The Call of the Isle'd: A Canada Story, Epilogue

 (written between August 22 and September 5)

Upon returning home, and after making sure the house was still secure and the animals were safe, I had but one mission: unfuck the house.

We had left in such a hurry that there were many little things left undone or left half-done in favor of just making sure everything was locked up and safe, and that the cats would have enough food/water/litter to get by, and the vast majority of those things were done in the last six hours or so before leaving the house in one hell of a jumbled scramble. I also had a list in my head of things I already knew I'd have to do once I got home, like the yard work and cleaning out Daisy's office (where we'd stowed one of the cats so that she couldn't pee everywhere), cleaning out the fridge, etc. 

My primary concern, however, was my PTO and making sure I'd organized it correctly and submitted it properly so that I wouldn't immediately, or relatively quickly, have to return to work upon getting back home. I checked it and saw that I'd placed it correctly, enough to cover the week with no issues. It was August 20. While I could return to work anytime I wanted, nobody would expect me back until August 28.

So, let's stop for a moment and take stock of the situation. I was home, alone, with the cats. I was alone in the house and would be alone for the longest stretch of time since before Daisy and I were married, and for what would be the longest time we had been out of each other's presence since we were married, at the greatest distance apart as well. At the time, I did not know exactly when she would return. I had over a week of time that was already paid for with vacation days. I was, in essence, getting a vacation from my vacation.

I immediately called my parents to let them know I was okay and home safely, made sure the cats had new, fresh food and water, and changed out the litter pans downstairs. I then ordered pizza (because it was 9000 degrees outside and I wasn't about to cook) and unpacked my suitcases to do the laundry.

Over the course of the next week, I would do the following things:

• Mow and string trim both the back and front yards.
• Unfuck the garden by mowing/trimming inside it, and pull off all the vegetables that were both ready to eat (one pile) and rotten/rotting (tossed into the side of the yard for the raccoons).
• Strip the bed and wash all blankets, sheets, and pillowcases.
• Strip the cat blankets off the couches and wash them.
• Grab all rugs and mats, including bath mats, and wash them along with the shower curtain and liner.
• Clean out the fridge, essentially gutting it as about 65-70% of the food in it was old and/or spoiled and no longer good.
• Vacuum the entire house (with the exception of the hardwood floors), twice.
• Undo the hold on our mail so that it would begin being delivered again on August 22.
• Run the giant box of "documents to be shredded" through my shredder over the course of about three days (creating six giant, very full trash bags of shredded papers).
• Wash, dry, fold, and organize every piece of laundry in this house -- both mine as well as the wife's -- and put it away in the closet (more on this later, but it took about three days to do it all).
• Do two separate grocery orders from different places in order to have food in the house to eat and to replace the food that had to be tossed.
• Do several Amazon orders to replace the household supplies I could not get or were otherwise unavailable from the grocery stores (i.e. cat food and litter, light bulbs, tissues, batteries, garbage bags, deodorant, incense, etc).
• Let the cat out of Daisy's office, stripped the office and cleaned it, aired it out, and burned through most of a box of patchouli incense to refresh it.
• Because I liked what I'd used on the trip so much, went back out to the website I'd ordered my disposable vapes from and ordered $300+ more of them (they still haven't shipped yet, even now...well, okay, a few of them have, but the bulk of them have not). 
• Saw that my favorite site had graphic t-shirts on sale again and placed a few more orders there, including a birthday present for Mama.
• Dumped the giant litter pans from the cat that was holed up in Daisy's office, and hosed them out in the back yard.
• Watered the garden hard, as it hadn't rained here since we'd originally left town. 
• Ordered a new laptop from Woot to replace my Chromebook, which has aged out of real useful life.
• Ordered two Christmas presents for Daisy, also from Woot -- starting my Christmas shopping season already.
• Scrub both toilets in the house.
• Spray down and clean the bedroom full-body mirror.
• Organize the kitchen counters, then disinfect them and the kitchen sink.
• Unhooked, recharged, and replaced the back yard camera.
• Paid the bills that were coming due and made sure Daisy paid the ones that only she has access to the accounts for.
• Waited until I could, then purchased/installed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection on my PS4.
• Cleaned the litter pans every other day or so, and replaced the litter/liners entirely at least three times.
• Ordered two new pairs of glasses (one was free, the other is a second pair of sunglasses).
• Canceled two comics' subscriptions (both DC books).
• Subscribed to TV Guide (it was a $5 Amazon deal, which means it's less than ten cents an issue for a full year).
• Subscribed to Car & Driver (which I've also been meaning to do for years; it was an $8 Amazon deal).
• Called to refill my prescriptions.
• Took care of sorting and opening all of the mail once it arrived after it had been on hold. 
• Broke down numerous cardboard boxes laying around the house to prep them for recycling.
• Backed up my hard drive. Twice.
• Wrote the first three posts in this series.
• Cooked several full meals of varying levels of healthiness.
• Ordered P.F. Chang's Chinese for delivery (it's not bad. It's not great, but it's not bad), which I wouldn't finish all of until the night before Daisy returned home.
• Moved around items and junk in the garage so that I could get the garbage and recycling cans in and out the back door, since our car is still in the garage.
• Ran cleaning cycles on the washing machine and the dishwasher.
• Had the repairman come not once, but twice to finish repair and restoral of our microwave (it now works like new)
• Washed the cat water fountain also not once, but twice.
• Ordered a raised water/food bowl set so our old, crippled cat can't lay down in the water when she drinks it, assembled it, and set it up.
• Gave a ton of fresh vegetables to the neighbor, and did the same once again once Dad brought over a lot more from the family garden.
• Edited, uploaded, and posted an entire album full of photos I'd taken on the trip.
• Called my parents multiple times to talk to them and reassure them that both me and Daisy were okay.
• Talked to Daisy's parents multiple times to let them know I was okay.
• Stripped the bed and washed it all a second time before Daisy would return home, so she could sleep in a clean bed.
• And, finally, caught up on almost all of the Marvel stuff I'd had backlogged -- I watched Spider-Man: No Way Home, both Doctor Strange movies, both Ant-Man movies, Black Widow, and the first three episodes of She-Hulk. None of these I had ever watched before.

