Conquering Carolina, Part I: Autopilot

[EDIT: written one week before the trip]

 We are very nearly ready for the trip at this point. All that's left is to do some remaining chores around the house, get Daisy packed, and to give the key (and/or payment, etc) to the catsitter lady and we will be all ready for wheels up to North Carolina. Daisy and I both work this week; I work my normal schedule and she's picking up some extra hours here and there in addition to her normal schedule to offset her PTO used for the travel.

This is the first full entry I'm typing from my new Lenovo ThinkCentre PC and giant 24-inch widescreen curved gaming monitor. It's very nice; the machine itself is quite fast and because it's not a giant tower with a lot of moving parts, it is very, very quiet. But I would assume the lack of giant fans or a spinning disk drive would be quiet, right?

Windows 11 Professional is...very similar to Windows 10 and not that different than the version of Windows 11 I use on my work laptop every day. There are a lot of little quirks to it that I'll need to get used to, and I'll have to take some time to really tweak my settings here and there to get everything just how I want it, but I've been quite impressed thus far with this new computer. I do know, however, that eventually I will lament that I don't have an internal optical drive, or extra USB ports, or anything like that; it is what it is. This is the future, and I still use a lot of "old tech" in my day to day life that I'll slowly have to adjust to not using as much or finding ways around inconveniences.

The old PC was boxed up, carefully, and placed under my desk in the box that the shell of my old pre-pandemic PC still occupied. That shell was removed, dismantled, and discarded -- as was my old monitor I'd gotten for free when they were legit giving them away shortly before I left grad school. The box was re-used to house my now-old PC so that if I need it as a backup machine, it's there, and takes up no more space in my room than it ever did before. 

I can tell you, it's going to be very hard to work and actually give a shit over the next four days. My brain is already in vacation mode, and I am really, really just wanting to get those four days of work over with so that I can get away. I'm sure Daisy is somewhat in the same boat. Like, work has been quite rough for me for the past few months, as I've detailed here over that time. I'm severely understaffed, I'm doing the work of 3-4 people every night, etc. For the entire month of June, I had to get on a giant video call every morning with corporate leadership and update them on what was handled in the overnight hours. Luckily those calls stopped, but the documentation and the work did not. So, I am frequently overwhelmed, am lucky if I get a lunch hour more than once a week, and I am absolutely drained when I get off work in the mornings. So, this week I just have to keep my head down as much as possible and go on autopilot, get the things done as much as I can, and then leave.

I have given my team -- as I am a manager and have about 15 people rolling up to me -- notice that I will be out of office. My leadership knows, including my direct boss and my executive director, PTO was put in and approved two months ago, etc. I've set my backup. Corporate knows, because there's a system on the corporate side we have to note our time in as well. It should not be a surprise to anyone, yet I am sure at multiple times during this week I will have people be like "you're going to be OOO? why didn't you tell anyone?" 

Believe me, my body is ready. None of this can come soon enough. 

I am still stressing about packing and about comfort versus fashionability versus the image I want to portray of myself while visiting family. I will likely -- very likely -- get some new clothing items while I'm on vacation, whether it's a t-shirt or pair of shorts here and there or a hoodie or jacket or who knows. And it's going to be August in the Carolinas, where it can be 100 degrees and humid one day and 85 and rain/storm for the next four days straight. You can't really, really predict the weather in the deep south, nor can you accurately and with some advance warning really know when it's going to rain or storm along a coastline on an island -- unless, of course, we're talking about hurricanes. 

And, unfortunately, that's a thing too. In August, Atlantic hurricanes can form quickly and smack the coastline within the span of a few days to a week. We fly out the 16th and return on the 21st. The 21st is 11 days from now, as I write this -- almost anything can happen between now and 11 days from now. We've been lucky thus far to be able to travel down there and back between tropical systems -- this is part of why I originally wanted to do this year's trip in May or early June, and will absolutely shoot for that next year -- but eventually our luck is going to run out and we're going to be racing a hurricane either flying in or flying out.

I have decided against dyeing my hair further before the trip -- meaning, I'm not going to use one of the industrial-strength, make-my-hair-black-forever dyes before we leave. However, I am "re-upping it" over the next few days with a few more applications of the color-depositing "Clenditioner" just to make it look its best before we leave. I've only used the Clenditioner once since Daisy originally put the industrial-strength black in my hair in June, mainly because that stuff works so well that I haven't really needed to maintain the color, as it doesn't wash out. The Clenditioner's color washes out gradually, slowly, over the course of a few weeks or so -- but it takes a good amount of time to do so unless you're really scrubbing the shit out of your hair (or bleaching it out). It also compounds upon itself, at least on my own head -- meaning if I put it in my hair three times this week, it'll (theoretically, but seen in practice) take three times longer to wash/fade out. I'm going to be out in the sun a lot, I'm going to be in the ocean, and I'm going to be washing my hair with unfamiliar water/shampoo/conditioner while we're there. So, I'm going to make the preparations I need now to prevent as much color-fade as possible. 

Look, I know this sounds ridiculous and sounds like a lot of work, but I know when I eventually stop doing all of my hair coloring and my normal color comes back in, it's going to be mostly gray -- I've been going slowly more gray for years. So, while I can and while I still have the hair to do it, I'm going to enjoy it. 

