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.

The End of the Universe: Canada 2026, Part I

 We have gone to, and returned from, Canada. I know, you've probably been waiting to hear that.

We have been back for a week. 

It has been...difficult to write about, and process, since our return, and thus I don't know how much I'm going to write about this trip as a whole or as a documentation of our experiences, because -- and I'm going to be 100% frank and transparent in saying this -- I had a miserable time when I was there this year and felt like a prisoner for a lot of the trip. 

I know that this must sound absolutely shocking to you. And it's shocking and sad for me too. 

It did not feel like a vacation to me. Most of the trip was not pleasant. We didn't break new ground or go anywhere/do anything new. Most of the family didn't even come into town to see us (most -- some made a special effort to come visit) and a lot of those family who knew we were there were otherwise occupied most of the time and did not make contact or outreach to us while there. It was freezing cold every day and poured rain, and when it wasn't freezing cold and raining I was, admittedly, in a very foul mood. 

Were there highlights of the trip? 

Eh. I was able to read a lot and I watched a lot of movies and TV on my tablet. 

I'll go down through the list of highlights and lowlights, I suppose, by the numbers:

4 different airplanes

3 different airports

2 rental cars

2 poutines from different places

$50+ of Canadian candy bars brought home

2 new Nova Scotia mugs

2 new Canadian souvenir t-shirts

5 days of trips to Tim Hortons

4 uses of my codename "Duke" in Tim Hortons, for pickup orders

3 new pairs of shorts

6 new pairs of socks

2 new retro, thin hoodies

1 new Canadian themed quilt set

2 sleepless nights on an air mattress

1 well-slept night on a bed

2 mediocre-slept nights on that same bed

1 horribly-slept night on that same bed

1 water bottle filled with urine (multiple times, multiple nights)

1 new water bottle purchased for obvious reasons

1 big family dinner

3 days of constipation

5 days of eating sandwiches and ketchup chips in the basement like a goblin

$30+ for a 12-pack of Monster

105 photos taken

0 photos taken that can be used for Christmas cards

1 damaged suitcase

6 cats happy we're home now

I always felt like traveling to Canada was like slipping into a slightly different, much better/quieter parallel universe. This trip felt like we stepped through the portal into a grimy, beatdown truckstop at the end of the universe. I felt like there was some change in the air, some sort of shift into a darker timeline. I don't remember seeing the Canadian summer sun -- the actual, beautiful summer sun of Canada -- the entire time we were there. Some days were brighter or darker than others, but I don't know that I actually saw a sunny day when I was there. 

Of course, I was in the basement almost the entire time. 

So if I'm going to tell this story, I should probably start with our arrival and what our living arrangements were while we were there. And before I go on I want to state that yes, I was miserable almost the entire time I was there, and when I am miserable it is incredibly hard to hide it. It turns me into an insufferable asshole, and while I am fully aware of this a lot of the time, I am not in control of it. Sometimes, as I apparently was during the majority of this trip, I am not aware that apparently I was being a miserable, insufferable asshole. So as you read through the story of our trip, please keep that in mind throughout -- but also keep in mind that even if I am an insufferable asshole, it does not make me wrong, nor should any of my perceptions be discounted or dismissed. 

That being said, let's move onward.

We arrived in Halifax with no issue. The flights were fine, they were actually comfortable, and we had the wheelchair assistance for Mama that we had needed and requested up until we got through customs and were then told, basically, "alright, you American fuckers are on your own" in less words. 

Daisy always requests a full-size car for our trips, or a medium SUV. As last fall we loved the new Bronco Sport that we had as our rental, Daisy opted for that again -- a "Ford Escape" or equivalent. 

This. Is not what they gave us.

Upon arrival at the rental counter, they told us the vehicle we'd reserved multiple months in advance was not available, and tried to stick us into a Hyundai Kona, which was not large enough to fit our suitcases, let alone the three of us. We declined and told them that we needed something bigger, because not only did we have three giant suitcases but we had our elderly, handicapped mother in tow, and they told us to sit there and wait.

So, here we were, in the basement of the Halifax airport, reliving the situation we'd been in two years ago during the last time we went on this trip with Mama -- waiting there, tired and in pain from traveling all day (with at least three more hours on the road to go before being home at the family homestead) with no rental car. 

To be fair, this time around they quickly prioritized us and got us into a new Volkswagen Tiguan, which was large enough for us and our luggage, but...I mean, it wasn't a Bronco.