Throughout all of this, I was also taking my meds normally, talking to Daisy via video call almost every day (there were some days/times she wasn't available or was already in bed when we'd have our chance to talk), regularly showering, regularly sleeping (though it was difficult when she wasn't here; see below), and I was also doing minor upkeep stuff around the house and on social media. I let my close friends know I was home a few days into the week -- Tuesday or Wednesday or so, and made sure to send in my bereavement paperwork to my bosses and let them know my return date of the 28th. The rest of the time was just free time, time that I would never, ever normally have to just decompress and be me.

During this time, because of course it would happen when I would be using it the most, the garbage pickup was delayed by four days. Our normal garbage and/or recycling pickup is Wednesday. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday came and went with no pickup for not just me, but our entire street. This did not work for me when I was cleaning the house and was creating probably 3-5x more trash than I normally would during any given week, not to mention all of the food from the fridge I'd cleaned out, and the cat piss and shit I had cleaned out of their pans multiple times since returning home. I called the city waste management company once a day every day, always in the morning as soon as I got up, to tell them "hey, they missed our street again" until finally, on Saturday morning that week, they came to get the garbage four days after they should have. 

On the following Wednesday they had picked it all up before I'd even gotten off work that morning at 7am. I guess they learned their lesson.

I can be a real pain in the ass when I want to be, though with every call (I talked to the same lady every time I called) I was very, exceedingly polite.

Anyway.

I returned to work on Sunday the 28th, to much fanfare and the relief of my coworkers and my team. The week at work was hell, as a number of new policies had been put into effect while I was out which slowed absolutely everything we do down to a crawl. It put me into a foul mood for most of the week, which bothered me a lot internally because this was supposed to be downtime, time where I wasn't supposed to be "on," but was forced to be because I didn't have any more PTO to spare. I slogged through the week night by night, only sleeping a few hours each day because for some reason it was very difficult to sleep knowing Daisy wasn't there, wasn't in town, wasn't even in the same country. I could never really place my finger on why, even when I was as exhausted as I was. 