Daisy, however, came to me with an interesting proposition yesterday.

"I know it's important to you for me to look my best and for you to be able to show me off to family," she said, "so if you want me to bleach out and re-color my hair before the trip, I will do so. No black, no red, no purple, but anything else you want. You pick."

Daisy and I have been married for over eleven years now, and we've been together for thirteen. Not once, not ever, has she said to me "I'll dye my hair whatever color you want, you pick."

That puts me in a very odd situation, because it's her hair, her head. Yes, she works from home and only has to be on a video call very infrequently (and her company appreciates diversity, so it wouldn't really matter what color her hair was), but it's still not my head that I'd be picking the color for, it's hers. 

For the record, Daisy's hair is fine. She had it colored earlier this year with pink, blonde, and neon highlighter green in multiple sections. Last year she had rainbow hair. Last fall when we were in NC she did it in yellow and dark greens/blues when mine was the sky blue that was, by that time, slowly fading out into more of a washed-out blue/green. Right now -- up until yesterday anyway -- it was mostly blonde with about three inches of her normal, medium-brown roots that had grown in, with a bit of the neon green and pink still fading out on the ends. 

Now, mind you, I'm a "all one color" hair person. If I'm going to dye my hair, it's going to be all one color and it's going to be uniform all over my head from root to tip. But that's me. Daisy can express herself however she wants (and that's part of the reason I married her, her free spirit and expressiveness). 

"Why are you letting me pick?" I asked. 

"Because when I tell you to grow and keep your beard for events you do, even if you don't want to."

She is right; I do this. But mostly it's for my own benefit because without facial hair, I look like I'm twelve. 

So, yesterday, off we went to Sally Beauty Supply. Sally's is our go-to place for most professional hair stuff these days; it's where I get my high end color-protect shampoo, and it's where I get my professional dye. Everything else I get from Amazon, of course. It's also where Daisy likes to get a lot of her stuff, because of the selection and the experience of picking something out in-store, comparing it in-store, etc. I'm fine with this. Sally's is a little pricey but I don't mind it -- I know they're struggling as a business and they're one of the handful of businesses that I do not want to go under for any reason as they are really useful to us for what we get there. 

After twenty minutes of comparing colors, I/we finally settled on a platinum lavender sort of color (called "mochi" by whatever company it was who made it, I can't remember). We got two big jars of it -- Daisy has a lot of hair -- and a bleach kit. She bleached her hair out last night and will apply the actual color today at some point, likely this evening. 

Yes, lavender is a purple. I'm aware of that and so is Daisy. But both of us really liked the color.

Regardless of whether we plan it or not, there will be many pictures taken of us during this trip -- whether we take those photos or whether they are taken of us. The Christmas Card Photos™ I use every year are usually taken from either the trip to NC or our trip to Canada -- only a scant few times have I used photos we've taken at home. Since we're not going to Canada until October this year, and I almost always have the Christmas cards done, ordered, and in my possession by around Halloween, unless we get some really good photos in Canada that will make me change my entire card layout and messaging, the NC photos -- whatever we take -- will likely be what's used, and I will likely create the cards after we return, around Labor Day or so. I have the barebones layout of them done now. This is a huge reason I want us to look our best at nearly all times when we're down there.

Plus, Daisy is right -- I do, very much, like to show her off. She is my world -- she is the one thing I got right in my life. You bet your ass I'm proud of my wife and want to be like "Look! This woman let me marry her! Likely poor planning on her part, but I lucked out!"

Or, you know, stuff along those lines. 

My oldest aunt will not be making the trip to NC with my other aunt and uncle. It's a medical thing. Aging comes to the lucky and it's very hard on a lot of us, of course. I'm sure she didn't come to the decision lightly. It's disappointing but not wholly unexpected. My other aunt and uncle will be there for the first three days of our trip and then will head back to WV. 

We have had, for the past two nights in a row, some nasty storms here in Omaha. On Saturday morning the storms in the area were so fierce, and had such high wind gusts (80mph+) that the tornado sirens went off not once, but twice. We were very lucky in that by the time the storms rolled through our area, we got almost none of that wind and barely had enough rain to wet the pavement -- but the light show in the sky was something else, and west of us -- the west side of town and further west into the western rich-people-areas of Omaha -- got hit pretty hard with many power outages, trees down, limbs down, etc. 

Last night, more storms rolled through, though none of them were anywhere near as severe. It rained hard and the thunder shook the walls/windows enough to wake me out of a dead sleep more than once, but nothing else. 

I do worry about storms when we're gone; the tornado risk for the Omaha area in August is still pretty high, and even without tornadoes we can still get destructive storms with those 80mph+ winds that sort of pop up out of the blue sometimes with little advance warning. We weren't predicted to get godawful storms Friday night into Saturday morning, just normal ones -- yet it still happened. I am always apprehensive about leaving the cats alone when we're gone, but that anxiety ramps up if I know the weather at home is bad while I'm across the country (or in another country) and cannot protect them or the house. When we were in Canada last summer, I was getting weather reports from my friends back home via Messenger because severe storms/tornadoes were hitting the area one night and I needed to know whether to call Dad to go take care of things with the cats (like if the power went out or what have you). It was a very stressful situation. We're not gone that long, only five days -- but it only takes one day for the weather to turn supremely ugly in a hurry.