As much as I want to or need to, I haven't done much over the past few days. In fact, I've been quite lazy. I haven't needed (or wanted) to leave the house, and I've been sleeping at really strange hours. Yesterday morning I went to bed at 9AM; last night, I went to bed at 4AM and got up around 11AM today, etc. I don't know why, really. Perhaps it's because I no longer have to sleep on a schedule, and can therefore sleep whenever I feel tired without repercussions or consequences. This may seem like a small luxury, but believe me, for someone like me who barely ever got any sleep as a graduate student, this is an amazing perk of graduation.
What have I been doing, then? Well, my biggest accomplishments yesterday were that I took a shower, washed the bed sheets, and ran the dishwasher. Yep, that's it. I mean, I have a lot of free time now, folks. The bills are paid, I don't have to go grocery shopping for probably another week or so, and the majority of the house is relatively clean. I need to vacuum the basement again, and really should dirt-devil the stairwell (which is time-consuming and really unpleasant to do) but aside from that? I've got nothing but multitudes of time on my hands.
As mentioned before, I am still looking for work, but languidly right now at best. My body/mind are telling me stuff like seriously, Brandon? Can't you just take a few weeks off and not fucking do anything important? I mean, really?
I think I'm so burnt out from my graduate school career that I need some mental health days. Or, as it turns out, weeks. This translates to some time, really, where I just want to be as lazy as possible. This is sort of like a summer vacation, and I desperately need and/or want a summer vacation. Some stuff can wait. It really can. I'm not running out of money anytime soon, and for my mental stability, I need everything to just stop for a bit until I get bored of having "nothing to do" for a day or two. That's when I'll be motivated to do something pertaining to my future and future employment opportunities. For now, though? I'm somewhat enjoying my time off.
I ordered a new keyboard on Amazon this afternoon because the space bar is sticking on this one after over three years of daily, almost-constant use. I can't do much about that. This keyboard is the one which came with this PC, and it's wearing out and getting dirty and gummed up anyhow. I will clean it up and keep it as a backup, but a new one was $10. Screw it, really. I can afford a $10 keyboard.
Since the storms rolled through, it's barely been eighty degrees outside. This is good; it means I don't have to run my air conditioner yet, and the windows and fans keep the house relatively cool. I'd like to prolong turning on and running the AC for as long as possible, as it drives my electric bill through the roof. Here's hoping we (finally) get another mild summer again. I desperately want a mild summer.
There's not a lot else to report; I've been relaxing, mostly. I get up, eventually make something to eat, talk to Daisy on Skype when she's not working and awake, and then play a video game, do some chores, and go back to bed. This is any given day in a nutshell, really. I haven't yet been writing as I wanted to -- I haven't been inspired to do so yet. It takes a great deal of inspiration to keep writing when it's so much easier to just lay about the house and do little else. I still have to edit through my CV again, I still have to update my Monster.com profile, and (as always) I have to continually clean sections of the house, but my big goal for this summer was, and is, to continue writing at a feverish pace, and when I'm not inspired to do that, said goal sort of falls flat. There are only so many poems I can write about the cats or my car, after all. It's not like I leave the house to do much else.
Daisy, as far as I know, is coming down once the weekend's over; she has to work from tonight through Monday night, and then will more than likely be coming down on Tuesday and staying until Thursday or Friday morning at the latest. We discussed it for a while last night, and she's optimistic she can do it, though her finances are a concern right now. I told her that if she can make it, that's good, but if she can't not to worry about it too much. My schedule is wide-open right now, honestly. If I have to, I can wait another week or two to see her again; we've got the rest of our lives to spend together, and it's not like I didn't spend a week up there earlier this month.
I am debating on cutting my hair and trimming down the beard a lot for the summer months. I love my long hair and beard, but I also know that when it's hot in the summer, both become a burden more than anything else. I haven't shaved the beard off in several months (I shaved it off over Spring Break, I believe), and it's now thick, good-looking, and shaped well. I haven't cut my hair in well over a year. If I do cut my hair, I'm not going to use the clippers this time around; it's too long for that, and it's a pain in the ass to do that when it's as long as it is now. I'll go to a hairstylist and have them cut it. Possibly in Walmart, even. I don't know. I'll ask Daisy what she thinks I should do. Yes, having shorter hair helps in the heat, but it will also more than likely help me get a job if I don't have long hippie-hair in an interview. Long hair looks good on me (I take incredible pride in my hair) but it's not exactly conducive to looking businesslike in professional work.
Yes, I just took this smirking photo of myself moments ago. 3:17 PM, Friday May 31. See what I mean about the hair and beard?
Anyway.
My mother told me yesterday that she has a card for me for graduation, but hasn't sent it yet. She wanted to know what I "wanted for graduation."
Eh.
