Piss n' Vinegar

Well, here it is. It's the last Friday night of June. June 28, the end of the month in two days. And I'm basically at the end of my rope when it comes to searching for teaching jobs. I have received no callbacks, no rejections, no replies of any sort for any of the positions I've applied for over the course of the past month, and as such, after I file my last few applications for teaching positions tonight, I must close the book on that chapter of job-searching for the rest of the summer in order to expand my focus into looking for positions that don't have a set start date of early-to-mid-August, and positions that aren't on the opposite side of the country.

My reasoning for this has been stated before (and should be pretty obvious at this point) -- I no longer have the time or money required to move across the country to a teaching job with about six weeks' notice. Up until this point, I had the time and resources to do so. Moving to somewhere in the tri-state area, or moving up to Omaha once I get a position there? That would be do-able in six weeks' time if absolutely necessary. Being able to move across the country to California, Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, or any of the other states I've applied for teaching work in is no longer possible in this timeframe with the budget I have and with the setbacks of having a car that's falling apart and three cats that I must move with me without a lot of help and/or a financed relocation, neither of which any of the positions I've applied for will provide me.

It is actually quite disheartening and depressing to let this go. I was hoping I wouldn't have to. I have a lot of important teaching credentials. I have two degrees. I have designed courses. My references are all top-notch people, two of whom have PhDs. My CV is excruciatingly detailed and contains all of my important achievements and skills needed to perform even the most basic of adjunct teaching jobs I've applied for even though I don't want to be an adjunct because the pay is fucking terrible. I've spent many hours during late nights and many hours during the sweltering hot days filling in boxes and forms on online applications, creating profiles, uploading CVs, lists of references, cover letters, and unofficial transcripts. I've even spent hours filling out paper applications for some positions which required them, and spent several dollars' worth of my own money in stamps to mail off those applications to colleges and other institutions who won't even give me a courtesy email reply or telephone call saying they're not interested.

Some places state on their applications that reviews of said applicants won't begin until July 8. If it takes them a week to get to and review my application to call me if they're interested, I will no longer have time at that point to move across the country. I just won't. Cleanup and move-out of this house will take at least a month straight of daily work when I'm doing it by myself with no help, and that doesn't count actual time spent moving all of this stuff, my car, and my cats to another city/state, nor does it count the search for a new house in said place. And I'm also pretty sure that Daisy wouldn't be able to uproot herself over the course of a month, either. It's a catch-22, a horrible situation that can't be remedied at this point. Colleges will start classes back up in six weeks. It would take me eight or nine, minimum, to get out of here and moved somewhere if I were offered a teaching job today. It's no longer possible unless that teaching job is someplace close or someplace familiar to me.

So, it's over. My search for actual teaching positions for the fall semester is now over. And I can't do anything about that. I worked hard to apply to as many positions as possible, in as many places as possible (my "CV and Apps" folder on my desktop has 25 cover letters in it alone, and three different versions of my CV) and I failed to get anyone to call me back or say "hey, we think you're a good fit for this job, would you like to Skype-interview with us?"

No, I just thought, Brandon, stop thinking like that. You didn't fail. These places failed you.

It has always been my mentality, and my mantra when I was teaching my classes, that you as a professor don't fail students -- they fail themselves. In the world of teaching, that is true; all students have to do (especially in the classes I've taught) is show up, follow directions, and actually do the work. Even if the work is shitty work, if they're showing up and doing it, and following the directions to do it correctly, it is really hard to fail any of the classes I've ever taught. It's the students who don't show up, who don't put in the work, and who don't even attempt to follow the directions that end up failing.

In the world of looking for teaching jobs, it's almost exactly the opposite. You can be the best applicant out there and you can have all the experience, motivation, intelligence, and willingness to teach that you want -- but it means precisely dick if the institutions you apply to drop the ball and don't even bother to contact you. Do I think I'm a fantastic instructor? No, I know I'm a fantastic instructor. My degrees, other credentials, experience and references back me up on that. If these institutions I've applied to don't recognize that, that's on them, not on me. It's their loss. I haven't failed them -- they've failed themselves in not hiring someone like me.

Wow. So it is sort of the same, then. Hm.

That doesn't mean it's any less disheartening or depressing. For once, however, I can place blame on the outside world and not on myself. I've done everything correctly and to the best of my ability -- it's these institutions who are failing to meet me halfway by even giving me any sort of acknowledgement that they don't want to hire me.

Now that I've said this, watch me get about ten offers and/or interview calls after July 8th, when I'd have no time to do anything even if the job were a good one. It's simply a terrible fucking situation. I wish I could explain to you how saddening and frustrating it is.

Well, tonight's the end of all that. Starting tomorrow I begin looking for other employment, non-teaching employment, on my terms. And looking for non-teaching employment that will actually pay me a decent salary, at that. The past six weeks of applying for over 100 teaching positions with no responses have shown me how little my knowledge and skills are appreciated when it comes to academia, and it's time I let that go for the time being. There are few things I despise more than being unappreciated or underappreciated -- it is something I cannot abide.

I have already started this non-teaching job search, sort of. I applied for an on-air radio position at Entercom in Kansas City.

...what?

Yes, I'm serious.

Entercom runs my favorite radio station ever, 96.5 The Buzz, out of Mission, KS. I have a few slight connections at the station -- namely that most of the on-air talent and I follow each other on Twitter and occasionally converse back and forth. Do I want to live in Kansas City again? No. I never want to set foot in Missouri again if I can help it. BUT. I would totally be happy to live on the Johnson County side, the Kansas side, of the city. Mission is a small town of less than 10,000 in the suburbs of the city. I'd be happy to live there or somewhere around there. I could start a real career there, start building a life there if I got a job with Entercom, even if I'm not on-air.

The point is, not necessarily being tied down to looking at teaching positions opens up all sorts of avenues for me which were previously unexplored. I've always wanted to be on the radio. I've always wanted my own podcast, too (though discussions about starting one with Daisy have led to some pretty big fights between us). Part of what I liked so much about teaching is that I had a captive audience -- people who would listen to me because they had to, but more often than not wanted to. A large part of teaching is performance; it's persona. It's about creating rapport with people listening to you. I've always wanted a position where I can do that for a living, where I can talk to/at people, yet be myself and be at ease. Performing, of sorts. I've always thought I could be a stand-up comedian, too. My friend Adam (who I've collaborated with on posts here in the past) does that now, actually. If nothing else, I've got an application in at a company where at some point I may actually get to do something I'd like to do for a living. If nothing comes of it, so be it, but I can't say I didn't try.

Daisy has been forwarding me postings for companies and other places in Omaha. Some of them are as varied as call center positions, sales jobs, or 911 operators (no, not kidding there; she wants to apply for that one herself). I'm trying to remain as open as possible, but it's difficult for positions that I have no interest in doing, or positions that I could have done almost ten years ago with no degree whatsoever. I will admit that a big part of it is pride; I don't want to have wasted seven years in college and graduate school to wind up with a position that doesn't require a college degree. I want that time to mean something. I want people to look at my vita and say "wow, this guy has his shit together." If I wanted a position that wouldn't require a degree, I'd move back to Missouri and work in the grocery store again for $17k a year and default on my student loans.

The truth is, though, the job market isn't much better now than it was during the massive recession we had a few years back, and it's certainly not any better for people like me who actually want to do something productive with their lives. The jobs that are being added are unskilled labor positions or entry-level positions that pay horribly, not positions someone with an education and bills to pay could actually live on and make a career out of. Those jobs are disappearing and/or there's an incredible amount of competition for them. All of it is depressing and somewhat troubling.

In other news, my parents went to see Man of Steel yesterday and loved it, which I thought validated my opinions of the film more than anything else possibly could have. Daisy and I want to see a movie again when I venture northward to Omaha next week, but there's not really anything coming out that I'm interested in, really, in the least. World War Z is out, but as it apparently shares nothing with the book it's based on, I'm not as interested in seeing it as I was before. The Lone Ranger comes out on the 3rd, but...eh. The trailers look good, but I could really take it or leave it. This Is The End is still playing, but it may not be by the time I get to Omaha, and the other very few movies I want to see this summer don't come out for another month or so -- Kick-Ass 2, The World's End, and Pacific Rim still have several weeks to go before they come out. Kind of a shitty July 4th movie weekend, if you ask me. I can't remember a year in recent memory where there wasn't a big tentpole action/sci-fi/comic book movie released on July 4th weekend. Strange.

Then again, I've already seen three movies this summer, which is three times more than I've seen in theaters for the past...three? Four years? I think the last movies I saw in theaters before this summer were Green Lantern and Inglourious Basterds. The latter was 2009 and the former 2011, so yeah, I guess it's been a while. I was poor for a very long time. Well, I'm still poor, but I'm talking too-poor-for-movies-poor.

This weekend I need to clean the house; I meant to vacuum yesterday after my trip to Walmart, but instead I made a late lunch and then went back to bed until 9PM, taking a long nap. I'll have to vacuum today, then. At some point, anyhow. I need to wash the bedsheets, too, as I've been sweating all over them for the past two weeks (which isn't really conducive to smelling that great when it's been as hot as it has recently).

Over the past day or so, I've noticed this skunk-like, vinegar-y smell in the house, getting somewhat strong whiffs of it every so often. Mind you, there's not a skunk in the house (obviously) and my vinegar sits unopened and untouched on the kitchen counter. It's not the cats; I cleaned their litter pan/cat room yesterday morning, yet the strange smell remains. It's not me, either; not only have I not begun producing vinegar-sweat, but I showered a few hours after I got up. The smell is not really strong, mind you, but a stiff whiff of it will hit you every once in a while, enough to make you think WTF, man? and start looking around for culprits. Finally, on a whim, I Googled "vinegar smell in house" and found the culprit.

