Conquering Carolina, Part II: I Was Told There Would Be a Handbasket

 [EDIT: written 36-ish hours before the trip]

You know, I am normally a patient man.

I'll wait for you to stop laughing before I continue.

I am not patient for a lot of things, this is true. I get irrationally angry with idiocy and minor inconveniences, while the larger stuff I tend to let go as it's mostly out of my control or sphere of influence. But, and I have been complimented on this on numerous occasions, I can have the patience of a saint for clients/my employees at work, or with Daisy if she's being cranky and needs food or sleep, or if I have to be on the phone with one of my executives. What I am saying is that in most situations, if I do not already have patience and grace, I can force myself to summon it. At least temporarily. Yes, it is difficult, but it is possible.

My point in saying this is that I have almost zero patience for travel. In fact, it's a continuing running theme throughout my life for every trip I've ever taken. I will prepare mentally, physically, and emotionally for months for any upcoming trip, and if it doesn't go smoothly and/or completely metered out as everything is supposed to be on paper (or in my head), I will absolutely snap and lose my goddamn mind. Sometimes.

I will cite last summer's trip to Canada as a time where I did not lose my mind when everything went wrong -- we were delayed for hours, we couldn't get the rental car on time, Mama was sick, the road up to the family homestead was closed and we spent hours trying to find an alternate route, and the travel time itself was a full 24 hours from start to finish, point A to point B. Daisy and I were the optimists that time around and both of us had to stuff our frustrations deep down in order to just complete the mission. 

Fast forward to today. I am now on vacation from work; I wrapped up my last shift this morning and my body is ready to get the fuck out of Nebraska for a week. Daisy will work for the next few hours before she too is off for a week. And there is still a lot to be done before we can be wheels up to North Carolina on Saturday morning. The below is just a short list:

• Mow both the front and back yards, and do some light string trimming if possible
• Set up the cameras throughout the house
• Move the trash cans behind the car
• Clean the counters as much as possible
• Pack airport "lunches"
• Daisy needs to pack for the trip completely, she hasn't touched her suitcase yet
• Meet with the Catsitter tomorrow morning once more, briefly (we've already paid her and she already has the house key)
• Take Pete to the vet tomorrow afternoon for a procedure (more on this below)
• Refill the bird feeders
• Pick whatever's available in the garden since we won't touch it for a week
• Move perishables to the freezer so they won't go bad while we're gone
• Do all the leftover laundry and then turn off the washer's water for when we're gone
• Book the Uber to the airport for like 2:30am
• Figure out our travel outfits and make sure Daisy can find her "travel pants" (oh yes, more on this below)
• Wash the cat fountain and all cat bowls and refill them
• Clean and refill all of the litter pans to a pristine condition
• Prop the upstairs doors open so the cats can't close them and lock themselves in rooms (yes, Mable is notorious for doing this)
• Wash the cat bed that sits in the kitchen sink because it's grody
• Water the plants inside the house
• Clean the fishtank and replace water in it
• Turn up the thermostat so that the AC doesn't (hopefully) kill itself again while we're gone
• Re-up my hair color one last time and attempt to dye my beard (more on this below)
• Set up the cat food, Pete's pills, and everything else on the stove/counter with instructions for the Catsitter

As well as other various small odds-and-ends. In the span of about 36 hours.

I will be doing the mowing tonight; I'll likely go out and start it within the next hour or two. I'd like the sun to lower itself in the afternoon sky a bit first so I'm not just intentionally giving myself sunburn a day and a half before I'm in another state on the beach for a week. I can mow the front and back yards both in the span of about 90 minutes total if I'm really booking it; it doesn't have to be perfect or pristine, just presentable. 

If you think about it, the vast majority of everything else on the list above are small, 10-20 minutes-at-most tasks. Pete's vet appointment will take longer, it will take Daisy longer to pack, the fishtank and the litter pans take a while to clean, etc -- but everything else is just small things, really. There's just a ton of them to do and they can be easy to forget and overlook.

No matter whether I've checked every little thing off my list or not, I will always feel as if I'm forgetting something when we lock up the house, get in the car, and head to the airport. It's the most anxious part of the trip for me.

So, to expand on some of the above, let's start with the small stuff and move to the bigger stuff.