I told her she didn't have to do anything for me; at this point, my parents have both done enough for me over the years, many times. They've loaned me money, they've flown me out to visit several times, and they've sent me boxes full of food and/or other care-package stuff whenever necessary. I don't like to be greedy or ungrateful, and I don't like to ask them for anything, especially whenever I can provide most things for myself. However, the one thing I would like to do at some point this summer would be to visit home again, as I do have an open schedule now. And, because they have not yet met Daisy, I would like for her to come with me if at all possible -- not just because I want her to come along, but because it's probably important that my parents meet the woman I'm going to marry. Of all the women I've been in relationships with over the years (read: four), Daisy is the only one who has not met my parents. My parents also used to fly me and my ex out to visit at least once a year as well, so this is nothing new.
However, this is sort of a problem with Daisy's job -- she already had to rearrange her schedule drastically in order to attend my graduation and for me to go to Omaha for a week, and even then she still had to work Sunday night while I was there. To be able to fly out to West Virginia with me would require her to basically take off an entire week, or one day at the end of one week and another two at the beginning of a second, with her normal days off in-between. I'm not sure this is feasible for her to do, really. Her job had some sort of stipulation about not being able to take days off for her first ninety days of work, or something like that. I don't remember when she started, and because she works night shift, I don't know when she could possibly take off. This throws a wrench into the works, honestly. I sent her a message earlier this afternoon asking if she'd be able to do it, but she hasn't yet replied.
I brought this up with my mother this afternoon in an email, and said even if Daisy couldn't come with me, I would still want to visit home at some point this summer (I haven't been there since Christmas, and I'm sure you remember what happened then). To be somewhat facetious (but also somewhat serious) I sent her a link to a '98 Monte Carlo Z34 at a dealership in Uniontown, PA, about 40 minutes from my parents' house, telling her that alternatively she could buy that for me and I'd drive it back home from West Virginia.
A guy can dream, right?
As an aside, the car looks just like mine, but it's two years newer, has 120,000 less miles on it, and it's gold. But, the 1998 models and newer have the much-easier-to-work-on, more reliable engine.
I think from now on I'm going to exclusively say "a new car" when someone asks me what I want for my birthday/Christmas or any other gift-giving occasion. Maybe, eventually, it'll work. I've not driven my car since the revving incident; it has remained peacefully in the garage.
In other news, a few months ago on one of her visits, Daisy brought me a frozen 1lb. roll of vegan ground "beef" that could be used the same way you would use ground beef. I'm guessing it was seitan or something similar. I put it in the freezer and forgot about it until this week. While cleaning out the freezer, I found it and realized that I had no clue what I would ever do with it. And then I remembered that with my dehydrator came a "jerky gun" and several packs of jerky cure and seasoning.
So I whipped it all together this afternoon, and in my dehydrator right now are three full trays of vegan beef sticks, drying and making the house smell delightful. I don't know how they'll turn out, but I used real ground beef with the cure and seasoning to make beef sticks last night, and those turned out great. If these turn out good, I'll save a bunch of them and will let Daisy try them when she comes down next week. If they suck, I'll just toss 'em out. I don't care either way, really. I've got plenty of food in the house to eat over the course of the next several weeks.
What else is new? Well, earlier this week I realized that the memory card for my PS1 was no longer functional, so I ordered a new one on Amazon ($4), along with a barely-used copy of the original Gran Turismo, a game I used to own but sold long ago to help finance my move out here to the midwest in 2006. I don't keep up with new gaming trends and never have. I've not yet played it again, though it will more than likely keep me mildly entertained downstairs when it's too hot to be upstairs this summer.
I also ordered some new spider traps for the house; I've killed no less than ten brown recluse in the house since I've been home from Omaha, either in the traps that I already had or by having the cats point them out to me so that I could stomp on them. When it gets warm and muggy outside, they tend to wander through the house more. My brother was amazed and mortified by this when I told him, but this is nothing new; Kansas is brown recluse central and always has been. I've never been bitten by one (to my knowledge, anyway) but they are everywhere here. Especially inside homes. The glue traps I use catch a lot of them, and I put them in several places throughout the house. I no longer have to worry about a rampant spider population. The bad thing is that the glue traps also catch the very few occasional wolf spiders that wander into the house as well, which sort of saddens me because wolf spiders will eat brown recluse and other problematic insects/spiders. If I see a wolf spider in the house or garage, I let it live -- at least if one of them bites me it won't possibly kill or otherwise injure me. Fuck the brown recluse, though. I set up four of the new traps last night as soon as they came in the mail, and was able to sleep a lot more peacefully. I haven't checked any of them yet, but I would imagine that within several days, they'll have caught a large number of recluse. I need to set a new one up in the garage, as well.
On that note, I'm going to go; it's hot, and I might take an afternoon/evening nap.
No comments:
Post a Comment