It's the trees.

Remember, about 36 hours ago we had horrible storms that tore the trees in this town apart, including many oak trees (like the ones on my street). When healthy oak trees are cut -- this time by winds and rains -- they secrete acetic acid. Guess what vinegar is? You guessed it, acetic acid and water. Get enough trees down throughout a town? The entire town will smell like vinegar. I'm smelling the acetic acid of the trees as the air and breezes (helped along by my fans) waft through the house. The cats don't seem to notice it (or, if they do, they don't care) but every once in a while I get a good, strong whiff of it. Oh well. It's better than the normal Newton smell, which I like to call "spread cow shit." Because that's what the town smells like a lot of the time, especially when it's windy.

So that's what's going on right now. I'll update again when I can, before I make the journey to Omaha.

Damages

Apparently, I was wrong about the whole "it's not going to storm" thing.

Yesterday, around 4:30 PM, a long line of storms formed on the radar to the northwest of me. Severe storms. And they popped up out of nowhere. Before that, it had been 103 degrees outside with a heat index of 116 (no, I'm not kidding). I had slept until around 1:30 PM because I wanted to avoid the majority of the heat by staying downstairs and sleeping. When I came upstairs, I turned on the AC and let it run; it was all I could do to keep it about 88-90 in my house.

As an aside, I received my electric bill from May 17 to June 22 in the mail yesterday, as well -- and it was about $50. No, seriously, it's less than it is for me to pay my cable internet bill every month ($57). I tried to figure out why, when I realized that for a week of that (after graduation) I was in Omaha, and therefore wasn't using electricity, and up until the past week and a half or so, I haven't needed to run the AC -- just the fans. It's the lowest electric bill I've had for a year. This doesn't really matter, of course; by running the AC a lot this week, I've probably doubled that bill for next month already. But, because my bill is low this month, I'm fine with running the AC a bit more when it needs to be ran...such as when the outside resembles the surface temperature of the sun.

Anyway. The storms sprang up out of nothing around us on the map, and made a slow progression toward me and the Wichita area. I watched as it steadily got darker and darker outside (yet no less hot) as the storm front moved in. By 5:30, it was really dark. By 6PM, it was as dark as if the sun had already set -- I had to turn on lights in the house because it was pitch black in here. I went outside onto my balcony to have a smoke and watch it roll in; my balcony points due north, and by looking up to the left, I could see the clouds coming.

I don't know how often you folks watch storms roll in, but I wished last night that I had a higher/better vantage point. I went in and out a few times, checking the radar and warnings each time, until I saw that the latest update said that there were 70mph recorded winds and 1-inch hail.

Now, hail an inch in diameter is nothing. That's like, quarter-sized hail. I've seen golf-ball and larger-sized hail living here in Newton before, and even that hail doesn't usually do a lot of damage (if any). But when you combine even smaller hail with 70mph winds, each hailstone becomes a bullet. I got my keys and put the car in the garage as a precautionary measure, and then came back upstairs to continue to watch the storm roll in. A few of the neighbor guys were out in the street talking, and I watched them turn around and look up at the clouds to exclaim "whoa, shit!" before calling their kids to come from the neighborhood houses.

Less than two minutes later, it began. First as some thunder and light wind, and a few flashes of lightning up in the cloud banks. I watched it with curiosity and wonder; there are few things I enjoy more than watching thunderstorms. There's something about the raw power of nature that I've always admired -- the ability to see a destructive force form out of nowhere and tear ass through an area.

And then the trees started falling.

I'm not making this up.

Those 70mph winds the weather forecasters were talking about were not lies. They're called "straight-line winds," and in some places, during the storm, got up to 80mph. I am not joking.

These straight-line winds ripped through my neighborhood. The tree on the left side of my driveway, in the neighbors' yard, had a huge branch blow off of it. Hm, I thought. Strong winds. And then half of it came down. Up the street a few houses, a large tree in their front yard toppled over as well, snapping into several pieces that blocked the road. I'd never seen wind like this before. It looked like my neighborhood was going through a tornado. And, of course, throughout all of this, I was standing outside on my balcony watching it happen. Because that's safe. But I wanted to see everything as it transpired. For about thirty-five minutes, it was storm-hell on earth on my street.

I went back inside and went out onto my back deck -- there are big trees in my backyard, including a huge cottonwood tree, and another tree in the neighbor's yard behind me that hangs down and droops over the power lines. I still had power and internet -- I never lost either one, remarkably -- but I wanted to see if the winds were damaging those trees. Luckily, they weren't. From the angle of the storm's attack, the houses and larger trees were in the way of those ones being damaged by winds.

And then, suddenly, it was gone as quickly as it had arrived. It was still dark as night outside, but the storm had moved out of Newton and was on its way south into the Wichita area. Aside from a few rumbles of thunder here and there and a bit of rain, it had left, and the winds stopped, making the air eerily calm and still. The temperature had dropped about fifteen degrees, but it was over. At least here, anyway.

Wichita wasn't so lucky. As of this morning, 12,000 people in Wichita are still without power, and photos began pouring into newsrooms of damage done by the storms as they rolled through the city. The tornado sirens were turned on down there in some places, not because of tornadoes, but because of the 70mph straight-line winds. One of my friends had her windshield broken by a tree branch. Several friends still in the area are still without power. It was, apparently, worse down there -- Parker told me that central Wichita "took it on the chin." Westar (the power company here) put out a statement that they don't expect power to be restored in most places until tomorrow morning.

Surveying my place, though? I was lucky, apparently. There are trees down and branches/leaves scattered everywhere, but none of them are on the house, in my yard, or were any of the trees I have (there's a huge pine tree in my front yard, which acts as the dividing line between my yard and the neighbor to my right; it was fine, with no lost branches or damages). My yard and driveway is a mess with branches and leaves, yes, but most of them are smaller ones which I could simply pick up or mow over with the lawn mower the next time I mow. I don't see any shingles in any yards around me, so apparently my roof (and the neighbors' roofs) didn't suffer any damage. I can better see the extent of the tree damage now, in daylight, and while it's extensive to the trees I mentioned earlier, nothing was uprooted or outright destroyed in my neighborhood (at least not that I can see from my house, anyway).

As for the bullet-hail that was in this storm, it didn't hail here at all. I am glad, however, that I put the car in the garage, as I would've risked damage to it by leaving it out with those trees coming down everywhere. A while ago, I looked out front to see my landlord's truck sitting in the neighbors' driveway; I'm guessing he came by to survey the storm damage. He's gone now; I didn't see him personally, but I'm guessing he'll be back with his trailer to haul away all of the tree branches and pieces strewn about the street, as he owns all of the houses on my street but two.

I, meanwhile, went to bed after the storms were over. It was much cooler, and I was able to actually sleep, and sleep I did -- I slept from about 9:30 PM to around 6AM. This morning it's 73 and beautiful outside. The weather forecasters were right, apparently, about cooler temperatures -- it's barely supposed to hit 85 after today, and the cooler (read: actually normal) temperatures are supposed to last for the next week or so. This means that I shouldn't need to run my air conditioner that much, if at all. I don't need to when it's only in the 80s outside, since it really doesn't do any good at that point (it's only really necessary when it's 90-95 or so, and even then it'll only keep it at about 85 or so in here). Today the forecasted high is 93 or so, though as that's ten degrees cooler than yesterday, I'll take it.

Once I'd been up for a few hours this morning, I decided to go to Walmart. I needed cigarettes and the cats were completely out of litter (I barely had enough to refill the pan this morning when I cleaned it). I figured this would also let me see if there was any real damage around the town, because surely my neighborhood couldn't have gotten the worst of it.

And it didn't. Not by a long shot.

It's about three miles between my place to Walmart, with about 3/4 of that being driven through neighborhoods and residential streets. In this three mile transit, I observed the following:

• Many more trees down and/or snapped in half; there were almost no trees that hadn't lost large limbs or suffered some pretty serious damage.
• Power/cable/phone lines down.
• Power poles snapped in half and being replaced by worker crews.
• 100-year-old trees uprooted or broken in half. There were several of these, including one in the elementary school grounds about half a mile from my house.
• Garage doors blown in or blown off their hinges and hanging at angles.
• Roof damage on many houses (not mine, whew), some of it pretty severe.
• Windows blown out of cars and houses.
• People cleaning up the massive amount of debris strewn everywhere. 

It looked like a tornado blew through the town. I'm not kidding. Streets are closed off because massive trees are down on them, or because power lines/poles have snapped. I totally believe and understand why 12,000 people in Wichita are without power today, if the storm hit down there as hard as it did up here.

City of Newton cleanup begins on Monday and could take up to three weeks, according to the press release put out this morning. Cleanup crews will be covering the entire city and picking up any branches/trees put on the curb in neat piles, to take them away and rid the streets and yards of them. I'll more than likely go out tomorrow morning and clean up the yard/driveway and put my stuff in a pile for them. My neighbors on the other side of me, who lost a large part of the tree to the left of their side of the duplex, are outside putting that stuff in order now. It's also 90 degrees right now, and I have no desire to be outside in the sun doing that shit in my own yard, which mainly has branches strewn about from that tree and one or two others in the three-or-four-house vicinity. I'll do it in the morning when it's cooler outside, also secretly hoping that since the tree is on my neighbor's side of the duplex, he'll pick up the scraps that blew into my yard as well, and all the shit that blew into my driveway.

