as we have named him, has either lived under our porch or has made our backyard his stomping grounds for a few years now, off and on. Sometimes we'll see him every day for weeks on end, and other times we won't see him for many months and then suddenly he'll pop back up again. He's very cute, he's about the size of one of our smaller cats (I'd venture to say he's larger than Dolly, for example) and we've coexisted peacefully for, again, multiple years.

"It sounds like he's tearing up your deck from the underneath," the catsitter told us. "Like gnawing at it, biting at it."

Now, mind you, I have never heard that. I have heard him moving around under the deck -- it sounds very similar to someone walking across the deck -- but I haven't seen or heard anything I would classify as destructive. And the deck itself does not appear to have any damage to it.

Still, this made us a little apprehensive. You wanna live here and eat the weeds in the yard, sure, fine, but if you start destroying our house? You gotta go, son. 

We looked up some groundhog deterrents -- apparently cayenne pepper is a big one. Put it around their living areas in abundance, and they'll get the fuck out.

Yeah, Gus didn't care. He would look at Daisy all terrified from under the deck, apparently, when Daisy was spreading around the pepper, but it does not seem to have deterred him in the least. But, I will say, I also haven't heard him doing anything to the deck other than moving around beneath it since we got back from Canada, so if it deterred him from tearing it up, I'm all for it.

Cut to a couple of weeks ago when I heard Daisy exclaim, from the kitchen, "OMG there's two of them!"

I came out to look, and sure enough, next to Gus in the backyard is a smaller, slightly lighter-colored groundhog that clearly appeared to be a female (though I don't know, maybe in groundhog physiology the males are smaller and the females are larger). 

Well, there ya go. Learn something new every day.

Anyway, the smaller female, which we've named Gretchen, has a little distinctive white spot on her face that also lets us tell her apart from Gus. She also likes to waddle back and forth across the porch around 6:30 in the morning, which gives Gary fits. Rarely do we see them in the backyard together most days, but we can tell them apart when we do see them out there individually. Neither appear to have been deterred by any of the cayenne pepper or anything else Daisy has tried to put out there, but also we don't hear or see them tearing shit up, so we have a live and let live policy, I suppose. Mind you, our deck and house are built on concrete slabs, so it's not like there's a lot they could really do to cause real damage. Now that I've said that, of course....

We have been trying to keep ourselves on a budget and relatively in-shape as pertaining to our actual health and routines. This does not mean exercise necessarily, but it means we don't really spend money on food or items we don't need and we are trying to eat what's in the house and cook creatively, especially when it's 100+ degrees outside and it's too fucking hot to run the oven(s). 

The cyclospora outbreak has had us on edge too -- we have an entire five-pack of full heads of romaine in the fridge that we picked up from Costco legit the day before the news of the outbreak came out, and we're too paranoid to eat it now. Add to this that if I wanted to, and I have wanted to a lot over the course of the past few months, I could eat an entire bag of Taylor Farms chopped Caesar salad in one sitting a few times a week. I could live off that salad if I had to. And now, well, Taylor Farms means until we get some sort of all clear, or we're otherwise told that salads are no longer a threat, I have to go without. 

I told Daisy that I am happy to live off what we have in the house, but, to do so...well, I have to get more grocery staples to add to stuff we have in the house.

"That kind of defeats the purpose," said Daisy.

"No," I said, "it doesn't. We have fifteen jars of spaghetti sauce and yet we have no spaghetti. So I would need to get spaghetti in order to use those. As an example."

I did get four giant boxes of spaghetti delivered to me from Walmart yesterday. As all of the cats watched me put it away, I told them "just call me Daddy Spaghetti."

Because, of course, they understand English and will find that amusing, right?

Anyway.

I just like having all of my ducks in a row when it comes to having supplies on hand and having food in the house. At the same time, the Mounjaro has made both of us digest food so very slowly, and as such, we are generally eating a lot less than we did before. Daisy has lost something like twenty pounds, but she is also experiencing some sometimes serious gastrointestinal issues from the Mounjaro. I have lost zero pounds on the Mounjaro, but I am only experiencing mild gastrointestinal side effects at best. What I can tell you is that I have almost zero appetite compared to before. When I am hungry, my eyes are bigger than my stomach, and after about 1/3 of the amount of food I used to eat, I become full or start to feel queasy.