Daisy has what she calls "travel pants." I may have mentioned them here before in previous entries about previous trips, but they are essentially workout pants -- stretchy, legging-like pants -- with multiple pockets. It's become tradition that she wears them every time we travel, whether it's domestically or internationally, due to their versatility. For me, I don't have travel pants -- but when flying I always wear shorts that have zipper pockets so that I don't lose any of my vital stuff to a plane seat or an airport terminal seat, and they tend to be cargo shorts. The downside to this is that for some reason the airport security scanner always thinks I have an iron cock when I go through the body scanner, as it always says I have metal in my crotch/waist area (I don't, and I've even tested this by using drawstring shorts with no metal aglets). I expect this to be the case again on Saturday morning when I go through the scanner.

I do, however, plan a travel outfit for maximum efficiency, access to my belongings, and comfort while flying. I am sad to say that I have not yet completely finalized it for this trip. I have the shorts ready, yes, but I have no idea what sandals I'll wear (my choices are between two different pairs) or what shirt I'll wear, which I have changed opinions on probably five times since I started readying for this trip. I'd also like to wear my utility vest, because it has multiple pockets for my things -- like my cell, my vape and charge cable, my Nicorette mints (essential when flying) and my mp3 player(s). I don't know, though. I just want to be comfortable and at ease when I travel and that in itself is harder than it sounds.

In other news, we were given some slightly worrying news about Pete upon his vet visit this week. Well, okay, I wouldn't necessarily say worrying but basically news that was eventually to be expected -- he is now in stage 3 of kidney failure (6-18 months left of life, maximum) and he is now officially too old to get yearly rabies shots as it could fuck his immune system up too badly (our vet is giving us a medical exception to this so that we don't get in trouble with the state/city, etc). His thyroid levels are slowly rising as well, and he's lost another pound since his last vet visit. All of this means he's slowly on his way out. He's not there yet, but he's getting there. To help counter this, we've doubled his thyroid medication and he is now going to be administered fluids once a week by us, at home. The vet visit tomorrow afternoon is so that he can get his first dose and so that the vet techs can show us how to do it from the comfort of our living room. Basically, it's a small IV bag that we stick in him between his shoulder blades and let it empty. It's very simple, he's had it done to him before, and it's not really that expensive. More than that, it will keep him hydrated and it can end up prolonging his life, which Daisy is very, very intent on doing since Pete is her baby. I love Pete, and I've had him since he was six weeks or so old in 2007, but there is indeed a point where I really feel okay, is this really beneficial or is it just another expense when he is already on the way out? I don't really have an answer to that, but as we have two vacations coming up still this year I would rather he not die in the house all alone while we're gone -- when it's time, I want to be able to be there with him and help ease the transition into the next life. 

So yeah, we're going in to get him some fluids tomorrow before we leave. 

The other thing I plan to do sometime tomorrow is to dye my beard.

Yes, I'm serious. This week I ordered a box of Just for Men beard dye that will match my black hair. I don't want it to be super black or anything like that, but man would I love to cover up a lot of the gray that works as a sharp contrast to my dark black hair. When I don't have dye in my hair, it's different -- all the gray in my hair looks normal with all the gray in my beard. However, when I have my hair dyed, especially black, that gray in my beard absolutely sticks out like a godawful sore thumb and makes it even more apparent that my black hair color isn't natural. And, honestly, it's been driving me nuts for some time. If it works, it works. If it mutates my hair and I end up looking like an idiot, I wash it off, and if it doesn't wash out, I shave. So really I've got nothing to lose.

Daisy's hair dye experiment with the platinum lavender dye I/we picked out this weekend was only semi-successful; yes, it made most of her hair mostly platinum lavender. The rest of her hair it turned straight up gray. She asked me if I liked it. Well, I'm not going to lie, I did like it, but I was hoping that it would be all-over color and not blotchy and grayed out in a lot of places. Daisy countered by saying she'd just go full-on purple over it using a spare bottle of my Arctic Fox "Purple AF."

Mind you, she said she did not want purple as one of the colors and she has now dyed her hair with not one, but two different purples.

Her hair now looks fabulous and is a deep, dark shade of brilliant purple with an incredible amount of life and shine to it. It's going to look positively wild in photos during our trip. The bad thing about purple, however, is that it will fade and wash out faster than almost any other color. I'm sure she's fine with that too, as she did not want purple indefinitely, of course. I'm just happy to have a purple wife I can show off over the next week. 

So, really, that's where things stand now. We are spending the next day and a half prepping for liftoff, and then it's beach, sun, vegan fine dining, and family for the next week. And I will, of course, make sure everyone is updated here, with stories of our trip, upon our safe return.