For now, though, the storms have passed and life returns to normal, much as it was prior. The temperatures are supposed to be cooler -- much cooler -- over the next week or so, and it's not supposed to rain again until after the 4th. My life goes on as well; I will keep searching for job openings and positions to apply to, I will still do household chores and pay my bills, and when necessary, I will mow the grass or do some shopping or cooking.

Moral of the story: always be in awe of the power of nature, folks. Because it is an awesome power.

Blazing

After a few mostly dry storms fired up two nights ago, the wind completely stopped, the overcast clouds burned away, and now Kansas has resumed its normal summer pattern -- not a cloud in the sky and over 100 degrees, with no rain anywhere in the forecast for the foreseeable future, and barely getting below 80 at night.

This forecast, screencapped from the Weather Channel's website for Newton (go look if you don't believe me) is laughable for a number of reasons. For one, it says the lows are going to get down into the 60s by this weekend.

It was 81 degrees last night at 1:45 AM. It had been 79 an hour or two before that. How do I know this? Because I was awake and on Skype with Daisy and watched the temperature go up outside.

Also, why bother saying "isolated t-storms" for tomorrow as if they're going to happen? There will be no rain or storms with the temperature over 100 in Kansas. Ever. That doesn't happen here. Any precipitation would evaporate before it hits the ground, and to have a thunderstorm you generally need a cold front. Does 104 degrees look like a cold front to you? No. There's not a "30% chance," there's a zero percent chance unless some crazy weather system develops out of thin fucking air.

It's 99 right now. There's no air moving outside. The sun is unhindered by clouds. Kansas is fucking baking like an oven. And it's 8PM.

I have been forced to run the air conditioner or otherwise melt. I can't afford to, really, and I have to watch it very closely, because once it runs for a while, if it's really hot outside, the condenser will freeze up. Yes, the condenser on the unit itself, outside. It will freeze up and become coated in ice, and the unit itself will stop blowing cold air. In fact, it'll stop blowing air period -- yet, the fan will be running and the unit will not power off. It will still cost me an outlandish sum of money to run it, since it will still be on and running, yet it won't do anything. I'm pretty sure my central AC unit is older than I am. I'm also pretty sure that most older AC units will do this if they're left running at full blast for eight hours straight (or more) because one's house is so hot that even when it runs that long and hard, it won't get down below 84 or so inside (when the thermostat is set at 82). It was overhauled and repaired two years ago when it had a leak of some sort, and since then it's been fine except when it gets so hot that the unit basically throws up its hands and says "FUCK IT."

So, I've been running it a few hours every day -- usually in the mornings/early afternoon when I get up, and sometimes again in the overnight hours for an hour or two before I go to bed. It will cool the house down enough to be somewhat tolerable. Downstairs, about half of the day it's actually rather cool, since my bedroom is in the below-ground basement. In the interim, when it's off during the day, the house will slowly heat back up.

It's not been below 85 in my Man Cave upstairs for the better part of the last month. My room upstairs captures heat like a greenhouse for some reason, much much worse than any other room in the house. I've gotten up at 7 or 8AM and it's still 88 in here when the windows are open, no electronics are on or running, and it's only 72 outside. There's no rhyme or reason to it.

Yet it's only like that in this room. Outside of this room, most of the time, it tends to be much cooler.

The cats realize it's hot; they've been spending most of their time downstairs under the bed (their favorite sleeping spot) or in the downstairs bathroom where their food/litter is, sleeping on the tile floor. I put Daisy's high-powered fan on me when I sleep, and they sleep on the bed with me then. At night when I'm awake, they'll all be up here with me in my room or in the hallway/living room, because it's a bit cooler at night. As I told my mother, who was worried about the cats when I'll be gone to Omaha over the 4th, they're resilient creatures, and they're smart. When they're hot, they go lay somewhere that's cool. I've been gone in the summer before on numerous occasions when it's been much hotter than it has been this summer, and they've always been fine. It's not like stray cats who live outside in 120-degree climates all keel over and die when it gets hot -- my indoor cats who have never (and never will) set foot outside will be just fine in the much-cooler basement of my house when it's 100 outside.

Not to mention that it's not like I would leave for Omaha without leaving them gallons of water and buckets of food and litter. I even plan to leave one of the fans on downstairs for them so that there's some air movement.

I don't know exactly what the plans are for the Omaha trip yet; Daisy is off today and tomorrow, and then works until the 1st. I'm guessing that means she'll come down here on the 2nd (Tuesday) and we'll either go back up that night or the next day. The 4th is a week from tomorrow, and even though it's one of her normal nights off, she still gets eight hours of holiday time sometime that week free-and-clear (from my shaky understanding of what she tells me, anyhow). That may mean she gets the 5th off, or most of it, or something along those lines. What I do know is that I'll more than likely be up there with her and her family for the better part of a week, until her next cycle of days off comes around again and we come back home to Kansas. The plus side is that it's only supposed to be in the mid-80s here (again, according to the Weather Channel, but as their above forecast was laughable, who knows) during that week, so I'm not concerned about leaving the cats alone when it's 100 degrees outside, but you folks know me -- as much as I love and adore Daisy's parents (and I do, I really do), the vast majority of my stay up in Omaha, Daisy will more than likely be working, and I won't have my car or any real knowledge of the area to be able to get out of the house and do anything. Not to mention that, y'know, I won't really have any money to spend anyhow. When I next go to Walmart (probably tomorrow night or Friday night) I'll be getting some cash back when I pick up some groceries, but it'll be a minimal amount -- enough to have some cash on me and enough to get a haircut while I'm in Omaha, but that's about it.

I also told Daisy that I oh-so-terribly, desperately want to go back to the Chinese buffet we went to when I visited last time. Her response to this was tepid at best.

Update: Daisy does have the 5th off as well, which means she'd only have to work basically the weekend days while I'm there. We're planning to do a little running about town and get my hair cut on that day, if at all possible.

In other news, I have applied for a few more positions, including one at the University of Nebraska and one at an internet company. Might as well, you know? It's not looking like I'm going to get a slew of interview requests anytime soon from anywhere else I've applied, and my money situation, while it's fine right now, is only going to get progressively grim and dire as the weeks and months go on. Daisy had a phone interview this afternoon with the same aforementioned company, as they have an amazing benefits package, but she's pretty sure she won't get a second callback.

I tried to go downstairs to nap earlier; while it is much cooler downstairs than it is up here, I also couldn't sleep -- I was hungry, I had to get up and go to the bathroom twice, and I couldn't get comfortable. The downstairs is still the most comfortable place in the house, but I don't have a computer down there (obviously).

"I worry about you tomorrow," Daisy told me earlier tonight.

"Why?"

"Because it's going to be hot there!"

"But...it's already hot here..."

Fuck it. If I can get it to cool down enough tonight by running the AC for a few hours, I'll stay up until 4 or 5AM and then go to sleep with the fan on me for the hottest hours of the day. Because there is no conceivable reason to be awake and upstairs tomorrow when it's supposed to be 104. If I'm downstairs where it's cooler, and with the fan on me to boot, I'll sleep through most of it. When it gets that hot, that's about all one can do, honestly -- sleep through it or melt.

Well, at least my face is a bit cooler.

Even though it is still 90 degrees and feels like 100.7 at 9:50 PM.

The one other plus is that apparently it's too hot for even the spiders to come out -- or maybe the traps I set up everywhere are working. Regardless, I've only killed two or three spiders throughout this entire past week or so, when before I was killing that many per day. I've seen a few other little wolf spiders that I've let live; they'll eat the recluse and/or the cats'll get them, and they're not a threat to my well-being. I don't want them crawling on me, of course, but generally they're better to have than not have.

Rae was telling me that there's now black widows in Ohio, apparently. At least in the Cincinnati area. There have also been confirmed widows in the Wichita area, too, but luckily even in my traps/cleaning/spider patrols I've never seen any here either in or outside the house as of yet. This is good, as if I did I'd probably never sleep again.

I haven't showered in over two days; this is because, really, it's mostly pointless -- ten minutes after I get out of the shower, while it feels good during the process, I am once more completely drenched in sweat. Because I never leave the house in the daytime when it's this hot, Daisy told me today that I'm so white that I've transcended normal white and have become "fluorescent." It's an apt description.

On that note, I'm going to attempt to ingest more fluids and cool down a bit more.
 

Endgame

It is another dark, ugly day in Newton, Kansas, and the temperature is 86 degrees. I am sure it's only 86 because there are some light storms/rain about to blow through the area (if, again, they don't dissipate before they get here like every other form of rain or storms we've had has done for the past two weeks). I'm not holding my breath. At this point I'm really just disgusted with Kansas weather. I really do hope I get offered a job in Florida at one of the now-many places which I've applied -- at least it rains there on a pretty regular basis.

Update: Again, the invisible wall around Newton that keeps out any rain and storms strikes again, and everything has dissipated before hitting the town. Sigh. Really?

In response to my last post here about her birthday, Daisy wrote this:

Kansas wasn't sure what to get me for my birthday and I told him not to get me anything.  I just don't see a reason for him to spend money he doesn't have on something I don't need.  Even if he did have it, unless there was something [in] particular he wanted to get me, I see no reason for him to try to find something to buy.

He seems to feel bad about this -- damn materialistic culture we've been socialized in.  I don't understand why, "hey, I'm happy you['re] alive" translates into a need for gifts.  I'm not opposed to gifts, but, I don't tend to put focus on turning holidays [into] day[s] where material possessions need to be exchanged.  I tend to give gifts randomly throughout the year when I see things that I think loved ones would like, rather then waiting for a specific day to shower them with stuff.

When I told him not to worry about it, I meant it.  There is nothing I need.  I'm good. Spending time with him was enough of a gift.  His love is a gift.  No material possession could mean more to me than his love.