So, I mean, I guess that aspect of the drug really works well. I just want to actually start losing weight on it. I know it's working to control my diabetes and lower my blood sugar/A1C, but goddamn do I want the weight loss side of that coin too. Daisy says she's read studies that some people don't start dropping weight on it until they reach the higher levels (7.5mg and above; I am at 5mg now), but after seeing the side effects she's had from it at 5mg like me, I'm slightly terrified to see if the same, or worse, would hit me at higher levels too. I had to discontinue the Trulicity because, essentially, it gave me terrible IBS. While I don't seem to have any major side effects yet, I do know that I am at least somewhat prone to them. 

What I do have, however, is a hemorrhoid. 

This happens about, oh, once every year or two for me. I'll have a flare up, I'll drink a ton of Metamucil and drink as much extra fluids as possible, and within a few days it'll gradually go away. This time it is taking its time and being, well....a real pain in the ass.

Pun intended.

So that's what's happened in July. Time to move onward now, into August, into football, and into fall.

Finally.

Locked In the Trunk of a Car: Canada 2026, Part III

 Now that the stage has been set and you know where my headspace was throughout the trip and how my mental health was -- for lack of a better description -- rapidly deteriorating, the middle of the week and the middle of our trip up there was Daisy's birthday. And, as she mentioned multiple times, rain or shine she wanted to go to her favorite beach, Inverness Beach, on her birthday.

Well, her birthday rolled around and it was likely the coldest, rainiest, windiest day of the entire trip -- absolutely not the weather you would want to go to the beach in. However, Daisy awoke that morning bound and determined. 

"Seriously?" I asked. "I know you said rain or shine, and I know you really want to go to the beach on your birthday, but honey, this really isn't the weather for it."

But there was no talking her out of it. I shouldn't have even bothered to try. I was given the choice of go to the beach with her and Mama and suck it up, or be left at home in the basement with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and nobody to talk to when I already felt like an absolute prisoner on this trip. Be a prisoner in the car and then in the rain and cold at the beach, or be a prisoner in a basement staring at the walls.  

This is why I did not enjoy this year's trip to Canada. Because it was a lot of choices like this. No upsides, just a bunch of spent calories with nothing to show for it. 

But Brandon, you may be saying, can't you just enjoy watching your wife have fun enjoying herself?

Psh, no. I can't. I can try but I end up faking it. I can't enjoy someone else's fun if I'm not having fun myself. I just can't. If that makes me a miserable person, so be it. I was definitely miserable on this trip. 

I hate being out in the rain and cold. There's nothing I hate more. I'd rather be out in the snow than be in rain and wind. Snow you can brush off you; rain soaks you to the bone, fogs up your glasses, and is just frustrating. 

I promise you I'm not trying to sound like a prick, and I wasn't trying to be one. I was just intensely unhappy throughout the vast majority of this trip. I don't know how much I can stress that, really. 

I promise you, this is the face of a man suffering from intense depression on the inside. 

So we went to the beach, we picked up a bunch of sea glass and a few neat rocks, and then we returned home. I faked it well. I tried to give Daisy a good birthday, after I was able to get over myself a little bit, but again...it just felt so hollow. It felt like I was getting nothing I wanted on this vacation, and my stress levels certainly weren't being lowered. It felt like Canada was being ruined for me the longer I was there and unhappy. I felt, much like the Tragically Hip song, as if I were locked in the trunk of a car. 

That night, not as much because it was Daisy's birthday but because it was the last night with Daisy's aunt and uncle in town with their camper, we all had a big family dinner. Daisy had originally wanted to make tacos for everyone, and we had specifically pre-frozen Trader Joe's vegan soy chorizo and flown up to Canada with it in our luggage so that could happen.