During the week, one of my close colleagues/friends got Covid and was down for the count, taking several days off to recover, and one of my agents let me know that it was quite possible she had mouth cancer and may have to get all of her teeth extracted.  Yeah. It wasn't a great week.

Daisy and Mama's return date was set to be September 1, which was a Thursday and my last working day of the week. They'd leave Canada on August 30, spend two nights in Maine visiting family friends and family graves, and then fly back out of Bangor on the same flights that Dad and I took to get home eleven days prior. Dad was set to pick them up at the airport on Thursday afternoon when they arrived, and I'd told Daisy to just call me when she was in the driveway so I could let her in the house -- after all, I had the house keys and it's not like she had the car/garage door opener. 

Well, in the interim -- starting right as they left Canada and arrived back in Maine (also without incident) both Daisy and Mama began to get really sick. Now, mind you, all of us had been exposed on some level multiple times to folks who later came down with Covid while we were all up there, though none of us had gotten Covid (to our knowledge, anyway). Mama and Daisy tested themselves multiple times -- because tests up there are free and are widely available at public libraries, apparently -- and every time they took one, they tested negative. This did not change the fact that they both felt and looked like hell. By the time they were flying home on Thursday, they were ill. As in, looking and feeling like death. Daisy sent me a Snapchat as they were leaving the hotel and both of them sounded like they were thirty-year smokers and looked as pale white as notebook paper. 

As an aside, when Mama and Daisy get sick, Dad and I are usually unaffected. Daisy used to have a horrible immune system and would pick up anything anywhere around her -- someone could cough in the same house three rooms away, and the next day, Daisy would be sick. In recent years she's gotten much better and her immune system has strengthened, but generally when she and Mama come down sick with something, Dad and I remain immune to it -- or at least mostly unaffected. Three or four years ago at Christmas (before Covid), both of them got so sick that it didn't completely go away for several weeks. I was fine, and Dad was also fine. I honestly can't remember the last time I had a cold -- it's been since well before Covid -- and the last time I had the Flu was likely 2017 or 2018. Before that it was 2015, and that Flu sucked. But, I do try to stay relatively close to my normal diet of mostly healthy foods, and I do take vitamins every day -- a lot of vitamins, actually. From a body chemistry point of view, I'm in pretty good shape and have a fairly tough immune system most of the time.

Their return flight was delayed by, eh, an hour or so, though they were able to make up some time in the air, or so they were told. My phone rang around 1:20pm on Thursday, and it was Daisy telling me they were about ten minutes away from the house. This gave me enough time to get up, put on my clothing and my glasses, and go downstairs to help Daisy into the house. I brought her suitcases upstairs (well, at least one of them anyway, I was half asleep so I don't really remember much) and Daisy collapsed onto the couch to spend some time with her fuzzy little son who missed her so much. 

I worked that night, and Daisy went to bed early, but in the time since she's returned, it has now become Labor Day weekend. Daisy is still sick -- she told me that the past two days (Saturday and Sunday) were likely the days she felt the worst, and as such, this weekend we've done fairly little while she recovers. She did a Whole Foods grocery delivery yesterday morning, vacuumed again, and took care of the cat pans, and I've wound down the last real vacation time I'll get before Thanksgiving week by mowing the grass and doing the trimming again, washing all of her laundry from the trip, and doing some writing here. Life has basically returned now to what it should be, now that September is in full swing and we're now at the traditional "end of summer" with it being Labor Day and all. Daisy will return to work on Tuesday -- a work-at-home day for her, before returning to the office on Wednesday. I return to work Tuesday night after the holiday.

The shirts I ordered, my new glasses, and the first set of disposable vapes I ordered will arrive beginning this week. We have groceries. The bills are paid. The cats are fine. I still have not left the house since my arrival home on August 20. The car has not left the garage since August 10. We may need to go pick up some meds and we may go see the parents today, depending on how Daisy feels (and how Mama feels, of course), and there are a few small errands we need to run (dropping off cardboard and glass recycling, etc). But slowly, life returns to the status quo.