She calls me "Kansas," of course, just as "Daisy" is a codename for her here in this blog. I have also corrected her typos with brackets.

I suppose she's right, really, but a big part of it is that she went all-out for my birthday -- she baked me a cake from scratch, she got me lots of presents small and large, and let's not forget that, like I am now, she had also been unemployed for a month at the time when she did so. Overall it makes me feel somewhat...I don't know, ineffectual? Unworthy? Something like that. Daisy deserves everything I can give her and/or do for her. I don't care that my budget's tight. It's just... sigh. I know it's not important to her, but it sort of is to me. Maybe I've got a complex about it or something like that.

I've not applied for anything else today. Not yet, anyway. I've spent the day cleaning and doing other various chores about the house, such as taking out the garbage and paying the rent. There's a limited amount of physically-active housework I can do during the day when it's hot outside and/or stuffy and hot in the house unless I want to soak my clothing and hair with sweat even more than it already is, so I have to meter it out rather slowly and do it during the cooler times of the day and night...hence why I tend to do my vacuuming either really early in the morning or late at night (if/when I'm awake, that is).

I have also created a pretty physically-active goal for myself, and that goal is to begin something I call "The Great Trashing." It's pretty simple, actually -- as I eventually plan to move out of this house sooner or later, it's time for me to do some real cleaning, which involves throwing away basically anything and everything I no longer need, and saving/boxing up the rest. As you may or may not know, my garage has basically gone untouched since mid-2011, when my ex moved out. As such, there's a large amount of, well, shit down there that I need to sort through, decide what stays and goes, and get rid of what goes. This is a dangerous job, primarily because of the brown recluse population in the garage area, but it's also a hot job because I'll have to wear protective clothing (because of the aforementioned brown recluse) and I'll be doing it in the summer. It is a job that requires a lot of time and energy. Time I have, but energy during the hot-as-fuck summer is totally at a premium, and burns out rather quickly once I get hot and sweaty.

In addition to the garage, I have the back deck to clean off and trash everything on it I no longer need as well. I haven't touched the back deck in two years either, and it's a complete mess. At least the mess in the garage is somewhat already organized. The deck? Nope. There's less on the deck, though; mainly, it's buckets and planters and the like, along with my old charcoal grill that I'll never use again.

I don't know when I'll start this great purge of the house; I've been meaning to do it for a long time, but have never been able to properly find the time or energy for it. The heat is a huge factor, too. I desperately need a week or so of temperatures in the mid-70s or so to be able to do this stuff without overexerting myself or suffering from heatstroke. To prepare, at least, I have two new sets of spider traps that I can and will be placing throughout the entire garage and storage area to avoid any more arachnid entanglements than necessary during the cleaning. I'm sure there's also some useful stuff down there in boxes and in storage which I've either forgotten about or never knew about in the first place (read: stuff the ex had, then summarily left behind years ago) as well as three different, older computers to gut for parts and pieces like drives and power supplies before proper disposal. I'd love Daisy to help me with this, but the very mention of the word "spider" makes her shudder, twitch, and want to burn the house down, so that's probably not going to happen. I've already done most of this cleaning of the upstairs while I was procrastinating this past spring semester; the garage and deck are all that's left, really.

The end goal, of course, is to have less to pack up and move when I do eventually get out of this house -- whether that be next month or next year.

There are other things I need to do as well, but they're smaller things; I need to wash my car, take a big jar of change to the Coinstar machine in Walmart, and start setting things aside for a yard sale I'd like to have around this time next month, for example. I need to clean out the freezer and pantry. I need to replace the furnace air filters. Stuff like that. A lot of it has to take a backseat for the time being while I search for work, actually do the more pressing stuff around the house, and still sleep/eat/spend time with Daisy whenever possible.

For now, it's back to looking for jobs and continuing with my daily life.

The De-Beardening

I shaved off my beard this afternoon.

Mind you, I hate the way I look without facial hair (read: like a twelve-year-old boy) but when it's this hot, sacrifices must be made. As you know, I'll be getting a haircut when in Omaha over the 4th, too, so this is the beginning of "summer look Brandon," apparently.

See? I don't look bad, I just look young and hairless. And generally, when I have my long hair with no facial hair (as I do now), I also get mistaken for a woman. Frequently.

You may laugh, but it's true. It's absolutely true, and happens a lot more than you'd think, especially in retail establishments and restaurants.

My face does feel a bit cooler, though.

Even though I have a ton of razors, I don't use them to shave my face. They irritate the skin way too much, especially if I've had a beard for many months (and even more especially when it's hot and I sweat a lot). I have a set of electric trimmers I use for my face, which also leaves me stubble that quickly grows back in. That's part of the plan. Stubble, or a light beard, is good for the summer. The full Castro-esque beard I've been rocking for the past four months or so is totally not.

Part of this is also because I'm expecting phone calls and/or Skype interviews soon for many of the positions I've applied for. I may have an in-person interview or two while I'm in Omaha as well, so therefore I have to look somewhat professional and not like a wild bushman.

Today is also Daisy's birthday. She's 25.

"I'm no longer in my early twenties anymore!" she exclaimed last night. "Now I'm in my mid-twenties! I'm an old woman! I'll have two more gray hairs by the end of the day, you wait and see."

"25 was more of a milestone for me than my 21st birthday was," I told her. "25 made me feel like I was actually a grown-up of sorts."

This is true, but only to a certain extent. You know what really made me feel old? Turning 30. Yeah, that's when I started to feel old. As for my 21st birthday, I don't even remember it, mainly because I did nothing interesting or of note. No, seriously, that's the truth. On my 25th birthday, I was working in a grocery store in Missouri -- and yes, I had to work that night. I remember it vividly, as I was rather pissed that I didn't get it off and was stuck working an overnight shift during the busiest week of the year -- the week before Christmas. Four days later I would get extremely awful food poisoning that would last for over a week.

Yeah, my 25th birthday wasn't that great.

Similarly, Daisy's isn't that great either; she began, and will end, her birthday at work on an overnight shift as well. She described this as "depressing," and I agree, especially since she's had to work overtime the past two nights because she's the only one, apparently, capable of doing her job.

In the past, it's been only on rare occasions that I've had to work on my birthday; throughout my seven non-consecutive years of higher education, my birthday (December 20) has always fallen outside the window of class days -- the semester always ends before it, and likewise, I can't really celebrate it with anybody because all of them tend to leave town fairly quickly after said semester ends. The night of my birthday last year, I was flying back home to West Virginia for Christmas -- the long-winded tale of which you can read starting here if you missed it. The only times when I've had to work on my birthday has been when I've been employed in the service industry, such as the grocery store, or occasionally when I was working in Microbiology (ages ago).

I did not get anything for Daisy for her birthday; she asked long ago for me not to, because (primarily) she knows I have to keep to a budget while I am unemployed, there's nothing she needs from me anyway, and she doesn't really like getting gifts anyhow. While I respected her wishes on this matter, I still felt like there was something I should have done -- even though she just spent several days with me, we went to see Man of Steel, and I fed her and put gas in her car. That's not the same as a birthday present. I know it's just an arbitrary day, as all other "holidays" of its ilk are, but still. It's an important day, and we don't like to spend important days apart (which is part of the reason I'm going up there over the 4th; the 4th last year was the first day Daisy and I met in person).

I have been busy applying for jobs again today; I applied for three teaching positions in Florida with Full Sail University, as well as one at the University of Colorado and one or two other places which offered quick, fill-out-a-form and upload-a-CV applications. I've lost count now for how many positions I've applied for since graduation, but I'm guessing it's close to 100. Something like that, anyway. Time is ticking away if I'm going to be hired anywhere for the fall semester -- this is probably the last week I've got to get in my last applications before I shift my focus to "anything and everything I can do" mode, simply because of time constraints when it would come to being able to move anywhere and settle in with enough time to get it all done. I'd basically have to be hired this week, and hired outright, if that's going to happen -- and I'd also have to basically move mountains to get everything packed, cleaned, and moved out of here and into a new place by mid-August if that happened. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't sleep for the next month or so straight, and Daisy and I would have to figure out when and how she could join me wherever I was hired, etc. To sum it all up, even though I'm still applying to all sorts of different places, getting hired by one of them at this juncture would almost be a curse more than it would be a blessing, and would certainly be a massive, very fast upheaval of my entire life.

Not to mention the stress it would put on my cats.

I have little plans over the course of this next week except to keep applying for jobs and teaching positions, and to wait to hear back from any of the ones I've applied for at this point already. The job market is grim, but it's not that grim. I'll find something sooner or later, even if that something is working in a bank or some office doing something I didn't go to school for as a stopgap measure. I remain optimistic, as generally that's the best course of action for situations like this. In the meantime? I pay bills, I do my grocery shopping, I keep the cats fed and the house (relatively) clean. I go about life. Whatever happens, happens.

Melting

I feel like I am fucking melting.

I ran the air conditioner this morning for three hours upon waking up. Roughly three hours, anyway. It lowered the temperature in my house five degrees...to 88.7.

I am not making this up. After I turned it off, the temperature went back up to around 90-92 within two hours, and there was nothing I could do about it.

This is my lot in life during the summer -- either run up the electric bill to $300 a month (which, obviously, I cannot afford) by running the AC nonstop, or to sit here, sweat, and feel like I'm melting, every day, for three months.

I've mentioned before that my home is like a greenhouse. I don't know why. It's always sweltering in the summer and there's nothing at all I can do to stop that. Unless we get a few weeks of mid-70s temperatures and lots of rain, this never changes. Never, not ever, for the entire summer. After a certain point it is no longer cooler downstairs than it is upstairs, and there is nothing I can do and nowhere I can go to escape the heat unless I leave the house and go somewhere to shop, or something -- which, on my unemployed-summer-budget, it's not like I can afford to do that every day for hours on end. I simply have to deal with the fact that my house is a sauna of oven-like proportions, and get used to it.