Well, Grandma didn't want tacos. She wanted chicken for everyone. Which was fine for everyone else but me and Daisy, since we don't eat the meats, so on the way home from the beach we had to stop and get alternative vegan foods for the two of us to eat. Honestly I was so tired and frazzled at this point that I do not remember, at all, what we ended up buying and eating during the big family dinner. I really don't. I don't remember much about the dinner at all. I know afterwards I was so exhausted that I went back downstairs to the back bedroom sanctuary and passed out. 

Two days later we gathered our things, packed everything as tightly as possible into our suitcases, drove to the airport, dropped off the rental car, and flew home. There was no pomp and circumstance, there was no big production about it, there were no overly long goodbyes or overwrought emotions. I felt battered and numb, upset that I'd really not had a fun time, tired because it was hard to sleep on the basement bed, disappointed that despite my tries on various stations I had not heard the Hip on the radio once during this trip, and I just wanted to be home more desperately than anything else.

When we finally arrived back in Omaha, our luggage had arrived hours before we had and was being held in the office off to the side. Mama and Daisy's luggage were fine, but my suitcase had been beaten to hell and the top handle and luggage tags had been ripped off -- of my brand new, four-month-old green monster suitcase that I'd purchased because my last one had been damaged beyond repair in the same fucking airport. 

We took pictures, and upon return home I filed a damage claim the next day. The company that the airlines contracts for their damage claims requested I put it in a box or a bag and mail it to them for repairs. 

I declined to do that, mainly because of the likelihood that it will become far more damaged in transit to and from their facilities, and asked if there was just a direct compensation or replacement they could do. Nope. Mail it to them or that's it. So, as that's not happening, I now have a suitcase with a busted handle. 

Like, obviously it isn't the end of the world, and it's not ruined without that handle, but it certainly makes moving it around a lot more difficult and I'll need to attach the luggage tags in a different place (may I suggest the holes ripped into it?) but few things irritate me more than stuff like this. 

I am on the fence on whether I'll purchase another suitcase at this juncture or whether I'll just get some wire, slip it through those holes, and try to wire the handle back on there by wrapping and fortifying it. If nothing else, or if I can't really travel with it as is, I'll stick it under the bed and it can be used as extra storage for bedding and blankets, because we will always need that. 

I need a new travel backpack anyway; the big canvas one I've used for years is wearing out, big time, and its stitching is ripping on the seams and on the straps. Maybe I can get a two-for-one package deal somewhere, somehow.

Anyway. 

So, our trip to Canada ended with a whimper. We returned home to six very grateful, loving cats, 90+ degree temperatures every day again, and a return to work for both of us about 36 hours after we got home. And that was that. I will tell you that I am better now; I am no longer out of sorts nor am I miserable, and I can look back on the trip to see the positives on it, but it was very hard to see those positives while I was there.

Two Canadians Plus One American Equals Three Americans: Canada 2026, Part II

 Traveling with Mama is not usually hard, but it is a much...slower experience. It requires a lot of patience and it especially requires you to not be in any sort of hurry to get somewhere or to do something whatsoever, no matter what. Mama has a walker and a lot of mobility issues due to health concerns and just plain old age, and I have always understood that and have never had a problem with it -- in fact, I am generally first in line to jump up and help her do something that would otherwise cause her pain or discomfort.

But, be advised that Canada is very different than the United States in both how they care for their elderly and/or otherwise sickly population as well as in a grand cultural sense. As Mama told us, there are not laws in Canada that say that the handicapped must get special treatment or special parking or entryways into buildings/ramps etc (whether this is true or not, I don't know; I have not looked it up) like there is here in the states, and in general it seems like the Canadians either look down upon or otherwise ignore the enfeebled almost entirely. As such, we have noticed it's harder for Mama to get around in public at places in Canada, and it's much more difficult to get, say, wheelchair assistance in the airport without telling multiple people multiple times in myriad ways that yes, it is absolutely necessary. 

This being said, when I travel to Canada with Mama and Daisy, I am traveling with two full-blooded Canadians, women with Canadian citizenship as well as American citizenship. I don't expect to be given special treatment, but I do expect to be treated, well, as a Canadian, even if I am not one, as I am married to one and the son-in-law of another. 

