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.
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