This is my fourth year, and fourth summer, of living in this place. One would think that I would've gotten used to it by now. But I haven't. Again, I stress that there is nothing I can do but take it. I could take a cold shower three times a day and still be miserable and sweat-coated again ten minutes after I dry off (yes, I've tested this theory). I can drink all the liquids/water I want, but it just makes me ill and makes me feel bloated rather than cooling me down or keeping me adequately hydrated. Any extra liquids I drink just comes pouring back out of me as sweat through my pores.

Even the cats seem affected by the heat; they've been sleeping in the bathroom on the floor/tub/sink where it's dark and cool quite a bit, and when they're not in there, they're downstairs sprawled out someplace. Even Sadie, who rarely wants to leave my side, has been spending almost all of her time downstairs to avoid the heat of the upstairs. I really can't say I blame her.

I think it's going to get to the point where I take my other two fans downstairs and plug them into the power strip, make a line of all of them blowing directly onto the bed, and see if that makes anything feel better. The drone of the fans may be loud, but I can tolerate that if it means that I'm not losing a liter of fluids via sweat every time I go to sleep this summer. I can barely sleep as it is anyhow, as you know.

Daisy told me that upon arriving home last night, her parents asked why she hadn't brought me back with her so that I could spend some time in the air conditioning there. I found this both amusing and very, very sweet. I'll be up there in a week and a half anyhow for the 4th of July, which is one of the reasons I didn't go back up with her this time. If I last that long, that is. It's supposed to be in the 100s later this week. As it's only 93 right now and I'm so hot that I feel physically ill, I don't know how much more of this "no rain, no cool nights, nothing but heat" shit I can take. Daisy really worries about me in the heat; she's afraid I'm going to keel over, or something.

I filled out an application and numerous background check forms for a teaching assistant job in Lincoln, Nebraska this afternoon. I'm not exactly sure what kind of teaching assistant it will be, but it's implied that it's heavily focused on childcare and child services, and is a state-run job. I can do that. I don't necessarily want to, mind you, but I bet it pays well, it's probably quite easy (there's no degree requirements) and it's something I could do while looking for other teaching gigs. And, of course, a big part of it is that it's the only position I've actually found in Nebraska. Lincoln is about an hour's drive from Omaha, but it's also a smaller city, and it would probably be easier to find a place to live somewhere between Lincoln and Omaha, similar to how I live in Newton but went to school/work in Wichita every day. I couldn't tell you, though. I don't know the area as well as, say, Daisy does, obviously. It's better than nothing. I had to print all the forms and fill them out, and then apply via snail-mail (something I hate doing because it costs me stamps), but again -- it's all I've found in Nebraska thus far.

I mentioned previously that before she came down this week, Daisy was planning to look at and, if possible, book the location for our wedding. This didn't happen. Well, half of it did. She did go look at the location, which was adequate, if not more than adequate for our needs...but while our date was open and available, the company changed their policy recently -- you can no longer reserve the location for the deposit only. Now, to book a date the entire rental fee and deposit must be paid in full and up front whenever the location is booked. Daisy doesn't have that sort of money right now, and neither do I...so until one of us does, we're back to square one. I've encouraged her to keep looking for other places in our price range, because even eleven months or so away, dates are going to fill up fast whether we like it or not.

There is really nothing else going on but my discomfort; I have done little because of the heat and its ability to make me queasy. There are severe thunderstorms and tornado watches on the western side of the state, hundreds of miles from here, but nothing here. Not a thing. It's infuriating. It's raining in Missouri, it's raining/storming in Nebraska and western Kansas, but here, there's nothing but heat and sun and hot wind. I cannot overstate how frustrating this is. It's as if there's an invisible wall for a 50-mile radius around my home where no rain, storms, or cool air is allowed to penetrate, and it's fucking maddening.

I plan to sleep a bit this evening, if possible, and then stay up most of the night applying for more jobs and paying bills. I need to make a Walmart run at some point as well, as I am almost out of cigarettes (and I didn't get any when Daisy and I were out previously this week). 

The Week in Review(s)

Man of Steel is fucking fantastic. I shouldn't have to say this, because you should've gone to see it already. But, I am saying it, and it is. That trailer above should prove it -- unlike some other trailers, every scene in that one is in the movie. It's the best superhero film I've seen since The Dark Knight. Keep in mind that The Dark Knight came out five years ago. I understand this is saying a lot, and I understand that some of you may not agree or will say I'm overstating things, but if you're a Superman fan (or even know the slightest bit about his character/origin/etc), you'll probably agree with me once you see this film. I've never wanted to see a movie in the theater more than once before -- I want to go see Man of Steel several times, and will absolutely be purchasing the Blu-ray when it comes out. I'm not sure a better present day, 21st century Superman picture could be made, really.

A lot of critics have panned the picture as dark and morose and hollow; it's not. Not in the least. I could write dissertations for years on the themes running through this movie. Upon closer examination, as I told my former officemate Zac (who saw it on opening night), the critics who are panning the film are the ones expecting to go in there and see Richard Donner's happy-go-lucky, "Truth, Justice, and the American way Superman," without realizing in retrospect that while the first two Donner films were cinematic masterpieces in their own right, they were in 1978 and 1980, and by today's standards hold up a lot less strongly than you probably remember simply because of their bright colors and campiness factor (read, they weren't incredibly realistic, and were actually pretty goofy at times). This is a serious, thought-provoking post-9/11 Superman film that handles these characters, and their situations, in a wholly realistic light, and treats the mythos with the utmost respect possible for the big screen. For any film, however, there are going to be points of dissension; there are a few very minor issues (and one semi-large one) in this movie that have the fanboys' hair standing on end and crying foul, but as a lifelong Superman fan who is pretty damned knowledgeable about the comics? I didn't allow these issues to bother me, because I know the history of the characters involved. Not only that, but I've read the stories they are more than likely intended, somehow, to mirror.

For those of you who are getting bored of my long-winded, excited review? I'll sum it up with this: the effects are beautiful, the storytelling is fantastic and is about as close to the comics as one can get in a big-budget Hollywood picture, the actors are well-cast and deliver brilliant performances, and once Henry Cavill puts on the suit, you don't miss the red underpants at all. I haven't gotten this much enjoyment out of a movie in several years, and the brilliance of it all is that it has almost universal appeal -- for those of us who are fans, it's great, yes, but for those of us who have almost no knowledge of Superman or comics whatsoever? It's also great. Daisy, who isn't nerdy at all (as you know) and who has very little knowledge of comics or Superman aside from the basics (Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Smallville, Metropolis, Daily Planet, etc) loved the film as well.

Daisy also doesn't cry during movies, even during the saddest scenes ever. She cried three times during this film. Yes. Three.

Anyway. See the movie. Now, on with the rest of the week.

As you know from my previous posts earlier, Daisy came down on Tuesday evening, and stayed until this morning. And, quite obviously, we went to see Man of Steel on Wednesday evening, in 3D (primarily because I didn't want to wait another several hours to see the 2D version). We did a little shopping and cooking, and ventured out around the town, but didn't do much else while she was here because of the heat. I'll get to that too.

I have basically become a fully nocturnal individual these days, but I am getting a lot of different things accomplished. In the past several days, I've applied for easily twenty-five (or more) teaching jobs, and several administrative and/or writing positions -- including about 8-10 more on Monday night alone.

I've got my eyes on the prize, so to speak, but again, the problem is that none of these positions I'm applying for are in the Omaha area...because there aren't any of these positions in the Omaha area. Not even administrative positions. As mentioned before, right now I'm trying to stay in the education field while I still have the window to do so, as it's what I know, what I'm good at, and what I am most experienced in. And those positions, teaching or otherwise, just aren't open in Nebraska. Yes, Nebraska. As in, the entire state. I've looked, repeatedly. I've also been running into a problem more often over the past few days now where the job posting on the website (whichever one I'm using at the time, usually either HigherEdJobs.com or Monster) is outdated, and the position has since either been filled or has closed. This is why I'm applying for everything I find that I can do -- I want to beat that unknown window, and definitely beat out any other applicants for said positions if possible.

I haven't received any calls or emails about the positions I've already applied for, of course, though it's not like I'm giving up hope or anything. But it has made me rethink my strategies somewhat, and the time running out has emboldened me to apply for more positions, as many as I can, to jump through the hoops and register for the job systems on all of these different college websites, etc. However, with the lack of jobs both around my area and around Daisy's area, I've been forced to -- for the moment, anyway -- go with my odds and familiar surroundings/known abilities and known places. This means that I've been applying for a lot of teaching positions around the tri-state area of my home state of West Virginia. I've applied for teaching positions at three different colleges in the state, and applied for a writing job at my alma mater of West Virginia University. However, most of my focus has been in and around the Pittsburgh area, as, well, I'd much rather live there than live in West Virginia again if I had the choice. I've mentioned this before.

Of course, since Daisy's been here most of this week, I haven't applied for anything new since Monday night because I've not been on my computer for 12+ hours every day as I normally am when I'm home alone. This weekend starts my job hunt anew with more applications and more forms to inevitably fill out and submit to all sorts of different educational facilities.

