(written December 24, 2019)
I've been off work for five days now, but truthfully it feels like it's only been half that amount of time.
The holidays are and always have been a rather hectic time for Daisy and me -- she generally has to work some of the days I'm off, I generally try to take care of as much in-the-background stuff around the house as I can when I'm off as well, and neither of us sleep a whole lot. I've been plunging in and out of sleep for the past four days, getting some rest here and there when I can, and have been working on all sorts of stuff when I can't.
To those ends, I have wrapped every present for Daisy, her parents, and the family save for two last difficult-to-wrap ones, I have done all of the laundry in the house, I have washed the blankets, bedsheets, bathroom mats, and shower curtains, and even had enough time to cook a breakfast and watch a movie this morning -- after running the dishwasher first, of course.
How do I have the time and energy to take care of all this stuff? Copious amounts of caffeine, mostly. If I don't do the stuff that needs to be done while I can, not only do I feel like a waste of skin, but it feels like my time off just quickly disappears, melting away to nothing with nothing to show for it. Truth be told, Daisy has a lot to do over the course of the next day or so that I can't help her with, including wrapping her own presents for me and her parents, and preparing large parts of the Christmas Eve snacks and Christmas Day dinner for us and the family. Because of this, as her partner, I try as I can to take care of as much of the ancillary stuff as I can.
Now, normally -- as it's December -- this time of year is marred by some awful weather, and we have to fight through it to get stuff done, errands ran, and more often than not it affects our travel anywhere we go (or don't go) during that time. Christmas 2014 -- the year Daisy and I got married -- we got a snowstorm on Christmas Eve that was supposed to be a dusting, but gave us nine inches. We've had to fight through some nasty snow/ice a few times over the years at Christmas, actually.
But this year? It was 55 degrees in Omaha yesterday. Today it's supposed to be 53. On Christmas Day it's supposed to hit 57, and may breach 60 -- breaking records for the area for Christmas temperatures. I'm not complaining about any of this -- we already had a pretty strong cold snap last from about Thanksgiving up until a few days ago, and the thought of wearing shorts and a t-shirt to family Christmas dinner is, needless to say, thrilling to me. We're gradually supposed to get back to more normal temperatures next week, but for now I've got the windows open and I'm going to enjoy all of this while I can.
In other news, the family has now arrived in town; we spent the evening with them Sunday night for my "birthday dinner" of fries and gravy (no cheese was involved, so it can't be called poutine) and a lemon cake that Daisy made. It was a very subdued affair; I was tired and my stomach was bothering me for a good chunk of the night, and while I love my nephews, sometimes my psyche can only take them in small doses. I was irritable for a good chunk of the day and evening due to lack of sleep, and I tried to be social as best I could, mostly succeeding. I really appreciate the family; they are wonderful people and even if I'm not feeling great I always attempt to be the best person I can be for them.
For my birthday, the parents got me an Ancestry.com DNA testing kit, something that I'd been extremely interested in for some time. They actually gave it to me on Friday shortly after I got my tattoo (before the family was in town) and got Daisy one as well.
I've always been low-key obsessed with my origins and family history/bloodline; my mother only knows a limited history of where our family originated from, and my actual father I have not spoken to in over 25 years -- and both of his parents were long dead before I was born. What I do know is that my mother's side of the family came to the states from England, and my father's side can be traced back to a mashup of all of the UK isles, primarily Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. My father's brother once pulled me aside in the early-to-mid-90s and told me he'd done a lot of research that had shown that our bloodline came from a village of actual dwarves in Scotland, I believe. I wasn't sure how much stock to put in that and am still not.
Over the past year or so I've done some research of my own, and traced my family origins back to the mid-eighteenth (1758 was the farthest back I could find) and early nineteenth centuries. It reads much like the Bible -- A begat B, who begat C, D, and E; C died, D and E married F and G and begat H, I, J, K, L....etc. The earliest I could go back on one side of the family tree was a preacher in early 1800s London; before his parents, records are unknown. I have family that originated in Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Ohio -- lots of Ohio, actually, on my father's side -- as well as some in Missouri. All were sons or daughters of western European immigrants, and some immigrants themselves. Some tree branches on both sides of my family showed Revolutionary War soldiers, soldiers in the War of 1812, as well as a scattering of Spanish-American War veterans. Interestingly enough, I didn't find a whole lot of Civil War soldiers in my lineage. There are one or two I noticed, but living on the Mason-Dixon line I would've expected a LOT more.
The depressing side of it all was that looking back through my mother's side of the family history, I noticed something very poignant -- once they came to the states, and settled in West Virginia, none of them ever really left ever again. I found pages upon pages of people who were born, lived, died, and were buried within 20 miles of my hometown. Generations of people, over the span of close to 200 years. Two different cemeteries on the western end of the county where my grandmother lived are literally filled with my ancestors. As a kid I would pass by those cemeteries almost every day and never knew. There are a few cemeteries around the Morgantown area that hold a lot of my family as well. Nobody had ever told me. There's even a family cemetery that I didn't know about until this year. My family never seemed to hold ancestry or family history in any high regard. Some of them actively disliked talking about it or even said they didn't remember anything because they themselves never really knew about family history.