It was a fine enough vehicle for our purposes, I suppose. I was and still am skeptical of Volkswagens after the rental company gave us a new Jetta two years ago in North Carolina and it had its check-engine light on the whole time we had it.

Well, this Volkswagen was fine, I guess. I didn't think the seats were comfortable at all (but Mama and Daisy did), but I did like -- for the most part -- the way the cabin sat off the ground and the way it was designed. It was more of an appliance than a car, honestly -- the equivalent of a refrigerator with wheels. We didn't need it to be special, we just needed it to get from point A to point B, and it did that without issue. 

After stopping for dinner and some light grocery shopping, we finally reached the family homestead as it was beginning to get dark. We brought in everything and went downstairs, where the downstairs great room was almost already prepared for us and where Daisy would set up the air mattress.

So, that bears a little explanation as well -- all of this does, I'm sure.

When we were up there last fall, Daisy's grandmother told us that she'd rather us stay there in the house with her than get a room at the Cove Motel or rent the really expensive AirBNB we rented two years ago. We've stayed with her before and it's been fine. It's not incredibly ideal, but it's fine. The upstairs spare bedroom is cramped and hot, but we manage.

Well, this time we were coming with Mama, and because Mama has limited mobility, that means she gets that upstairs spare bedroom, and we are relegated to the basement. 

Now, to be fair, the basement of the family homestead isn't a dungeon or anything like that -- it is furnished, has a kitchen with sink and fridge/freezer, laundry room area with washer/dryer, a workshop (where Daisy's grandfather did leatherwork and built guitars) a back bedroom with a queen-sized bed, and a great room with a couch, piano, TV/VCR/DVD player and Daisy's grandfather's old desktop computer/desk. But, it is not a space that has been occupied, for any real reason, since some time before Daisy's grandfather's passing in 2022. So, it looks like a space trapped in time -- his tools where he left them on his workbench, the CDs and DVDs on his computer desk in the order he'd left them there, the electronics and glassware and everything slowly gathering a layer of dust after years of being untouched.

And of course we bomb down the stairs and begin touching everything again.

Now, mind you, Daisy's uncles have been slowly cleaning out the house, so stuff isn't exactly completely untouched. Grandma also has a home care nurse that uses the downstairs kitchen area/fridge/washer-dryer every week too, so it's not like stuff is falling into disrepair or anyhing. Additionally, Grandma has given the edict that she wants people to clean up the things and get what they want now, so that when she goes there's not a fight about things/stuff/money/property. The woman will turn 93 this fall, so this is understandable. And as much as we'd like to fantasize that we'll be making this trip every year for the next five, six, seven years -- it is getting more likely by the year that each trip up there will be our last. The house is already in the name of Daisy's uncle who lives next door, so whenever it's time, it's time, We won't really have much reason to go visit the family homestead once grandma is gone, of course.

Now, I've been down in the basement a lot while I've been there -- mainly for laundry -- but we'd never stayed down there before. Daisy had come downstairs to sleep in the spare bedroom when it got too hot upstairs during our trip there in 2023, and had said then that the bed wasn't exactly comfortable -- which is why she'd gotten the air mattress. Both she and I have felt her grandfather's presence down there since his passing, and Daisy even saw him once -- this is something she does not like to talk about -- so it's a bit strange compared to if we were staying there while he was still alive. 

I will say that last year when we were there in the fall, I did not feel his presence in the house more than the equivalent of a faint, lingering whisper. Previously, when we were there in 2023 it felt like he was still there, in the room with us at all times. This time? I felt absolutely nothing downstairs. The place felt completely empty and lonely with no wisps whatsoever of his presence there. I did not ask Daisy or Mama how they felt being in the house this time around, but, to me -- the man had finally left the building.

Anyway.

Because she knew of the bed downstairs being uncomfortable for her, let alone both of us, Daisy spent months researching air mattresses to purchase, stuff into the suitcase, and take with us to Canada. It needed to be a king-size, it needed to have its own plug-into-the-wall auto inflator/deflator, and it would need to be firm enough to be comfortable yet not too firm to where it would feel like sleeping on a board. 

She found one on Amazon that had decent reviews, purchased it, stuffed it into our suitcase when we left, and unloaded it once we got there in the basement. 

And it was...awful.

Like, maybe I'm being picky. I'd gone out and had gotten special sheets for the air mattress so that it would feel like some semblance of a bed, and honestly that first night when we had just gotten there after traveling for something like eighteen hours straight...I would've slept on the floor, I would not have cared. So, Daisy inflated it, we put the sheets and a blanket on it, and Daisy passed out on it almost immediately. I joined her and had some trouble, but eventually I slept.