Something I have noticed, though, is the frequency of what I call "why are you contacting me" emails and calls from recruiters. I've received no less than three emails and two calls/voicemails this past week from recruiters in my area wanting me to work sales positions or entry-level temp jobs manning phones or telemarketing. I do not understand this in the least; all of them have said either in their voicemail or email that they found my information on Monster. Well, good for them, but for them to have gotten my phone number they would have clearly needed to read my CV, which is tailored to teaching/editing/writing positions and nothing else and specifically says that's what I'm looking for. Yes, I am more than capable to do sales work or telemarketing if I wanted to. But I didn't go through seven years of higher education and get two degrees to end up in a telemarketing job that I could've done with no degrees. I have therefore dismissed these folks out of principle, though I would imagine they'll keep calling/emailing, and if things get really grim over the course of the next few months, I may have no other option eventually. I'd rather that not become the case.

Daisy and I have done rough calculations, and I need to be making at least $25k a year before taxes, in addition to her own income from our household (given the job she has now), for us to be able to pay bills and student loans without excessive worrying or penny-pinching. And that's scraping by almost at the bare minimum. No low-level sales or telemarketing job is going to pay me $25k a year. And that's setting the bar really, really low. Most of the teaching positions I've applied for -- those which list their salary on the application/posting, anyway -- start at $35k, and some are even in the $45k to $50k range.

And, of course, we're also basing our expectations on what we'd need to survive based on costs of living in the Omaha area, even though I've not found anything there, because that's what Daisy knows. Other areas, of course, will have much lower or much higher costs of living.

Rae tells me I should seriously consider the Cincinnati area, after I asked her what the job market is like there. She said most teaching positions are union only, and that the higher education there tends to hire PhD students on as GTAs, basically, to avoid hiring any real staff (again, remember, being a GTA is one step up from slave labor, really), but it's a very live-able city. I also know that Rae isn't exactly independently wealthy, so the fact that she can live there with no major issues is sort of encouraging.

In other news, I have been incredibly uncomfortable over the course of the past few days. Not mentally or anything, but physically. It's been in the low-to-mid-90s every day, and while most of the time it has been cloudy and windy, all that does is blow hot air around and make me sweat from every pore on my body. Daisy and I, when we've been awake, have spent more time in the basement with the fan blowing on us than anywhere else in the house. If we're not doing that, it's only because we've left the house to go somewhere with air conditioning or to simply drive around with the air conditioner on in her car. The clouds have made it unbearably muggy, but despite numerous forecasts for possible rain and storms over the past four days (all of which have been murky and gray), we've gotten nothing here in Newton -- which makes the heat and air movement feel that much more oppressive. When the wind stops, it feels like you're slammed with a brick wall of heat from which there is no escape. Even with all of my windows open and the fans in the house running, very little of that air flows through the house.

The temperature in my house has never dipped below 82, and it usually runs in the 88-92 range. I ran the air conditioner twice, for a few hours each time, while Daisy was here. It'll bring it down to about 82 or 84, but no lower, no matter what. It's usually a tad cooler in the basement/bedroom, but not by much -- hence why when we're down there, the fan is blowing on us from three feet away at full power, and we barely even feel it. Yes, the air is that thick.

My ability to tolerate heat has rapidly degenerated over the past two years or so. It is not as hot (yet) this summer as it was last summer and summer 2011, but I already can't really take it. It makes me physically ill, it keeps me from eating, and more than that, it keeps me from being able to sleep.

I've been having some real sleep issues this week. Bad ones. I'll sleep for about two or three hours at a time, at most, and I can only do that when I have completely physically and mentally exhausted myself. One or the other won't do -- I have to completely run myself ragged into total exhaustion on both fronts to be able to sleep. Add to this that I frequently have trouble sleeping when Daisy is here anyway, and this past week has been nothing but body aches, fatigue, queasiness, and oppressive heat. None of it is her fault, of course, and it never is -- I just can't rest. And I wasn't going to take a sleeping pill and sleep for fourteen hours while she was here, because that would have been a waste of our time together. Last night after dinner, I fell asleep on the couch in the living room because I'd reached that exhaustion point regardless of the heat. I seriously just passed out; I went from full consciousness to unconsciousness in a matter of moments while Daisy was washing the dishes -- which couldn't have taken more than ten minutes. I'd been feeling dizzy, so it's quite possible that I just fainted -- I'm pretty sure I'd been suffering mild heatstroke all day.

When I awoke, I was positively soaked in my own sweat as if I'd been sprayed down by a water hose, and could barely move. Across the room, Daisy sat in the chair nonchalantly reading one of my issues of Playboy. I don't really remember much after that. I remember going downstairs only vaguely, and next waking up at 8:30 this morning so Daisy could get ready to go home. She left this morning and went back to Omaha once we got up, and arrived there safely a few hours ago. She has to go back to work tonight, so she's going back to sleep (apparently while I was sleeping most of the night, she wasn't, but I didn't know that; I was dead to the world).

I have a fair amount of groceries now, thanks to our shopping while she was here, but have now exhausted my petty cash left over from my tax refunds. I have three dollars left in my wallet in actual cash. I suppose I'm somewhat okay with this; I have a lot of food in the house and won't have to go out for anything but cigarettes and cat litter for the next several weeks, and I've got a little bit of extra money about to be deposited into my bank account courtesy of the people who sent me graduation checks over the past month or so. I'll still have bills to pay, of course, but I'm not necessarily worried about running low on funds, and shouldn't be for a while. I'm hoping I get at least a callback or a response from some of those teaching positions soon, however.

Tonight I'm shaving off the beard. Or, at the very least, I'm shaving it down drastically. Probably, anyway. It depends on how much energy I have and whether I can stand to be in the hot bathroom for half an hour without being under the cold stream of the shower. It's way too hot to keep it as is, and it's only going to get hotter as the summer moves onward. When I go up to Omaha for the 4th, one of my missions is also to get a haircut, as you folks already know...if I can last that long without going somewhere here around town to get it done beforehand, of course. I'm not exactly looking forward to this, but it's necessary when it's this hot all the time, and when I have to start looking somewhat respectable for possible Skype interviews.

Really, more than anything else I just want to feel, and be, comfortable when it's this hot and there's no relief in sight in the weather forecast. If I'm too hot for too long, again, I'm no longer as tolerant of it as I once was, and my body/energy levels start to break down. As it's rather important that this doesn't happen while I'm looking for work and/or busied with things that need to be done, well...I don't really have much of a choice in the haircut-and-shave department.

On that note, it's really, really hot today, so I'm going to bed downstairs where it's cool.

Monsoonery?

It stormed here tonight briefly, for about an hour or so. That's it. The Weather Channel was predicting us to get 1-2 inches of rain. We got maybe two-tenths of an inch here. It was enough to wet the pavement and grass, and now (at nearly 5AM) has mostly dried up. This made me want to cry out to the heavens for more rain, harder rain, and winds which would actually blow through the house and cool it down in here more.

Instead, nothing. It's supposed to clear up as the morning hours progress, and get up to 85 today. The chances for rain and storms previously in the forecast throughout the rest of the week have now vanished, and after Wednesday it's supposed to be in the 90s every day again for the foreseeable future.

I don't know what I expected, really. This is Kansas in the summer, where it never rains and it's so hot on a daily basis that you may broil in your own home, in your own skin. Immediately after it stopped raining, the temperature began to noticeably creep up again inside the house.

However, on my spider patrols tonight, I found, saw, and killed nothing. I don't know if it was the rain or the fact that yesterday wasn't incredibly hot, but I did put out five new traps before I went to bed this morning -- two in the garage, two downstairs, and one in the upstairs. That was the last of the traps I had; I ordered two more sets of them on Amazon tonight in the overnight hours since I've been awake. If I need to put thirty spider traps in this house to catch them all and make them go away, then I will do so.

Daisy is coming down tomorrow instead of Wednesday; she is getting off work in the morning and going to look at the places she wants to book for the wedding, and will either drive down shortly thereafter or will nap before coming down, but she's coming tomorrow. This means that today and tomorrow before she gets here are, effectively, my "chore days." I need to vacuum the house and put away my laundry, and if the grass is dry enough, I need to mow it and do the outside trimming. That will probably also require me to put gas in the mower and in the car while I'm out and about. Before I go to bed for the day I will at least do the vacuuming, and I have already put cleaner in the toilet so I can scrub it down as well.

Doing more job searches tonight has been fruitless; nothing in the way of teaching positions have been updated with anything new since Thursday or Friday, and I've already applied for all of those that I could. The non-teaching side looks even more grim, with companies looking for managers and sales consultants and holders of MBAs or PhDs. It's rather frustrating. I have a lot of applications out right now, yes, but that doesn't mean anyone's going to contact me.

On the plus side, I have paid all the bills that have come in with relative ease and no worries. I'll have to write out the rent check next week, but other than that I've already taken care of everything for the month, as well as my car insurance (which I wrote about yesterday morning). In addition to that, I mailed my parents the checks I had from graduation gifts, which my mother will deposit into my bank account once she gets them later this week.

I was able to call home yesterday morning and talk to my parents for a while, especially my dad (for Father's Day and all) and discuss stuff with them about the wedding as well. My parents want to do a separate reception back home, at the house, after everything has wound down a bit -- so that those family and friends who are unable to come to Omaha for the wedding can have a celebration for us. I said that was fine; I rather expected that, actually. Very, very few of my family and friends, aside from my parents, will be able to attend the wedding, and many of those friends and extended family who will be invited to this separate reception haven't seen me since I moved out here to the midwest...in 2006. Some have, of course, but most of my friends back home who are still around the area? Only a handful have been able to visit with me on my trips back home. I tend to keep a low profile when I fly home to visit anyhow, as there's never enough time to see everyone who would want to see me, and I don't want anyone to feel spurned.