It bothered me on multiple levels for years. I asked my father once, and only once, about his parents -- he told me his father committed suicide in the early 70s, and his mother died before that. Before that, one of his brothers drowned, and he did not seem to want to talk about any of it, so I let it be. The only real information from my father's side of the family is what I've found on Findagrave.com as well as word of mouth from some older relatives I'm still in contact with. I know virtually nothing other than that, aside from the dwarves thing.
So really, the Ancestry DNA test will give me something to latch onto, genetically, to see who I am and where I really come from. It'll also show me some relatively close genetic matches and the like, people I may have never even met or heard of. But, more than anything else, I'm down for the statistics of it. Percentages. X percent from the British isles, X percent from other places, X percent extraterrestrial, etc, whatever it is.
Anyway. Onward.
The tattoo is healing fine; we've now entered the stage where the top layer of skin on the design dries out and begins to peel off, akin to scabs. Larger tattoos, I've read, will have actual scabs form on them and flake off. On mine the skin is just dry and lifting off around the design, which is normal. I've been using the Hustle Butter on it to keep it moisturized, but otherwise I'm letting it do its thing (as you're supposed to). It isn't itchy, it doesn't hurt, it's just my arm. My arm that sort of feels weird to have a layer of butter-moisturizer-lotion on it at almost all times. But meh, it is what it is. I don't have to do it forever, just for a few weeks.
I told Daisy I wanted to go get the Rebel tattoo on Friday, as she has the day off and we're doing eye appointments to use the last of our FSA account stuff before we lose it at the end of the year -- I need my prescription re-upped anyhow -- but the tattoo shop posted that they are closed between now and January 2, so that's sadly off the table. I'll go get it done eventually, I just don't know when. It's a high priority for me on my to-do list. I want that ink soon.
We have not yet seen The Rise of Skywalker, and I'm guessing that will be a Thursday evening/Friday activity as well, depending on our plans. I would not be opposed to going to see it tomorrow, on Christmas Day, but we'll have to see how things pan out at and with the family. When a new Star Wars movie comes out around the holidays, if the family is in town, my brother-in-law and I go see it together. This is sort of a tradition since almost as long as Daisy and I have been married. On the years we don't go (or the years when there's not a new movie out at Christmastime) we generally get each other something Star Wars-related for Christmas -- a mug, socks, etc. Something small. We've learned at this point that we're just nerds and have grown to accept that in one another.
I mentioned earlier that all of the gifts are wrapped now (except for the ones Daisy needs to wrap for me, the family, and the kids), and I do have a list of them -- however, I'm not going to write about them here until after tomorrow when everyone has already opened them and knows what they have. I also plan to do a breakdown of my own gifts, similar to what I've done here in the past, just for the sake of analysis. I have no clue what anyone got me but the parents -- I've known what Daisy's parents got for us for over a month, as does Daisy -- but I'm not going to write about it here until everything's all said and done. I know our nephews are going to love the stuff we got for them, and this year part of my stuff for the parents (as well as for the wife) was handmade and took time and energy to do.
Still, fatigue plagues me at every turn. I slept a good bit yesterday, but the time spent asleep versus awake, the times of the day or night I've done it, and my ratio of hours spent asleep versus wakefulness are all really, really off-kilter. I'm attempting to reset those hours tonight by not taking a nap today, even though I want one, and instead just powering through everything until I can sleep normally tonight in the overnight with the wife. It is my hope that this will wake me up early enough in the morning, and well-rested enough, to take on the day with vigor -- as it is going to be a really long day.
This afternoon is the Christmas Eve church service that all of us will attend, in about four hours; in total, ten of us will be in attendance -- the parents, brother and sister in law, the four boys, and us. Afterwards we'll return to the parents' home to do Christmas Eve dinner/snacks (Daisy is making vegan fondue, for example) and then will return home to go to bed -- or, at least, return home to wind down and let Daisy wrap the rest of the gifts she needs to wrap and cook whatever part of the Christmas dinner stuff she wants to start tonight, anyway.
Truth be told, Daisy and I have been operating on differing schedules all week, despite the fact that we have more time together this week than we've had in months. It's all been spent running back and forth, doing errands, doing family stuff, taking care of Christmas-related tasks, and in the midst of it all it's been punctuated, for her, with going to and from work this week. She has a half-day today, as mentioned before, but she worked normally all day yesterday and will work all day normally on Thursday as well. It's a lot of stress and a lot of up-down, up-down for her that won't really end until after the new year...when none of us have anything else to look forward to but the cold, cold months of winter until spring starts in March.
Aside from the chores around the house, my downtime has been rather boring; I've listened to about forty (yes, forty) episodes of one of my favorite podcasts, and I've idly played some computer or phone games or read a comic here or there to pass the time. Like I said, what I can help Daisy with, I have done so and continue to do so...but a lot of the holiday work is her and her alone, and all I can do is occasionally offer assistance if and when she needs it. It does, at times, make me feel a bit useless. I really just long for everything to be done so that she can sit on the couch and cuddle with me or we can curl up in bed together and just sleep. I'm hoping we can do one or both tonight.
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