Aside from a short nap the next evening, it would be the only time I ever attempted to sleep on that godforsaken fucking air mattress. It destroyed my back, it made me sweat profusely, and it was near impossible to get on and off of without being catapulted directly into the wall or hyperextending one's knees or elbow joints. It was an absolutely miserable sleeping apparatus that I felt the need to curse with every colorful metaphor in my extensive vocabulary of colorful metaphors.

Daisy was fine with it. She didn't understand why it bothered me so much. She slept like a rock on it every night of the trip. 

Starting on night two, I moved into the back bedroom and slept on the old queen-size bed down there. It was old and broken down, but it was an actual mattress. That second night was the best night of sleep I've had on vacation in a long time. Nights three through six were a bell curve on the downhill swing as I perceived that bed to be less and less comfortable each night I slept on it. 

The back bedroom itself was interesting, though. It was always more of a spare room, I supposed -- there was an old treadmill in there from at least the mid-80s gathering dust, and all four sets of Grandpa's golf clubs. Yes, four sets of clubs. Back in the day, he was apparently a very well-respected, could-have-gone-professional golfer. The great room, where Daisy was sleeping on the air mattress, was filled with golf tournament trophies on top of the ancient player piano. The closets held every jacket, coat, or weird pair of pants that the old man ever owned, most of them looking like they hadn't been touched since the 90s or early 2000s. I didn't mess with them, though I did look through the racks a bit and I examined a few of the clubs out of curiosity.

The good thing about the back bedroom is that it was quiet, it was private, it had its own door and lighting system, and it was likely the coolest spot in the house even when Grandma turned up the heat every morning (yes, in June). It was also below ground, with the only windows in the room being at ceiling level, and those were, essentially, basement windows. It was also right below the bathroom, and in essence also right below the wifi router -- meaning to get full signal, all my tablet or phone needed was to go eight feet straight up through the ceiling. This gave me, accidentally, the best connection in the house. As such, I made that back bedroom my base of operations -- if I ever wanted to go read or watch something on my tablet, I could, and easily. 

Except, well, it was also the furthest room in the house away from the bathroom.

Let me explain. The family homestead has one very outdated, sad little bathroom. It is upstairs on the opposite end of the house from the basement stairs -- as mentioned, the bathroom was right above the back bedroom in which I was sleeping. This meant that for Daisy or myself, when we needed to use the bathroom we would have to walk across the entire basement, go up the stairs, walk across the entire house in the opposite direction, and hope that one of the other three people in the house didn't need to use the bathroom at the same time or weren't already in there.

Add to this that I am a diabetic and I drink a lot of liquids to stay hydrated, and every day/night while I'm sleeping, I get up multiple times to pee. It's just part of who I am now, I guess.

Well, when you're sleeping in a basement with no bathroom and no other options, a 28oz-capacity, dollar-store water bottle with a wide mouth becomes your new best friend.

I wish I were making this up. I knew if I trudged upstairs and made the long journey across the house, not only would I likely wake up everyone on the way there or the way back, but by the time I got back downstairs after a simple pee, I would be wide fucking awake again. It was different when we weren't traveling with Mama and were staying upstairs in the spare room...the spare room that was eight feet across the hall from the bathroom. 

So, when nature called, at least for pee, I would roll over and pee in the bottle, cap it/seal it, and then go wash it out in the sink next to the washer/dryer the next day.

Look, I'm not proud of it, but I'm old and in pain all the time and that is a long walk up and down stairs and back and forth across the house just to take a piss. I'm not here for that. 

When I had to shit or shower, it was bad enough that I had to essentially take my entire cosmetics bag to and from the bathroom every time because leaving it in there would upset Grandma. Mama and Daisy had to do the same thing, essentially. 

This didn't matter much though, because aside from this incident on day two...

...I don't think I had an actual, normal, comfortable shit again until we returned to Omaha. Oh, I had some defecations, yes, but none of them were normal or comfortable. 

I correct myself -- I had an explosive shit in a gas station bathroom outside the Halifax airport the day we flew home. That was somewhat normal for me. 

Anyway.

So that was the living situation for seven days, six nights. It could have been worse. The downstairs fridge was all ours to use, and we did. The washer and dryer are 30 years old, but they run well and run fast cycles with efficiency. In the basement, we actually have a little privacy too.