"What about this summer?" I asked my mother on the phone. "I'll be in Omaha with [Daisy] for the 4th and a few days after, probably, but as you know, my schedule is pretty wide open right now, and [Daisy] only needs to get some advance notice to her bosses to be able to come out."

It would be a fairly short trip out there anyhow; while Daisy does get three days a week off, the most she would be able to take at any given time would be about three more, I'm guessing. And, of course, that has to take into account flight and travel time there and back home, too. I again reminded my mother that even if Daisy couldn't make it out there because of job restraints, I still want to come out at some point this summer. As much as I'd love Daisy to make that trip with me, neither she nor I know as of yet if it will be completely possible. I do know, however, that it's possible for me.

Mind you, it's pretty odd of me to want to visit home as much as I do right now. Or, at the very least, it's somewhat uncharacteristic of me. I say this because every other trip I've made home over the past several years has been, really, a hassle on some level because of school and/or work. I haven't been home in the summer since 2010, which was the last time I visited over the summer months. Since then I've only made two other trips out there, last year. Each time it was scheduling around my schooling and work, and there was a set number of days I could be gone before I had to be back home or face catastrophic grad-school-related consequences. I've turned down offers for visits in the past due to budget or time constraints, as well. My parents wanted to fly me out there for Christmas 2011, for example, and as I was broke and living alone for the first time ever, I wasn't able to do it. Now, however, until I find a job someplace I could conceivably visit anytime, and stay for a day or two longer than I normally do -- as long as the cats have enough food, water, and litter, they're fine -- and have proven that fact to me countless times in the past. I may be on a fixed budget for a while, but I'm not "poor," per se.

Daisy can't just disappear to West Virginia for a week with no ramifications, however, because of her job -- and she can't really help that, as it's sort of vital to her finances (and to our wedding planning/finances) that she stay employed. Obviously. I've made sure she understands that she doesn't need to try to move heaven and earth to be able to come visit my parents with me this summer if she can't do it, or can't get more than a couple of extra days off.

As always, though, there are multiple factors at play if I or we get to visit -- if I get hired for a teaching position somewhere, it basically means there's no way I'll be able to make a trip home. All of the teaching positions I've applied for have been in faraway states, and if I'm hired in one of those places, it means that the rest of the summer I will be cleaning, packing up the rest of this house, and using every bit of money I have left to move out of here and move to one of these places, with Daisy in tow soon thereafter or at the same time. The only saving grace is that some of the places I've applied to are within a few hours of driving from my parents' place, and one or two of them are very close.

And, of course, I'd have to figure out a way to get the Monte Carlo to wherever I'd end up, as well. Because, believe me, she's not gonna make a cross-country drive unless I gave her a full mechanical overhaul first, as much as I love her.

Also, if I can't find anything and end up adjuncting here this fall, well, I wouldn't be able to travel past August 15th or so anyhow. So, it's possible that there's a fairly short window of sorts for this trip, and (ironically) the only time I would be able to make it without any real time (or money) constraints would be, well, if I were to remain unemployed. Which is again, so incredibly ironic that I'm drowning in its irony.

Like I said, I'm fine for money right now, but ask me again in three more months, especially if I am still unemployed at that time.

Yet another reason I am itching to organize a yard sale here at my home sometime this summer -- let's get rid of all this stuff I don't need and start making money on it.

As day breaks, it has clouded up again outside and looks like it could continue raining, though everything on the radar is north and east of me. I'm waiting until later this morning to do the vacuuming, as I'd not only like to be able to see what I'm doing, but I need to get a shower before I go to bed for the day anyhow, and there's no reason to shower and then get all sweaty again from working around the house.

I was wearing one of my tie-dye tank-tops last night until, after three or so years of wear, it basically fell apart on me; I was adjusting it after using the bathroom and the stitching ripped. I had to end up throwing it away. Oh well. At least I now know the general life-cycle of a tank. At least a dyed one, anyway.

By the way, I said I would take pictures of the shirt that I kept after making shirts for Daisy's dad for Father's Day. Here it is:

I'm getting better with the spiral technique, though the "wine" colored dye I used in this shirt is the kind that will run and fade if it's not soda-ashed first -- which is why I kept this one. You can see the pinkish-purple hue in the fabric; that will slowly wash out over repeated washings, and will eventually fade back to almost white while the darker streaks of it will slowly fade as well. It's pretty, but after several washes it'll not look as good as it does now, which is a big part of why this is the one I kept. I found a bottle of red dye I had stored away and didn't know about, so I might re-dye this at some point in the future with that, and see how it looks then. I made sure I got the shirts in 2X; Daisy's dad doesn't need a 2X, but 100% cotton shirts will shrink slowly over the years with repeated washings and dryings -- I don't care if it says "pre-shrunk" or not. They still do.

On that note, there's not much else to report -- Daisy will be getting home from work soon, and I plan to talk to her for a bit before I finish my cleaning for the day and go to bed.

Anniversaries

One year ago today, on June 16, 2012, I began talking to Daisy.

Today, on June 16, 2013, we celebrate our one year "acquaintance anniversary," I suppose it could be called.

Daisy and I have several anniversaries of different sorts, and there is some dispute over a few of them. I maintain that she and I have been a couple since roughly mid-July to mid-August, and we really have been. Yes, our first few months were incredibly rocky and filled with a ton of stops and starts, speed bumps and issues we had to overcome, but I always viewed us as a couple from that time onward, despite not really having a definition as to what our relationship was at the time. While we were together, we didn't make everything official and completely solidified until early October, when we'd already been a couple for more than a month at that point and hadn't called it that.

Daisy was the one good thing, the one shining light that came out of my hellish summer last year, when it seemed like absolutely everything else was crumbling down around me. She stuck with me through it all; she supported me, she did her best to take care of me (even though she didn't have to) and she was my rock. And I loved her. I fell in love with her quickly and deeply, even though I tried to tell myself not to (in order to save myself more emotional battery if it didn't work out).

Now, a year later, we're engaged to be married, and a year from now, that wedding will have already taken place. If I hopped into the Delorean and came to visit myself this time last year to tell me that "Hey, in a year you'll be engaged to this woman and you'll be planning your marriage," I would have been stunned at future-me. Yet, that's what's happening. And really, I couldn't be happier about that. Daisy and I do have our little squabbles and arguments from time to time, but they're always smoothed out quickly and efficiently and we continue to move forward. We are perfect for each other, and I can't put into words how lucky I feel that I have her in my life.

Yet she was still slightly perturbed that I wrote in my last post that, at least this week, I am more excited about seeing Man of Steel than I am about our wedding planning. Can't win 'em all.

Today is also Father's Day, and once again, the cats have gotten me no presents. Little ingrates.

I've barely spoken to my father in twenty years, but my Dad, the man who raised me and who has been with my mother for just as long, will be getting a call this morning before I go to sleep for most of the day. Yes, I've already gotten my dad and Daisy's dad Father's Day presents, and sent them to them a week or two ago, but that's beside the point. I sent my mother $40 worth of coffee for her Keurig machine well before Mother's Day, and yet I still called her on Mother's Day, because (duh), it's the right thing to do to show that you care.

I also didn't realize in my planning last week that if I'd chosen to go see Man of Steel today, the theater would be swamped with people taking their dads out to see it. I am now glad that I am waiting for when Daisy comes down in a few days.

Daisy is planning to book the wedding location on Tuesday, and then come down on Wednesday morning. We'll go see the movie that night, and then she'll leave (at the latest) on Friday morning, since she'll have to work that night. Again, it's a short trip, but this won't be a big deal since she and I will be spending the 4th of July together in Omaha anyway, and probably a few days afterwards as well. I haven't really asked her about how the logistics of that excursion will work out, primarily because I have a pretty open schedule and don't really have anything to do before then but pay a few bills and keep looking for/applying for jobs. When Daisy comes down in a few days, we'll make a short shopping trip together (I want us to go to Dillon's to get some good groceries and the like, for example), but otherwise I really don't even have to leave the house for anything for another two weeks or so, roughly. My money situation is perfectly fine right now, as I've been living primarily on the tax refund money I have, and have been using it for everything. While I do have bills and rent to pay, everything else is relatively negligible -- I haven't needed to put gas in my car for over a month, for example, and barely eat when it's hot (cooking during the summer just makes the top floor of my house that much hotter).

While I'm in Omaha I'm going to try to see if Daisy can recommend a nice, cheap haircutting place. While I love my long hair and thick beard, again, they're not going to help me get a job when it comes to formal interviews, and they're both incredibly, oppressively hot to keep and maintain in the summer months, especially when the average temperature inside my house tends to be about ninety degrees. Normally, I would just cut my hair myself with my clippers, but if I do that, it can't be styled and/or it generally just gets buzzed down pretty short and military-style, which would make me look like a skinhead or cancer patient to any potential employers. That would be bad, as you may have guessed. And, after having the full beard for about four or five months now, it's time to take it off again. I don't like to, I don't want to, but it's necessary to do so in the summer. The bonus that comes with this is that by the time we get married next year, my hair will have grown long again and I will have had time to grow back the beard beforehand. The beard only takes about eight weeks to come back in fully.

Some of you may laugh at that, since you can grow a full beard in a week or two. I can't.

There are some rain and storms slowly moving through the area tonight, and when I say "slowly" I mean really fucking slowly. It's been thundering off in the distance for the past hour or two, and I will occasionally see a small flash of lightning out my back window, but it's coming so slowly that I really want to go outside and yell at the sky for it to hurry up and arrive -- it is so hot in my house, even though it's relatively nice outside, and I desperately want the wind to pick up and the rain to come so that some air will move and my weather allergies will stop trying to kill me via sinus congestion and pressure. I've barely been able to breathe for the past eighteen hours or so because of the storms' slow approach.