But to anyone watching us on the outside, it is very clear that all three of us are Americans. It doesn't matter what flags we wave or how front-and-center my Tragically Hip t-shirt is when I travel -- I stick out as an American. Daisy says it's mannerisms, tone of voice, even body language that gives it away, and even Mama can't hide it now since she has spent so long in the states. 

Mind you, we are all American citizens too; Daisy is and always has been a dual citizen and Mama just got her American citizenship two years ago after being here for nearly fifty years (married to Dad, of course, who is also American). Believe me, if I had any actual Canadian blood heritage anywhere in my ancestry or family line that would qualify me to become a Canadian citizen, I would be doing so -- but, sadly, I don't have that. When I travel, especially during this dark era of the Trump Administration, I try not to stick out as an American. I've mentioned this before. However, it's really hard these days, and I don't think it's going to get any easier. 

However, traveling with Mama does have its perks -- she takes her handicap placard with her everywhere we go, and we hang it off the mirror of any vehicle we're in and get the best parking in the parking lot every time, for one. For two, we do get to board airplanes first with her, and in airports (especially stateside) if we are far from our next gate/terminal, we have people who will jet us across the airport on one of those go-kart things, luggage in tow, all together because we're traveling together.

In non-handicap situations though it is very clear that we are all Americans when out and about (sorry, I'm talking about Canada here, so it's oat and a boat) either shopping or in restaurants. While Mama will slip back into her Nova Scotia accent a bit when she's there, and I am also one of those people that if I spend enough time someplace, the accent there will work its way into my speech, Daisy is not one of those people (though I do think she could if she let it). However, even for me it takes a while, so any time I open my mouth more than a mumble, it is very clear that I am absolutely American. 

So generally I keep my mouth shut in most public places. I'm not making any more waves than necessary.

When we went to Inverness Beach for Daisy's birthday, there's a gift shop on the way that we have always wanted to enter but it has never been open when we've driven by. There's a running joke within the family that it's not open, but it is shut, because that's what the sign says. Not closed, but shut. Well, this time it was open, and we found that it was owned and operated by an American transplant from California who had family in the area. Turns out we're not the only Americans in the area -- especially not up on the island, where a lot of the people there are from the states and have moved there for retirement or to just plain get away from the trainwreck that is the US government.

I don't know how much I really believe that. A lot of the people we see and interact with there are very clearly Canadian, or are naturalized citizens who are clearly immigrants -- I can't say that I see or interact with a lot or any "known Americans" other than us when we're there. Nobody there seems to be overly hostile towards Americans (though if you'd ask Mama, she'd say differently). Also, if you're moving to Canada to retire there? On Cape Breton Island, along the coastline? You have to have a lot of money, because that is not something that is cheap, and it is doubly not cheap for Americans. If it were, I'd already be living there and our cats would be Canadian cats. 

This time around, it seemed like the novelty of us coming to town had worn thin or we had otherwise not warranted a lot of attention from the rest of the family, even with Mama with us. I let Daisy and Mama handle communication with everyone, of course -- it's not my family, it's theirs and I just married into it. While there are definitely aunts and uncles and cousins who adore me and who have accepted me into the family as an honorary Canadian as if I was born and raised there and always belonged, it's still not my place to be messaging extended family and being like "hey, we're going to be in town on X days, be there" because not only is that not my place, but I'm sure everyone would see it as aggressively American -- because I certainly would. 

Now, I will also mention that our arrival coincided with prom and graduation for one of the younger kids in the family and the one I would call, more than anything else, the "golden child" of the family. Yes, Prom on the weekend we arrived and Graduation on the weekend we were leaving, in late June-- school schedules are very different in Canada. Because of all of this activity surrounding the golden child and the preparations/schedules involved for the graduation party (taking place the day we were flying home, unfortunately), a good chunk of the family we'd normally see -- including said golden child as well her parents and brother and at least two other cousins, we did not get to see. Daisy's other cousin who had the wedding in October was stuck coordinating trainings at work in Halifax all week, and thus we did not get to see the newlyweds either.