With everything else I've been doing since, well, a month ago now almost, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that my professional writing -- the book -- is sort of on hiatus at the moment. It is very clear that I now will not finish it by the end of the year, as the beginning of fall means we are beginning to enter the season of holidays, which tend to be busy times for us. My parents wanted us to fly out to have Thanksgiving with them in North Carolina, which we may or may not do depending on money and time (remember, I used almost all of my PTO, and Daisy used the vast majority of her own), but it is indeed a plus knowing that we can get a direct flight on American Airlines from Omaha to Charlotte and back, and it only takes like three hours. 

Daisy was not happy that while she was gone, I washed, dried, folded, and put away all of her laundry into her closet (it disrupted her "system"); it made her possibly the angriest I've seen her in a very long time, despite the fact that I did it out of love and organized it in a very logical way. It overwhelmed her until she saw it and actually looked at how I'd done it, and over the course of about two hours I helped her move and reorganize it back into her "system" the way she wanted it. 

From Canada, Daisy brought back a lot of things -- I made the joke to my coworkers on Thursday night that "when my wife goes to Canada, she goes hard" and this was accurate. In addition to one of her grandfather's hand-built guitars (in a hardshell case), she brought back an entire new, extra suitcase of clothing, rocks, seashells, bags of coffee, candies, chocolate, a candle, two souvenir coffee mugs, food, and various other items she'd purchased while she was up there for three weeks. And yes, she had stopped in Maine to bring back more coffee brandy as well. All of this has been slowly unpacked and dealt with in the few days since she's returned home. I can't really say I blame her, as, well, when and how often do we spend an extended amount of time in Canada? The last time we were up there was eight years ago. It's not somewhere we can just jaunt off to on a whim, you know. 

I brought back relatively few Canada-centric things, or things at all really from the trip. I bought a Canada-branded sweater and a tank top while up there, and some pins for my jacket. I brought home some ketchup and all-dressed chips, and the maple candy I purchased in the duty-free shop across the border. In Maine, I bought a vest, a t-shirt, and some underwear. Once I was at home, I ordered a Cape Breton shirt and a Nova Scotia flag shirt in my size, as I couldn't find either one when I was up there (I felt bitter about doing so once I was at home, because I don't think souvenirs really count if you get them after the fact). I could've gotten so many more things if only I'd wanted to (or had the space to) bring them back, but I really didn't want or need much else. It was enough for me to bring back what I did; the trip itself was experience enough for me.

I'll also mention that the stuff I purchased after returning home -- including the groceries, food delivery, vapes, the new laptop, etc -- was far more than any amount of money I would've ever wanted or needed to spend in Canada, so, there's that. I'm not exactly proud of that, but, whatever. 

That new laptop is a nice little machine, actually. I didn't really say that before. It is a manufacturer-refurbished Dell 11.6-inch laptop made specifically for education -- basically, it's the specs they'd have for issuing laptops to high school kids -- and it was about $80 on a pre-Labor-Day sale on Woot. It's built really well and has a full installation of Windows 10 on it, which -- after it was fully updated -- makes it a very capable little machine for very little money, and will serve me well for my laptop needs (such as travel, writing, or if my main desktop here tries to die on me again). While I adored the little Chromebook I got at the beginning of the pandemic, the ChromeOS it runs has aged out as of about a year ago and can no longer be updated, and while it's still functional to some extent, it's not a Windows machine and its usefulness will be fairly limited moving forward. I'll put it in my closet with my other older machines for other, emergency-use only purposes. 

So, life returns to normal again, or at least somewhat normal. I'll nap this evening to reset my sleep schedule, and Daisy and I will return to our normal work-a-day lives tomorrow. I'll go back to writing my book when I can, I'll go back to normal routine. My beard and hair will grow throughout the fall and winter. Pictures will be edited and posted of the trip. Pictures will be taken for this year's Christmas cards. The holidays are coming. I'm about to turn 40. Life goes on.