Update: it began raining, and rained for five minutes at the most before stopping. It has now dried up and has evaporated off the radar, and my allergies are just as bad as before. The Weather Channel is predicting -- and I couldn't make this up if I wanted to -- "Heavy T-Storms" for tonight's forecast, starting in the evening. It's supposed to storm and only get up into the 80s through Thursday, which makes me happy. But I'll still believe it when I see it.

My spider patrols have been going well; tonight I've only killed one since 11PM or so, and that was up here in the bathroom. I haven't seen a single one downstairs in several hours despite a few trips down there to do laundry (read: wash the sheets that Pete decided to violently-hairball-spew upon). I'm still putting out more traps once daylight hits.

I have a bit of a to-do list over the course of the next two or three days; since Daisy is coming down, I will of course have to do some cleaning of the house, including vacuuming (which I've needed to do anyhow, so meh), I'll have to pay my car insurance bill and the cable bill, and I'll have to take out the trash and put away the laundry.

Update: I just paid my car insurance bill. I told Daisy that it's both awesome and somewhat hilarious that the only thing I ever use my Citi Card for is to pay my car insurance. Yes, I could write a check for it if I wished to -- it's only about half a month's rent -- but eh. I'd rather just pay it and then, if I have to, pay it off in installments with the card.

On that note, I'm going to leave you. I shall keep all of you updated on anything else interesting that happens.

Ferked

 

After having a big fight last night, Daisy and I got back on good, loving terms and spent a few hours this afternoon trying to pick out wedding songs. As in, the first song that we'll slow-dance to at said wedding. I. Am not a slow-dancer. I am not really a dancer at all, unless I'm really drunk. Those of you who were at the graduation party last month know what "really drunk" constitutes for me.  

We never really came to a consensus on what to pick, though we did narrow it down a bit. We have to figure out where the hell the wedding is going to be first, for starters. Daisy has found several primo locations thus far that she's called about, and they're relatively inexpensive (read: definitely within our budget). I told her to pick whatever one she wished and to book it now, since the ones she called about today are still open on our chosen wedding date.

I, of course, am more excited at the present moment about Man of Steel.

"I wish I could go see it with you," Daisy told me a few minutes ago.

"Lieeeeeee," I replied. "You have no desire to see Man of Steel."

She has told me this in the past. I'm not making it up. Again, Daisy is not nerdy in any way. I have grown to slowly accept this, while still taking her to movies like Star Trek Into Darkness and Iron Man 3. It's really to prepare her for a life married to an unabashed nerd who will father unabashedly nerdy kids with her. Call it an initiation of sorts.

"If it's with you, then I do," she said.

"Okay, then come down here after you get off work on Tuesday morning and we'll go see it that night."

Note: I do not want to wait to see this movie, obviously. But it is quite apparent that it is important to Daisy that we see it together. Ferk. FERK FERK FERK. But okay.

"Can we make it Wednesday? I want to check out locations on Tuesday with [mutual friend] so I can reserve one of the two..."

"If you're okay with only being able to stay for about 36 hours before you have to go back home, love."

Daisy, as you may know, works a bizarre night-shift schedule of ten-hour shifts, Friday through Monday nights, 8:30PM to 7:30AM. It throws a big wrench into any sort of visiting plans either of us make, because she's only ever off for a maximum of 72 hours at any given time, and driving time here and back is 10 hours total. It also means that she sleeps really weird hours, and any time for a social life is basically nonexistent.

"I can make it, just not sure what day. But, if you want to see it this weekend, we can just hang out when I'm there. It's up to you."

Ah, the illusion of choice.

"If you want to see it with me," I said, "then I want to see it with you and can/will wait for it. But I want to see it soon."

So it looks like I'm waiting a few extra days to see the movie. Which is okay, I suppose. I didn't see Star Trek until a week after its release, and didn't see Iron Man 3 until its fourth week. It's worth waiting a few extra days to be able to see it with Daisy. That's love, baby.

In other news, I've been applying for teaching jobs like a madman tonight. Not only did I apply for one in Kentucky which I had to mail an application for via snail-mail, but I applied for at least five or six more in several different states -- Maryland, Massachusetts, Virginia, New Jersey, and one in my home state of West Virginia. Okay, so I guess that's five more. No, wait, there was one in San Antonio too. Six. By the time I was done filling out applications, updating my CV/tailoring it for positions, and writing cover letters, I basically exhausted today's English instructor postings.

Daisy's response to this?  

"God, I love you. I am so excited for our future. I don't care how hard we work or how poor we are, I just want to be with you."

Pretty sure I'm marrying the right woman, folks.

Especially since, y'know, we's gon' be poor.

Anyway.

If I can keep up this pace of applying for new positions posted every day, I will more than likely have a shot at getting an interview from at least a few of them. Or an email. Or even an acknowledgement of hey, your application is cool. Something like that. The position in West Virginia is about 40 minutes away from Pittsburgh. It's in the northern panhandle. I told Daisy that we wouldn't even have to live in West Virginia if we didn't want to, because we wouldn't need to. The good thing about the northern panhandle is that Pennsylvania is to the east, and Ohio is to the west. Both are superior states. Hell, Ohio still has Rax restaurants and White Castles. 

Don't think I wouldn't drive hours out of my way to go to either of those places to eat again. Because I totally would. And I would also base where to live on their proximity to my home. Again, not kidding here.

This is because I live in Kansas, and there is fucking nothing in Kansas. 

However, the one thing that is missing from all of these applications I've been sending out should, sadly, be quite evident -- none of them are in, or even close to, the Omaha area. None. Not a one. That's because there are no teaching positions whatsoever in and around the Omaha area (because, believe me, I check three different sites every single day for them). 

This is disheartening. Really, really disheartening. There's just nothing there, and I can't change that. And, again, until my reasonable window for applying to teaching jobs is closed, I have to focus on that. Can I do basically anything I want in Omaha? Yes, I can. But do I want to teach? Yes. And it doesn't appear -- unless something is posted for the area soon -- that I'll be able to teach in Omaha.

It certainly won't stop me from applying at places like Google and PayPal -- both of which have big hub offices in Omaha. It won't stop me for applying for high-end positions in any number of fields in that area. But will I be teaching in Omaha in the fall? That is, at this point, quite doubtful.

After trying to go to bed and finding myself unable to sleep in the heat of the house, even in the bedroom downstairs (where it's substantially cooler) I came back upstairs and attempted to be productive, and when failing at that, played Xbox for two hours for the first time since...March? Something like that. When I was finally tired enough to sleep, I returned to the bedroom and slept until nearly 9PM, and woke up to see that Pete had hacked up a monstrous black hairball on the sheet next to my pillow. I also awoke to Sadie finishing off a battle with a gravely wounded brown recluse on the floor in the laundry room, and standing above it proudly in triumph.

Cats, I swear.

I have been, for the past several days, an incredible spider slayer in my home. Over the past week, I have killed more brown recluse in this house than I've killed in the past year, both upstairs and downstairs, at an average of 4-5 spiders per night. This is primarily because, while it had been nice, cool and mild for the past several weeks, this week it spiked into the high 90s and 100s, and whenever this happens fairly suddenly, they all come in through the cracks and crevices to get out of the heat and to stay cool. Similarly, when it cools down at night and gets dark, they come out in search of food (or for whatever else bastard spiders do). My house is old; I can set up all the spider traps I want (there are about ten or so traps scattered about the house right now), but they're not going to catch them all. The cats will chase them down and kill them as well -- Pete once killed three of them in one night and left them all outside my bedroom door as trophies/presents a few years back -- but I know their habits, and I now have been proactive and have a plan of attack. 

Here's how it works. The recluse "wake up" and come out from around 10PM to 2AM, roughly. During that time, with the cats in tow, I will make several "patrols" of the house, examining walls, corners, and floors, especially downstairs. Any I see, or any the cats see, get killed. With extreme prejudice. If there's one on a wall or near the ceiling that I can't reach, no worries there -- I have a spray bottle, filled with hot water, with a focused squirt stream that will fire at least fifteen feet, if not more. Aim, fire. Most of the time the water itself, or the force of it, will kill them. If it doesn't, and they try to limp away once they fall to the floor? Squish. 

I kill 2-3 spiders on each one of these patrols, roughly. Sometimes I won't see any at all. But, in the past few days, each night I seem to kill less and less. Last night it was five, total. Tonight it was three. This tells me that I am, slowly, winning this war and eliminating these eight-legged fucks from my house. 

I will also remind you that in Kansas, you can't really do anything about brown recluse. They are, and will be, everywhere. No matter what. Despite this, they are called recluse for a reason, and in my four years living in this house (almost seven years living in the midwest total), I've never been bitten by one, and I've lived in some pretty shitty apartments over my years of independence. Apparently they're not dangerous to the cats, either, since the cats tend to kill them pretty easily and have done so for years. But I hate having them in the house. The traps help, though. The traps help a lot, and catch a ton of them.

There is one spider I let live, however; he's a little wolf spider who lives under the carpet in the stairwell. I see him pop out from time to time, and always leave him be/shoo the cats away from him. Why? Because wolf spiders eat recluse. He can live. Let him hunt and all that...until the cats eventually catch him or he gets caught in one of the traps. I'm setting up more traps in the morning; another two new ones will go into the garage, and at least two more in the basement areas. I'm a pro at this by now; I know what stops them from becoming a true nuisance. 

On that note, there's not much else to say. I'll be waiting for replies or calls from the jobs I've applied for, and will continue to search. In the meantime, it's thundering here, which means (hopefully) we'll finally get some rain and I'll be able to cool down a bit.