Who did we spend time with while we were there? Well...

Daisy's aunt and uncle, the parents of our cousin we saw get married in October, always make a special effort to drive the camper up to the family homestead to see us when we're in town. I love them; they are wonderful people and nobody makes us feel more at home in country than they do. These are the aunt and uncle who have told us point-blank that it's time to escape the states and come home, and when we do we will have a place to stay with them. They came up the day after we arrived and stayed a couple of nights before heading home. 

We did see some family friends we always see when we're there, if possible, and we did see Daisy's other aunt and uncle who live next door to the family homestead. However, aside from one of Mama's friends, we saw nobody else while we were there. As mentioned, most of my time was spent in the basement, where I felt trapped and unimportant because nobody wanted to come spend time with us while we were in Canada. The oppressive rain and cold didn't help matters much either.

I was struggling. All I wanted was to have some fun and be happy, to be able to enjoy my vacation and actually feel like I was on vacation, not trapped in a basement while it poured rain for days on end. There were no adventures to really be had, and the parts of the Canada Experience that I'd enjoyed so much in years past just felt hollow and empty. Yes, we would go to Walmart and shop in the vastly superior Canadian Walmart, but...it lacked the charm it had in previous years. 

They changed up the inside of the local Tim Hortons, added kiosks and new seating and new register systems, and in doing so made the place far less quaint and inviting and more like an assembly line with furniture. It made me sad. The food and coffee was just as good as always, but still. 

Yes, when I am in Tim Hortons, my codename is Duke. Nobody knows me. I'm sure there could be other Brandons around up there. But I doubt they run across a Duke very often. Plus, it's always somewhat hilarious to hear the small, waify foreign (mostly Indian) coffee girls yell out "Duke? Duuuuuuke!" when my order is ready. 

Daisy rolls her eyes but I know she gets a kick out of it too. Also, it's pure coincidence that together we are Daisy/Duke. I promise that wasn't intentional. 

Aside from the brief social gatherings with people, we treaded no new ground in Canada this year. Did we go to Giant Tiger and Dollarama? Why yes, yes we did. We spent a little money at each place. Did we take Mama to get her fish and chips in Truro? Yes, we did, and I got a poutine there. Did we go to 5c to $1.00 in Antigonish as we do every year? Yes, we did, and just like every other year, I got a new hat there. 

Sigh. For some reason, it was just all so...depressing. Sad. I was not having fun at all. I was really, really struggling, I was getting increasingly irritable with everyone, especially Daisy, and there was nothing that could really make me feel better. It got to the point where Mama and Grandma noticed it as well, and the last thing I wanted to do was ruin everyone else's time just because I was miserable, but at the same time I wanted everyone to know that I was enjoying absolutely nothing about this trip. 

Looking back on it now, yes, the weather was a big factor in why I felt so badly, but also the fact that we weren't being treated like royalty for our visit and that everything wasn't revolving around the three of us flying in to visit from thousands of miles away was subconsciously affecting me too. Add to this that we hadn't had any adventures planned just for me and Daisy -- we didn't really have any true vacation time to ourselves, everywhere we went and everything we did involved Mama or doing something for Mama or taking her with us, and in those situations I felt very heavily like a third wheel, wondering why I was even there on this vacation with them, because it certainly wasn't for my enjoyment. 

Over the span of a few days, this compounded and I was absolutely miserable. There's only so many things you can do to entertain yourself when you're essentially trapped in a basement. There's only so many hours you can read books or watch television on your tablet (a tablet that, in Canada, only has half the apps be functional -- i.e. no HBO Max, no Paramount+, and no Libby library app) before you're like "fuck, let me out, I have to do something different."

But we didn't. We did nothing different. We did nothing adventurous. Daisy and I didn't take a day trip to drive up and down the Cabot Trail. We didn't go whale-watching. We did little more than sit in the basement, and while I fully realize being there, being in another country, is a treat in itself -- this time around it all just rang hollow. I felt like I had become the ghost in the house, not Daisy's grandfather.